The Problem With Tearing Down Statues...

And well, I mean, as you know, in the chapter on culture, I go into this. Uh, because I think at this stage it is clear that there is not an aspect of Western culture that has not been assaulted at such a fundamental and dishonest level that if you were to continue this game, there's just nothing left.

Nothing. Uh, the British Library in 2020 announced that they were going to create a list of authors whose work was in the British Library, including manuscripts and important documents by these authors who had some connection to the slave trade or colonialism. They produced this sort of blacklist of authors, including the late poet laureate Ted Hughes, who died in 1998, who was born in considerable poverty in Yorkshire in the 1930s and who had nothing to do with the British Empire.

The British Library claimed that one of his ancestors in the 17th century had benefited from the slave trade. I mean, this isn't even the sins of the father debate anymore; this is the sins of the ancestor four centuries earlier debate. And by the way, it turned out, among other things, that the British Library can't even get researchers these days because the researchers turned out to have selected a person called Nicolas Ferrer, who actually was opposed to the slave trade and wasn't an ancestor of Ted Hughes.

So they weirdly just decided to posthumously defame somebody. And this isn't at all uncommon. The Tate Gallery in London—I give an example, one that I might come on to is particularly painful to me—but there's an example of one of the masterpieces they have in there. I don't know if you know the work, but it's a beautiful painting called "The Resurrection Cucumber" by Stanley Spencer, one of the great mid-century British artists.

And it's a huge, vast canvas which the Tate is exceptionally lucky to have—painted in the 1930s. It is a depiction of the physical resurrection of the dead at the Day of Judgment, and they're all coming out of their tombs in the graveyard of his local church in the village of Cookham. It’s a profoundly moving painting to me. I've always been; I used to occasionally, my lunchtime, just go to sit in front of this canvas.

Some of the dead coming out of the tombs are recognizably, apparently, neighbors of Spencer's from his village, but he wanted to show the resurrection of all humanity. So he also includes, you know, there are black men and women coming out of some of the graves as well. He didn't have to do that, but he wanted to show the literal representation of the actual physical resurrection.

Well, the Tate now has a descriptor beside this sublime painting saying that it is a racist painting because whereas Stanley Spencer accurately depicts his neighbors from his village in England, the black people in the painting are generic black people copied from National Geographic magazine of the time. Well, Stanley Spencer didn't have any black neighbors, you know, so what?

So what? There weren't any black people in his village in the 1930s in England. And how dare these people? But they've done it now on everything. Well, they're bigger to be morally superior yet to be morally superior to a genius. They get to be morally superior to a genius. And what concerns me is that they pull down a sublime thing into their banal, monotone, utterly monomaniacal view of the world, which is that race is the only thing that matters.

Let me give you one example after example, if I may, because it's particularly painful to me. There's a wonderful painter—an artist I'm very fond of—called Rex Whistler. Um, who was an English artist from the early 20th century. Everybody adored him; he was clearly an exceptionally lovable human being and an exceptionally talented artist.

His first artwork was a mural for the Tate that he did in his early 20s. He worked all around the clock for months and months on end to complete this mural called "In Pursuit of Rare Meets." It's a fantasy; a beautiful fantasy landscape and an Arcadian landscape that goes around all four walls of the gallery.

A couple of years ago, a group whose name was "White Pube," only consisting of a couple of people, decided that this mural was racist. They decided it because of two figures—one of whom was a Chinese figure they said was generic, and the other was because in one corner of the forest, in one of the bits of the rest, a tiny figure about two inches high is a young black boy clearly in distress, being pulled on a chain by a woman in a white frock.

Now, clearly, Rex Whistler always included sort of ugly things like this—there's a drowning child, a white drowning child elsewhere in it; it's clearly an Arcadia ego, you know? That's clearly what he's saying. He was always saying this; all of his work always included this, you know? There'd be a two more; he'd even painted himself in things as a lowly street sweeper, you know?

And he had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful and dark sense of the carnal nature of all things, even in Arcadia. This was decided two years ago by the Tate to be a racist painting, and they have closed the room until further notice. They looked into whether or not they could actually remove, after 100 years, actually remove this from the walls of the gallery, and it seems that they can't because part of it’s on plaster. So they've locked the room.

And the reason I mind this, among many other reasons, is because they have posthumously declared Rex Whistler to be a racist. They said that he reflected the racist attitudes of his time. Rex Whistler died on his first day in action in Normandy in 1944. How dare these people do this? How dare they do it to everybody in our past, to all of our heroes, to all of our artistic heroes? How dare they say that the story of the West is purely a story of racism and xenophobia and colonialism and slavery?

How dare they not even bother to weigh that up? As I say in one point in the book, weigh it up against, just let you know, let’s name a few cities: Paris, Florence, Rome, Venice, just for starters. How dare they not be able to even weigh up the achievements that have come from this allegedly unremittingly terrible past?

But worse than that, and the point I really wanted to make, Jordan, is what they are driving us to, and I feel it very, very strongly myself, is how dare you do this to our ancestors? How dare you do this to all of our heroes? And then the follow-on thought is this: if you have no respect for my ancestors, I see no reason why I should have respect for yours.

If you have no respect for my past and my culture, I don't see why I should continue to say that I have respect for yours. If you have nothing good to say about me, why should I have anything good to say about you? And what I suggest is that in the West at the moment, we are in a potentially short holding pattern—a holding pattern based on politeness.

Or, as Kenneth Clark, Lord Clarke of Civilization, put it: that fundamental aspect of Western culture—courtesy. We are in a period of courtesy where we have been willing to say, "Okay, you can keep rampaging through the past of the West and assaulting my ancestors and insulting my predecessors and saying all of these negative things about my past, and I am pretending for the time being or saying out of courtesy that you can do this, and I will put up with it for a time."

And I will even say, "And there are these other ways of knowing," and so on. But there is a moment there where that absolutely stops. And as I say at the end of the book, as you know, Jordan, I say there's a very clear place where you can do that. The courtesy stops at a certain point, and it stops when you say, "You know what? This politeness seems not to be working for us, so let's go for the impolite things."

And the impolite things that can be said are legion, and nobody should want to go there, but that's where we're being led.