3 ms·

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

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.

akerl_ 5y ago
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.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  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.
  - akerl_ 5y ago
    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.

akerl_ 5y ago

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.

beaconstudios 5y ago
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.
- akerl_ 5y ago
  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.