This argument that we should keep statues (or windows) to remember history doesn’t seem to hold water to me.
What are we remembering by keeping them? I don’t think that anyone argues that we should be _erecting_ statues to figures we don’t admire - who, if they’re intended as cautionary tales are surely _more_ worthwhile to think about. So it’s not just that they serve to help us remember figures from the past.
So should we instead keep them to remember that the people _were_ once admired enough to get statues? That seems like a very odd second-order reason to keep something.
The question here is about who gets a literal stained-glass window in their honor. If not having a stained-glass window means you're erased, then we'd better start making a whole lot more stained-glass windows.
People who make significant contributions to science get stained-glass windows and such. If removing the ones for people we're trying to memory hole as being part our own histories isn't trying to erase them, what is it?
For the most part, they don't get 'stained-glass windows and such' and beside that, our capacity to remember people is independent of stained-glassed windows. It takes overly broad, maximalist interpretations to make this into much of an argument to begin with.
> For the most part, they don't get 'stained-glass windows and such'
Then why did this guy have one to begin with?
> our capacity to remember people is independent of stained-glassed windows.
Then why do we build them for people we do like?
The problem is this: Having someone be simultaneously notable for something good and notable for something bad doesn't cancel out and make them notable for nothing. They did the good thing they did, which we should remember, and they did the bad thing they did, which we should also remember.
But institutions have the incentive to present only the good in their histories. Which is how we forget our mistakes and make them again.
You don't like this guy? Leave the window alone and build whatever the opposite of a window is to condemn his bad acts.
> You don't like this guy? Leave the window alone and build whatever the opposite of a window is to condemn his bad acts.
Ironically, the article includes a photo of someone who has done just that: stencilled some critical graffiti. It's in the process of being erased. The author who is so keen to preserve the window doesn't seem to mind that opinion being cancelled.
But probably neither windows nor graffiti are actually good ways to evaluate historical figures and their good and bad contributions to science.
Which is how we forget our mistakes and make them again.
It's not, though, that's just the somewhat circular premise of your argument. Nobody is forgetting this guy. He's on the Nobel Prize site, on Wikipedia, in the scientific literature, etc. Fiddling with a stained glassed window doesn't change any of that. Society changing its mind about whom to honour, how and where is a thing that happens all the time.
The problem is this: Having someone be simultaneously notable for something good and notable for something bad doesn't cancel out and make them notable for nothing.
Installing or removing a stained glass window is not really taking a position on this supposed 'problem'.
Because the college wanted to celebrate itself and demonstrate how it has notable alumni. So any alum of any defensible level of notability would have worked here. Nobody looked at the story of Sir Ronald Fisher and decided he need a window somewhere; they looked at the yearbooks of Gonville and Caius and found who could fit on the windows.
If we can at least be honest about that, then we can conclude that the college has a vested interest in claiming that the guy is stained-glass-window-worthy, and therefore the fact that he has a stained-glass window now is not a reliable argument that he ought to have one.
There are thousands of scientists who didn't get windows. In practice the methods by which "who contributed the most" were often not particularly fair. Isn't it possible we could re-evaluate who we want to have a window? The other people are still in books.
I'm not sure why the discussion always jumps to this extreme. The entire thread for this article is full of people jumping to a similar conclusion, which I also think exaggerates the situation. It makes the window or the statue or whatever far more important than it really is. It's like bikeshedding, but for outrage.
Firstly, the real world isn't immutable. Just because a college made a stained-glass window for someone doesn't mean they have to preserve it for all eternity. Doesn't matter who it is, it's just a piece that was commissioned once and now the owner of it doesn't value it the same way any more.
Secondly, we're in an age where information is so abundant that an internet search or a trip to a library will allow you to learn as much as you care to learn about a notable person. Lecturers and professors may choose to disclaim this person's work when teaching it, such that the value of the science remains but the history of the scientist is laid bare.
If we're talking about erasing people or memory-holing them, the thing to worry about isn't a commemorative decoration, but the education system itself.
In that sense, a far more egregious crime is to, for example, balance out an atrocity like the Holocaust by giving equal credence to Holocaust denial. Or to attempt to ban the teaching of slavery and other unpleasant aspects of a country's history by blocking the literature in schools. In these cases, unsavoury history very much is being erased, and replaced with a version that is more 'family friendly'.
You’re confused on one point — she staunchly opposed abortion except to preserve the mother’s life (her support of birth control was to avoid needing one) — and Planned Parenthood isn’t shying away from acknowledging the bad parts of her legacy:
"No one is safe from the future" and all that. It feels sad on one hand that someone's legacy can be brought down so quickly. On the other hand, our legacies don't belong to us anymore, after we leave. When it's up to our children to decide how to run the place, they also get to choose their own idols.
They actually cancel academics for saying the “wrong” thing. This is not even anything close to that. Having a window removed is not a big deal at all:
But now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him. It has removed from the Hall a stained-glass window commemorating him, one of a set of six installed to celebrate him, Crick, Venn, Chadwick and two other distinguished college figures, Sir Charles Sherrington and George Green. It has done so because of accusations that Fisher was a proponent of eugenics.
Ironically, whilst arguing that only crazy woke leftists could possibly see postwar enthusiasm for the race science of literal Nazis as a reason not to venerate a [very clever] eugenicist, the same "pushback against dangerous consensus" publication carries other columns twisting Popper's paradox of tolerance into a case for the Civil Service to purge anyone sufficiently left wing to criticise the government. Cancelling stained glass tributes to flawed geniuses is a tragedy, cancelling those who complain about the government they work for a necessity
It's almost the reductio ad absurdum version of culture war bullshit.
> only crazy woke leftists could possibly see postwar enthusiasm for the race science of literal Nazis
Let's not forget that eugenics was not an exclusively right-wing position. Many socialists were pro-eugenics: the Webbs, Shaw, C.P. Snow, Haldane, and many more. Eugenics was widely supported by many academics of all political stripes in the early 20th Century.
At some point eugenics was very much "progressive" way of thinking. People tend to forget that every old idea at some point was progressive and new, progress itself doesn't mean it will we judged right by future generations.
Also its very much as alive right now - we abort the vast majority of fetuses with known birth defects, we just don't want to call it that. Doesn't matter your view of abortion but its difficult to argue against it.
Sure, but he's not being called out for being one of many intellectuals subscribing to the once fashionable proto/pseudoscience of eugenics, he's being called out for enthusing about the Nazis desire to improve their stock in a postwar defence of a scientist charged with being a Nazi, which many more nuanced takes on his contribution to science acknowledge paint his views on "defectives" in an unflattering light even if we assume he was somewhat naive with that comment and certainly not as problematic as, say, Spearman.
I have no idea what Fisher's wider politics were, but I have a pretty good idea of what the politics of the publication are.
Yes, but we don’t hear much from Cambridge about plans to remove the memorials of left-wing heroes who were eugenics supporters like Bertrand Russell. Just conservatives like Fisher.
Crick is being cancelled as well. Not a bad thing, since he is an old boy who largely claimed credit for the discoveries of Rosalind Franklin, who could not defend her claims due to her untimely death, as well as the general misogyny of the establishment at the time (and arguably still today).
Having a window removed is not a big deal at all (depending on who pays for it).
Having a window removed because of misrepresentations made with religious zeal by a social movement is a huge deal. That should be enough to reverse the decision and sanction everyone involved in putting forward the lies.
The article has a lot of waffle, but it seems clear that even in the author's viewpoint, Fisher was a eugenecist, and argued for the cause even in the wake of WW2:
> (6) Fisher, in a testimonial for von Verschuer after the war, supported von Verschuer’s “wish to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally”.
You can say "we should judge people by the standards of their time", but it seems that he fell short even by those standards.
I don't think it's that simple. When you award someone a prize, you are potentially giving that person a great deal of influence and credibility not only on issues regarding the specifics of the prize, but also general publicity.
Another thing society needs to curb is getting celebs to comment on everything, so attention in one area doesn’t make one into an all-knowing life coach as it seems to work for some people.
But more broadly, if you are worried that giving someone’s attention will create a large following of, for instance eugenicists, then you are actually worried about the idea already having a large support, irrespective of the person who would receive an unrelated award.
There are good arguments to be made against eugenics programs, just make them instead of trying to disappear anyone that has ever seemed to support them.
Refusing to recognise someone’s brilliance because of political ideologies is something most people understand to be wrong and in my view just as likely, if not more, to create support for that political cause than to suppress it.
> You can say "we should judge people by the standards of their time", but it seems that he fell short even by those standards.
Just out of curiosity, what are notable examples of people saying “we should judge people by the standards of their time” in a reasonable way?
I most frequently hear it used for many of the “American forefathers” or other prominent people during that time to refer to their views on slavery and the treatment of indigenous people. In that case it’s clearly laughable, since A) there were prominent contemporary critics and B) a lot of those people spent considerable effort performing mental gymnastics in writing to defend these things, which one wouldn’t expect if they were simply unaware of any potential moral problems with their actions and views.
But were they morally and culturally equipped to recognize those issues as failures, or were they simply average people of their time, that spent time debating what was to them a fringe, extremist idea that made little sense? If the latter, can you condemn them for not being remarkable in this regard too, as they were on political, philosophical, scientific and patriotic issues? Can, indeed, any man be such a timeless conscience that is not only revolutionary to the their time, but to all future moral codes?
You are most probably not among the universally righteous minds of our times, you are just an average man of our time. I don't think that means, by default, that all your actions are not worthy of praise of that your failing by an undisclosed future moral crime (such as eating sentient animals) negate all your moral choices today.
In many cases they were highly educated who are widely accepted as significant thinkers and writers, and they wrote in depth about the arguments for and against slavery. So yeah, they’re on record as explicitly considering the arguments at the time and rejecting them.
And further, "standards of their time" has a particular frame. By the standards of enslaved people, slavery was terrible. When people say that slavery was not considered evil by the standards of the time they are saying by the standards of white people who benefited from a slavery-based economy.
This is quite a simplistic view. Slavery in its milder forms (buying and selling people along with land, restrictions on movement etc.) was widespread in Europe up until 19th century. There has not been a homogeneous class of “white people” who universally benefited from slavery. Secondly, there is a distinction between considering something “evil” and “unnatural”. My ancestors clearly hated the German landlords but, at the same time, clearly saw the situation as something quite natural. After all, it had been the fact of the matter for 600 years. This is further evidenced by the fact that it took more than a century of gradual awakening to actually realize an alternative social structure. So, by the standards of about 200 years ago slavery in these parts was certainly not seen as desirable by the slaves but quite certainly as something “normal”.
No, that's not what they are saying. Slavery predates written records and was perpetrated by many cultures. It continues to exist in Africa (Mali, Niger, Sudan, etc), in India (bonded labour), in the middle east (migrant workers) and other places. When one includes sexual slavery and trafficking, it's virtually everywhere.
> Just out of curiosity, what are notable examples of people saying “we should judge people by the standards of their time” in a reasonable way?
Do you consider eating meat at a restaurant to be a morally acceptable thing to do?
The meat you consume there is likely factory grown, which means that the animal lived in total misery until it was brutally murdered under extreme duress.
It's highly likely that people will consider treating animals like that to be immoral at some point. If you don't accept your quote as truth you'll also have to accept that your descends will consider you (and everyone else in our society) monstrous.
Do you accept that at some point they might try to take away an honor from you because of it?
Personally, I'd say yes. I know enough to try to diminish my animal consumption, but for a variety of reasons I haven't eliminated it. If that is someday seen as monstrous enough that they want to revoke my awards and recognition, I'm actually all for it. It will be a better, kinder world than the one I live in.
I mean, that's one frequent US-based usage. But people use it in plenty of other contexts too.
E.g., reading (non-politics) authors from the past. Listening to music by musicians from the past. Just as a quick example, should you or should you not listen to Wagner is a question among Jews, because of his anti-semitic views. Personally I wouldn't let that stop me from listening to him, but people have different views on this kind of stuff.
one such example is the quote "an eye for an eye".
Today this sounds as condoning revenge or vigilantism, as opposed to forgiveness.
But in its historical context, it was in fact the opposite, since the norm at the time used to be to engage in vastly unequal retaliation (e.g. "your entire family for an eye").
One of the progressive HR departments I'm familiar with recently celebrated Messrs. Sanger and Anthony (Susan B.) either in full knowledge (presumably given they passed over celebrating others they found problematic) or totally ignorant of their histories (which given their sensitivity, seems unlikely). If the latter, then it looks like it could depend on the person whether they are "forgiven" for their sins. Sanger, for those unfamiliar, was a eugenicist.
Also, mr Sharpton is known for his past history of bigotry and the great majority of people pretend he never uttered bigoted words is not only on TV but is celebrated as a civil rights leader.
After reading that quote, I can sympathize with why the people behind the cancellation were concerned. However, I still think it's valuable to preserve the ugly parts of history in particular as waypoints.
> The wording is unfortunately brief, but Fisher the professor of genetics is referring to the future “stock” and the ultimate elimination from the population of the genes that cause the defect, as is clear from his earlier writing on the subject. To eliminate the defectives themselves would constitute murder.
If you are going to quote the article, maybe read it first. The author is quite clear that he believes this to be a misunderstanding given other writings by Fisher.
> (6) Fisher, in a testimonial for von Verschuer after the war, supported von Verschuer’s “wish to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally”. The wording is unfortunately brief, but Fisher the professor of genetics is referring to the future “stock” and the ultimate elimination from the population of the genes that cause the defect, as is clear from his earlier writing on the subject. To eliminate the defectives themselves would constitute murder.
Context is important. Cherry picking specific sections to make a point contrary to what is actually being said has a name, but it escapes me.
I'm always disappointed in cherry picking. On the other hand, without knowing anything else about that extended piece, it looks like the author is whitewashing and trying to brush something unpleasant about Fisher under the rug.
Genes aren't "deficient mentally" and it's hard to read that quote any other way than as advocating eugenics.
Reading the extended text makes me wonder about the whole story, but doesn't really convince me Fisher wasn't in favor of eugenics and all that entails. I wouldn't say I'm skeptical, but it would take more than that.
Do you eat meat? There's a chance that in the future people will have stopped eating meat, for it to be replaced with lab grown meat or whatever, and the very thought of eating another animal will appear to those people as completely disgusting and unforgivable (especially mass farmed meat for the 1st world, ie not for survival).
Seems unfair to judge people of the past in such a way?
edit: I see this idea has already been discussed below _- I should have done a search for "meat" before commenting.
I guess since I'm not a student there this doesn't make me that mad. Why would i care? Did they remove his research & discoveries out of the libraries too?
I am puzzled by the "oh no, this is erasing history" people.
There are many people throughout history that are known and studied without being celebrated.
Statues, windows, etc. are there to commemorate and celebrate people. If we decide that we shouldn't celebrate an individual (confederate generals for example), removing that statue is not the same as erasing them from history.
> If we decide that we shouldn't celebrate an individual
That's precisely what's at issue. Who decides who should be celebrated and who should not? What are the criteria for deciding? And what story are we telling about our history with those decisions.
That would leave approximately no one from more than a century ago and almost no one from the last century, especially if you're going to exclude anyone who might be considered a bigot by modern progressive standards.
Are you really cool with that though? It implies no mathematician, scientist, artist, writer, athlete, politician, soldier, or activist should be celebrated or admired unless they exactly conform to the ideological purity standards of modern progressives? If you are cool with that, you and those who think like you are precisely why people get so agitated when statues are pulled down and windows hidden in basements.
You’ve jumped from “bigoted” to “ideological purity”, which I didn’t say.
But just in the interest of going whole hog: let’s assume I become King Of Earth and my new rule is “nobody is allowed to be celebrated”. Does the world stop spinning? It’s a crazy rule, but celebration of dead people isn’t exactly the glue holding society together.
Meanwhile, racism is a pretty ongoing issue that is tearing it apart.
Celebrating people and history is a core pillar of identity. The “founding fathers” are central to the story of America’s founding.
Jesus is certainly a glue of Christianity, Mohammad of Islam, etc.
Does that mean we have to accept all of who those people are? Of course not. We can choose to celebrate the Federalist papers and denounce the slaveholding.
People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.
> People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.
Yea, this is pretty much the same reason that people want racists’ statues taken down.
People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots, and that’s a tribe I’m pretty happy letting go extinct.
> People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots
But, with some exceptions, these people aren’t celebrated for their bigotry. They’re celebrated for their positive achievements. People are complex mixtures of good, bad, and indifferent values. No one is pure of character or thought.
FWIW I happen to think ideas should be celebrated, maybe accomplishments per se, not people. I've grown skeptical about celebrating people. There's too many problems in the background, all the time, too many unknown stories, too much about the idolizers rather than the idolized, too much weight of privilege, too much.
You think racism today is tearing society apart? Racism has never been lower. I haven't ever seen race riots breakout. In a few American cities anti-police protests have happened.
Liberal guilt is tearing itself apart. As things get better day after day because of the work so many put in, a group of people exists who ignores this and thinks the world is frozen in some media generated history.
there's no causal link between Fisher supporting eugenics and continued institutional racism though? The idea of "cancelling" all of history's greatest people is one of the worst suggestions I can imagine, optically, for progressive movements. I would think that educating people about the shades of grey in our cultural icons' history, beliefs and personality is a much better cause.
For example I didn't know that Churchill had some pretty horrendous things to say about Indian people until the last couple of years because British cultural attitudes towards him are pretty unflinchingly patriotic. It doesn't diminish that he played a key role in saving us and the rest of the world from the Nazis, but it does balance his image as a man with positive and negative qualities, which is a more realistic image. To tear his statues down says to other people "fuck your heroes, racism is the only dimension I judge people on" - which is much more likely to garner a reactionary response than to initiate dialogue and understanding on the racism of our history, which IMO is the valuable thing you can get out of these conflicts.
Tearing down statues (of people famous for things unrelated to racism) just makes progressives seem incredibly unreasonable, which is already a popular perception, because of exactly things like this.
Few people paid attention to racism until people started tearing down statues and burning Targets. What's the incentive to be nice and polite when being nice and polite gets you ignored?
This is just another call for respectability politics. You're asking people to do something that doesn't work.
I don't care if you're canvassing in a suit and tie or spray painting Marxist slogans on banks - respectability doesn't matter. Results do - and consequentially speaking, destroying things that people consider symbols of pride is not going to win you many friends among moderates. If you want to argue that trying to clandestinely pull down a statue prompts a national conversation about the motives of the vandals, then sure, I can agree with that reasoning. But actually making the argument "no accomplished people should be celebrated at all if they weren't morally squeaky-clean"? That's purity politics, and a continued association between progressivism and puritanism is not going to win any friends or allies.
Fisher has published works confirming his belief that different races have different “innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development”. Is that not racist enough to be considered racist?
yes, that's obviously racist. But you do realise that publishing about how much he hates racial minorities isn't the thing he's being celebrated for? Robert E Lee's primary contribution to the world was trying to defend the right to own slaves. If Fisher was being celebrated as a race scientist or whatever then I'd be against that too. It's not like celebrating Fisher's accomplishment is an endorsement of his racial beliefs - a statue celebrates a person's achievement, not the entirety of their being.
There aren't singular people behind progress. If Newton had never been born we would still have Calculus, and in fact we don't teach Newton's calculus in schools. Einstein was part of a team, and his team was only slightly ahead of another team.
Statues and shit paint a picture of a lie: That great people drive the world.
Human progress happens because other areas progress, the new ideas are inevitable, the person who does them has no real bearing on whether they happen or not. History is not driven by "great men" but by society working together.
The entire "great man of history" thing is actually a giant pile of racist garbage, used to promote unjust systems and reinforce tribalisms, which is the very thing you're talking about it being good for.
Also, Churchill (who I believe you brought up earlier) was a piece of dog shit who starved millions of people in India out of spite. Very few people have done as much actual evil as Churchill did, and his statues and images should be shit on.
The fact that you aren't aware of those things is entirely down to "great man of history" nonsense being the place where you get your ideas. It's bad, it's backwards, and it's really not defensible.
Teams are important, but sometimes "great men" have a huge impact on history. What do you think the world would look like today if Arthur Wellesley hasn't been present at the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon Bonaparte rolled over the Allied lines?
> What do you think the world would look like today if Arthur Wellesley hasn't been present at the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon Bonaparte rolled over the Allied lines?
Most likely, another general would have defeated Napoleon.
Wellington wasn’t some unique tactical genius. He had 1.5 times the men Napoleon did. I’m sure he was a perfectly competent general, but if he wasn’t there, the next guy in line would be.
I get that you're arguing a systemic position and it's one that I mostly agree with but I do think you take it too far - great man don't drive history alone, but they do contribute incrementally to it. The Wright brothers weren't the only ones trying to invent the plane, many had come before and were attempting simultaneously, and it was all based on existing work from those who came before, but they were successful where others were not. That counts for something.
Where did I say that either the great men of history model, or national pride, were good things? My whole point that I explicitly laid out was that attacking symbols that people think are good is not good praxis. That doesn't mean that perpetuating myths is good, but if you want to win people over to your side, taking a shit on thinga they think are good is not the way to do it. It just makes you feel good in your righteous indignation, which is basically the image a lot of moderates have of progressivism in general.
Not tearing statues down and not scouring flawed people from history also didn't help. Cancelling people who do it is also purity politics. They got exhausted trying to be polite and nonviolent while nothing changed or things got worse, tore down a racist statue erected by racists for racist reasons, and now you claim that's why you don't listen to anything they say even though you weren't listening before.
are you under the impression I'm defending Confederate statues? To be clear, I'm not; I'm defending the celebration of people like Fisher, the subject of this actual article. Fuck the confederates.
> The idea of "cancelling" all of history's greatest people is one of the worst suggestions I can imagine, optically, for progressive movements. I would think that educating people about the shades of grey in our cultural icons' history, beliefs and personality is a much better cause.
This is a strawman.
I’m specifically saying we shouldn’t celebrate bigots. We should continue to educate people about the “shades of grey” as it were. We can do that without statues. Monuments are never going to have context.
If you think me unreasonable, I guess I’ll just have to be okay with that.
I don't care about your personal levels of reasonableness; I care about the normalisation of progressive policies, and puritans keep people from learning about and exploring progressivism; I know because it kept me away for a long time, thinking progressives are all unreasonable.
"we shouldn't celebrate bigots" is reductionist because it narrows important people down to a single dimension. That's puritanism - if somebody invents a cure for cancer and saves billions of lives, they should be celebrated for that achievement even if they have bad racial views, because from a consequential perspective people want to be celebrated and are inspired by the idea of being considered a hero for breakthroughs in their field. You can simultaneously celebrate and condemn a single person, it's called nuance - and the conversation around an individual is not solely shaped by the placard on their statue.
We can praise an accomplishment without forgetting context. But monuments cannot.
Unless there’s a proposal for building an “un-monument”, when we put up a statue for a bigot who did a good thing, we’re elevating the good thing without the context of the bad.
We should celebrate that FDR’s policies got us out of the Great Depression, and also never forget that he signed off on internment camps.
I think this is the point we're actually in disagreement on: you believe that a statue is a celebration of a person in their entirety, where I believe a statue is a celebration of a person's accomplishment - their personhood becomes a symbol for that accomplishment. In my mind a statue of Churchill is a symbol of war victory over the Nazis and British stiff upper lip, a statue of Robert E Lee is a symbol of upholding slavery, etc etc. The statues we build are symbolic of the moments in history that we want to uphold culturally, not an endorsement of a famous person's total being.
I don’t necessarily think that a statue is intended by its builder to celebrate a person in their entirety. As two example: I’d agree that it’s unlike the folks who put Fisher’s likeness on that window didn’t mean to celebrate his racism. It’s also interesting that Robert E Lee denounced monuments to the Confederacy before he died; the people erecting statues of him aren’t intending to celebrate his entirety either.
But in practice, raising a statue of somebody raises that person. They’re put forth as the face of the accomplishment, and they’re more than just the accomplishment. Else we’d just raise a tower with the inscription “In recognition of the British spirit, and of the lives lost protecting us from Naziism”
My broader contention is that you don’t need a statue to celebrate the accomplishment, we have plenty of other ways to do that. So when somebody says “hey, lets take down this statue because the person in it did some pretty bigoted things”, the only thing fighting for keeping the statue is inertia. Nobody in the UK is going to forget defeating the Nazis, every other building is inscribed with details about what stood there before the Blitz.
This is certainly not true! Many, many people from more than a century ago opposed racism and bigotry. It's just that many powerful people in recent years supported it and want you to believe that racism and bigotry was (and still is) a normal and defensible thing.
Most obviously - there were a lot of people from non-dominant races (in various times and places) in history! We have writings from Olaudah Equiano, for instance, that confirm that he did not believe in the common racism and bigotry of his time, and there were many thousands like him that didn't write anything down either.
But even among the races benefiting from racism, we have writings of people opposing it, too.
Here, for instance, are excerpts from journal entries of Bp. Thomas Coke, one of the founders of Methodism in the US, written in 1785:
> At night I lodged at the house of Captain Dillard, a most hospitable man, and as kind to his negroes as if they were white servants. It was quite pleasing to see them so decently and comfortably clothed. And yet I could not beat into the head of that poor man the evil of keeping them in slavery, although he has read Mr. Wesley's thoughts on slavery, (I think he said) three times over, : but his good wife is strongly on our side.)
> I preached the late Colonel Bedford's funeral sermon. But I said nothing good of him, for he was a violent friend of slavery, and his interest being great among the Methodists in these parts, he would have been a dreadful thorn in our sides, if the Lord had not in mercy taken him away.
And here is Gouverneur Morris, one of the Founding Father, debating in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention the merits of the Three-Fifths Compromise, as recorded in James Madison's notes:
> Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? [...] The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.
What you see in these writings is a belief that there is no moral distinction to be made between white and black, that slavery is in fact an outrage, and no defense of it can be made based on race. What you see, simply, is opposition to racism.
This is what some successful and powerful and praiseworthy people - bishops and founding fathers - believed in the 1700s.
You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.
What do the people you have quoted think about gender equality, gay rights, and trans issues? I was careful to say very few people were not bigots by modern standards, not that no one opposed racism and slavery.
> You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.
I mostly don’t know about these people because I’m not American and have very little interest in American history.
I don't know what their views are on those matters - I don't think there's a lot of documentary evidence. (I also picked those two people because I'm American and I grew up Methodist and I happened to have read about both of them recently; my point is very much that it wasn't only these two people who were the only non-bigots of the 1700s, and I'm sure we can find similar stories from whatever segment of history you're interested in, too.)
I also think the question here isn't really about bigots by modern standards. Bp. Coke makes it clear that Col. Bedford was a terrible man by the standards of the time, so much so that he didn't say a single positive thing about him at his funeral and he was quite glad that God had killed him off. Morris thinks the slavers of his era were working "in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity" and the slaveholders of the south were putting people in "the most cruel bondages".
Ronald Fisher died in 1962. He was a contemporary of such people as MLK and Rosa Parks, just as much as he was a contemporary of Josef Mengele. He was one of many participated in the drafting of the 1950 UNESCO statement on "The Race Question," and out of those, he was one of very few who insisted on the reasonableness of dividing up the human population by race, both in terms of biological nature and in terms of moral worth. The article is not asking about modern standards of bigotry; his colleagues in 1950 would have called him a bigot.
Nobody is trying to cancel Herod for not being a fan of neopronouns. There were enough reasons for Herod's own contemporaries to call him evil.
That said, since you mention trans issues - you might be interested in the story of the Public Universal Friend (1752-1819), who among other things insisted on being referred to in a gender-neutral manner and generally had that wish honored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend
I think people were much less concerned about this sort of thing in the past when they were not told to be concerned about it. See also the 1952 New York Daily News headline, "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty," subtitled "Bronx Youth Is a Happy Woman After 2 Years, 6 Operations." https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx-army-vet-ground-b... (see the original headline at https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25375703/ex-gi-becomes-blond...) The article straightforwardly refers to her as "she" and a "new woman" and says the conversion was "successfully completed," noting also that her military and immigration records were changed. To be abundantly clear, I am sure that Christine Jorgensen would have been much happier to have been alive today and going through transition today instead of seventy years ago - but I also think the anti-trans bigotry that we see today from certain corners is not the remnant of a universal worldview of seventy years ago. Some fraction of people were bigots in the past, as they are today; many people weren't and aren't.
(Of course, also, part of this is that scientific studies of gay rights and trans issues at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were burned by the same folks that Fisher decided to defend in 1950.)
if you and ten thousand others, can accurately and repeatedly find and describe the same people with these labels .. then MAYBE?. Your view of that suspect person now, today, will change..
These obviously negative terms become a mud fight, where each accuser "sticks" others with as much mud as possible, since every single person on earth is imperfect..
one way forward from this depressing situation is to instead, celebrate virtue, and the contest is to find and identify virtue.. meaning "someone did or said something positive" with positive evidence.. that takes away the mud fight and gets everyone looking for virtue. I suggest, do not throw insults as a substitute for seeking and honoring virtue, and find the virtue in others, as a way to move the conversation.
Real -- Humans are dangerous pack hunters, and the reasoning of the mob is notoriously fickle.. If the activity of the day is to "out bigots" and "get them" .. I guarantee you it will descend further
I’m not looking to solve every problem today. But also I’m not interested in engaging with people trying to “find and identify virtue” in bigots. If we can’t agree that celebrating bigots is bad, I’m at a loss as to how to resolve the disconnect.
I’m not looking to “get them”; Robert E Lee and Sir Ronald Fisher aren’t around to be annoyed that we aren’t throwing parades for them.
Let’s get the crane out. All the statues come down. We can learn about historical figures in our schools, and in our museums, surrounded in both cases by appropriate context.
I don't feel a particularly strong inclination to agree or to disagree with your ideals as you lay them out in this statement.
but when the standard of how to judge your comment is based on practicality and not ideals, what is your _actual_ position? because you know it will take another hundred years to clear just the confederate statues.
I think my position is: let’s start knocking down monuments for people who are bigots. There’s a lot of them, so it’ll take a while, but we have plenty of viable ways to remember people in context besides monuments. Eventually either somebody smarter than me finds a way to build a monument that includes context, or we just eventually run out of them.
The problem is that you’re going to piss off an awful lot of people, the vast majority of people. That is impractical if you want your broader political project to succeed. Churchill is a great example of this. Tearing down statues of Churchill will set the majority of the UK population against you, even if they broadly agree with your other political goals. It’s incredibly polarising and does nothing to help the people who are actually hurt by bigotry today. That’s the problem with political purity; sometimes you have to hold your nose and accept things you don’t like; otherwise you’ll achieve nothing.
there may be a huge disconnect here. I haven't switched. I've grounded my original example in practicality. All people are awful. Give it 50 years, and you will discover things about people you hold in high esteem that you wish were not true.
my example with MLK was to demonstrate that it cannot be a binary decision whether or not to celebrate the accomplishments of racists.
and if you say I am wrong, I'll ask again what you intend to do with the amazing, inspiring,,.. but womanizing MLK.
in this case, the leadership at Caius College. in every other case, the same sort of people who made the decision to celebrate the individual in the first place.
in a broader sense, history does - the same people who rail against taking down statues seem to like talking about how history will view the leaders of today. "cancelling" historical figures is the literal implementation of "history will judge my actions". history has judged this guy, and decided that eugenics aren't cool.
There are no saints on this earth. All of us have done or said things we are not proud of and most of our deeds will seem monstrous to the sufficiently distant generations. Newton, for example, was apparently quite a horrible person even by the standards of his time. So now what? There does not seem to be a way to celebrate anybody for any length of time, does there?
This view of not celebrating humans in art for their inherent sinfulness is actually very well known in history. The reason for islams intricate ornaments in buildings is the ban on depicting humans. The christian church has also been split on the matter. Could we be a wee bit more civilized in the 21st century and celebrate the whole person, warts and all? A human? “The man greatly contributed to the field of statistics but was also involved in eugenics” both should be known, researched, debated and understood. For neither would have been possible without the other.
Interestingly, Margaret Sanger Awards were stopped quietly in 2015 but never given the negative press. For example, Wikipedia article is completely silent on that point [1].
All selective breeding is eugenics. If you believe in aborting babies with Down Syndrome, you're a eugenicist. If you believe in choosing a sperm donor based on genetic fitness, you're a eugenicist. If you selectively breed cattle, or your dog, you're a eugenicist. There are rare but debilitating genetic diseases that can arise from mixed race procreation as anyone who's watched Discovery Health may know. Before people judge, they should study the topic and motivation thoroughly. Eugenics does not means racist or genocide, nor does it mean a eugenicist is motivate by hatred or racism. The word for that is racist. There's a whole field of Genetic Counseling that exists for the purpose of eugenics and catering to the biological health of offspring that have emerged since our science has advanced enough to understand the role genes play in biological, physical and mental health. Read up on the topic. It's quite revealing.
>All selective breeding is eugenics. If you believe in aborting babies with Down Syndrome, you're a eugenicist. If you believe in choosing a sperm donor based on genetic fitness, you're a eugenicist. If you selectively breed cattle, or your dog, you're a eugenicist.
Dating & Mating is eugenics at a conscious & subconscious level.
Some things are considered okay if individuals do them voluntarily, and bad when governments send men with guns to enforce them.
By the same logic, there is nothing wrong with censorship, because individuals also decide to not say certain things or not pay attention to certain things.
I expect that if humanity even invents fully functional external wombs and reliable CRISPR-level gene editing, humanity will call all progressives arguing for the right to have an abortion murderers. Society's frame of reference changes constantly, and what once was progressive will likely be looked unfavourably upon in the future. My guess for the next big shift in society: a movement towards complete abolishment of all consumption of animal products.
You can see this effect in a short scale too. J. K. Rowling was once considered a feminist and role figure for an accomplished woman, until her views on trans people made her no longer reflect the progressive opinions of today.
I think this is part of the normal progression of modern society, accelerated by the ability to reach out to countless people across the world.
It's interesting and perhaps a little scary to theorise what taboos will change from "disgusting" to "progressive" in the future. There's a good chance most people, even the progressive ones, will fall behind on the curve of acceptance at some point.
I myself believe that eugenics, if applied well, can help humanity. In practice, though, I don't think humanity can be trusted to apply it well, so any attempt to introduce it is doomed to be plagued by humanity's flaws. It's the same reason communism fails: humanity cannot work together enough to make something work that in theory would be beneficial to all of us.
I think a lot of people are eugenicists, depending on the precise meaning.
Is bemoaning the fertility of some disfavoured social or religious group eugenicist? If it is then a hell of a lot of people are eugenicist, and definitely not confined to the right.
A better approach would be damnatio memoriae, as with the Venetian Doge Marin Falier, whose official portrait was covered with black velvet and a mention this was done for his crimes (attempting a coup).
IMO, the accusations in the article really don't hold up under a broader examination of Fisher's views on eugenics and his work as a whole.
Quotes in this comment come from
Bodmer, W., Bailey, R.A., Charlesworth, B. et al. The outstanding scientist, R.A. Fisher: his views on eugenics and race. Heredity 126, 565–576 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-020-00394-6
I highly recommend you read this paper if you're interested in a deep exploration of these topics.
I've also paraphrased a few things here, but, go easy on me. This is a HN comment, ya know, not an academic paper. It's not my intention to plagiarize anyone here. :)
---
FISHER THE EUGENICIST
Fisher absolutely was a eugenicist, but not in the way in which that word is typically colored by its association with the Nazis. His concept of eugenics was more along the lines of a set of methods by which a population could improve itself via controlled or regulated breeding.
This concept, as espoused by Fisher, was certainly extremely classist, as he regarded people of high intelligence and leadership ability, whom he referred to as the "higher classes" as inherently more valuable than others, among which would fall people such as tradesmen and unskilled laborers ("lower classes"). And, he did support the Eugenics Society's position in favor of voluntary sterilization of "feebleminded" individuals as part of a way to realize his eugenic vision, and this was the view espoused in the 1934 Brock Report.
FISHER AS RACIST
The closest he ever comes to advocating any kind of racist idea is when he suggests in his comments on the 1952 UNESCO statement on "The Race Concept" that:
> '...available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,' seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes.
It's not clear whether he intends the word "groups" to mean "races" in any sense in which we would think of it today. In any case, he does not go so far as to suggest that some "groups" may be generally superior to others. And, remember, he holds out eugenics as a way in which any population may "improve" itself, such as by increasing the overall intelligence level of the population by preventing people of lower intelligence from being born. This is the context in which we should take "his support for von Verschuer’s 'elimination of mental defectives to benefit the German racial stock,'" as noted in the posted article. (I'll return to von Verschuer in a moment.)
He does, however, write in private correspondence:
> I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?
Given the man was born in 1890, I think we can forgive him this belief, which was extremely common right up until the day he died in 1962.
ASSOCIATION WITH VON VERSCHUER
Now, as regarding von Verschuer and his association with Mengele, there is no evidence Fisher even knew of this association, or that von Verschuer approved in any way of Hitler's genocide against the Jewish people. Indeed:
> Richard Goldschmidt, who had been forced to leave his position in Germany because he was Jewish, supported Verschuer as “a fine and sympathetic person” and “an exceptional scholar in his field and one of the most knowled...
Stanford University has been systematically erasing the names of early professors and missionaries from buildings and streets who were politically incorrect by current standards. They almost needed to rename the university itself due to the naughty speeches of Governor Leland Stanford. But fortunately they have a loophole since the University is named for his son who died as a teenager.
I thought it ironic that at the end of this article, the author lists the institutions that have taken years to consider this topic and claims they have rushed to judgment, assert his authority over theirs nakedly (and unpersuasively).
But the article did remind me how fun the board game Sagrada is.
Perhaps the most prominent is Margaret Sanger, found of Planned Parenthood. Hillary Clinton tried to rehabilitate her, but this failed. I understand PP is now offering belated apologies and is slowly erasing references to it's founder.
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[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIf we’re comparing it to statues what do they teach? What do they symbolize?
Are we required to keep them forever?
Under what circumstances is it acceptable to change, replace or remove them?
What are we remembering by keeping them? I don’t think that anyone argues that we should be _erecting_ statues to figures we don’t admire - who, if they’re intended as cautionary tales are surely _more_ worthwhile to think about. So it’s not just that they serve to help us remember figures from the past.
So should we instead keep them to remember that the people _were_ once admired enough to get statues? That seems like a very odd second-order reason to keep something.
It seems to me to be perfectly reasonable for an organisation to decide that they no-longer want to celebrate someone.
That's a good enough reason to not worship him.
Then why did this guy have one to begin with?
> our capacity to remember people is independent of stained-glassed windows.
Then why do we build them for people we do like?
The problem is this: Having someone be simultaneously notable for something good and notable for something bad doesn't cancel out and make them notable for nothing. They did the good thing they did, which we should remember, and they did the bad thing they did, which we should also remember.
But institutions have the incentive to present only the good in their histories. Which is how we forget our mistakes and make them again.
You don't like this guy? Leave the window alone and build whatever the opposite of a window is to condemn his bad acts.
Ironically, the article includes a photo of someone who has done just that: stencilled some critical graffiti. It's in the process of being erased. The author who is so keen to preserve the window doesn't seem to mind that opinion being cancelled.
But probably neither windows nor graffiti are actually good ways to evaluate historical figures and their good and bad contributions to science.
It's not, though, that's just the somewhat circular premise of your argument. Nobody is forgetting this guy. He's on the Nobel Prize site, on Wikipedia, in the scientific literature, etc. Fiddling with a stained glassed window doesn't change any of that. Society changing its mind about whom to honour, how and where is a thing that happens all the time.
The problem is this: Having someone be simultaneously notable for something good and notable for something bad doesn't cancel out and make them notable for nothing.
Installing or removing a stained glass window is not really taking a position on this supposed 'problem'.
Because the college wanted to celebrate itself and demonstrate how it has notable alumni. So any alum of any defensible level of notability would have worked here. Nobody looked at the story of Sir Ronald Fisher and decided he need a window somewhere; they looked at the yearbooks of Gonville and Caius and found who could fit on the windows.
If we can at least be honest about that, then we can conclude that the college has a vested interest in claiming that the guy is stained-glass-window-worthy, and therefore the fact that he has a stained-glass window now is not a reliable argument that he ought to have one.
Firstly, the real world isn't immutable. Just because a college made a stained-glass window for someone doesn't mean they have to preserve it for all eternity. Doesn't matter who it is, it's just a piece that was commissioned once and now the owner of it doesn't value it the same way any more.
Secondly, we're in an age where information is so abundant that an internet search or a trip to a library will allow you to learn as much as you care to learn about a notable person. Lecturers and professors may choose to disclaim this person's work when teaching it, such that the value of the science remains but the history of the scientist is laid bare.
If we're talking about erasing people or memory-holing them, the thing to worry about isn't a commemorative decoration, but the education system itself.
In that sense, a far more egregious crime is to, for example, balance out an atrocity like the Holocaust by giving equal credence to Holocaust denial. Or to attempt to ban the teaching of slavery and other unpleasant aspects of a country's history by blocking the literature in schools. In these cases, unsavoury history very much is being erased, and replaced with a version that is more 'family friendly'.
They removed the stain glass window worshiping him. Did you read the article? What do you think erasing means?
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/opinion/planned-parenthoo...
That seems to be the right way to handle this: the history is still there for anyone curious but nobody is saying she’s a role-model for the future.
No one has made a stained-glass window to commemorate me. Am I also being canceled?
But now the college Fisher loved has turned its back on him. It has removed from the Hall a stained-glass window commemorating him, one of a set of six installed to celebrate him, Crick, Venn, Chadwick and two other distinguished college figures, Sir Charles Sherrington and George Green. It has done so because of accusations that Fisher was a proponent of eugenics.
It's almost the reductio ad absurdum version of culture war bullshit.
Let's not forget that eugenics was not an exclusively right-wing position. Many socialists were pro-eugenics: the Webbs, Shaw, C.P. Snow, Haldane, and many more. Eugenics was widely supported by many academics of all political stripes in the early 20th Century.
Also its very much as alive right now - we abort the vast majority of fetuses with known birth defects, we just don't want to call it that. Doesn't matter your view of abortion but its difficult to argue against it.
I have no idea what Fisher's wider politics were, but I have a pretty good idea of what the politics of the publication are.
Having a window removed because of misrepresentations made with religious zeal by a social movement is a huge deal. That should be enough to reverse the decision and sanction everyone involved in putting forward the lies.
> (6) Fisher, in a testimonial for von Verschuer after the war, supported von Verschuer’s “wish to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally”.
You can say "we should judge people by the standards of their time", but it seems that he fell short even by those standards.
The commemoration was for mathematical contributions, not humanitarian efforts.
Another thing society needs to curb is getting celebs to comment on everything, so attention in one area doesn’t make one into an all-knowing life coach as it seems to work for some people.
But more broadly, if you are worried that giving someone’s attention will create a large following of, for instance eugenicists, then you are actually worried about the idea already having a large support, irrespective of the person who would receive an unrelated award.
There are good arguments to be made against eugenics programs, just make them instead of trying to disappear anyone that has ever seemed to support them.
Refusing to recognise someone’s brilliance because of political ideologies is something most people understand to be wrong and in my view just as likely, if not more, to create support for that political cause than to suppress it.
Just out of curiosity, what are notable examples of people saying “we should judge people by the standards of their time” in a reasonable way?
I most frequently hear it used for many of the “American forefathers” or other prominent people during that time to refer to their views on slavery and the treatment of indigenous people. In that case it’s clearly laughable, since A) there were prominent contemporary critics and B) a lot of those people spent considerable effort performing mental gymnastics in writing to defend these things, which one wouldn’t expect if they were simply unaware of any potential moral problems with their actions and views.
You are most probably not among the universally righteous minds of our times, you are just an average man of our time. I don't think that means, by default, that all your actions are not worthy of praise of that your failing by an undisclosed future moral crime (such as eating sentient animals) negate all your moral choices today.
Do you consider eating meat at a restaurant to be a morally acceptable thing to do?
The meat you consume there is likely factory grown, which means that the animal lived in total misery until it was brutally murdered under extreme duress.
It's highly likely that people will consider treating animals like that to be immoral at some point. If you don't accept your quote as truth you'll also have to accept that your descends will consider you (and everyone else in our society) monstrous.
Personally, I'd say yes. I know enough to try to diminish my animal consumption, but for a variety of reasons I haven't eliminated it. If that is someday seen as monstrous enough that they want to revoke my awards and recognition, I'm actually all for it. It will be a better, kinder world than the one I live in.
E.g., reading (non-politics) authors from the past. Listening to music by musicians from the past. Just as a quick example, should you or should you not listen to Wagner is a question among Jews, because of his anti-semitic views. Personally I wouldn't let that stop me from listening to him, but people have different views on this kind of stuff.
Today this sounds as condoning revenge or vigilantism, as opposed to forgiveness.
But in its historical context, it was in fact the opposite, since the norm at the time used to be to engage in vastly unequal retaliation (e.g. "your entire family for an eye").
Also, mr Sharpton is known for his past history of bigotry and the great majority of people pretend he never uttered bigoted words is not only on TV but is celebrated as a civil rights leader.
If you are going to quote the article, maybe read it first. The author is quite clear that he believes this to be a misunderstanding given other writings by Fisher.
> (6) Fisher, in a testimonial for von Verschuer after the war, supported von Verschuer’s “wish to benefit the German racial stock, especially by the elimination of manifest defectives, such as those deficient mentally”. The wording is unfortunately brief, but Fisher the professor of genetics is referring to the future “stock” and the ultimate elimination from the population of the genes that cause the defect, as is clear from his earlier writing on the subject. To eliminate the defectives themselves would constitute murder.
Context is important. Cherry picking specific sections to make a point contrary to what is actually being said has a name, but it escapes me.
Genes aren't "deficient mentally" and it's hard to read that quote any other way than as advocating eugenics.
Reading the extended text makes me wonder about the whole story, but doesn't really convince me Fisher wasn't in favor of eugenics and all that entails. I wouldn't say I'm skeptical, but it would take more than that.
Seems unfair to judge people of the past in such a way?
edit: I see this idea has already been discussed below _- I should have done a search for "meat" before commenting.
There are many people throughout history that are known and studied without being celebrated.
Statues, windows, etc. are there to commemorate and celebrate people. If we decide that we shouldn't celebrate an individual (confederate generals for example), removing that statue is not the same as erasing them from history.
That's precisely what's at issue. Who decides who should be celebrated and who should not? What are the criteria for deciding? And what story are we telling about our history with those decisions.
Let’s agree not to celebrate racists or other bigots?
We can remember these people existed and the things they did without celebrating them.
Removing statues is an example of that.
But just in the interest of going whole hog: let’s assume I become King Of Earth and my new rule is “nobody is allowed to be celebrated”. Does the world stop spinning? It’s a crazy rule, but celebration of dead people isn’t exactly the glue holding society together.
Meanwhile, racism is a pretty ongoing issue that is tearing it apart.
Jesus is certainly a glue of Christianity, Mohammad of Islam, etc.
Does that mean we have to accept all of who those people are? Of course not. We can choose to celebrate the Federalist papers and denounce the slaveholding.
People have a natural desire to follow leaders, to idolize people. In doing so they are tied more closely to others who value/worship/memorialize the same.
That’s (one!) tribal glue.
Yea, this is pretty much the same reason that people want racists’ statues taken down.
People celebrating bigots are people who value bigots, and that’s a tribe I’m pretty happy letting go extinct.
Funny, saying that sort of thing is what got Fisher condemned.
But, with some exceptions, these people aren’t celebrated for their bigotry. They’re celebrated for their positive achievements. People are complex mixtures of good, bad, and indifferent values. No one is pure of character or thought.
Liberal guilt is tearing itself apart. As things get better day after day because of the work so many put in, a group of people exists who ignores this and thinks the world is frozen in some media generated history.
For example I didn't know that Churchill had some pretty horrendous things to say about Indian people until the last couple of years because British cultural attitudes towards him are pretty unflinchingly patriotic. It doesn't diminish that he played a key role in saving us and the rest of the world from the Nazis, but it does balance his image as a man with positive and negative qualities, which is a more realistic image. To tear his statues down says to other people "fuck your heroes, racism is the only dimension I judge people on" - which is much more likely to garner a reactionary response than to initiate dialogue and understanding on the racism of our history, which IMO is the valuable thing you can get out of these conflicts.
Tearing down statues (of people famous for things unrelated to racism) just makes progressives seem incredibly unreasonable, which is already a popular perception, because of exactly things like this.
This is just another call for respectability politics. You're asking people to do something that doesn't work.
There's a significant difference between a statue to Robert E Lee and a statue to Churchill (or, say, a stained-glass celebration of this Fisher guy).
There aren't singular people behind progress. If Newton had never been born we would still have Calculus, and in fact we don't teach Newton's calculus in schools. Einstein was part of a team, and his team was only slightly ahead of another team.
Statues and shit paint a picture of a lie: That great people drive the world.
Human progress happens because other areas progress, the new ideas are inevitable, the person who does them has no real bearing on whether they happen or not. History is not driven by "great men" but by society working together.
The entire "great man of history" thing is actually a giant pile of racist garbage, used to promote unjust systems and reinforce tribalisms, which is the very thing you're talking about it being good for.
Also, Churchill (who I believe you brought up earlier) was a piece of dog shit who starved millions of people in India out of spite. Very few people have done as much actual evil as Churchill did, and his statues and images should be shit on.
The fact that you aren't aware of those things is entirely down to "great man of history" nonsense being the place where you get your ideas. It's bad, it's backwards, and it's really not defensible.
Most likely, another general would have defeated Napoleon.
Wellington wasn’t some unique tactical genius. He had 1.5 times the men Napoleon did. I’m sure he was a perfectly competent general, but if he wasn’t there, the next guy in line would be.
Where did I say that either the great men of history model, or national pride, were good things? My whole point that I explicitly laid out was that attacking symbols that people think are good is not good praxis. That doesn't mean that perpetuating myths is good, but if you want to win people over to your side, taking a shit on thinga they think are good is not the way to do it. It just makes you feel good in your righteous indignation, which is basically the image a lot of moderates have of progressivism in general.
This is a strawman.
I’m specifically saying we shouldn’t celebrate bigots. We should continue to educate people about the “shades of grey” as it were. We can do that without statues. Monuments are never going to have context.
If you think me unreasonable, I guess I’ll just have to be okay with that.
"we shouldn't celebrate bigots" is reductionist because it narrows important people down to a single dimension. That's puritanism - if somebody invents a cure for cancer and saves billions of lives, they should be celebrated for that achievement even if they have bad racial views, because from a consequential perspective people want to be celebrated and are inspired by the idea of being considered a hero for breakthroughs in their field. You can simultaneously celebrate and condemn a single person, it's called nuance - and the conversation around an individual is not solely shaped by the placard on their statue.
Unless there’s a proposal for building an “un-monument”, when we put up a statue for a bigot who did a good thing, we’re elevating the good thing without the context of the bad.
We should celebrate that FDR’s policies got us out of the Great Depression, and also never forget that he signed off on internment camps.
But in practice, raising a statue of somebody raises that person. They’re put forth as the face of the accomplishment, and they’re more than just the accomplishment. Else we’d just raise a tower with the inscription “In recognition of the British spirit, and of the lives lost protecting us from Naziism”
My broader contention is that you don’t need a statue to celebrate the accomplishment, we have plenty of other ways to do that. So when somebody says “hey, lets take down this statue because the person in it did some pretty bigoted things”, the only thing fighting for keeping the statue is inertia. Nobody in the UK is going to forget defeating the Nazis, every other building is inscribed with details about what stood there before the Blitz.
Most obviously - there were a lot of people from non-dominant races (in various times and places) in history! We have writings from Olaudah Equiano, for instance, that confirm that he did not believe in the common racism and bigotry of his time, and there were many thousands like him that didn't write anything down either.
But even among the races benefiting from racism, we have writings of people opposing it, too.
Here, for instance, are excerpts from journal entries of Bp. Thomas Coke, one of the founders of Methodism in the US, written in 1785:
> At night I lodged at the house of Captain Dillard, a most hospitable man, and as kind to his negroes as if they were white servants. It was quite pleasing to see them so decently and comfortably clothed. And yet I could not beat into the head of that poor man the evil of keeping them in slavery, although he has read Mr. Wesley's thoughts on slavery, (I think he said) three times over, : but his good wife is strongly on our side.)
> I preached the late Colonel Bedford's funeral sermon. But I said nothing good of him, for he was a violent friend of slavery, and his interest being great among the Methodists in these parts, he would have been a dreadful thorn in our sides, if the Lord had not in mercy taken him away.
And here is Gouverneur Morris, one of the Founding Father, debating in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention the merits of the Three-Fifths Compromise, as recorded in James Madison's notes:
> Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? [...] The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.
What you see in these writings is a belief that there is no moral distinction to be made between white and black, that slavery is in fact an outrage, and no defense of it can be made based on race. What you see, simply, is opposition to racism.
This is what some successful and powerful and praiseworthy people - bishops and founding fathers - believed in the 1700s.
You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.
> You don't know this, of course, because the people who make statues and stained glass windows aren't excited about sharing that history.
I mostly don’t know about these people because I’m not American and have very little interest in American history.
I also think the question here isn't really about bigots by modern standards. Bp. Coke makes it clear that Col. Bedford was a terrible man by the standards of the time, so much so that he didn't say a single positive thing about him at his funeral and he was quite glad that God had killed him off. Morris thinks the slavers of his era were working "in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity" and the slaveholders of the south were putting people in "the most cruel bondages".
Ronald Fisher died in 1962. He was a contemporary of such people as MLK and Rosa Parks, just as much as he was a contemporary of Josef Mengele. He was one of many participated in the drafting of the 1950 UNESCO statement on "The Race Question," and out of those, he was one of very few who insisted on the reasonableness of dividing up the human population by race, both in terms of biological nature and in terms of moral worth. The article is not asking about modern standards of bigotry; his colleagues in 1950 would have called him a bigot.
Nobody is trying to cancel Herod for not being a fan of neopronouns. There were enough reasons for Herod's own contemporaries to call him evil.
That said, since you mention trans issues - you might be interested in the story of the Public Universal Friend (1752-1819), who among other things insisted on being referred to in a gender-neutral manner and generally had that wish honored. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Universal_Friend
I think people were much less concerned about this sort of thing in the past when they were not told to be concerned about it. See also the 1952 New York Daily News headline, "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty," subtitled "Bronx Youth Is a Happy Woman After 2 Years, 6 Operations." https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx-army-vet-ground-b... (see the original headline at https://www.newspapers.com/clip/25375703/ex-gi-becomes-blond...) The article straightforwardly refers to her as "she" and a "new woman" and says the conversion was "successfully completed," noting also that her military and immigration records were changed. To be abundantly clear, I am sure that Christine Jorgensen would have been much happier to have been alive today and going through transition today instead of seventy years ago - but I also think the anti-trans bigotry that we see today from certain corners is not the remnant of a universal worldview of seventy years ago. Some fraction of people were bigots in the past, as they are today; many people weren't and aren't.
(Of course, also, part of this is that scientific studies of gay rights and trans issues at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft were burned by the same folks that Fisher decided to defend in 1950.)
These obviously negative terms become a mud fight, where each accuser "sticks" others with as much mud as possible, since every single person on earth is imperfect..
one way forward from this depressing situation is to instead, celebrate virtue, and the contest is to find and identify virtue.. meaning "someone did or said something positive" with positive evidence.. that takes away the mud fight and gets everyone looking for virtue. I suggest, do not throw insults as a substitute for seeking and honoring virtue, and find the virtue in others, as a way to move the conversation.
Real -- Humans are dangerous pack hunters, and the reasoning of the mob is notoriously fickle.. If the activity of the day is to "out bigots" and "get them" .. I guarantee you it will descend further
I’m not looking to “get them”; Robert E Lee and Sir Ronald Fisher aren’t around to be annoyed that we aren’t throwing parades for them.
does this example help you to understand the danger in your particular brand of ignorance?
but when the standard of how to judge your comment is based on practicality and not ideals, what is your _actual_ position? because you know it will take another hundred years to clear just the confederate statues.
I think my position is: let’s start knocking down monuments for people who are bigots. There’s a lot of them, so it’ll take a while, but we have plenty of viable ways to remember people in context besides monuments. Eventually either somebody smarter than me finds a way to build a monument that includes context, or we just eventually run out of them.
my example with MLK was to demonstrate that it cannot be a binary decision whether or not to celebrate the accomplishments of racists.
and if you say I am wrong, I'll ask again what you intend to do with the amazing, inspiring,,.. but womanizing MLK.
in this case, the leadership at Caius College. in every other case, the same sort of people who made the decision to celebrate the individual in the first place.
in a broader sense, history does - the same people who rail against taking down statues seem to like talking about how history will view the leaders of today. "cancelling" historical figures is the literal implementation of "history will judge my actions". history has judged this guy, and decided that eugenics aren't cool.
This view of not celebrating humans in art for their inherent sinfulness is actually very well known in history. The reason for islams intricate ornaments in buildings is the ban on depicting humans. The christian church has also been split on the matter. Could we be a wee bit more civilized in the 21st century and celebrate the whole person, warts and all? A human? “The man greatly contributed to the field of statistics but was also involved in eugenics” both should be known, researched, debated and understood. For neither would have been possible without the other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger_Awards
Dating & Mating is eugenics at a conscious & subconscious level.
By the same logic, there is nothing wrong with censorship, because individuals also decide to not say certain things or not pay attention to certain things.
You can see this effect in a short scale too. J. K. Rowling was once considered a feminist and role figure for an accomplished woman, until her views on trans people made her no longer reflect the progressive opinions of today.
I think this is part of the normal progression of modern society, accelerated by the ability to reach out to countless people across the world.
It's interesting and perhaps a little scary to theorise what taboos will change from "disgusting" to "progressive" in the future. There's a good chance most people, even the progressive ones, will fall behind on the curve of acceptance at some point.
I myself believe that eugenics, if applied well, can help humanity. In practice, though, I don't think humanity can be trusted to apply it well, so any attempt to introduce it is doomed to be plagued by humanity's flaws. It's the same reason communism fails: humanity cannot work together enough to make something work that in theory would be beneficial to all of us.
Is bemoaning the fertility of some disfavoured social or religious group eugenicist? If it is then a hell of a lot of people are eugenicist, and definitely not confined to the right.
Quotes in this comment come from
Bodmer, W., Bailey, R.A., Charlesworth, B. et al. The outstanding scientist, R.A. Fisher: his views on eugenics and race. Heredity 126, 565–576 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41437-020-00394-6
With full text available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41437-020-00394-6
I highly recommend you read this paper if you're interested in a deep exploration of these topics.
I've also paraphrased a few things here, but, go easy on me. This is a HN comment, ya know, not an academic paper. It's not my intention to plagiarize anyone here. :)
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FISHER THE EUGENICIST
Fisher absolutely was a eugenicist, but not in the way in which that word is typically colored by its association with the Nazis. His concept of eugenics was more along the lines of a set of methods by which a population could improve itself via controlled or regulated breeding.
This concept, as espoused by Fisher, was certainly extremely classist, as he regarded people of high intelligence and leadership ability, whom he referred to as the "higher classes" as inherently more valuable than others, among which would fall people such as tradesmen and unskilled laborers ("lower classes"). And, he did support the Eugenics Society's position in favor of voluntary sterilization of "feebleminded" individuals as part of a way to realize his eugenic vision, and this was the view espoused in the 1934 Brock Report.
FISHER AS RACIST
The closest he ever comes to advocating any kind of racist idea is when he suggests in his comments on the 1952 UNESCO statement on "The Race Concept" that:
> '...available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,' seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes.
It's not clear whether he intends the word "groups" to mean "races" in any sense in which we would think of it today. In any case, he does not go so far as to suggest that some "groups" may be generally superior to others. And, remember, he holds out eugenics as a way in which any population may "improve" itself, such as by increasing the overall intelligence level of the population by preventing people of lower intelligence from being born. This is the context in which we should take "his support for von Verschuer’s 'elimination of mental defectives to benefit the German racial stock,'" as noted in the posted article. (I'll return to von Verschuer in a moment.)
He does, however, write in private correspondence:
> I am sorry that there should be propaganda in favour of miscegenation in North America as I am sure it can do nothing but harm. Is it beyond human endeavour to give and justly administer equal rights to all citizens without fooling ourselves that these are equivalent items?
Given the man was born in 1890, I think we can forgive him this belief, which was extremely common right up until the day he died in 1962.
ASSOCIATION WITH VON VERSCHUER
Now, as regarding von Verschuer and his association with Mengele, there is no evidence Fisher even knew of this association, or that von Verschuer approved in any way of Hitler's genocide against the Jewish people. Indeed:
> Richard Goldschmidt, who had been forced to leave his position in Germany because he was Jewish, supported Verschuer as “a fine and sympathetic person” and “an exceptional scholar in his field and one of the most knowled...
But the article did remind me how fun the board game Sagrada is.
Perhaps the most prominent is Margaret Sanger, found of Planned Parenthood. Hillary Clinton tried to rehabilitate her, but this failed. I understand PP is now offering belated apologies and is slowly erasing references to it's founder.