The War Against the Past:
Why the West Must Fight for Its History
By Frank Furedi
Polity Press, 272 pages, $29.95
Near the beginning of Frank Furedi’s alarming study of cultural vandalism in Britain and the United States, we find this quotation from Karl Marx: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” It’s an illuminating remark, one that applies well to the peculiar intensity of all things woke in our moment. Note the language of burden (“weighs”) and distress (“nightmare”), along with the odd choice of “brain” instead of “mind” or “heart,” plus the mixing of metaphors, which further signals mental confusion over the influence of the past. The shadow of the dead hovers; it won’t let us be; we’re suffering.
We don’t expect the great leftist guru to speak like this. Obviously, a revolutionary politics follows from it, but it is more accurate to describe Marx’s version of the past-as-burden as a form of psychopolitics, the expression of psychic turmoil through political ideas and practices. The civilization our forefathers created is a cause of neurosis, it implies. Tradition is a genuine curse; the bare remembrance of our ancestors, a disability. The past haunts us, we can’t seem to escape it, but we must if we are to make progress.
Furedi sets this troubled relationship to the past at the center of the current assault on Western culture. He calls it “pathological history,” and he demonstrates with one vignette after another how deeply it has infected schools, colleges, museums, libraries, civic spaces, government policy, and ordinary public discourse. To treat it as a customary political reform or school of thought is to overlook the aggression, animus, and irrationality associated with the war in the author’s title.
The toppling of statues, biting chronicles such as the 1619 Project that garner awards and are widely adopted by school districts, Aristotle and Shakespeare taught through anti-racist frames, the association of Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler by talking heads and prominent politicians, a vow by the head of Kew Gardens to “decolonize the institution”—Furedi covers these episodes and many more. They bespeak a “morose fascination with human evil,” he says, that seeks both to escape the past and settle scores with it. In the antihistorical warriors’ eyes, the past is a “dangerous contaminant” that lives on in spite of our enlightened awareness; a full accounting of misdeeds is yet to be done. Some identity groups are still victimized by events 200 years old, while others continue to profit from them.
The past, then, must be remembered differently—the logic goes—the dead (and their beneficiaries) punished for old crimes, language itself must change. Johns Hopkins created a glossary of LGBTQ terms and identities that defined “lesbian” as “a non-man attracted to non-men”; the European Union in 2004 scrubbed its constitution of any mention of Christianity in statements about the continent’s heritage; Lincoln was pulled down from his plinth by a mob in Portland; and so on.
The result is an inhumane society. We live under Year Zero ideology, Furedi says, which divides time into a bad past and a rightly engineered future, and which splits people into shamefaced identities and victim identities. “The territory of the past is the most important site on which the Culture Wars are fought,” notes Furedi. On that, identity politicians and traditionalist conservatives agree (while liberals and libertarians often shrug at disputes over, say, the name of a street). The past is present, Furedi acknowledges, and the stakes are high.
That’s why the iconoclasts are so ruthless about apparently minor things such as the syllabus in high-school English. They recognize the influence of the old. But this puts them in an impossible position. They believe in the mighty power of the past and also the necessity of neutralizing it. It doesn’t work, but they must keep trying. (“Grievance entrepreneurs,” Furedi notes, have found ways to make this endless ritual pay.) No wonder they get so angry, arguing by accusation, for instance, and loving a good struggle session—the happy idiom of inclusion and equity is a rhetorical screen. If the past is toxic and persistent, we have no time for nuance and prudence. If we can’t eliminate the past, at least we can deprive people of a positive model of it.
“Disinheritance” is Furedi’s name for the process. When diversity officers redefine “man” and “woman” as “fluid” traits, they rob young adults of longstanding conventions that help them realize their own sexual identities. A school system bent on “disabusing the young of the belief that their country is a noble nation” takes away any pride they might have in their homeland. The inheritance is tainted or withheld, the young disarmed. Worse than that, to plant identity politics into students’ heads, teachers must erase or downgrade the white Christian male identity that reigned in the bad old times. The moral status of historically disfavored groups rises only as the status of privileged groups falls. What the iconoclasts pass off as a benign addition of multicultural, multi-gender material to the curriculum is, in fact, vengeance against the villainous West.
“Rising adults are left homeless and uprooted.”
Rising adults are left homeless and uprooted, suffering psychic damage of a kind contrary to what Marx regretted. “The sense of historical continuity plays an important role in the constitution of the self,” Furedi writes; hence, discontinuity thwarts the self. Individual identity is an intergenerational accomplishment. Without the transmission of secure customs and meanings, role models and great works, all of which are “moral resources,” people are on their own, shaky and lost, though said to be free and independent. This may be why cosmopolitan elites have so readily blinked at the vandalism that’s taken place. A society of disinheritance ends up loathing itself. The West commits suicide, slowly.
Furedi offers only one answer: Fight back. Defend the heritage, celebrate the heroes, stop apologizing, no more contrition. He presents no plan of action, no specific moves, just a rousing call to arms. Such a proposal is certainly necessary given that the righteous, presentist, high-handed treatment of the past has become dogma in elite circles—or at least, has become a posture that high-ranking individuals believe they must assume if they are to prosper. Furedi is right: The time has come to shatter the dogma by demonstrating its spiteful psychopolitical sources and its calamitous emotional effects.