Statue-toppling and imagined communities

A few words on the waves of statue-topping we are witnessing.

I am genuinely puzzled. For once, about time: celebrating genocidal rulers (Leopold II is all over Brussels), slavers, murderers is a terrible thing to do, and we are finally moving beyond it; and not a second too early.
On the other side: what’s the boundary? When shall we stop deleting, removing, reinterpreting our history, even when it’s a history of bloodshed?

For let us be frank: human history is a history of brutal violence. Individual violence, but especially group violence; perpetrated and received. We are a bloody species which needed half a million years to learn peaceful, in-group coexistence, and it is just “now” (in historical terms) beginning to develop mechanisms of peaceful coexistence between groups.It does so by means of psychological stratagems. Solidarity, identity in your close group- the people you eat with, hunt with, make love with, and die with- is dramatically easier than solidarity between different groups; even more so, between groups who never met or will never meet. How to link these groups? The evolution of group violence and protection from it led to the evolution of *nations*: “imagined communities”. how they have been brilliantly called. These communities, such as nations, are imagined- because individuals never experience them. Yet individuals experience them through cultural experience, cultural narratives, cultural rites, where the shared experience is an imagined, ideational construct as opposed to an actual experience. Why this matters in the context of today’s debate? It matters because history- which is mostly an history of oppression of groups on groups, and later of imagined communities over other imagined communities, usually celebrated when performed and mourned when received- is a fundamental element of the shared cultural backstop to said imagined communities. If we take the cleansing of our history seriously – as in my view, is reasonable to do if we take seriously the full discussion, and we do not want it to be simply interpret statue-toppling as set of random acts of rage- then there is very little left in our collective memories to keep. Our monuments, our streets, our museums, our cultural rites, our national anthems, our history books, our poems, our family heirlooms, our own personal and family names- are for the large part linked to such history of oppression of groups over groups. If you rationally approach the idea of -say- the Colosseum or the Traian Column, just to name two of the main monuments left to us by ancient Romans – you realise that tens of thousands of innocent men and women were probably butchered in the former for the amusement of the plebs, while the second literally depicts successful military campaigns enslaving entire countries. Julius Caesar – a guy whose countless people admire and whose names are bore by millions – can either be seen as the civilizator of the Gauls, or the general who in seven years of occupation transformed a heavily populated region into a near desert at the cost of literally millions of deaths and slavery, ready for colonists to be taken over.

Every national history is the same, from this point of view. There’s no nation that never oppressed others, and if they did, they didn’t survive. Shall we put a dot, reset and start a new?Perhaps. If such enterprise is successful, we would have the chance of writing on the blank sheet the code for the only imagined community we all belong to, the human species.
But remember why imagined communities exist in the first place. They aren’t there for leisure, but as instruments of self defence; as instruments of solidarity; as instruments of organized violence. Naturally selected to bound individuals together for the sake of the largest group possible, usually at the costs of minorities and other groups.Yet a nation without history, is a nation deprived of one of the fundamental pillars of identification; it’s a non-nation. Individuals without a nation a nation are lost, and vulnerable. When the world complexity increases, when reality becomes too sophisticated to grasp, when external threats abound, individuals seek in the group joint protection. It is not a case that nationalism is returning even in an integrated world; for openness, technological open-ended possibilities, constant interactions with individuals in all parts of the globe- they make life more complicated. They require more expertise and more division of labour and knowledge, which means less control and more trust. All else equal, these more vulnerable individuals will need to counterbalance all that with something they feel close to, and one easy option is already built-in in their culturally soaked brains: imagined communities such as nations. If you try to destroy national history, and individuals will feel vulnerable like never before. Their natural protection mechanisms will kick in: they will react to the blunt, rapid deterioration of their imagined community, even if that occurs for all the good reasons, even if it’s justified, even if this means that other narratives will have a chance of emerging, for instance an inclusive narrative, a global imagined community.If you try to destroy national history, my fear is that nationalists- those who genuinely admire oppression over other groups, those who see human life a a group-based zero sum game- will be really happy, for they will have the chance to bring national dominance back on the agenda, as individuals are afraid of losing what brings them together: their shitty, violent, blood-soaked national history. Toppling statues is an élite concern, but rebounding nationalism will be the masses’ business

Let the past be. Reinterpret it; take consciousness of how bad our species used to be just hundred years ago or so. Transform, if you like, celebratory monuments into shrines of shame; from “good examples” to “bad examples”. Change the narrative to build inclusive communities; to show how bad is nationalist zero sum thinking; to demonstrate that the only genuine pareto-efficient imagined community is the human species. But not attempt to destroy history, because history will hit you back with a terrible, frightening laughter which will set us aback to times it’s better leave behind.