“More Statues, Not Fewer”-by Sydney Williams
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
George Orwell
Statues and monuments are erected not just to honor an individual but as reminders we did not just appear, that we descend not just from our parents and grandparents but from a past and a culture that gave rise to the country in which we live. Despite nihilist messages from Black Lives Matter (BLM), we in America are fortunate. Most nations are not as free as this and none have seen so many “rags to riches” stories. Much of the world lives under totalitarian regimes, and the fact that global poverty has shrunk is (largely) due to the creative genius, entrepreneurial spirit and generosity of Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently Tweeted, “America is the best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans or what have you.”
Evolution is a slow process. Life, according to most scientists, began about four billion years ago, primates about a hundred million years ago and humanoids perhaps twenty million years ago. Over the millennia, evolution provided natural selection that allowed our ancestors to survive and gave us inherited traits that permitted us to develop as individuals. It took millions of years for man to live communally and even longer to reach the age of Enlightenment, when concepts of self-government, rule of law, equal justice and individual liberty emerged. Throughout most of history, man fought – generally over land or religion. Today, we are indebted, in terms of liberty, democracy and markets to men like Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Galileo, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, David Hume and Adam Smith. Their ideas, many based on the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans, developed in the 17th and 18th Centuries. The United States Constitution, when adopted in 1788, served as their laboratory. We are still being tested.
Civilizations in other places have materialized and dissipated: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, India, Mexico and Peru. All collapsed. None offered the universal freedom and respect for the individual’s rights embedded in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence in 1776. One can find fault in the Declaration, as its soaring rhetoric did not include women, and slavery was still a fact of life. Nevertheless, it was a revolutionary document. And it should be judged against customs and standards of the time. How free were women in England, Germany, China or Japan at that time? Slavery, then, existed most everywhere, including Africa, and it still does in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Context counts when passing judgement on past lives and customs.
A genius of the Founding Fathers was their creation of a government with limited power, a concept necessary for liberty, but one fragile, as it conflicts with man’s instinct for power. They gave us a government that permits free speech, the right to assemble and to protest. We have the freedom to worship as we may. In terms of behavior, we have rights to march, but we also have property rights and the right to defend what is ours. We have a government based on the rule of law, not men, and that relies on civility, tolerance and mutual respect, designed to hear diverse opinions. It has worked for almost 250 years. We must keep it. Its strength is not its military; it is not a powerful executive or a wise judicial branch. Its strength is its people, whose collective wisdom is gained through independent thinking, not propaganda that stems from “group think,” where illiberal ideas today are nurtured in universities, promoted by the media, supported by the entertainment and sports world and executed by government bureaucrats.
We live in a frightening time. In the name of inclusion and diversity, we exclude those whose opinions differ from what has been sanctioned by the “thought police.” In seeking diversity of skin color and sex, we get conformity of ideas that demand allegiance to the “Party.” We have fomented a culture that “cancels” history and divides people into victims and oppressors. Through BLM and terrorist groups like Antifa, and our willing acceptance of their demands, we are led away from liberty into the darkness of totalitarianism. What is happening is manifested in mobs that desecrate and tear down remnants of our past. Writing in The Times of London last week, Gerard Baker noted: “It’s still surprisingly little understood that BLM wants a revolution: defunding the police, dismantling the institutions of capitalism and white supremacy.” We see elected officials, who forego responsibility to public safety and bow to mob demands. Recently, we witnessed the Speaker of the House and other congressional Democrats don Ghanian Kente cloth scarfs and kneel on the Capitol steps, in eight minutes and forty-six seconds of hypocritical silence to a man who should not have died as he did. This desire to be “woke” extended to the Head of my old school. In a recent e-mail, he called for inclusion and an end to hate speech and racism, while saying nothing of the need for excellence in scholarship, or the right of free speech, including diversity of opinion. “The racial divide,” as Victor Davis Hanson wrote two weeks ago, “will not be healed by black separatist tribalism.”
Of course, Black lives matter, including that of George Floyd, but also the 97% of Black murder victims who, according to the Washington Post, were killed by other Blacks in 2015. As well, we pray that the lives of the 70% of Black children born every year into father-less families will matter. In truth, all lives matter, just as all voices need to be heard, not just those in fashion. But those who tear down monuments and destroy history remove any sense of how man has changed over time. Ours is a troubled era. We need voices to call out: Slow down and think about what is being said and done! In a speech at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois in 1838, a twenty-eight-year-old Abraham Lincoln spoke: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Evil needs to be suppressed, even when done by those who profess to be doing good.
What is needed is a positive message of universal affirmation, that acknowledges imperfections but is not ashamed of who we are and what has been accomplished. We need more monuments and statues, not fewer. We need them of recent heroes, like Thurgood Marshall and Edward Brooke, to add to those erected yesterday. It allows our descendants to see how we evolve toward a fairer, freer and more equitable society.
And we must keep in mind that every sculpture and monument is a work of art. Michelangelo once said: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” Whether the four faces on Mount Rushmore represent the four greatest Americans who ever lived is a matter of personal opinion. But we can all admire the talent and effort of Gutzon Borglum in producing that monument. My parents were sculptors. They worked in marble, granite and clay. They produced what they thought was (and is) beautiful. Politics never entered the equation. Most of what they produced was small – busts of children and statuettes of horses. My father did, however, carve a Madonna and Child from a granite rock. It now sits outside my brother’s bookstore, the Toadstool, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a symbol of serenity and love – something missing in today’s fractured world.
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