American Iconoclasm

People like tearing down confederate monuments. Seems largely sensible.

Some worry there is a slippery slope.

Circa 2016 the respectable position was to deny that such a slope existed: no-one would desanctify the good-but-problematic guys like George Washington.

Then in 2020 people tore down some statues of George Washington in Portland.

To be fair, that was just Portland. Nothing happened irl.

But then you started seeing committees in real life places like NYC, SF, and DC removing the names Washington and Jefferson from places of honor.

And now there’s even some support to delionize Lincoln.

C’est la vie.

To be fair, Lincoln, Jefferson, Washington all did pretty bad things.

Sally Hemings was like 15 when her relationship with Jefferson started, even it was sort of consensual.

So there is some intuitive sense to dethroning these guys.

But the trouble is that they were basically the good guys. You can tell if you read their letters. Or, compare them to post-Bolivar and post-Louverture elites. We have a lot to thank them for.

And yet they still did pretty reprehensible things. The past was pretty backward.

Matt Bruenig accordingly concludes that you shouldn’t valorize people, but rather valorize acts. No one is really pure enough to beatify, and everyone looks bad in hindsight.

https://twitter.com/MattBruenig/status/1656717114122592256

I think Bruenig is basically correct, insofar as he is talking to sane, rational, educated adults.

But what Bruenig misses is that lionization is for children.

Some facts about children:

We have to teach children history so they’re not ignorant little fucks.
We also have to teach them morality and social norms.
We have to convince them that following social norms is a good idea.
Children like big powerful things, especially boy-children.

Here is a five-step-plan for doing all of that at once:

Teach children exciting stories from history.
Make it very clear who the heroes and villains are by exaggerating the heroes’ virtues and minimizing their flaws.
Make the heroes be cultural relatives of the children, while making the villains sort of foreign (maybe the villains are British!) so the children identify with the heroes.
Make the heroes win. Maybe they die (like John Henry) or they lose the war (like Athens) but eventually history vindicates them.
Tell the children that the stories are literally true.

You may have noticed that the five-step plan above is followed in every culture ever, anywhere on the globe. Sometimes people go to wild lengths to fit history to the plan. Medieval Persian poets typically portrayed Alexander as the secret rightful heir to the Achaemenid throne.

Using the plan, you can teach kids to be moral while teaching them semi-accurate history, and convince them that being moral is a good idea: the good guys win! You make kids think the stories are cool, rather than lame, by having the characters be actual successful people from reality, and occasionally making ultraviolent movies about them.

You can see how this process doesn’t work if you’re just lionizing actions rather than people, as Bruenig suggests. If you wanted to teach morality, you would have to say, for every action “… and this was good” or “… and this was bad.”

That would not be efficient.

Furthermore, you couldn’t convince kids that good triumphs. We can’t expect kids to calculate the expected value of goodness by tallying up exactly how much good stuff characters did and how much they succeeded. What we can expect kids to do is to see that the good guys won.

It’s good to convince people that good guys win and that defections will be punished. Trusting societies are the societies where people cooperate to punish defections. Unsurprisingly it is trusting societies that succeed economically.

One way to convince children that heroes win is to make up some heroes and put their names on important stuff.

Then, you grow up, and you realize that history is more nuanced than the history they taught you as a kid. Maybe you get disillusioned; maybe you go ancom in college or leave the Baptist church. But you still have this deep irrational sense that you should cooperate for the good of the group. Which was the point.

So, if we’re to remove George Washington’s name from things, it should be because we have better options.

Probably the right move is to just pretend George Washington was black.