An Icon Burns Along the Seine

I don’t think society should ever take the option of taking significant monuments down. Opinions change, and over the sweep of history one radical notion is replaced by another. If we leave everything intact, then future generations can have their own views on what’s been left to them, because they can gaze upon it and find their own interpretations.

But if we decide to censor the past, for whatever reason, we’re depriving those future generations from beholding what their ancestors once considered important. Each relic is born by the hand and intellect of man, and has the potential to last for countless millennia unless it is destroyed or discarded by only one of the hundreds of subsequent generations to come.

The “morally superior” generation, if remembered at all, will mostly be remembered for destroying the priceless relics. Historians will trace the documented history of all the artifacts that no longer exist, and will note that countless relics made it all the way to that one narrow-minded intolerant generation of people, a generation who took it upon themselves to be a mass-extinction event for ancient monuments and relics.

There are always passing fads and transient passions, and there are always people who self-righteously insist that it falls to them to censor the past. They always have reasons, and those reasons are, in hindsight, almost always wrong.

Is the world a better place because the Spanish burned Mayan books? Is it better because the Library of Alexandria burned? Is the world better because the Maoists worked so diligently to erase Chinese history, deriding it as backwards, primitive, and non-communist?

Would it be better if Medieval English Christians had smashed Stonehenge, an evil pagan monument that was an offense to the Lord and Savior, to make building stones for a redundant abbey that later got turned into a pub? Would it be better if Renaissance bishops had decided to destroy any Greek or Roman statues that flaunted nudity? Will it be better when some secular purist or ISIS wannabe in France decides that the old cathedrals are offensive and have to be leveled?

If you view the culture of the past and the culture of the future as different cultures, which they are, then how is advocating the destruction of a monument in the present any different from a European Christian demanding the destruction of the Hagia Sofia, the Taj Mahal, or the Temple of the Emerald Buddha? Destroying a monument built in the past, which was a different culture, to deprive a culture in the future from inheriting the monument is the most flagrantly imperialist thing I can imagine.

Monuments, like other real estate, are eternal, while generations come and go, a list of unimportant names scrawled on a deed. It’s not up to us to decide to censor objects because we think the ideas they represent are bad, because in the long sweep of history, all ideas were bad and all humans were flawed. If we rip down all the statues of conquerors, because they were conquerors, all we’ll do is sit around wondering why nobody back then built statues to the conquered. Then our kids will wonder why nobody back then built statues.