Dan Demetriou on the Ethics of Colonial Monuments
Philosopher interviews
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Dan Demetriou is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Morris. An ethicist and social-political philosopher, he is the co-editor of “Honor in the Modern World” (Lexington/Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) and has recent and forthcoming work in the areas of sex ethics, monument ethics, gun rights, and migration ethics.
My collaborator is Ajume Wingo, who’s a Cameroonian philosopher, who teaches at Colorado and is a friend and mentor of mine. We published the first wave of discussions about monuments in 2017. And that was just as the Decolonize South Africa movement had started.
Yes, I do. For instance, it matters how much of the population that cares about the monuments are still represented in the area.
Let’s say we’re talking about British memorials in India where almost all the British have left. That’s a different situation than, say, Afrikaner memorials in South Africa where the people who erected them are still there, and they are still supposedly part of this South African family. So that would be different. There are other things too, like whether the monuments are for someone who is ostensibly a founder of the nation. In the case of America, maybe like George Washington or Jefferson, but who also were people who had slaves. So, yes, these these things matter a lot.
Yes, the discussion in America, for instance, often concerned Confederate monuments. Then you have this idea of colonialisation. And I think we’re now being forced to just talk about problematic monuments in general, about the ethics of removing or maintaining monuments generally. And we’re kind of searching for some overarching theory.
It’d be nice if there was some overarching theory for when a monument should go up or down. Generally, I think that would be good. Even if we come to different answers because the morally relevant facts are different in different areas.
So, for instance, here are two theories that you might hear: Some people are what I call moralists about monuments. They think that a monument, let’s use the term “disqualified” for when a monument should not be erected or if you take it down — and let’s say it is “qualified” when it should stay up or go up. Moralists think that if a monument is to a bad person or a bad enough person or to a bad cause, or if it commemorates in some positive way an evil thing, then it is disqualified.
And then you have some people, who are what we might call offense theorists. They think that what matters isn’t whether the person or the event that are being commemorated are moral, but whether or not the monument is offensive to enough people or the wrong people.
And so that’s an interesting distinction that has emerged in the literature.
Yeah, I think that is definitely a position in logical space. But it is rarely argued for. I won’t say that no one has argued for that, but I haven’t seen that defended among philosophers. It seems just sort of like, well, once it goes off, we can’t take it down. Not many people are that conservative about monuments.
DP: It seems also that it has something to do with time. When we think of very ancient monuments, then we don’t have this attitude towards them. Nobody is upset today about a monument to Alexander the Great. At the time when Alexander died, perhaps many people would have been because he was the oppressor who occupied their lands. In contrast, today we see this monument to Alexander the Great and it does not move us emotionally.
And then there is the very recent past or present, where the majority of a society happens to agree with the erection of a monument. So again, this is not problematic. But it seems that there is this intermediate zone in time, where the monument is old enough to be out of fashion or to contradict the present sensibilities, but it is not yet old enough to be part of ancient history.
Right. Yes. Certainly, monuments can change their meaning, or the meaning that we take from a monument can change. Scholars who write about monuments talk about monuments being “living” or “dead.” Like when you have a statue that people are so used to that they literally don’t even see it anymore. It just doesn’t cause any feelings whatsoever.
And I think that’s a nice distinction, too. It doesn’t even get to the point of like, well, what does this mean or something? You know, no one’s even talking about it. It’s just part of the landscape and they just ignore it.
But sometimes an old monument can be resurrected, start living again and be very meaningful and a point of controversy. I think a lot of the Southern monuments were like that. People were just ignoring them and they were just part of the landscape, for example in my generation, when I was growing up. But suddenly they started becoming icons. I think the example of the Buddhas in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up — they were 1500 years old. No one was really thinking of them as important religious iconography. But then, to the Taliban, they became alive and became idolatrous. And so they destroyed them.
DP: This now brings up an important question. You know, when the Taliban do it, then we all agree that it is bad. But is it different from when let’s say, in the United States, a Confederate monument is toppled? Or is it a similar process? And we just sympathise more emotionally with the people who are against the Confederacy, but we don’t like the Taliban.
So I’m thinking that in both cases you are destroying a document that, as you said yourself, doesn’t mean much to anyone anyway. What is your opinion? Do you think that in the Southern states, people really identify with these Confederate monuments?
I think they do. But with regard to the question about how we feel about the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas versus a mob tearing down a Confederate monument, I think the Buddhas, the statues, were not alive spiritually. But they were alive as a World Heritage site. And so we in the Western world viewed these acts as, you know, crimes against World Heritage.
In contrast, most defenders of Confederate monuments won’t say that they are as important as World Heritage sites or that they have some great historical value. They’re not going to say that they have some important artistic value or something like that.
So, you know, they’re more political. They’re more about the people and their culture and their heroes. And what they represent demographically and what they represent for the future.
Okay, So generally I think we should try to separate the esthetic value of something from the morality of that. For example, you could have a very beautiful altar on which the Aztecs sacrificed people or something like that. But at the same time, whether or not we play Russian music, whether or not we celebrate all these things that might be controversial — this is a political decision. And I do think that I am what I call a “sentimentalist” about monuments. So I see monuments similar to how we decorate our homes. Basically, for me, monuments and memorials are a people decorating their landscape or decorating the territory of their country, sort of culturally terraforming their environment.
And if we view the logic of monuments in this way, a couple of interesting things happen. One is that it isn’t necessarily only moralistic. We might put up a picture of a grandfather. And let me ask you: Supposing you had a grandfather who had killed somebody and not righteously, but let’s say he killed them for drug money. But you have a lot of warm feelings towards him. Maybe he was good to you or something like that. Would you not put up his picture on your wall because he did that?
Well, it’s interesting that when I ask philosophers this question, they’re often like you. They’re kind of on the fence about it, which is enough for my purposes — that it’s close. And if it’s close, that means we’re not obviously moralistic about who we put on our walls. We don’t have some moral standard of whether this person was bad and then they get maybe a small picture, but if this person was good, they get a bigger picture on our wall or mantelpiece. We don’t really think in that way.
And so yes, I think that when we’re decorating our landscape, we’re also not going purely by esthetic criteria. For instance, if it’s a bad picture of a loved one, we may still put it on. And we could care a lot about a bad monument esthetically. A lot of these southern monuments and frankly, northern monuments, there was a sort of generic soldier cast and they would sometimes use them for all these statues, and they would just literally sometimes be Union soldiers, sometimes Confederate soldiers, and they’re just mass produced. They’re not esthetically extremely important, but they nonetheless may have a high sentimental value to some people.
Yes, I think that’s right.
DP: So in your paper, you say that we need to look at three different aspects of these monuments. And you discuss what you already mentioned, whether we should make monuments to immoral people or immoral causes.
But this is also a matter of perspective, isn’t it? I mean, if you asked Cecil Rhodes or somebody like that if what they were doing was immoral, he would probably have said no, this is perfectly fine: we are just bringing civilization to these uncivilized people.
But today we think that what they did was immoral. So morality also changes over time or is different in different groups. How are we going to even decide which causes are moral and which are immoral?
So I’m a moral realist. If I abandon moral realism, I’ll just be a nihilist. I don’t think morality is subjective. And because I don’t believe it’s subjective, I’m also not a moral relativist.
The question about how we could tell what’s morally right or wrong is, of course, a very vexing question. But I think that this is a more general problem than just about monuments. Because even though I’m a moral realist, I’m not very committed to there being moral progress or anything like that.
So if you are a moralist about monuments, you must observe that moral opinion certainly changes, both through time and across space. And if you are a moralist about monuments, you’re basically committing yourself to tearing down a lot of monuments and, you know, monuments aren’t going to last very long.
And then, of course, we could observe that there are also moral fads in the sense of changing sensibilities. I’m not saying a moral fad in the sense of some dumb idea about morality, but just that certain aspects of morality get cared more about at particular times. So right now we’re in a time period where we really care a lot about racism. I don’t know if you find this with your students as well. But, you know, when I started my career, just 15 years ago, if I was trying to get everyone in a class on the same page that some action is wrong, and just to take the obvious example that everyone agrees is wrong, I would choose something like a rapist or something like that. But nowadays it’s racism. For my students, this is the great evil. And in 20 years from now, it could be something else.
And recently I was in one Q&A, I talked to a professor who said that she thinks there shouldn’t really be many monuments put up to people because they were so horrible to animals. And so you can see, like in 20 years from now, we’re going to take down these monuments to people who hated animals.
And that’s not necessarily us changing our minds. But even most vegans today would not say that we should take down monuments to meat eaters. But in 20 years from now, the moral focus could be so much on animals that they will.
So if you’re committed to moralism, monuments won’t have much of a half-life, at least in a culture like ours where there’s so much moral churn.
But if you’re a sentimentalist instead, you could say that you have positive sentiments towards your national decor, you’re used to it, and so on. You’re interpreting them in a different way and maintaining them even though you disagree with their morality, which I think is very much the case of the Southern whites who support Confederate monuments. It isn’t like any of them want there to be slavery. And even when those monuments were raised, they weren’t really monuments to slavery. But of course, you know, the meaning of monuments changes. So for some people today, they may be monuments to slavery.
And I think that you can have moral change and yet have a somewhat stable heritage landscape if you are thinking about things in a more sentimentalist way. So I think of sentimentalism as opposed to moralism, and it is more descriptively true of our attitude towards monuments.
DP: Right. But your metaphor there where you say that monuments are like decorating our landscape, our living room with personal memories, this downplays a little the historical documentation aspect of monuments, doesn’t it? Monuments are not only some decoration that I take away from my home. It is more like the picture of my grandfather. The picture of my grandfather might have some emotional meaning to me, but it also has a historical value for my grandchildren who perhaps will otherwise never be confronted with a Nazi as a human being. But now they can see this picture, and they can know about what this time was, and they can try to learn about it. And if this picture was gone, then this connection, this personal connection to this time would have been gone.
Or what we saw in the ex-Soviet-Union states. If you destroy all the Lenin statues, if you destroy all the palaces of these so-called communist rulers and replace them with other buildings and remove all these big streets and these public spaces that were made for the parades, then you suddenly have a different city that does not remember its past anymore.
And this reminds me also of the discussion about books. Which is similar to what we are talking about here. When you have Mark Twain novels which use words that we don’t want to use today, or they discuss topics that we don’t want to see discussed in this way today, is it right to be rewriting Mark Twain? Or are we destroying something of cultural value, not only in the sense of high artistic value but in the sense of historical memory? What do you think?
I think I think those are excellent points. Definitely, when parents decorate their house, they have in mind, I want to be able to point to this thing when I have a discussion about my parents, I can point to that picture and it will help my kid connect. So I think that is part of why we put up monuments and memorials.
But the critics say, oh, well, you could always go to a museum. If you want to learn history, you could go to a museum or open a book, and you could learn about this stuff. You don’t need these representations shoved into your face, especially when they’re offensive to some of our people, which we can talk about later. But people, you know, don’t go to museums. You know, kids don’t go to a photo album as often as they’re just going to walk past a hallway and see pictures. So you do kind of want some of that stuff up there.
But on the other hand, these things are of cultural importance and memory, but they’re not sources of accurate history. It isn’t like we tried to be even-handed historians. Some things that are of minor historical importance might be very emotionally important. And because they’re important to us in that way, they get more space on our walls or more space in our landscape.
We sometimes will hide a defeat and exaggerate a victory or distort history in similar ways. And so critics are right to point that out. So the historical argument isn’t good because it distorts history.
So when you make a historical argument, are you saying that it is important for us to understand history accurately, or just to understand history at all? Or is it about understanding at least our own narrative about our history? But I’m okay with distorting history when it comes to how we decorate our homes and how we decorate our national landscapes. I think it’s okay for a family or a people to decorate their landscapes or their homes in a way that makes the kids feel proud of their history and their people, and that could absolutely ignore evils that their cultural heroes committed.
This is actually such a basic point, but we’re so out of control on this issue. So when somebody says something, we could interpret that in a charitable way or an uncharitable way. And in philosophy, we’re taught to try and interpret the person we’re talking to charitably.
If they give an argument that has left out a lot of premises, we just may fill in those premises to make their argument valid. If they say something that could be offensive or not offensive, we are supposed to try to understand it in the non-offensive way. Now the question is, shouldn’t we also do that to monuments?
That’s what I see in the removalist camp. They give the most uncharitable interpretations of monuments as justifications to pull them down, and they don’t give enough airtime to the charitable interpretations.
It isn’t that they don’t realize that there is a charitable interpretation that can be given, but they seem to operate with this principle that if there is a reasonable, uncharitable interpretation, then that one should determine our behavior.
So if there’s a reasonable charitable interpretation, like, say, we’re just honoring the bravery and sacrifices that this person did for his people; and there’s the uncharitable interpretation, like, we’re celebrating slavery; then the uncharitable interpretation will usually determine policy, whether the monument goes up or down.
And I’m just asking, why is that? Why does the policy not respond to the charitable interpretation? And then the same people are more than willing to give the charitable interpretation towards other things. I never hear them say, get down all the Genghis Khan monuments which are going up all over Mongolia. And they’re putting up monuments to Shaka Zulu, who is, by their own ethics, just a horrible person.
So they’re willing to be charitable about some, but not about others. And it’s not consistent. And so I think that we need to ask if there is also a reasonable charitable interpretation, There should be way more discussion about whether monuments should go down, even if they have a reasonable disqualifying interpretation.
DP: But then, the obvious counter-argument that comes to mind now would be that if a figure has both positive and negative effects on the world, then the negative effects can cause actual harm, they can cause damage to some populations. Some part of the population feels harmed by this person and perhaps harmed by the monument, while in the positive sense, it’s usually not harmful to follow the uncharitable interpretation and remove anything remotely offensive. If I am, let’s say, a South African black person and I see those colonials being displayed publicly, then perhaps I will feel that this is an offense to me personally, and this is why the negative interpretation should trump, somebody might say. Because the negative one is associated with harm.
So this is about protecting the victims from harm, and one could argue that this is more important than pleasing the rest of the population through a charitable interpretation.
Yes, well, I think that it depends on the population. If there’s still a significant percentage of your population that still cares about the monument, it is providing a good for them. They feel like they are represented in the landscape, they feel like their decorations are up on the wall. They still live there and they still have a home there. These people will feel very bad if their monuments or their decorations are taken down because that means that they’re not welcome there. And in fact, I am now increasingly of the opinion that monuments are a sort of social technology that is actually adaptive on a group level, that it’s a way of knowing whether you are on the way up or whether you are on the way out.
So people are more willing to take down your monuments before they’re willing to kill you. But it’s a canary in the coal mine. It allows you to see what’s next. So this is why I think we should not be virtuous about monuments.
One other distinction I make is between universalists and particularists. Universalists say monuments have to be for everybody. If there’s a monument that doesn’t express all of our values or that doesn’t represent all of our people, that monument should not stay up or go up. In contrast, a particularist is more okay with saying, you can have monuments that are really only meaningful or loved by part of the population.
Again, we have an inconsistency among removalists, in my opinion. When removalists are talking about colonial monuments or Confederate monuments, they tend to talk like universalists. They say, how would a black person feel about this Confederate monument? It doesn’t represent all of us, right? And so take it out. But then, they’ll put up a monument that only black people care about.
Or they’ll say things like, how could you put up a monument for someone who fought against America? And then they’ll put up a monument to native Americans who fought against America.
I’m mostly a particularist. If South Africa belongs completely to the black South African population, why should they have the decorations of people that aren’t even around, unless they thought of them as interesting historical artifacts, or esthetically interesting, or as victory trophies. Like we’re going to leave it up because we kicked you out. But if they don’t have any sentimental value for any of those reasons, then they should take them down.
I have this domestic analogy of an interracial couple, you know. One of them might say, I’m sure your ancestors were against our marriage. Maybe my ancestors were also against our marriage. But our kids should see and honor and feel good about both of their ancestors from both lineages.
And that is why I call myself a Mandelian. The Mandelian solution (named after Nelson Mandela) is that better than taking monuments down, if many people in your nation care about them, you just add new monuments to the people who are underrepresented, which was the case in South Africa. Everyone expected Mandela to have a wholesale removal of white South African monuments and he kept that from happening. And the solution was more cultural heritage being represented for black South Africans. And I think obviously there’s a huge heritage gap in America, too, for black Americans. And that has to be rectified because they are part of the American household.
Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash
But just like in my household, my son decorates his room and my daughter decorates her room. And my wife and I decorate the living room. She has some say, I have some say and so forth. And perhaps some of the things she puts up aren’t that important to me, but they’re important to her. And so because they’re important to her, I leave them up.
DP: Right. So now this moves more in another direction. I noticed that you approach this problem in a very rational, systematic way. Making all of these distinctions. But one could also say that perhaps this misses the point because, in reality, our monuments are just an expression of the power dynamics in our societies. One could see it like Foucault and say that there is no objective truth about which monuments should be where, but it is a matter of power. And the groups in society which have power tend to dominate the monuments in the same way, like perhaps you as a father can tell your children not to hang a particular poster. Perhaps they would like to hang it in their room, but you have the power to say no. In this house, we don’t want this poster. Let’s say your children would want to hang a Hitler poster somewhere. You would perhaps say no.
So is this whole debate really as rational and cool and detached as you make it appear, or is it in reality not a power struggle onto which we just put this thin layer of rationality to make it appear manageable?
Yeah, that’s a good question. I feel like my sentimentalist approach is the more rational approach as opposed to those who say, we have to have a meeting and weigh the moral pros and cons of Thomas Jefferson and weigh the pros and cons of Robert E Lee and so forth. I don’t believe in any such meetings like this. I feel like I’m representing the more rationalist view.
But sentimentalism isn’t, you know, just pure power in the Senate. In a family, there are obviously power differentials, but I don’t want to think of it as a power struggle where everyone’s trying to gain supremacy over each other. Like different factions of the family will try to dominate as much wall space as possible.
This is one of the problems with this metaphor for Americans, especially middle-class and lower people, who don’t grow up in multigenerational homes. The average American stays in his home for seven years or something like that. We are very itinerant. For the analogy to really work in an interesting way, you got to think about people like country gentry, where they have their homes for maybe like a thousand years. And every generation that comes up, they do have the power to change the heirlooms and what gets displayed and how. But they also see themselves as part of that. What they don’t do is just rip it all out and start afresh with a clean slate. They do see themselves as caretakers a family lineage that they want to pass on and they tweak around the edges. But, you know, they basically try to maintain a certain sort of continuity.
And I think that even though they’re the ones in power, generationally, I do think we have precedent for people who can maintain continuity even though they are in power.
Of course, another important difference with the family is that the family is the same demographic. It’s that same family inheriting. Whereas in multi-cultural and multiracial states, it’s less obvious that you have the sort of demographic stability and you do have more of that power struggle.
You can’t really talk about monument ethics without talking about questions of demographics and migration and things like that.
If what you say is true, if it’s just the power struggle, then so much of the discussion about monument ethics is just fake, as you say. It’s just a pretense. But I have to play this game of acting like we are all just good-faith actors, generally really just, trying not to cause offense. So if it’s just nothing but raw struggle on a history and heritage level, then that’s where the discussion needs to go. Then that’s the real conversation.
Well, again, it depends on the monuments, just like my example earlier. After almost all the British have left India, what do you do with British monuments? There is an argument to be made that, well, if you have all these Confederate monuments that Southern whites really cared about, but then, assume the Southern whites have moved around the country and they’re not even there anymore, what do we do? If you left this space, why do you expect other people to maintain the monument? It’s like if my son moves from a bedroom upstairs to a bedroom downstairs, and my daughter moves into his bedroom upstairs, it would be strange to say, you can’t take down my decorations in my bedroom upstairs. What right do you have to claim that?
Just like the Israelites in old times, when you’re going to move, take your icons with you. Americans are basically a nomadic people at this point. And nomadic people take their household gods with them. So take them with you.
But I don’t know, I don’t have any general advice to policymakers other than: slow down. Don’t just listen to the loudest people. Iconoclasm is usually looked poorly upon historically. When China did it, when other countries did it, people tended to look back and wish that it hadn’t happened. So just slow down the process as much as possible when it comes to taking down a monument because usually people will move on to the next fad and worry about something else.
Secondly, insofar as some popular person in your family is not represented, do you try to have them represented? I think that we should be inclined towards adding rather than removing. That should be like a reflex action, which is the sort of Mandela solution.
Don’t get caught. I would advise them not to get caught up in the morality questions, but just ask questions of interpretation. Talk about how we’re interpreting monuments in this way or that. That’s positive because that’s usually the case. It isn’t like the Mongolians want to go retake China. You know, that’s not really part of their ambitions. But nonetheless, they have a lot of pride in Kyrgyzstan. But let’s also not be simplistic about what these monuments mean.
So these are a few pieces of general advice. Go about it slowly, default to adding rather than removing, don’t get caught up in removalist arguments, and don’t let moralism, universalism and uncharitable interpretations dominate the policy.
Yeah, I don’t have a book on the issue. I’ll probably end up writing a book. But I have the original short piece: it’s called The Ethics of Racist Monuments, with my collaborator, Ajume Wingo. And we have another piece that is under review right now that is talking about the ethics of monuments as they intersect with mass migration.
But I think that my most recent piece, called “Questioning the Assumptions of Moralism, Universalism, and Interpretive Dominance in Racist Monument Debates,” I think that’s a good piece for policymakers and it gives a lot of concrete cases from around the world that people can see.
Thank you. And goodbye.
