Book Review: Graeme Kemp, European Conservative.
The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History by Frank Furedi (2024); Polity Press; Cambridge; 260 pages.
Frank Furedi has established an enviable track record for challenging current cultural trends in society including obsessions and narratives around identity and history. The War Against the Past is his latest and in many ways most detailed effort to expose the corrosive nature of certain radical ideas that seek to influence and overturn cultural assumptions in the West.
Furedi is clear about the threat we face from various radical activists and destructive trends in European culture and values:
The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilisation is pursued through reorganizing society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimizing its ideals and achievement.
Guilt in the West about past historical events is therefore used by radical activists as a way of dealing with present day issues around ethnicity and race, as well as explaining how identity functions as part of those things. The radical aim is to deconstruct culture and history by controlling and changing the language we use, estranging particularly young people from their past, Furedi argues. Far from the past bestowing a rich legacy on later generations, history is seen as transmitting outdated, ‘racist’ or colonial ways of viewing the world.
The past is therefore to be judged by the harsh standards of the present and ‘decolonised’. Thus the history of the West becomes little more than a history of domination and oppression of weaker groups by dominant European ethnicities and countries.
This is illustrated by the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign at Oxford University around 2015. The statue of Cecil Rhodes was so imbued by the spirit of colonialism, activists claimed, that merely having to walk past it was to suffer a form of violence. A toxic past contaminated the present.
As Furedi notes, this phenomenon has arguably been a long-time brewing. It has seen a shift in intellectual thinking. Today, the past is often seen as presenting an actual threat to minorities. Past injustices continue to somehow actively harm certain ethnic groups.
With the evils of the past having been rendered contemporary, the ideology of ‘presentism’ emerged, Furedi points out. Presentism judges the past by the standards of the present and actively tries to take apart cultural assumptions and values, to change the ‘shameful’ legacy of our Western past.
Many examples of this attack are simply laughable—such as when Penguin Random House publishers warned readers that Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse was “published in 1927 and reflects the attitudes of its time.” No kidding—as opposed to reflecting the values of a future that didn’t yet exist, presumably?
Those attitudes from the past are seen as also capable of inflicting harm or distress on readers in the present. As literature professor Mark Hussey points out: so-called trigger warnings create a feeling that the past is a dangerous, scary place.