In the latest video from PragerU, Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds, begins by asking the question, “What kind of future do we have if we destroy our past?” Has anyone who has “pulled down a statue of Churchill, Lincoln, or Columbus” stopped to ask themselves this question, Murray muses.
“The presumption that we can stand in perfect judgment over the lives of historical figures,” Murray says, “is not merely foolish and unfair, it’s dangerous.”
Murray explains this assertion by asking us to consider the message sent by statue destroyers. “They are saying that people in history should have known what we know,” which is equivalent to insisting that “they should have known the future.”
This view is believed by an increasing number of people, Murray says, simply because “it’s what they are taught.” The education system “long ago prioritized ‘empathy’ over facts,” while promoting the idea that “the ultimate point of history is not to learn lessons from it, but to judge it from the pre-ordained left-wing conclusions about such ill-defined concepts as social justice, equity and tolerance.”
This approach to education drives students to become “judge, jury and executioner over issues that they (and increasingly their teachers) know little or nothing about,” made possible by the fact that “no one has bothered to teach them the nuance, complexity and context that is history.”
In addition, Murray says, such attitudes also “breeds arrogance,” based on the view that we are better than those who came before us solely because we “know things these people did not know.” This leads to the view that “a new, ‘better’ history must take the place of the old one.”
As an example, Murray argues that “this impulse has culminated in The 1619 Project,” which makes “the arrival of the first African slaves into the American colonies the foundational date of the American republic.” In this “new history,” the American Revolution becomes nothing other than an attempt to protect the Founders’ interest in slavery.
“These men — some of the most remarkable humans to have lived at any time — are to be understood simply by their attitude toward this one issue,” Murray says.
Not only that, the 1619 Project’s goal of portraying America “as exceptional only in one respect: in so far as being exceptionally bad,” is a “purposefully destructive view of history, and “one intended to pull down rather than build up.”
Murray continues to argue that a “healthy, humane and — in the truest sense — liberal mind does not view history as a mere playpen for our moral judgment.” Instead, “it recognizes that people in the past acted on the information they had, just as we do today.”
Murray acknowledges that history of course contains elements of immorality or evil, but that such instances must be judged in the context of their time.
“Sure, it would have been nice if the Founders of America had abolished slavery in its Constitution. Some, in fact, tried very hard to do so,” Murray admits. “But had they been unwilling to compromise, there would be no Constitution and no United States. All the sacrifices of the Revolution would have been lost. So, a compromise balancing the interests of the northern states and the southern states was reached.”
Unfortunately, “the woke mind abhors these subtleties.” Instead, they prefer to assume possession of what is right, “and that everybody before our current age — year zero — should have known better.”
Murray continues to add further context to figures of the past, saying that they “did the best they could under the circumstances in which they found themselves,” and that “their efforts largely succeeded is why we are here.”
Using Isaac Newton’s humility as a further example, Murray presents today’s Left as a movement which rejects the idea that “we stand on anyone’s shoulders.”
“It imagines that if we could only liberate ourselves from the dusty, misguided and misinformed ideas of the past then we might see further, fly still higher,” Murray says. “This view is wrong.”
Murray concludes the video by reminding us of the chronological reality in which we live, and the inescapable role those who came before us played.
“Divorced from our past we would be utterly lost. We would not rise, but plummet. We would be forced to start again with far less insight, and with far poorer examples as our guides,” Murray says. “Ironically, thanks to the statue destroyers, the great figures of the past have never looked greater.”
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