By John Daniel Davidson
Thursday, March 31, 2016
In ancient Rome, damnatio
memoriae was the practice of condemning Roman elites and emperors after
death. The phrase means, “the condemnation of memory,” and the idea was to
dishonor people by erasing them from history, usually by seizing their
property, removing their name from public monuments, and destroying or
re-working their statues. As you might imagine, those subject to damnatio memoriae tended to be traitors
or deposed emperors—like Maximian, who ruled Rome for a decade before he was
forced to commit suicide by Constantine the Great in 310.
In other words, the practice of purging names and images
was a political tactic of Imperial Rome to suppress dissent and intimidate
enemies.
Now it’s back. Not in Russia or Iran, but here in America
among left-wing activists, for whom the names and images of many historical
figures have become intolerable—especially those on the losing side of the
Civil War. As the campus protest movement gained momentum last year, students
groups called for, among other things, the removal of Confederate statuary and
all names of Confederate generals and segregationists from college buildings.
Some schools complied, like the University of Texas at Austin, which removed a
statue of Jefferson Davis from its historic quad last fall. Many other schools
are still “in consultation” about student demands.
From College
Campuses To Elementary Schools
What started on college campuses has now trickled down to
elementary schools. The school board in Austin, Texas, voted Monday to change
the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary School, an historic building named after
the Confederate general upon its completion in 1939. Kendall Pace, the school
board president, said history is important and we should never forget it, but
then revealed the shallowness of his own grasp of history, saying, “students
should not be required to attend schools named for people who made a choice to
lead the fight to keep a race of people in slavery.” (A passing knowledge of
Lee’s life and times would be enough for anyone who cares about history to
refrain from such an oversimplification.)
Some objected to the name-change on the grounds that the
building itself is an historical landmark that was funded by a New Deal program
under President Franklin Roosevelt. Changing the school’s name, after all,
would require defacing the historic art deco building’s stone façade.
For the activist Left, though, defacing public buildings
and historical monuments is a small price to pay for political correctness.
Similar efforts are underway across the country. The Houston School Board is
changing all school names with ties to the Confederacy. Recently, it added
Reagan High School to the list, named after John H. Reagan. His crime? Serving
as postmaster general of the Confederacy. In Charlottesville, Va., the city
council has begun the process of moving a large statue of Lee that sits in… Lee
Park. In New Orleans, the city council voted in December to remove four
Confederate monuments from prominent places around the city, including a statue
of Lee in the middle of… Lee Circle. Without a trace of irony, Mayor Mitch
Landrieu called for the statues to be put in a museum or a Civil War park,
saying, “The Confederacy, you see, was on the wrong side of history and
humanity.”
The mayor must think those who tear down monuments and
war memorials are on the right side of history.
One problem with all this is that there is no end to it.
Today, Confederate generals must go. Tomorrow, who can say what names or
historical events must be purged from public places? More importantly, how do
you learn from history if you banish it from the public square? It’s not as though
American students are especially knowledgeable about their history.
Encountering a plaque on a statue or a memorial might be the only way some
students learn about episodes from our country’s past, especially the darker
periods like the Civil War.
The Left’s
Rejection Of Truth Demands Separatism
Purging the past is of course just one symptom of a
pervasive intellectual malady on the Left. The internal contradictions of
identity group politics necessitate not only the suppression of history but
also separatism in the present. As Tom Lindsay notes in a recent column at
Forbes about the rise of white student unions, “Racial separatism is what is
now taught in too many universities. More precisely, what we teach provides no
principled barrier to separatist agendas.”
If all principles are relative, if the “self-evident
truths” listed in the Declaration of Independence are merely “values,” then
there’s no basis for asserting equality, freedom of speech, or government by consent.
Everything is reduced to competing groups pressing their subjective values.
That’s how you end up with The National Union of
Students’ LGBT Campaign passing a motion last week calling for the abolition of
representatives for gay men because they “don’t face oppression” the way other
members of the LGBT community do. One can find endless examples of this sort of
special interest group in-fighting. On Monday, a video surfaced of a black
female student at San Francisco State University accosting a white student in
the hallway for his cultural appropriation of dreadlocks.
College Campuses
Breed Intolerance
It’s easy to see why students would act this way toward
one another: they learn it in class. Last week, a staff writer at the Harvard Crimson spoke out against a
campus culture “defined not by open expression—but by sensitivity.” The writer,
Rachel E. Huebner, describes scenes at Harvard that read like satire:
In a class I attended earlier this
semester, a large portion of the first meeting was devoted to compiling a list
of rules for class discussion. A student contended that as a woman, she would
be unable to sit across from a student who declared that he was strongly
against abortion, and the other students in the seminar vigorously defended this
declaration. The professor remained silent. In a recent conversation with
peers, I posed a question about a verse from the Bible. A Harvard employee in
the room immediately interjected, informing me that we were in a safe space and
I was thus not permitted to discuss the controversial biblical passage. And
these are just stories from the past three months.
Alas, this is real life on many college campuses
today—and the speech police routinely target not only students but also tenured
faculty. Marquette University has apparently fired and barred from campus
political science professor John McAdams because he criticized a female grad
student on his blog. The university has said McAdams can be reinstated only if
he apologizes and admits his “guilt” in the next two weeks.
Instead, the professor plans to sue Marquette, which is a
great idea because he has a good chance of winning. The Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) keeps a running list of free speech cases
at colleges across the country, many of which are blatant violations of the
First Amendment. Earlier this month, for example, the University of Kansas
reinstated an assistant professor after a four-month “investigation” into
comments the professor made during a class discussion that offended some grad
students. FIRE sent a letter to the university reminding them what all
university administrators should know: speech is protected by the First
Amendment and any punishment would violate the professor’s constitutional
rights. The university backed down.
Such victories are a small comfort, though, in the face
of a rising culture of intolerance on the Left—one that now seeks to unleash a
new damnatio memoriae against its
modern-day political enemies.
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