Writing for The Spectator, Jonathan Sumption reviews Frank Furedi’s latest book ‘The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History.’
Sumption begins: “For many years the academic sociologist Frank Furedi has been among the strongest conservative voices in the front line of the culture wars. The target of his latest book is the systematic campaign to discredit the history of the West in the interest of a modern political agenda. The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions and curricula, the recasting of museums and the rearrangement of libraries are all symptoms of something more fundamental. Furedi argues that historical memory is the foundation of western identity and culture. The object of the campaigners is to discredit the West’s ideals and achievements. The result has been to persuade a generation of young people that our history and identity is something to be ashamed of and to dissolve the bonds of shared experience which make us a community.
“This is an important book, which chronicles more fully than any other work that I know the gradual development of this rage against the past. It suffers from two main flaws. One is that Furedi is too angry to understand the mentality of those whom he is criticising. The other is that he tends to go off-piste to pursue other targets, such as gender-neutral vocabulary, trans ideology or dogmatic modernism, none of which has much to do with the discrediting of western culture.
“As the campaigners see it, the object of their war against the past is to redress perceived inequalities, mainly of race, which they blame on the West’s sense of its own moral and cultural superiority. This, they argue, has marginalised racial minorities and whole nations outside Europe and America whose histories are equally valid but commonly ignored. In the process, their distinct identity has been suppressed. Slavery and colonialism, as the campaigners see it, are not just historical phenomena but symptoms of underlying attitudes whose persistence is held to be the main obstacle to the proper recognition of marginalised groups. Western societies must therefore be made to ‘confront’ these aspects of their past and feel suitably ashamed of them.
“The attachment of historians to present values is not always objectionable. They naturally interest themselves in subjects such as gender and ethnicity which reflect modern concerns. Their views about slavery, torture or cannibalism inevitably reflect their own moral standards rather than those of the people who once engaged in these practices. The real objection to what conservatives call ‘presentism’ is not that it is unpatriotic or anti-western, but that it often relies on bogus methodologies and the tendentious selection of material. The result is a presentation of the past which is fundamentally false. It is exemplified at its extremes by fantasies such as that the original inhabitants of Britain were black or that the Greek philosophers plagiarised their ideas from black Africa.
“The study of history is vulnerable to this kind of attack. Historical scholarship involves judicious selection from a vast and usually incomplete body of source material. The significance of any part of this mass of information must depend on the mentality of the age which created it, and not on our own political values. The major threat to historical integrity arises when a modern ideological agenda determines not just the choice of subject but the criteria by which source material is selected and analysed.
“The chief offence against historical truth is to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve it up as if it were the whole. This is what has happened to the study of the British Empire. The Jamaican slave plantations, the near-extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, the Opium Wars and the Amritsar massacre were dark episodes. No one denies that. But Britain’s imperial history cannot be treated as if there were nothing else to it.”
Sumption concludes by posing the question: “Does it matter that large numbers of race-obsessed intellectuals wish to discredit its legacy in ways that have very little basis in historical truth? Furedi is surely right to point to historic memory as the key to the identity of any coherent community. Nations exist because there is a sense of solidarity among their populations, of which consciousness of their past is a major component. Social and political institutions only work if people identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity undermines the solidarities that bind it together. In the process, it also impedes the integration of ethnic minorities and creates artificial grievances which generate racial tensions. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about the past.
“Today, an older generation can laugh off the eccentricities of this movement. But to a younger age group they are not eccentricities. They are all that are being taught. A poll conducted in 2022 found that most 18- to 24-year-olds thought that Britain was ‘founded on racism’, a view shared by no other age group. These young people are the future. ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ ran the slogan of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian world. They called it ‘reality control’.”
Worth reading in full.
If you want to find out more about Frank Furedi’s The War Against the Past , do come along the FSU Book Launch on the 12th of September. Join us to hear Professor Furedi introduce his book and discuss it with his eminent respondent, historian Professor Jonathan Clark.
Click here to get your in-person tickets.
The lecture, response and Q and A will be followed by a book-signing and wine reception.
Copies of The War Against the Past will be on sale on the night for £25 or you can purchase it in advance, for collection on arrival, at checkout along with your ticket, for just £20.
Alternatively, you can order a copy for UK delivery, at £22, using this link.