A Better Way To Deal With The Past

Yale demonstrated how to discuss controversial statues and honours

As with most cultural currents in the Western world today, the furor around statues and other public memorials started in the United States. Or, in another sense, in the Confederate States.

From Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former CSA was festooned with statutes glorifying the men who tried to preserve slavery by smashing the United States. I am Canadian, a foreigner. This isn’t my history. But whenever I saw one of those statues — or drove the highways named after Confederate grandees or passed by the military bases named for men who slaughtered American soldiers by the thousands — I was agog. Why would a nation so grandly honour those who fought to destroy it?

Then I learned the history of the monuments themselves. Most weren’t erected by veterans, or grieving mothers of dead soldiers. They were put up decades after the war, even a hundred years later, or more, by people defending Jim Crow against the civil rights movement. They were explicitly intended to say, “white men rule here.”

The South will rise again. In a sense.

What should remain in the public square and what must go is often a difficult question with fuzzy boundaries. But these statues aren’t difficult borderline cases. Quite the opposite. They are among the most extreme cases anywhere in the world. If any statues should go, they should go. To new locations with proper contextualization, I would argue, or to museums. Or dedicated parks of the sort created in Eastern Europe when the Soviet Union fell and people quite reasonably wanted to clear out the giant Lenins and Marxes and Red Army soldiers the Soviets had sprinkled across the continent. But wherever they go, they should go.

And over the last few years, they mostly went.

That should have been the end of it. But because this process unfolded in America, it inevitably spread elsewhere.

A vast swathe of the world watches America much more closely than most Americans understand. We foreigners know America’s celebrities and pop culture, of course, but we also know the names of even its minor politicians. We watch its election returns. Our news routinely features Americans events seemingly of no consequence outside the United States, so if a tornado hits a trailer park in Oklahoma, we all hear about it. If America is horrified by a school shooting, then wracked with debate about gun control, we are horrified and we debate. If a policeman murders a black man in America, it can spark Black Lives Matter protests not only in America, but around the world.

I have no survey data to prove this but as a one-time Canadian lawyer and longtime journalist, I am reasonably confident that more Canadians understand the American presidential primary system than grasp the basics of the Canadian constitution.

So when debate about Confederate statues grew heated, then exploded after white supremacists marched in defence of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, it was all but inevitable that statues would face a “reckoning” — a word made popular around the English-speaking world after being popularized in America, naturally — in many other countries. And it was all but inevitable that this clash would be framed in American terms, with every controversial statue treated as if it were a monument of Robert E. Lee erected by Ku Klux Klan.

A 125 year old sculpture going into Bristol harbour.

It started, arguably, when a statue of Edward Colston was torn down and thrown into Bristol harbour. Colston, as we all know by now, was a 17th-century slaver. (More precisely, he was an executive of the Royal African Company, which transported and traded slaves, and that was the source of a significant part of his fortune.) Invariably, news reports said the statue honoured “the slaver Edward Colston,” or similar wording, which all but invited the reader to think the statue was erected to honour “the slaver Edward Colston.” Seldom did reports note that the statue was only erected in 1895 by Bristol merchants, who were quite explicitly honouring Colston’s philanthropy. And none, as far as I know, noted that in 1895, British popular opinion fiercely despised slavery. By that time, the British military had been aggressively suppressing slavery around the world for more than half a century. The merchants who put up the statue certainly turned a blind eye to the source of the wealth for Colston’s philanthropy, but they just as certainly did not intend to honour slavery by erecting the statue.

I’m not suggesting these details should necessarily have decided the statue’s fate. But surely they were relevant. They should have been made known, discussed, and considered. But in the worldwide reporting and debate that followed, they almost never were.

Statues all over the Western world — the English-speaking Western world, in particular — were then embroiled in controversy. As diverse as these controversies were, and are, a pattern emerged in how they were discussed and handled.

First, activists insisted the statue had to go because the person depicted had said or done something offensive to public values today, or symbolized something offensive. The alleged offence was highlighted in news reports and discussed extensively. What else the subject of the statue had said or done in life was ignored. Who erected the statue? Why did they erect the statue? What did they want to communicate by erecting the statue? None of these questions was seriously discussed. Seldom were they even mentioned in passing.

Next, public officials promised to discuss the concerns. Lots of unfocussed talk followed. Time passed. Activists got upset. Petty vandalism was repeatedly inflicted on the statue. More unfocussed talk. Finally, in many cases, a small group of people decided the best way to settle this was with ropes and hacksaws.

In some cases, the statue was destroyed. In others, officials took the toppled statue away and vaguely promised to discuss what to do with it at some unknown time. These statues are presumably in the same warehouse that houses the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark and will be seen again shortly after the Ark emerges.

Whatever you think of these statues, I don’t think anyone who values democracy and the rule of law should be happy with how these controversies have been handled. Decisions about how public space should be used should be thoughtful and informed. And made by elected officials, or those designated by elected officials. No one, and no group, should be permitted to tear down a public statue on public land without lawful authorization, any more than anyone, or any group, should be permitted to put one up wherever they please. That statement shouldn’t be controversial. From experience, I know it is. But it really shouldn’t be.

Decisions should also be informed by guiding principles. Overwhelmingly, they are not. Instead, these discussions routinely become little more than exercises in rationalization.

Some people say, “that statue is offensive. Tear it down.” Others reject that. Argument begins. Those who want to remove the statue comb history books looking for information that makes the person honoured by the statue look as awful as possible. Those who want to keep the statue do the opposite. Those in the “remove” camp appeal to principles they say should guide these decisions — and the principles they cite all (by an amazing coincidence) support the conclusion they are urging.

Those in the “keep” camp, do exactly the same in service of the opposite conclusion.

If a reasonable process of sifting evidence in order to make a sound judgement can be called evidence-based decision making, this is decision-based evidence making.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that most reasoning deployed by humans is not intended to discover the right conclusion. It is justification for a conclusion already reached. In Haidt’s pungent terms, it is reasoning not as a scientist, but as a lawyer.

The debates about statues and other memorials and honours are almost always debates between lawyers.

Another basic failing? These debates are overwhelmingly presented as binary choices between two positions: It’s “status quo” versus “tear it down.” In binary debates, extremists thrive. And that’s exactly what happens here, as the most unwilling to listen to others, the most unwilling to acknowledge contrary views and concerns, the most unwilling to compromise even an inch, make the most noise and drive debate. Even worse, these binaries ignore the very wide spectrum of possible solutions between the extremes — everything from creating new monuments to adding explanatory plaques to moving statues and many more.

Garbage in, garbage out: The results of these debates often make little sense.

Remember that statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville that was ultimately removed? It was one of four with the same funder and artist erected in the early 1920s. The second statue was of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. It was removed along with the Robert E. Lee statue, reasonably enough. But the third statue depicted explorers Lewis, Clark, and Sacajawea and the fourth honoured explorer George Rogers Clark. They are beautiful sculptures and officially designated heritage. But they, too, were removed after scant discussion — even though they have nothing to do with Confederates or slavery.

Or consider what’s not removed. In Canada, statues to our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, have been torn down, after very little serious discussion, because Macdonald was responsible for the creation of the residential schools system inflicted on indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, honours to prime ministers with equal or worse records on indigenous relations are unmolested. More startling is a statue of Emily Murphy that stands on Parliament Hill in honour of her pioneering work for women’s rights. That statue has never been the subject of even a whisper of controversy — despite the fact that Murphy was a leading eugenicist who wrote racist and highly influential tracts about the “yellow peril” and other threats to the white race. And a stone’s throw from Murphy’s statue is one honouring Joseph Brant, the great indigenous leader — who was also a major owner and trader of black slaves.

If one of the essential elements of justice is that like cases be treated similarly, this is gross injustice.

Sir John A. Macdonald and Black Lives Matter protestors. For some reason.

These outcomes happen because reasoned consideration of history, community, and the role of memory in public spaces plays little role. What matters most is politics in its rawest form: If your side can cause trouble or embarrassment for elected officials, and is passionate enough to reject any compromise, and will keep going no matter what, and there is little or no countervailing opposition, you get your way. And yes, that goes for both the “remove” and “keep” sides of the debate: In Britain, the “remove” activists were running the table until an organized “keep” movement formed and started having considerable success by being equally extreme and intransigent, and using similar pressure tactics.

Whatever you think of statues and monuments, surely we can agree that all of this is a horrible way to make decisions about public space and public memory.

Still, you may say, that’s democracy. It’s a mess. Always has been. We can’t do better.

But we can do better. And that’s not speculation or idealism. It’s experience.

For many decades, Yale University had a “Calhoun College.”

It honoured John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), an American statesman who held various posts over his long career, including that of Vice President. One constant in Calhoun’s work was support for the interests of the South and slavery. And he was a very effective advocate. It was Calhoun who developed the theories about “states’ rights” — which mostly meant the right to maintain slavery — that were foundational to the secessionist movement. Calhoun died years before the Confederacy formed but he contributed at least as much to its cause as Robert E. Lee.

By 2015, an intense campaign to strip Calhoun’s name from the college was underway. When Yale initially decided flatly against changing the name, pressure mounted. In response, Yale struck a committee whose job was explicitly not to settle the issue at hand. Instead, the committee was instructed to develop principles that should guide the university when other committees made decisions like these.

Normally, a committee to study how to make a decision is nothing more than a delaying tactic. And given the circumstances under which this committee was struck, well, it certainly looks like a dodge. But a funny thing happened: Whatever their intentions, Yale’s administrators hit on exactly the right process.

By removing the case at hand from the deliberations, Yale gave the committee space to think much more deeply about the role of institutional honours. There would be no decision-based evidence making.

Historians and other scholars were appointed to the committee, along with alumni and students. Extensive consultations and research were conducted. And the committee delivered a report that is one of the most thoughtful on the subject I have ever come across.

I’ll give a quick summary here, but remember this doesn’t do it justice. If you’re interested in the subject, you really should read the whole thing, which is excellent.

At the outset, the report notes:

A university’s ongoing obligation is to navigate change without effacing the past. The imperative in addressing renaming questions is that the University align any building name change with the mission of the University, with its deep history, and with its promising future.

Past, present, future. That’s a textbook-worthy illustration of “thinking in time,” as Ernest May and Richard Neustadt defined it — “an almost constant oscillation from present to future to past and back.” It’s also right there in the mission statement of this newsletter. So, yeah, I love that.

A posture of humility points the inquiry in the right direction. At a university as old as this one, those who occupy the campus today are stewards of an intergenerational project. Hubris in undoing past decisions encourages future generations to disrespect the choices of the current generation.

“Stewards of an intergenerational project.” What a brilliant phrase.

What are cities? Countries? Organizations like the US Marine Corps, or corporations like Ford or General Electric or Ben & Jerry’s? They are all intergenerational projects.

But this perspective is totally missing in virtually all debates about statues, memorials, and honours of all sorts. In these debates, past generations are almost never discussed. Nor are future generations. The sole focus is on us, now, what we want. That is a fundamental mistake. We didn’t create the project. We don’t own it. It is not ours to do with as we wish. We are merely the latest caretakers of something that started long ago and will continue, we hope, long after we are gone.

The Yale report’s highlighting of this “posture of humility” is deeply wise. And vanishingly rare. As the report notes, “ill-fated renaming has often reflected excessive confidence in moral orthodoxies.”

One need only consider twentieth-century regimes that sought to erase their own past in the service of totalitarian propaganda. The Soviet Union conducted aggressive renaming campaigns of a kind captured by George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which a so-called “Ministry of Truth” wrote and rewrote history.

Renamings, however, are not inevitably Orwellian. In 1784, the change in the name of Kings College to Columbia College, now Columbia University, did not improperly efface its history. (The crown remains an iconic symbol of the institution.) Nor did name changes in West Germany after the Second World War, or in Russia after the fall of communism, or in South Africa after Apartheid. In each of these settings, and in many more, name changes have combined renaming with preservation of the historical record.

(An aside: See the “however” there? That’s cognitive gear-shifting. As psychologist Philip Tetlock argues, and we discuss in Superforecasting, the use of words and phrases like “however” and “on the other hand” indicate a shift from one perspective to another. That is, they demonstrate the speaker is seriously considering different perspectives and contrary evidence. They are thus the hallmark of integratively complex thinking — the sort of thinking worth taking seriously.)

After the introduction, the report explores Calhoun’s history, but also, and just as importantly, how his name got put on a college at Yale. Calhoun was a Yale graduate, but he was never honoured at Yale for seventy years after his death. Only when the college opened in 1933 was his name selected.

Ironically, the Calhoun name was attractive for some precisely because in the 1930s he seemed unlikely to engender controversy among the University’s students, faculty, and alumni. To the extent the name would be able to help draw students from the South, it seemed to hold out the prospect of a certain kind of diversification of the student body. Moreover, the committee charged with developing nomenclature for the new colleges aimed for names that would serve as unifying symbols for the student communities. Speaking to the alumni in 1931, University president James Angell said that contemporary names would “inevitably” produce an “acute controversial atmosphere.” President Angell therefore decided to “avoid all personal names belonging to the last century.” Angell seems to have meant that he would not consider names whose association with Yale fell within the previous 100 years. The decision excluded men such as president and chief justice William Howard Taft (B.A. 1878), who had died the year before.

Calhoun also seemed a useful symbol to Yale’s leaders because he embodied their ambitions to produce statesmen of national stature. In the era of Jim Crow, when African Americans had been excluded from national politics, Calhoun came to figure in American political life first and foremost as a statesman of distinction. And so, in May 1931, the University committee charged with naming decisions approved the selection of Calhoun as “Yale’s most eminent graduate in the field of Civil State.”

After an exploration of the university’s history and mission, the report sets out principles that should guide any consideration of removing honours. Following are a few that I think are really central to any controversy, whether at a university or anywhere else.

There is a strong presumption against renaming a building on the basis of the values associated with its namesake. Such a renaming should be considered only in exceptional circumstances.

There are many reasons to honor tradition at a university. Historical names are a source of knowledge. Tradition often carries wisdom that is not immediately apparent to the current generation; no generation stands alone at the end of history with perfect moral hindsight. Moreover, names produce continuity in the symbols around which students and alumni develop bonds with the university and bonds with one another. Those bonds often help to establish lifelong connections of great value to members of the University community and to the University.

This has to be the starting point. And it has to be explicit. If we are indeed stewards of a grand project, preserving what we inherited must the presumption. Not the conclusion, mind you. It is, as lawyers say, a rebuttable presumption. But a presumption nonetheless.

Was the relevant principal legacy significantly contested in the time and place in which the namesake lived?

Evaluating a namesake by the standards of the namesake’s time and place offers a powerful measure of the legacy today. Such an evaluation does not commit the University to a relativist view of history and ethics. An important reason to attend to the standards of a namesake’s time and place is that doing so recognizes the moral fallibility of those who aim to evaluate the past. Paying attention to the standards of the time also usefully distinguishes those who actively promoted some morally odious practice, or dedicated much of their lives to upholding that practice, on the one hand, from those whose relationship to such a practice was unexceptional, on the other.

The idea that people can have unexceptional relationships to moral horrors is one of the most disturbing features in human history. Examining the standards of a namesake’s time and place therefore does more than confront us with the limits of our own capacities. It helps us see people as embedded in particular times and particular places – and it helps us identify those whose legacies are properly thought of as singularly and distinctively unworthy of honor.

This is another central point I’ll write about in more detail in another post some day.

Is a principal legacy of the namesake fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University?

We ask about a namesake’s principal legacies because human lives, as Walt Whitman wrote, are large; they contain multitudes. Whitman, as it happens, contained virtues and vices himself. He excoriated the Lincoln administration for insisting on equal treatment for black soldiers held as prisoners of war in the South. But his principal legacies are as a path-breaking poet and writer. Frederick Douglass contrasted African Americans with Indians, who he said were easily “contented” with small things such as blankets, and who would “die out” in any event. But his principal legacies are as an abolitionist and an advocate for civil rights.

Of course, interpretations of a namesake’s principal legacies are subject to change over time. They may vary in the eye of the beholder as well.

Three factors constrain such changes or limit their significance in the analysis. First, asking about principal legacies directs us to consider not only the memory of a namesake, but also the enduring consequences of the namesake in the world. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, a legacy is “a long-lasting effect.” Principal legacies, as we understand them, are typically the lasting effects that cause a namesake to be remembered. Even significant parts of a namesake’s life or career may not constitute a principal legacy. Scholarly consensus about principal legacies is a powerful measure.

Second, even if interpretations of legacies change, they do not change on any single person’s or group’s whim; altering the interpretation of a historical figure is not something that can be done easily. Third, the principal legacies of a namesake are not the only consideration. They should be considered in combination with the other principles set forth above and below in this report.

Determining the principal legacies of a namesake obliges the University to study and make a scholarly judgment on how the namesake’s legacies should be understood. Prevailing historical memories may be misleading or incorrect, and prevailing scholarly views may be incomplete.

A principal legacy would be fundamentally at odds with the mission of the University if, for example, it contradicted the University’s avowed goal of making the world a better place through, among other things, the education of future leaders in an “ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” A principal legacy of racism and bigotry would contradict this goal.

“Principal legacies” is a critical idea. Frederick Douglass wrote horrible things about Native Americans, as the report notes, but that has nothing to do with his principal legacies, which are entirely worthy of honours. The same is true of Gandhi, who, as the report notes elsewhere, wrote horrible things about blacks. There are countless examples like these.

Why does this focus on “principle legacies” matter?

When white supremacists marched to save that statue of Robert E. Lee, then-president Donald Trump moaned about the supposed loss of precious heritage. (The man who faked a Civil War battle site on one of his golf courses is a big fan of historic preservation, you see.) “What’s next?” Trump asked. Will they tear down statues of Washington? The answer then — and now — is simple. No. They’re completely different cases. Lee was honoured for his principal legacy, which was an attempt to dissolve the country and save slavery; Washington was honoured for his principal legacy, which was creating the country.

Notice what happens if we drop the idea of a principal legacy and instead say that anything a person said or did that we find offensive is grounds for removal.

Robert E. Lee owned slaves. That’s offensive. His statue has to go. OK. Washington owned slaves. So Washington’s statue has to go, right? And the name of the capital? And the state? And all the rest? Trump had a point — if we do not apply a “principal legacies” standard.

In fact, if we do not adopt some principle like this, and apply it consistently, only one of two outcomes is possible: Either we will find ourselves unable to honour anyone, because literally every major historical figure said or did something we would find offensive or shameful today. Or we will engage in massive hypocrisy — condemning some historical figures for words and deeds that were not their principal legacies while carefully turning a blind eye to the offensive words and deeds of others whose principal legacies we want to honour. The latter happens constantly now. It is indefensible.

So what became of Calhoun College?

After the report on principles was delivered, Yale applied the principles enunciated by the report in a reconsideration of the issue. And it decided to remove Calhoun’s name.

I think that was the right decision. Not because it feels right to me or falls in line with my prejudices. I think it was the right decision because it is supported by evidence produced by careful research. And it squared with Yale’s carefully considered, clearly articulated principles.

It was the right decision because it did not thoughtlessly capitulate to the loudest and angriest voices. It did not ignore the past and future. It did not engage in ad hoc rationalization. Instead of decision-based evidence making, the process that produced the decision was evidence-based decision making.

And in future, by applying the same process and principles, Yale can make decisions which are broadly consistent, satisfying a basic ingredient of justice.

Vanishingly few such decisions are made this way. They all should be.

The new name of Calhoun College, incidentally, is Grace Hopper College. Grace Hopper had a PhD from Yale, was a rear admiral in the US Navy, and was a pioneering computer scientist.

An excellent choice, I’m sure we all agree.