The Arrogance of the Present

Debates about honours are becoming less thoughtful, not more

Learning curves are supposed to go up.

We experience something. We learn. We experience something else. We learn more. As time passes, we get smarter, even wiser. The learning curve goes up.

But in rare circumstances, learning curves go down.

Debates about honours for historical figures — statues, street names, building names, and the like — have been headline news for the better part of a decade now. And the learning curve isn’t going up. If anything, the reasoning being applied is getting dumber.

The latest illustration was published in The New York Times this week, under the headline “North American Birds Will No Longer Be Named For Racists — Or Anybody Else.”

On Nov. 1, the American Ornithological Society announced that it would be renaming all the birds under its purview that are currently named for human beings. The birds’ new names will reflect the species’ appearance or habitat — some trait associated with the actual bird, in other words, and not with the colonial explorer who first identified it.

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today, said Colleen Handel, the president of the society, in a statement. “We need a much more inclusive and engaging scientific process that focuses attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves.” The process of choosing new names will begin next year.

The bird formerly known as Cooper’s hawk. (credit: Mark A. Chappell, UC Riverside)

My dad was a biologist, outdoorsman, and passionate birder with an amazing ability to tell a Cooper’s hawk from a goshawk a mile away but I’m pretty sure he had no idea who “Cooper” was. (Wikipedia informs me Cooper’s hawk was named in honour of William Cooper, an early-19th century conchologist who assisted other naturalists and helped found the New York Academy of Sciences. Wikipedia also informs me a conchologist is a shell zoologist.) I suspect the same is true for the overwhelming majority of birders. But those who investigate will discover, unsurprisingly, that most North American birds named for people were named after 19th-century naturalists. Even less surprisingly, they will discover that many of those early naturalists said and did things that we, today, find offensive.

John James Audubon

As Margaret Renkl, a contribution opinion writer, put it in that Times article:

This change, which will affect some 150 North American birds, has been a long time coming. Ornithologists and amateur birders alike have long wrestled with the historical nature of bird names bestowed by early collectors. The norms of that era were themselves problematic, as explorers tromped across an already occupied landscape, killing, collecting and naming after themselves thousands of animals and plants that had already been given human names by people who lived more ecologically responsible lives.

Worse, some of these early naturalists were, like many others of their generation, racists and enslavers. Top of that list is, John James Audubon, born in 1785 into a French family that owned a Caribbean plantation operated with slave labour. Audubon later moved to the United States and gained renown as an exquisite painter of birds. His models were birds he and others shot. When he became famous, and his finances permitted, he bought slaves.

So Renkl lays out the case for erasing the lot.

Some of the birds — not all, it’s important to note, but some — were named for people who held views considered repugnant today. John James Audubon, the naturalist for whom the Audubon’s shearwater is named, was an unrepentant slaveholder who opposed emancipation. Gen. Winfield Scott, for whom the Scott’s oriole is named, led the forced eviction of the Cherokee along what is now known as the Trail of Tears.

The idea that some of the most beautiful birds in North America still carry those ugly names is objectionable to a lot of us, a scar from the past still enshrined in the present like a Confederate statue installed in a town square or a robber baron’s name gracing a university building. Such monuments represent history, it’s true, and history should not be forgotten. But neither should it be celebrated wholesale, especially when the bigotries and injustices of the past are too often on clear display in our own age.

“The impulse to address overt white supremacy in the history of birding is an admirable one,” Ms. Renkl tells us.

Barn owls and dinner, painted by John James Audubon

But is “overt white supremacy” what those names are?

Here is a statement I am confident no naturalist ever uttered: “Well done, Monsieur Audubon, for owning slaves! Damned abolitionists! Let’s name a bird after you!”

Monsieur Audubon and the rest were not honoured for what appals us today. They were honoured for their work as naturalists. To say that the mere presence of Audubon’s name amounts to “overt white supremacy” makes as much sense as calling it “overt Franco-supremacy.”

Remember the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville that led, in 2017, to the march by white supremacists and a protest in which one person was murdered? That statue was “overt white supremacy” — because it, like most other Confederate statues, had been erected as a political statement. A white-supremacist political statement.

Defending the statue, then-president Donald Trump noted that Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson?”

Observers rolled their eyes. Trump’s complaint was foolish, they said, because he was deliberately ignoring a huge distinction.

“Jefferson was a slaveholder. Washington was a slaveholder. But the reason we memorialize them is not because of their slaveholding,” wrote Jamelle Bouie, now a Times columnist. Jefferson and Washington are honoured for their work founding the country. Lee and other Confederates were honoured for sedition in defence of slavery.

Or to put it another way, Washington and Jefferson were honoured despite their involvement with slavery; Lee and other Confederates were honoured because of their involvement with slavery.

This is not a small distinction. But in the years since, it has vanished. In debate after debate, people simply ignore the intentions of those who raised the statue, or chiselled the name on the building. Or gave the bird its name.

They simply point to something the honoured person said or did that we find offensive, declare the honour to be honouring that, and demand that the honour be erased.

I think this is self-evidently indefensible.

But if you’re still not convinced, try this thought experiment.

A Debate in 2173

The world of 2173 is very different than that of the first half of the 21st century in many ways, but one change stands out. In 2173, people don’t eat animals.

Everyone in 2173 can identify the transformative years.

By the mid-21st century, artificial meat replacements had become so advanced they were indistinguishable from animal meat. Then they became cheaper than the real thing. Consumption of animal meat plunged. Animal-rights advocates launched campaigns arguing that eating animals wasn’t only expensive, bad for health, and bad for the environment. It was wrong. The hundreds of millions of people in developed countries who were no longer eating animal meat readily agreed — and the movement to abolish the animal-meat industry exploded. The industry fought back, but it struggled to rationalize its position. And as revenues collapsed, its political power collapsed with it.

By the end of the century, and the signing of an international treaty, the contest was over. The killing of animals for meat was illegal in every country with an effective government.

In 2173, this is all ancient history. Humans may have eaten animals in almost all societies known to history but today the very thought of killing and eating an animal is repulsive to essentially everyone.

With this shift has come a profound change in how people view the past: The factory farms and meat consumption of the 20th and 21st-centuries are viewed with horror and revulsion. The disgust people feel for those who owned and ran the slaughter industry is the same as the disgust directed at those who owned and ran sugar and cotton plantations in the days of slavery.

This outrage extends beyond the titans of the industry to the entire system of “slaughterism,” as it is now known. Anyone who had any part in it, however small, has a black mark forever against his name. Even the consumers who happily swallowed what the industry offered, without a word of protest, are condemned for complicity. People are horrified by photos of their ancestors grinning as the cooked flesh of animals is displayed on dining room tables.

Some say it’s unfair to judge people of the past by the standards of the present. We are all products of our time and place, they say. They didn’t know any better.

Others respond, oh, but they did. There were millions of vegans throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Millions of people who insisted “meat is murder.” It was always a significant movement. Some simply chose to close their eyes.

Today, those early abolitionists are treated as heroes, while those who opposed abolition are held in contempt. Abolitionists are honoured with statues and buildings named in their honour. Those who led opposition to abolition had their names swept away long ago. Now, controversy focuses not on anti-abolition leaders, but those who were minor players, or who held power but were quietly complicit in slaughterism.

An on-going debate in 2173 involves a statesman of the late-20th century.

Nelson Mandela defied the Apartheid regime in 20th-century South Africa and, against all expectations, successfully lead a peaceful transition of power to a multi-racial democracy. He was honoured all over the world.

But today, Mandela’s legacy is fraught. For Mandela was no vegetarian. He never spoke out against slaughterism. In fact, he personally loved eating meat. All his biographers are clear about that.

Mandela’s modern defenders don’t deny these facts. They can’t. They simply say that, however much his meat-eating may appal us, Mandela did great things, and the many honours to his name that still exist today — the statutes, streets, scholarships, and the rest — do not honour his support of slaughtering animals. They honour his heroic and humane political work, which is widely admired to this day.

Not good enough, others say. Anything with Mandela’s name on it honours slaughterism. It all has to go.

Back to 2023

Would it be madness to erase honours to Nelson Mandela because he ate meat? I think so. But the logic used by today’s erasers is clear: Any honour for someone who said or did something that offends us today has to go.

Of course, implementing that edict calls for combing the histories of famous names from the past, looking for offences. That is work. And if people like me push back, it can quickly get complex and challenging.

Alternatively, there is what the American Ornithological Society has chosen to do: Erase everything.

Tear down all the statues.

Remove all the names. Choose some distinguishing feature of the Cooper’s hawk to give it a new name. If it’s good enough for the rose-breasted grosbeak, it’s good enough for the … whatever we’re going to call that hawk.

In The New York Times, Margaret Renkl thinks this is brilliant.

Though this change didn’t prevent outrage from erupting online in certain predictable quarters, the decision is wonderfully pragmatic. The impulse to address overt white supremacy in the history of birding is an admirable one, but it does invite an everlasting and irresolvable debate. How will we decide which ornithologists and explorers from the past held reprehensible views? Who gets to define “reprehensible”? What happens when that definition inevitably expands or simply changes?

Better to avoid the rancor inherent in all such debates and instead confront the problematic nature of naming itself.

It is indisputably true that melting down all statues is easier than deciding which should be removed and why. But it ignores why people put up statues — or name a species after people — in the first place.

Honours like these are universal. Their particular nature varies from culture to culture, but everyone has practices like these. That tells us they speak to basic human needs. Perhaps we should explore that before we go and erase everything?

Almost accidentally, Renkl does that. Sort of.

Names tell us something about who we are, where we come from, how we signify in the larger world. Names carry social and cultural resonances. For these and any number of other reasons, a rose by any other name doesn’t necessarily smell as sweet. We bend to a rose expecting sweetness, and so sweetness is what we tend to find.

Exactly right.

But then Renkl goes on to write this:

But where wildlife is concerned, perhaps most troubling of all is the claiming involved in any act of naming. The Book of Genesis lays out this relationship very clearly, establishing human dominion over creation and giving the first man naming rights to it all: “Whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.”

Other early biblical texts, including some in Genesis, articulate a healthier relationship between human beings and the other-than-human world, charging humanity to care for and protect creation. But that insistence on dominion — on naming the animals, on claiming the earth for our own uses — is what has persisted most powerfully in this country through the ages. It is arguably the root cause of our troubles today. Instead of tending the plants and animals that share our planet, we have burned the planet down. In my lifetime alone, we have lost some three billion North American birds.

Naming birds for their identifying characteristics instead of for the people who “discovered” them may be little more than symbolic, with hardly any pragmatic effect on the birds’ prospects for survival in a burning world. But symbols have always mattered to our species. Like names themselves, they tell us something about who we are, what we value, how we belong to the world. If renaming the birds becomes part of a broad reorientation toward nature itself, it’s a symbolic gesture that could be the start of saving it all. The birds and us.

I have some sympathy for her reasoning here. But notice what she omits.

The past. Specifically, past generations.

In Renkl’s thinking, and that of the American Ornithological Society, and so many others today, we are all there is. Us, now.

What we want — what we aspire to — is all that matters.

Erasing all the choices made by those past generations of naturalists is splendid because it allows us to better pursue our aspirations.

There’s some irony here. Renkl denounces the arrogance of the human relationship with the natural world, but in doing so, she demonstrates another form of arrogance.

It is the arrogance of the living, the arrogance of the present.

All these debates in recent years reek of it.

Those who want change almost invariably show no interest in the past beyond finding two-dimensional figures they can denounce and feel superior to. No need to grapple with the complex contexts of the past. No need to understand the history of the honour itself, why those who created it did so, how people perceived it, how it perceptions and uses may have changed over time.

And most of all, no need to respect the desire of past generations to leave something that lasts, just as we do when we create our own honours today. Past generations are not our equals. They are no concern at all. Our desires matter; theirs don’t.

I’ve written about the phrase “stewards of an intergenerational project” before. It comes from a Yale report that is by far the most thoughtful consideration of memorials, honours, and renamings I’ve ever come across.

“Hubris in undoing past decisions encourages future generations to disrespect the choices of the current generation,” the Yale report warned. “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.”

Yes, we’re in charge today. But we’re not owners. We are stewards, caretakers. We inherited our responsibilities from earlier generations, and will hand them over in time.

Caretakers may renovate but they do so with both past and future in mind. And unlike owners, stewards would never gut or demolish the building.

That is where every discussion of memorials and honours should start. None does.

Worse, the trend seems to be toward even greater disregard for the past, and even more casual destruction of what has been entrusted to us.

The arrogance of the present is getting worse.

We are not learning. The curve is turning downward.