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The past is a foreign country

We should not judge the past – or other cultures – by our own modern standards.

Patrick West

Patrick West
Columnist

Topics Culture Politics

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Last month, Camden Council in London attached a QR code to a statue of modernist author Virginia Woolf. On scanning it, you are informed all about her supposedly ‘offensive opinions’, ‘imperialist attitudes’ and ‘unacceptable views’. It aroused a question that constantly re-emerges these days: can and should we judge the behaviour and attitudes of those who lived in different times? After all, Woolf was born in the 19th century and died 83 years ago.

Most sensible and intelligent people would answer that we can’t and we shouldn’t. Those who think we can and should tend to be driven by a peculiarly confused and perverse malice towards Western civilisation. These people, embodied in Camden Council and wokery at large, believe two things at once. Firstly, that all things Western are evil, and secondly – with jaw-dropping irony – that we in 21st-century, Western, liberal societies have also reached a moral plateau from which we can denounce all who came before us.

To be fair, today’s hyper-liberals are not the only ones given to confusion here. While decrying the carry-on of Camden Council, or the behaviour of publishers altering texts of novels from the past to suit the sensibilities of the present, conservatives are prone to accept that morality is generally self-evident and based on ‘common sense’. While they concede that value systems are different in time, they don’t easily grant that mores also differ in space: that what people do today in other cultures cannot always be judged by our own standards either.

In this, conservatives share a comparable dilemma with humanists and other heirs to the Enlightenment – those who believe in the timeless, universal tenets of reason and rights. This stance inevitably runs against the notion that values are contingent and culturally specific.

Rationally speaking, no one can say what is right or wrong. Unless you believe in a god that lays down iron-clad rules of morality, there’s no rational defence for arguing that one single culture knows best. Living in a godless world means accepting that values are man-made.

Yet being a cultural relativist need not lead to hopelessness. Culture is only the stuff on the surface, or the software. The hardware remains universal. We are all of the same species, with the same instincts, feelings, needs and mental apparatus. After Claude Lévi-Strauss, we understand that we all have the same mental tendency to think in binaries. ‘Societies everywhere break people into in-group versus out-group, child versus adult, kin versus nonkin, married versus single, and activities into sacred and profane, good and evil’, as Edward O Wilson wrote in Consilience (1999). After Noam Chomsky, godfather of generative linguistics, we understand that all human languages contain similar structures and rules, reflecting something innate. Plato and Kant may have imagined an intangible ‘other’ world that is more pure and more real than ours, but so do all other cultures. Above all, we all share something unique to our species: the capacity for reason.

While no culture has a privileged insight into what’s right or wrong, some cultures are certainly better than others, in that some prove more amenable and favourable to how we live. As the late Larry Siedentop wrote in Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014), individualism was conceived first by Christianity. Then secularism, which emerged out of Christendom, proved more desirable and advantageous, in that it instilled ‘the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent… It puts a premium on conscience rather than the blind following of rules.’

Some characteristics are universal, while some prevailing moralities emerge and recede with time and space. We just happen to be living in an era when one particular morality predominates. And it believes that everyone else in the past was wrong. It’s called hubris.


The perils of social media

The current ITV series Douglas Is Cancelled is that rare beast: a modern drama that isn’t preachy or politically slanted, and doesn’t make you want to smash up your television set. Like all good satire, everyone is a target and all protagonists are flawed. Hence the absence of that blight on modern drama: the mandatory Strong Female Character.

Up till half-way through the mini-series, we still didn’t know the true meaning of a tweet sent by Douglas’s co-presenter, Madeline, which read: ‘Don’t believe this. Not my presenter.’ This refers to a sexist joke he made at a wedding – a joke that has gone viral and now threatens his very career.

We didn’t know the ultimate meaning of Madeline’s tweet because the tweet itself is doubly ambiguous. Here rests the crux of the story. Is she expressing disbelief and incredulity? Or disapproval and distancing? Is she an ally or a bitch? Or, as last night’s episode suggested, is she seeking redress of some sort?

Casual, disembodied dialogue without face-to-face interaction is fraught with the possibility of misunderstanding. Contrarily, in a physical context, Madeline’s facial expressions, body language and intonation would have told us if she had meant: ‘I simply can’t believe this! Don’t you either. So unlike my presenter Douglas.’ Or if not that, then: ‘I can’t believe this! My so-called presenter Douglas…’ A reminder once again that social media is wholly unsuited to discussing serious matters.


‘Behold the Man’, by Mungo Krankenhaus

The day began auspiciously.

Stately, plump Keir Starmer approached the lectern on Downing Street. He passed through the assembled throng. The multitude wept hot, salty tears. ‘Lo!’, he began, with characteristic steely eloquence. ‘I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey. I need hands out-stretched to take it.’

Focussed, broad, thoughtful and guided by decent values, Starmer looked comfortable, relaxed, in charge. ‘I am the resurrection and I am the light’, he continued. ‘I am the one and only. Nobody I’d rather be. I am the one and only. You can’t take that away from me.’ There were gales of applause, screams of delight. It was caring politics. It was grown-up politics. It was liquid politics.

I hadn’t wanted to do the whole pathetic fallacy thing, but as Starmer proceeded to march to No10, the Sun actually came out. What a contrast to 22 May when Rishi Sunak launched the election campaign. I almost cried. Makes you realise how starved we’ve been of decency. We now have a government with a massive majority, widespread internal agreement and no likelihood of massive instability anytime soon. For the first time in many of our lives, Britain looks like a little haven of peace and stability.

What a piece of work is this man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties. In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!

I bring you this Superman! This Superman shall be the meaning of the Earth! I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the Earth, and believe not those who speak to you of other hopes! Poisoners are these extremists and populists. Despisers of life are they. Anaemic vampires and vengeful serpents.

Revenge! About! Seek! Burn! Fire! Kill! Slay!

Écrasez l’infâme!

Ecce Homo!

Patrick West is a spiked columnist. His latest book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, is published by Societas.

Picture by: Getty.

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