Escaping the Past

There is what strikes me as a good post on the controversy over Confederate monuments by Greg Weiner at Library of Law and Liberty:

There is similarly a difference between dragging every past figure before the bar of contemporary reason, on the one hand, and, on the other, accepting history as a storehouse of custom but also complications. The former arrogates all power to the immediate generation. It is, ironically enough, supremely Jeffersonian reasoning. Jefferson—whose monuments some want to be next—argued that “‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”

Yet history does not operate in discrete generations. Generations are constantly passing in and out, contracting debts and making demands. We are all heirs to our complex history, sharing both its blessings and its shortcomings.

That we, right now, might make a permanent moral judgment for all generations by simply excising the past like a tumor rather than confronting its complexity requires both a generational arrogance and a supreme faith in contemporary reason that is at odds with the typical Progressive presupposition that moral feeling is generally advancing. On the contrary, it accepts an ironically transcendent morality that can only transcend for an instant before something else transcends it in turn. (Consider that Woodrow Wilson was a hero to generations of Progressives before his recognition as a notorious racist.)

To use prescription as a measure for gauging monuments to the Confederacy or other morally flawed causes or people is not to provide an airtight abstract standard. That is, in many ways, the point. This is ultimately a prudential question that must account for the legitimate feelings of those who feel excluded and in fact outright assaulted by these monuments and those who will feel further alienated by their removal.

I think we would do well to consider Karl Marx’s view of history:

People make their own history, but they do not make it however they want, not under self-selected circumstances, but out of the actual given and transmitted situation. The traditions of all the dead generations burden, like a nightmare, the minds of the living.

as expressed in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. That is what G. K. Chesterton referred to as “the democracy of the dead.” Try as we might we cannot escape the past. Every successive generation should make its own struggle to come to terms with the past. Simply rejecting it is foolhardy.