https://quadrant.org.au/features/ideas/why-the-west-must-fight-for-its-history/
Dr Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent. This was an edited extract from his introduction to his new book, The War Against the Past, to be published by Polity this month.
There was no formal declaration of war. No gunshots rang out. It didn’t even make the local news. But, sure enough, at some point at the turn of the twenty-first century, a war against the past was launched.
Who were the culprits? They are hard to pin down. The partisans supporting the assault on the legacy of European civilisation are not members of a party. They have not issued any war aims and have never formulated an explicit strategic vision. They are also a heterogenous bunch, a coalition of disparate interests and movements.
In an earlier era—the 1990s—when the first wave of mobilisation was taking shape, the English historian J.C.D. Clark warned against representing the promotion of this conflict as the “outcome of a grand conspiracy”. He wrote that it is “the result of a thousand separate, distantly related acts, the promptings of widely absorbed assumptions”. Nevertheless, argued Clark, despite its diverse and uncoordinated prompting, it amounted to a “distinct enterprise of historical disinheritance”.
Hostility towards the past evolved slowly, and then all at once, its intensification occurring haphazardly without any serious long-term thought. The use of the term “war” to account for the systematic pursuit of historical disinheritance is not simply metaphorical. In effect, this war leads to the diminishing of the authority of the past, to the discrediting of its legacy and to the killing of the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture.
This book’s principal argument is that the main driver of the culture war is an undeclared War Against the Past.
At times, supporters of the culture war against Western civilisation behave as if this perilous territory continues to represent a menace to the contemporary world. Their constant targeting of the legacy of the past—its physical symbols, values and achievements—resembles a frenetic moral crusade seeking to make people feel ashamed about their origins and who they are. Culture warriors have, in effect, opened up a second front to gain mastery over how the past is viewed.
The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation is pursued through reorganising society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimating its ideals and achievement. They seek to erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past to achieve this objective. There has never been a time in living memory when so much energy has been devoted to readjusting the past and questioning and criticising historical figures and institutions. At times, it seems as if the boundary between the present and the past has disappeared as activists casually cross over it and seek to fix contemporary problems through readjusting the past.