This is good. I agree. There is the expected dig at Trump (it must be in your contract) but you make great points about the arrogance of the present, our role as stewards, and the need to have humility. I am personally a descendant of black slaves and plantation owners from Barbados, I know the subject of slavery in the British Empire very well, and I refuse to judge my ancestors.
I really think you're missing the point on this particular move.
Look at it this way. There were and still are places all around the world whose names on 20th Century maps were decided by European explorers, conquerors and imperial rulers. It doesn't matter if some of them were nice people, there's still something profoundly odd about insisting that those names are for-all-time names when they are the result of a very recent and ultimately ephemeral moment in human history. Step away for a second and think about it. There's a big waterfall on the Zambezi River on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia that's still referred to as Victoria Falls on most maps. But it was called Mosi-oa-Tunya by the people who lived there between the 16th and 19th Century ("the smoke that thunders"), and slowly, the nations on either side have been trying to restore that name.
I agree completely with you that trying to completely unravel these histories of naming is folly. They are like geological strata of the last five centuries, and have come to be deeply meaningful over time. In many cases, what the last five centuries have made in people and in the world can't be undone via some reversion to an original, and the wrong names designate real things for which there is no other name. Calling the people who Westerners used to call "the Bushmen" by the seemingly more appropriate ethnonym "San" only replaces one obviously patronizing name with one that only the people called the San know is also patronizing. (It's a lightly derisive name given to them by their pastoralist cousins the Khoikhoi that references the foraging lifestyle of San groups.) The San weren't a single people, they were a number of separate bands that didn't see themselves as a group; "San" was as much a way of life as a language or culture. It would be like calling "Swifties" a 'people' and implying that a Swiftie is nothing but a Swiftie and will be a Swiftie forever. And yet, today, the San *are* a people because that is how successive state regimes from the 18th Century to today have related to them; it's what they've become. They might have a better name in the end they'd rather have, but they can't really insist on having no one name; they themselves need one.
But where it's possible to rename places, why not? More importantly, let's actually honor the history of how things get names in the first place! Things get *new names* all the time. Species get renamed when biologists realize that where they thought there was one species, there are three. Towns and places rename when they merge or fade or just want to rebrand. Read up on the bizarre history of how the town of Jim Thorpe renamed itself from being Mauch Chunk and tell me you would have decried the renaming then--or would now insist that this is something that can never ever happen in the future. Names aren't a game of musical chairs where once everybody sits down, that's where they will sit forever.
Why *should* birds have a human name attached to them forever and ever as a popular identifier? Widely seen birds tend to have multiple names, after all--if I see a northern flicker, I can call it a woodpecker, a flicker, Colaptes, Colaptes auratus, yellowhammer, clape, yarrup, gawker bird and many other common names. Some of those names will make no sense outside of the local culture that uses them. Others have faded over time. Birds get new colloquialisms attached to them, as does most of the world that humans see and interact with. Would you stand in the way of that process and say, "No, a Cooper's is a Cooper's forever: only once could there have been a name given to it". It's not even a matter of separating out colloquial names (of which the Cooper's has many), formal ornithological names, and taxonomic names, because the same bodies (more or less) that authenticated "Cooper's hawk" are those deciding to undo that now. Are you saying that the early 19th Century ornithological community is one whose authority you believe should last forever? If so, why do you prefer that community in that moment to the point of making its choices eternal?
I think saying "You know what, no human names on birds or animals period" is actually a very consistent system of nomenclature that isn't making judgments about particular past people or even about imperialism, etc.--it's just saying "Hey, that was kind of weird, right, that we thought animals should be called 'Burke's Badger' rather than just 'Northern Atlantic Badger'" simply because a bloke named Burke got shipwrecked on an island in 1845 and told people there was a new kind of badger there when rescued? Which seems like a fair enough observation: it IS weird. The period you're venerating was a period where people weren't afraid to give old things new names. Why should they be the only ones in human history to do that?
I have a lot of sympathy for your first point -- that many of the things whose renaming people like me decry were, in fact, renamed before. To be clear, had I been alive at that renaming, I would have objected! But then the question is what do you do when, many years later, the renamed thing is targeted again for renaming? To take a deliberately extreme example: Like most revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic erasers of the past and the renamed everything in sight. So should St. Petersburg have remained Leningrad? Wouldn't that effectively endorse a renaming I would have opposed at the time?
This is far too large and complex a subject to tackle here but, briefly, I think there is guidance in how societies have tackled past injustices and problems like "if property confiscated by one regime should be returned, what about earlier regimes? What if that leads to competing claims on the property? Won't the risk of return undermine the security of property itself, damaging societies and economies?" Perfect justice is impossible. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. Lines will inevitably be drawn here but not there, etc. I would simply tackle the problem in a spirit of pragmatism and humanity. For how long has the name been in place? How much history would be lost if the name were changed to something else, or changed back? (I wrote something related here: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/stewards-of-an-intergenerational ) How much confusion would a change cause? And -- here's a big one -- what name is familiar to most people? What do they actually use? "Mt. McKinley" is a good example. The name was switched from Denali when McKinley was assassinated. But locals apparently seldom or never used that, and kept saying "Denali." So what's lost if, a hundred years later, the name is switched back? Not much. Far more is preserved, in fact. So that's a renaming I would have supported.
On the specific issue of "European" names versus indigenous. one of the bigger issues is that there are very often many indigenous names in many languages for one thing. Many of the colonial names effectively became the "lingua franca" name. That's a big reason why many of the colonial names you might think would have been quickly erased have endured.
On your last point, I agree! Nicely pragmatic approach. (Makes it easier to remember the names, too. "Hey, what's that grosbeak with the rose breast called...?) If we had discovered a brand new continent with all-new species, I would support that. But here's the thing: Many, many people in the past thought differently. Imposing this new system may sound modest and pragmatic but in doing so you are, in fact, sweeping away the judgements of all those people in the past and replacing them with your own. Right or wrong, that's just a fact, I'm afraid.
Well, as did Charles Lucien Bonaparte in naming that hawk "Cooper's hawk". I'm still at a loss about why you want to sanctify one moment of naming as a sacrosanct moment of "people in the past thinking differently" at the cost of all the other people in the past thinking differently about the name you're holding up as the necessary lodestone. Look at how many names the Cooper's has in local American folklore--what makes Bonaparte's name the one that can't be touched? People have thought it best to call it chickenhawk, striker, swift hawk; those names drift and shift (though chickenhawk is really common)--if your standard is "people in the past thinking differently", why not elevate those more folksonomic names? They've been displaced in popular parlance not by some naturally democratic process of "thinking together (in the past)" but by the assertive efforts of ornithological experts and bird-watchers over the 20th Century trying to be more precise in their nomenclature--as much for the sake of clarity in a *hobby* as anything else. The hawk we're talking about has a wide range over North America so there are also many indigenous names for it--Potawatomi called it "bose", for example. Why doesn't "many many people in the past thought differently" include those many, many people who have a longer past in relation to the bird in question? Ultimately, it feels as if you're saying "The judgments of a strikingly few people in the past with very specific purposes, identity and historic locations must not be swept away; all others can be swept away handily." In renaming things now we are doing nothing different than what has been done continuously in human history generally and what was done quite specifically, in layers, in the past two centuries here in North America. It is a strange thing to sanctify one set of dead people's decisions as immutable and to say to people in the present, "Sorry, the era of naming is now over, you must live forever with what was done before".
Also, please note I have never taken the view that nothing should change. What I’ve argued for, here and in along list of earlier pieces, is for a more thoughtful and principled approach than either “we should change whatever we like, whenever we like”or “nothing should change.” The Yale report I constantly refer to is a superb approach: it very thoughtfully lays out considerations on either side of the equation and calls for a careful weighing of considerations based on the particular circumstance of each case. This decision to simply sweep everything away is the polar opposite approach -- as foolish as the Yale report is wise.
The Yale report concentrates on the naming of buildings, and tries to envision the specifics of when and how particular renamings might or should happen.
Buildings are something human beings make, and something human beings fund. Organisms are neither. What I'm trying to ask you is why you think the naming of organisms is the same thing as the naming of buildings--and why each naming of organisms is something you think should follow the same painstaking approach that the Yale report proposes for the naming of human-made structures. It isn't just a question of the difference between nature and human construction, it's a difference of history. Yale's buildings were made after the history of European settlement in North America, with all its complexity. A Cooper's hawk was here before that. You're seeing this as the same issue when it's not. A Cooper's hawk was here before Europeans were and it had other names; in the time European-descended people were here, it has had other names besides "Cooper's hawk", many of which are perhaps more evocative and meaningful in the communities that see that bird--most notably "chickenhawk", which "many people in the past have thought and said".
You can't cut the Gordian's knot of buildings that humans have made and memorials that humans have built as easily as saying "give them no human name". You can't have Yale's buildings simply be "that's the grey stone building" or even "that's the political science building". But you can have names for animals that are not named for humans; most animals aren't named for humans. It's a simple and elegant thing to say, "All animals should have names that have no human named attached to them"--about as simple and elegant as saying "all animals need a name in Latin that specifies their taxonomy", which no one seriously proposes to overturn and yet which is neither natural nor new. We know it's too much to ask people in everyday life to know the Latin names; we know animals we see everyday need everyday names. "Raven", "crow", "blue jay", "house sparrow". Why not follow those rules and say "no Cooper, no Stellar, no Audubon". It's got nothing to do with whether those were bad or good people. It's a simple nomenclatural rule. An old one and a new one--because before the 16th Century, no society on Earth named animals for the first man to say "This is the name of this animal" in writing.
I see no meaningful distinction between naming buildings and species. In both cases, we look at it and decide to memorialize or honour by choosing a name. The motivating impulse is the same. The fact that one is an artifact and the other a lifeform strikes me as immaterial -- just as there is no meaningful distinction between naming a bird to honour someone or naming a mountain, a river, a region, a state, or a country. And, again, I don't actually disagree with the reasoning behind "let's leave people out of it." What I disagree with is sweeping away the countless decisions of people in the past, who sought to use the name to memorialize others they thought worthy of memorial. The fact that we choose not to do the same going forward is simply not, in itself, justification for erasure.
Bonaparte was only a "we" in the sense that he made his naming recommendations to learned societies, whose authority to name was primarily a kind of closed-loop--the state government of Pennsylvania incorporated the Academy of Natural Sciences in the early 19th Century, and yet it then set about authenticating names suggested by its members for organisms across the country, because various learned societies and amateur naturalists accepted that someone ought to. That's the process you're valuing--which is not as abstract or generic as "countless decisions of people in the past". It's quite specific. And that's the same process by which those names are being changed--very nearly the same kind of group (the American Ornithological Society) has accepted the idea of "bird names for birds". I don't understand why that doesn't satisfy your ideals for *process*--it's a learned society recommending a change to how to approaches the naming of species just as it was a learned society recommending the naming of species over the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I'm sure you're aware that past species names, whether for individuals or not, have at times been quite contested or controversial within such learned societies--dinosaurs and hominim species have been especially so--and the practice of honoring a particular person via a name for an organism has been criticized at times as unscientific or as giving an individual too much discretion all by some scientists going back quite a long ways.
So I guess I don't understand why this particular case bothers you so much. There's a process here that mirrors the process by which species acquired their names. The same kind of experts are involved now as were involved then. There's a consistent idea in the process that makes a reasonable case against the prior convention. If the objection is simply "some people are attached to those names", then they're not in a situation any different than people who prefer folksonomic names for organisms rather than names conferred by learned societies--they can keep calling those organisms by their preferred name as much as they like. No naming police will swoop down on them.
Excellent article. I am a far leftist, feminist, atheist, biologist, environmentalist, obsessed ornithologist, AND member of the infamous "rainbow" and a visible minority.
Purging eponyms from bird names does nothing for avian conservation.
Purging eponyms from bird names does not help me feel "more included" in birding activities
Purging eponyms from bird names is a culture war
Purging eponyms ONLY gives power to language authoritarians
Eponyms are ubiquitous throughout the English language, and throughout ALL languages. In common parlance, and in all scientific fields,
Right. Our world is a tangled mass of etymologies. To think that we can order and rationalize it, and bring it all into alignment with our desires, is hubris on stilts.
And as a francophone, I can see both linguistic approaches. The French language is *prescriptive*, the English language is *descriptive*.
In the francophone bird world, all common names are supposed to follow the Latin binomial. So at least it's a uniform and rational approach, to all linguistic issues.
But English being a descriptive language, everything is made up along the way. It's really annoying to Cartesian minds! (rather like the French Napoleonic Code for law, versus Anglo's "case precedents"... always moving, always up for grabs according to whatever fad comes along.
The bilingual/bi-cultural that I am prefers a prescriptive approach. Change is normal, sure, yet, too much change is a waste of time/resources and good will.
What's the difference between Islamists blowing up ancient Buddhist statues and 21st century American activists tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee?
History is filled with glory and atrocity, with heroes and villains. If our position is that we will only remember the good things that happened (according to present day moral fashion), we create a self-imposed blindness toward the actual events of the past.
How about adopting the position, "Let's not try to erase history, whether we approve of what happened or not"?
The difference lies in the history of the statue itself. It wasn't put up merely to say "the Civil War happened." It, and so many other Confederate statues like it, were put up as explicit statements in support of Jim Crow and white supremacy. In fact, a great many of the Confederate statues were put up in the 1950s and 1960s as very explicit statements rejecting civic equality.
People who support removing statues often say "it's not erasing history." They're right in the limited sense that the history surrounding the statue (civil war or whatever) doesn't change. But they're wrong because the statue itself has a history and is an expression of history, and that's lost when the statue is removed. Most often, I would argue, that's not justified. But it is justified in those in rare cases such as Confederate statues explicitly erected to declare the South "white man's country." (That said, even in these rare cases, I think the statues should be moved to museums, or statue parks, or some other suitable setting, so people may still learn the statue's history, but not in a context that endorses what the statue was intended to endorse.)
Great piece and a good discussion with dissenting views. Personally, I annoy myself through my inconsistency in avoiding the fallacy of historicism (which only some of the forgoing concerns); I don’t seem to be able to recognise it in my thinking sometimes and it can take one to some very dark places. I always appreciate articles on the subject as it helps self reflection.
We have to think of statues and names differently. These are lessons from history that the statue or building or species can tell us who we are and how we got here. general Lee was a complex man and Hitler really happened. Neither statue is there to glorify the individual but memorialize the time and the events. We are all General Lee and Stalin and Mao. But we - hopefully - aren't so much anymore. Loved the happy ending in 2073 but I'm afraid Canadian icon Farley Mowatt wouldn't make it, diner on mice and rats at least. Not that there are any statues of him anywhere. I wonder if that says something about us.
Given all the bad things that I assume someone of Amerigo Vespucci's era believed, maybe we should question the motives of any member of the American Ornithological Society?
So, how should we go about making these decisions? Can we look at just one aspect of someone’s legacy and decide we will continue to honour them because that contribution is almost universally seen as positive? Or that this positive contribution can stand alone for recognition notwithstanding anything else they did? Is there some tipping point in terms of Mandela’s support for eating animal meat which would make it logical and acceptable for future generations to remove or diminish the honours he received? If he not only ate animal meat but owned a large network of abattoirs would the add to the preponderance of ‘evidence’ against him? What about if he was presented with options to ban slaughter or at least improve the conditions of animals raised for slaughter?
It feels as if this issue is a subset of a larger element of unlearning where we find it difficult to look at complicated issues, recognize their complexity and think deeply about them. We focus not on someone’s intent or full argument, instead clipping out a phrase, or brief video (possibly with mangled syntax or poorly chosen words) because that bolsters our negative opinion of that person, institution or political or social identity. So many times we see a detailed description of a problem condensed down to a sound bite or quote which claims to show the person’s intent or values and often as a clickbait process to confuse or outrage.
Incidentally, your point about the middling position ("what if he supported ameliorating conditions, but not abolition?") appears often in debates over figures connected to slavery. And activists have pretty consistently taken the position that nothing other than "abolish now!" saves the figure. Which is absurd because the abolitionist movement would never have succeeded if it had been so wilfully blind toward the political exigencies of the day. But, again, the people pushing erasure are mostly interested in taking a political stand today, and seldom interested in exploring actual history.
Right. The Yale report is wonderful on this. They emphasis not only the intention of the honour -- "what were they honouring?" -- but whether the thing we find objectionable is a principal, or at least important, part of the legacy of the person involved. Robert E. Lee's whole legacy is defending slavery. Easy peasy. But Audubon? Any of his contemporaries -- including abolitionists -- would have found it bewildering to think future generations would equate his name with slavery.
The problem is that human beings are imperfect, that societies change and values are altered - often radically - over time, such that you cannot look back in history, and assume that the people who lived in a time long before us were the same as we are today. That is inarguable. Judging people who have been dead for centuries by today’s standards is intellectually dishonest. Things happened the way they did frequently for reasons we can never know or understand today. In my view, it’s best to leave these things alone - trying to change them simply underscores our own miserable self-conceit. One only has to look around at the mess the current world is in to understand the fatuity of this preoccupation.
This is good. I agree. There is the expected dig at Trump (it must be in your contract) but you make great points about the arrogance of the present, our role as stewards, and the need to have humility. I am personally a descendant of black slaves and plantation owners from Barbados, I know the subject of slavery in the British Empire very well, and I refuse to judge my ancestors.
I really think you're missing the point on this particular move.
Look at it this way. There were and still are places all around the world whose names on 20th Century maps were decided by European explorers, conquerors and imperial rulers. It doesn't matter if some of them were nice people, there's still something profoundly odd about insisting that those names are for-all-time names when they are the result of a very recent and ultimately ephemeral moment in human history. Step away for a second and think about it. There's a big waterfall on the Zambezi River on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia that's still referred to as Victoria Falls on most maps. But it was called Mosi-oa-Tunya by the people who lived there between the 16th and 19th Century ("the smoke that thunders"), and slowly, the nations on either side have been trying to restore that name.
I agree completely with you that trying to completely unravel these histories of naming is folly. They are like geological strata of the last five centuries, and have come to be deeply meaningful over time. In many cases, what the last five centuries have made in people and in the world can't be undone via some reversion to an original, and the wrong names designate real things for which there is no other name. Calling the people who Westerners used to call "the Bushmen" by the seemingly more appropriate ethnonym "San" only replaces one obviously patronizing name with one that only the people called the San know is also patronizing. (It's a lightly derisive name given to them by their pastoralist cousins the Khoikhoi that references the foraging lifestyle of San groups.) The San weren't a single people, they were a number of separate bands that didn't see themselves as a group; "San" was as much a way of life as a language or culture. It would be like calling "Swifties" a 'people' and implying that a Swiftie is nothing but a Swiftie and will be a Swiftie forever. And yet, today, the San *are* a people because that is how successive state regimes from the 18th Century to today have related to them; it's what they've become. They might have a better name in the end they'd rather have, but they can't really insist on having no one name; they themselves need one.
But where it's possible to rename places, why not? More importantly, let's actually honor the history of how things get names in the first place! Things get *new names* all the time. Species get renamed when biologists realize that where they thought there was one species, there are three. Towns and places rename when they merge or fade or just want to rebrand. Read up on the bizarre history of how the town of Jim Thorpe renamed itself from being Mauch Chunk and tell me you would have decried the renaming then--or would now insist that this is something that can never ever happen in the future. Names aren't a game of musical chairs where once everybody sits down, that's where they will sit forever.
Why *should* birds have a human name attached to them forever and ever as a popular identifier? Widely seen birds tend to have multiple names, after all--if I see a northern flicker, I can call it a woodpecker, a flicker, Colaptes, Colaptes auratus, yellowhammer, clape, yarrup, gawker bird and many other common names. Some of those names will make no sense outside of the local culture that uses them. Others have faded over time. Birds get new colloquialisms attached to them, as does most of the world that humans see and interact with. Would you stand in the way of that process and say, "No, a Cooper's is a Cooper's forever: only once could there have been a name given to it". It's not even a matter of separating out colloquial names (of which the Cooper's has many), formal ornithological names, and taxonomic names, because the same bodies (more or less) that authenticated "Cooper's hawk" are those deciding to undo that now. Are you saying that the early 19th Century ornithological community is one whose authority you believe should last forever? If so, why do you prefer that community in that moment to the point of making its choices eternal?
I think saying "You know what, no human names on birds or animals period" is actually a very consistent system of nomenclature that isn't making judgments about particular past people or even about imperialism, etc.--it's just saying "Hey, that was kind of weird, right, that we thought animals should be called 'Burke's Badger' rather than just 'Northern Atlantic Badger'" simply because a bloke named Burke got shipwrecked on an island in 1845 and told people there was a new kind of badger there when rescued? Which seems like a fair enough observation: it IS weird. The period you're venerating was a period where people weren't afraid to give old things new names. Why should they be the only ones in human history to do that?
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I have a lot of sympathy for your first point -- that many of the things whose renaming people like me decry were, in fact, renamed before. To be clear, had I been alive at that renaming, I would have objected! But then the question is what do you do when, many years later, the renamed thing is targeted again for renaming? To take a deliberately extreme example: Like most revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic erasers of the past and the renamed everything in sight. So should St. Petersburg have remained Leningrad? Wouldn't that effectively endorse a renaming I would have opposed at the time?
This is far too large and complex a subject to tackle here but, briefly, I think there is guidance in how societies have tackled past injustices and problems like "if property confiscated by one regime should be returned, what about earlier regimes? What if that leads to competing claims on the property? Won't the risk of return undermine the security of property itself, damaging societies and economies?" Perfect justice is impossible. Some arbitrariness is unavoidable. Lines will inevitably be drawn here but not there, etc. I would simply tackle the problem in a spirit of pragmatism and humanity. For how long has the name been in place? How much history would be lost if the name were changed to something else, or changed back? (I wrote something related here: https://dgardner.substack.com/p/stewards-of-an-intergenerational ) How much confusion would a change cause? And -- here's a big one -- what name is familiar to most people? What do they actually use? "Mt. McKinley" is a good example. The name was switched from Denali when McKinley was assassinated. But locals apparently seldom or never used that, and kept saying "Denali." So what's lost if, a hundred years later, the name is switched back? Not much. Far more is preserved, in fact. So that's a renaming I would have supported.
On the specific issue of "European" names versus indigenous. one of the bigger issues is that there are very often many indigenous names in many languages for one thing. Many of the colonial names effectively became the "lingua franca" name. That's a big reason why many of the colonial names you might think would have been quickly erased have endured.
On your last point, I agree! Nicely pragmatic approach. (Makes it easier to remember the names, too. "Hey, what's that grosbeak with the rose breast called...?) If we had discovered a brand new continent with all-new species, I would support that. But here's the thing: Many, many people in the past thought differently. Imposing this new system may sound modest and pragmatic but in doing so you are, in fact, sweeping away the judgements of all those people in the past and replacing them with your own. Right or wrong, that's just a fact, I'm afraid.
Well, as did Charles Lucien Bonaparte in naming that hawk "Cooper's hawk". I'm still at a loss about why you want to sanctify one moment of naming as a sacrosanct moment of "people in the past thinking differently" at the cost of all the other people in the past thinking differently about the name you're holding up as the necessary lodestone. Look at how many names the Cooper's has in local American folklore--what makes Bonaparte's name the one that can't be touched? People have thought it best to call it chickenhawk, striker, swift hawk; those names drift and shift (though chickenhawk is really common)--if your standard is "people in the past thinking differently", why not elevate those more folksonomic names? They've been displaced in popular parlance not by some naturally democratic process of "thinking together (in the past)" but by the assertive efforts of ornithological experts and bird-watchers over the 20th Century trying to be more precise in their nomenclature--as much for the sake of clarity in a *hobby* as anything else. The hawk we're talking about has a wide range over North America so there are also many indigenous names for it--Potawatomi called it "bose", for example. Why doesn't "many many people in the past thought differently" include those many, many people who have a longer past in relation to the bird in question? Ultimately, it feels as if you're saying "The judgments of a strikingly few people in the past with very specific purposes, identity and historic locations must not be swept away; all others can be swept away handily." In renaming things now we are doing nothing different than what has been done continuously in human history generally and what was done quite specifically, in layers, in the past two centuries here in North America. It is a strange thing to sanctify one set of dead people's decisions as immutable and to say to people in the present, "Sorry, the era of naming is now over, you must live forever with what was done before".
Also, please note I have never taken the view that nothing should change. What I’ve argued for, here and in along list of earlier pieces, is for a more thoughtful and principled approach than either “we should change whatever we like, whenever we like”or “nothing should change.” The Yale report I constantly refer to is a superb approach: it very thoughtfully lays out considerations on either side of the equation and calls for a careful weighing of considerations based on the particular circumstance of each case. This decision to simply sweep everything away is the polar opposite approach -- as foolish as the Yale report is wise.
The Yale report concentrates on the naming of buildings, and tries to envision the specifics of when and how particular renamings might or should happen.
Buildings are something human beings make, and something human beings fund. Organisms are neither. What I'm trying to ask you is why you think the naming of organisms is the same thing as the naming of buildings--and why each naming of organisms is something you think should follow the same painstaking approach that the Yale report proposes for the naming of human-made structures. It isn't just a question of the difference between nature and human construction, it's a difference of history. Yale's buildings were made after the history of European settlement in North America, with all its complexity. A Cooper's hawk was here before that. You're seeing this as the same issue when it's not. A Cooper's hawk was here before Europeans were and it had other names; in the time European-descended people were here, it has had other names besides "Cooper's hawk", many of which are perhaps more evocative and meaningful in the communities that see that bird--most notably "chickenhawk", which "many people in the past have thought and said".
You can't cut the Gordian's knot of buildings that humans have made and memorials that humans have built as easily as saying "give them no human name". You can't have Yale's buildings simply be "that's the grey stone building" or even "that's the political science building". But you can have names for animals that are not named for humans; most animals aren't named for humans. It's a simple and elegant thing to say, "All animals should have names that have no human named attached to them"--about as simple and elegant as saying "all animals need a name in Latin that specifies their taxonomy", which no one seriously proposes to overturn and yet which is neither natural nor new. We know it's too much to ask people in everyday life to know the Latin names; we know animals we see everyday need everyday names. "Raven", "crow", "blue jay", "house sparrow". Why not follow those rules and say "no Cooper, no Stellar, no Audubon". It's got nothing to do with whether those were bad or good people. It's a simple nomenclatural rule. An old one and a new one--because before the 16th Century, no society on Earth named animals for the first man to say "This is the name of this animal" in writing.
But thank you, again, for making the case. "You're right!" is nice and all but civil debate is the only way to improve thinking.
I see no meaningful distinction between naming buildings and species. In both cases, we look at it and decide to memorialize or honour by choosing a name. The motivating impulse is the same. The fact that one is an artifact and the other a lifeform strikes me as immaterial -- just as there is no meaningful distinction between naming a bird to honour someone or naming a mountain, a river, a region, a state, or a country. And, again, I don't actually disagree with the reasoning behind "let's leave people out of it." What I disagree with is sweeping away the countless decisions of people in the past, who sought to use the name to memorialize others they thought worthy of memorial. The fact that we choose not to do the same going forward is simply not, in itself, justification for erasure.
Bonaparte was only a "we" in the sense that he made his naming recommendations to learned societies, whose authority to name was primarily a kind of closed-loop--the state government of Pennsylvania incorporated the Academy of Natural Sciences in the early 19th Century, and yet it then set about authenticating names suggested by its members for organisms across the country, because various learned societies and amateur naturalists accepted that someone ought to. That's the process you're valuing--which is not as abstract or generic as "countless decisions of people in the past". It's quite specific. And that's the same process by which those names are being changed--very nearly the same kind of group (the American Ornithological Society) has accepted the idea of "bird names for birds". I don't understand why that doesn't satisfy your ideals for *process*--it's a learned society recommending a change to how to approaches the naming of species just as it was a learned society recommending the naming of species over the 19th and early 20th Centuries. I'm sure you're aware that past species names, whether for individuals or not, have at times been quite contested or controversial within such learned societies--dinosaurs and hominim species have been especially so--and the practice of honoring a particular person via a name for an organism has been criticized at times as unscientific or as giving an individual too much discretion all by some scientists going back quite a long ways.
So I guess I don't understand why this particular case bothers you so much. There's a process here that mirrors the process by which species acquired their names. The same kind of experts are involved now as were involved then. There's a consistent idea in the process that makes a reasonable case against the prior convention. If the objection is simply "some people are attached to those names", then they're not in a situation any different than people who prefer folksonomic names for organisms rather than names conferred by learned societies--they can keep calling those organisms by their preferred name as much as they like. No naming police will swoop down on them.
I really don’t understand this response. Did you read my response? I am floored that you would characterize my views the way you have here.
Excellent article. I am a far leftist, feminist, atheist, biologist, environmentalist, obsessed ornithologist, AND member of the infamous "rainbow" and a visible minority.
Purging eponyms from bird names does nothing for avian conservation.
Purging eponyms from bird names does not help me feel "more included" in birding activities
Purging eponyms from bird names is a culture war
Purging eponyms ONLY gives power to language authoritarians
Eponyms are ubiquitous throughout the English language, and throughout ALL languages. In common parlance, and in all scientific fields,
-medicine
-microbiology
-plants
-other animals
-stars
The list is endless
Right. Our world is a tangled mass of etymologies. To think that we can order and rationalize it, and bring it all into alignment with our desires, is hubris on stilts.
And as a francophone, I can see both linguistic approaches. The French language is *prescriptive*, the English language is *descriptive*.
In the francophone bird world, all common names are supposed to follow the Latin binomial. So at least it's a uniform and rational approach, to all linguistic issues.
But English being a descriptive language, everything is made up along the way. It's really annoying to Cartesian minds! (rather like the French Napoleonic Code for law, versus Anglo's "case precedents"... always moving, always up for grabs according to whatever fad comes along.
The bilingual/bi-cultural that I am prefers a prescriptive approach. Change is normal, sure, yet, too much change is a waste of time/resources and good will.
What's the difference between Islamists blowing up ancient Buddhist statues and 21st century American activists tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee?
History is filled with glory and atrocity, with heroes and villains. If our position is that we will only remember the good things that happened (according to present day moral fashion), we create a self-imposed blindness toward the actual events of the past.
How about adopting the position, "Let's not try to erase history, whether we approve of what happened or not"?
The difference lies in the history of the statue itself. It wasn't put up merely to say "the Civil War happened." It, and so many other Confederate statues like it, were put up as explicit statements in support of Jim Crow and white supremacy. In fact, a great many of the Confederate statues were put up in the 1950s and 1960s as very explicit statements rejecting civic equality.
People who support removing statues often say "it's not erasing history." They're right in the limited sense that the history surrounding the statue (civil war or whatever) doesn't change. But they're wrong because the statue itself has a history and is an expression of history, and that's lost when the statue is removed. Most often, I would argue, that's not justified. But it is justified in those in rare cases such as Confederate statues explicitly erected to declare the South "white man's country." (That said, even in these rare cases, I think the statues should be moved to museums, or statue parks, or some other suitable setting, so people may still learn the statue's history, but not in a context that endorses what the statue was intended to endorse.)
I think these statues should receive a "information plate" of no more than one foot in size, describing WHY the statue was erected.
Eventually the statue will be removed due to changes in urban planning, but it shouldn't be invisibilised for the sheer sake of invisibilisation.
If new urban planning occurs, then of course place "offensive" statue in a museum.
Maybe we should just drop the word offensive and make actual material criticisms of things.
Great article.
Thank you.
Great piece and a good discussion with dissenting views. Personally, I annoy myself through my inconsistency in avoiding the fallacy of historicism (which only some of the forgoing concerns); I don’t seem to be able to recognise it in my thinking sometimes and it can take one to some very dark places. I always appreciate articles on the subject as it helps self reflection.
We have to think of statues and names differently. These are lessons from history that the statue or building or species can tell us who we are and how we got here. general Lee was a complex man and Hitler really happened. Neither statue is there to glorify the individual but memorialize the time and the events. We are all General Lee and Stalin and Mao. But we - hopefully - aren't so much anymore. Loved the happy ending in 2073 but I'm afraid Canadian icon Farley Mowatt wouldn't make it, diner on mice and rats at least. Not that there are any statues of him anywhere. I wonder if that says something about us.
Given all the bad things that I assume someone of Amerigo Vespucci's era believed, maybe we should question the motives of any member of the American Ornithological Society?
Shhh... Stop thinking and the problems dissolve.
Indeed my wokest friends say "AmeriKKKa"... therefore, the A eponym should be purged from all names too.
I’ve always thought it would be appropriate to just call that country Us.
So, how should we go about making these decisions? Can we look at just one aspect of someone’s legacy and decide we will continue to honour them because that contribution is almost universally seen as positive? Or that this positive contribution can stand alone for recognition notwithstanding anything else they did? Is there some tipping point in terms of Mandela’s support for eating animal meat which would make it logical and acceptable for future generations to remove or diminish the honours he received? If he not only ate animal meat but owned a large network of abattoirs would the add to the preponderance of ‘evidence’ against him? What about if he was presented with options to ban slaughter or at least improve the conditions of animals raised for slaughter?
It feels as if this issue is a subset of a larger element of unlearning where we find it difficult to look at complicated issues, recognize their complexity and think deeply about them. We focus not on someone’s intent or full argument, instead clipping out a phrase, or brief video (possibly with mangled syntax or poorly chosen words) because that bolsters our negative opinion of that person, institution or political or social identity. So many times we see a detailed description of a problem condensed down to a sound bite or quote which claims to show the person’s intent or values and often as a clickbait process to confuse or outrage.
Incidentally, your point about the middling position ("what if he supported ameliorating conditions, but not abolition?") appears often in debates over figures connected to slavery. And activists have pretty consistently taken the position that nothing other than "abolish now!" saves the figure. Which is absurd because the abolitionist movement would never have succeeded if it had been so wilfully blind toward the political exigencies of the day. But, again, the people pushing erasure are mostly interested in taking a political stand today, and seldom interested in exploring actual history.
Right. The Yale report is wonderful on this. They emphasis not only the intention of the honour -- "what were they honouring?" -- but whether the thing we find objectionable is a principal, or at least important, part of the legacy of the person involved. Robert E. Lee's whole legacy is defending slavery. Easy peasy. But Audubon? Any of his contemporaries -- including abolitionists -- would have found it bewildering to think future generations would equate his name with slavery.
The problem is that human beings are imperfect, that societies change and values are altered - often radically - over time, such that you cannot look back in history, and assume that the people who lived in a time long before us were the same as we are today. That is inarguable. Judging people who have been dead for centuries by today’s standards is intellectually dishonest. Things happened the way they did frequently for reasons we can never know or understand today. In my view, it’s best to leave these things alone - trying to change them simply underscores our own miserable self-conceit. One only has to look around at the mess the current world is in to understand the fatuity of this preoccupation.
We're not "honouring" them. They are a part of history and history should not be erased. End of.
Bird names can change when taxonomy changes.
There's no other rational reason.
Policies based on people's feelz are always wrong
Anybody ask the birds if they care?