When is it legitimate to levy the charge of presentism? Over recent days the Rhodes Must Fall campaign has gotten much media attention in the UK. They are currently concerned with questioning the literal elevation of a statue of Cecil Rhodes at oxford university, these are their aims:
"RMFO is not just a campaign about a statue. We are engaging with the issue of race in Oxford from multiple angles – from the curriculum to improving BME representation and welfare amongst staff and students. We are not here to obliterate the statue in its entirety. We are highlighting that by (quite literally) elevating it on one of our buildings, we are effacing the histories of the many people who suffered tremendously under Rhodes and his legacy. Indeed, we are not a destructive movement. We are, at our core, constructive; we are looking to create better, more appropriate ways of engaging with our history."
Now, politics and history is naturally a messy affair. I have seen some folks decrying such a campaign as "presentist." Rhodes is a "product of his time" we "shouldn't rub out the past." Is the charge of presentism a mere pretense for rational argument, being used to delegitimise concerns and criticisms of Britain's colonial past by British public intellectuals and segments of the media more widely? Does this not assume there were no critics of Rhodes or Empire more broadly during the 19th and 20th century who would equally have been "products of their time?"
There are a few different things going on here which the counter protestors seem to be wrongly mixing togeter.
There is, on the one hand, the question of how we understand the past. We need to understand the past in its own context and on its own terms in order to have a fair and accurate knowledge of why people in the past did what they did. Rhodes certainly was a product of his time, and understanding how his context shaped the choices he made and actions he took is essential if we wish to explain what happened.
But understanding is different from moral judgment. We do need to understand that Rhodes' actions flowed feom a particular historical context to know about the past, but that doesn't mean we are forbidden to question his canonization as a British hero, or to confront the reality of the horrible human suffering he directly caused. We should, as scholars, explore how what he did may (or may not) have been acceptable by contemporary standards, but we don't live in the past, and we have the right and indeed the responsibility to face the moral implications of historical events which continue to influence the shape of the world we live in today. Condemning Rhodes for the evil he did shouldn't (and needn't) stop us from understanding why he did it or what it meant in his own time; and understanding the man behind the monster shouldn't and needn't prevent us from calling evil by its name.
The third issue is one of commemoration. We shouldn't efface historical atrocities from historical memory (and indeed, the movement to take down the statue is drawing more attention to Rhodes' actions), and I strongly disagree with people who have, in the US, defaced the tombs of Confederate soldiers. We shouldn't destrpy the past. But Rhodes' statue isn't a record of his life and it's not his grave - it's a monument created to honor his memory and praise his life's work. Demanding the statue's removal is not asking Oxford to forget the history behind it. It's asking Oxford to stop continuing to praise a man whose actions are no longer considered praiseworthy. It's absolutely about te present: the commemoration of Rhodes by the preservation, here and now, of a monument praising him on the facade of one of the leading research centres in the world. Removijg the statue doesn't rewrite history; it rewrites how people today engage with and understand that history. And this is a good thing: as times change, we should and must continue to reevaluate how the events on the past fit into the present, to confront the evils of past generations, and to seek to heal the lasting effects of past attrocities instead of celebrating their perpetrators as timeless heroes. The past doesn't change (it's dead and gone!), but the monuments we build to can and should grow (and fall!) with our changing understanding of the world we live in.
Or, to put it as a question: at what point should an active civic monument be taken down and moved into a museum? When do statues stop being conduits for showcase present living values, and become instead relics of past attitudes worth preserving only for their historical interest?