Since the outbreak of the culture war, which dates to the 1970s, there has been a discernible trend toward decoupling the present from the past. In part, this trend is fueled by the palpable sense of estrangement of Western society from its historical legacy. References to the past, and the demand to settle score with it, have acquired an unprecedented presence in public life. Time and again, institutions are accused of not going far enough in their condemnation of the past. According to an American proponent of this school of accusatory history, “the United States does not yet have the stomach to look over its shoulder and stare directly at the evil on which this great country stands.”
The alienation of Western society from its cultural inheritance transcends the conventional ideological divide. Such sentiments aren’t confined to the radical decolonizers. Even mainstream thought in the West has become emotionally disconnected from the past. Thus, in reference to racist incidents in soccer in February 2012, David Cameron, then Britain’s Tory prime minister, declared that “we will not let recent events drag us back to the bad old days of the past.” His use of the phrase “bad old days” constituted more than a response to a single ugly episode. It suggested that as far as he was concerned, there was little worthwhile to “conserve” from Britain’s past. By contrast, the expression “good old days” has been extirpated from the mainstream political lexicon.
The metaphor of the “bad old days” is often deployed as a corrective to the supposed nostalgia of populism. Populists will pine for an imaginary, “whitewashed” past until politicians offer a “credible” future, asserts Cas Mudde, an international-relations scholar at the University of Georgia. Mudde, who accuses populists of mystifying the past, appears unaware of his own impulse to pathologize it and represent it as an unending story of oppression and hypocrisy. The unintended—or possibly intended—outcome of the cultural war against the past is to morally distance society from its own history.
The Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has characterized this as the “Black Armband” view of history. From this perspective, the past is haunted by evil, its legacy is malevolent, and it continues to exercise its influence on contemporary society in oppressive and exploitative structures and behavior. This sentiment is particularly directed at the foundational values of the West. Take The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which insists that the American Revolution was primarily motivated by the hope to preserve slavery—a proposition rejected even by eminent liberal and progressive historians.
Since the emergence of the modern era, societies have had an ambivalent and, at times, uneasy relationship with their past. In some instances, political movements demanded a clean break with the past, so that their world could start anew. For example, the attempt to rid the world of its past was imaginatively expressed by the invention of Year One in the 18th-century French revolutionary calendar. The ideologues of the French Revolution, unlike today’s obsessive crusaders against history, recognized that the past has its share of heroes. As Karl Marx famously observed, the revolution “draped itself alternatively in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.”
In contrast to the French Revolution, today’s enemies of history take no prisoners. They seek to nullify every dimension of the past. Call this the yearning for Year Zero. What we are seeing is an attempt to punish the past and to place it under quarantine. This project—to establish an ideologically determined Year Zero—is motivated by twin objectives: breaking with the past, and denouncing the historical memory associated with it.
“Year Zero ideologues erode the temporal distinction between the present and the past.”
Hence, the ritual of humbling characters from the past. By treating individuals and events in the past as having to account for themselves in relation to the standards of the present, Year Zero ideologues erode the temporal distinction between the present and the past, assessing historical figures as if they were our peers. And so the likes of Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Hume, and Kant are frequently hauled before the contemporary court of public opinion and charged with various recently formulated cultural crimes. Ostensibly, these rituals aim to “raise awareness” about past injustices. But at times, it appears that the thrashing of the reputation of historically significant figures is also designed to re-educate the dead. A trigger warning attached to a recent edition of Kant’s Critiques warns:
This book is a product of its time and does not reflect the same values it would if it were written today. Parents might wish to discuss with their children how views on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and interpersonal relations have changed since this book was written before allowing them to read.
In this instance, the impulse to vilify the era within which Kant lived is coupled with the arrogant assertion that if this philosopher were alive today, his works would express values that are different from the original. Shocker.
Advocates of Year Zero ideology frequently use the term “outdated” to morally condemn attitudes, forms of behavior, and language associated with the past. Those who practice the ritual of outdating—the act of delegitimating the past—signal that whatever is deemed outdated has no place in the present. The practice of outdating is based on the premise that the language and attitudes of previous generations are likely to be “problematic,” because they are old. In effect, outdating renders the activities and accomplishments of previous generations morally inferior to people living in the here and now.
Among the most sinister examples of outdating is the irrational burning of books on the ground that they are old, outdated, and associated with the unacceptable values of the past. In September 2021, for example, in the province of Ontario in Canada, books featuring so-called outdated content were ceremoniously burned as a goodwill gesture to indigenous people. Year Zero ideology imposes a moral vacuum on society. Disconnected from the past and unaware of its origins, society lacks the moral and intellectual resources necessary for developing an outlook oriented toward the future. This is nothing less than a recipe for moral paralysis.
Note: This column was adapted from the author’s The War Against The Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History, which will be published on Nov. 12 by Polity Press.