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 Far from the past bestowing a rich legacy on later generations, history is seen as transmitting outdated, ‘racist’ or colonial ways of viewing the world.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.
The battle over language and control over language is therefore a vital part of this radical crusade to view the past through the lens of the present, judging that historical past by present obsessions about ‘problematic’ words or phrases.
As Furedi points out: those who engage in such wars on the past seek to draw a favourable comparison between their own ‘progressive’ selves today and the outdated, offensive people of the past. Such radical activists flatter themselves and their superior moral positions.
Furedi also explains that in the context of education, students are left in no doubt that their new ‘progressive’ values are superior to the ‘problematic’ values of their parents.
The result of all this, says Furedi, is a kind of cultural stagnation and inertia, Western societies are increasingly demoralised and turning in on themselves, instead of thinking about how to focus on creating a better future. Decolonisation becomes a strange act of revenge on our past by “grievance entrepreneurs.”
The impact of such thinking on young people is clear. An example from 2021 is the decision of Pimlico Academy, London to stop flying the Union Flag after protests from pupils. The Headteacher Daniel Smith applauded the “intelligence” of his pupils and praised their concern over injustices. The national flag was somehow seen as historically tainted and offensive, not least to ethnic minorities.
Oddly, those who obsess about historical injustices become prisoners of the past, says Furedi—living their current lives through the endless wrongs committed years ago by others. Radical activists disown the past—and yet are obsessed by it.
However, when it comes to studying history, Furedi notes, we should remember that the positive often triumphs over the negative. In ancient Athens, the valuable insights and example of democracy have outlasted the existence of slavery and its justifications. Those on both the left and right-wing of politics can still draw valuable lessons from historical experiences of making history, he says.
In the last part of the book, Furedi underscores the important legacy of such historical events as the Renaissance, for instance. For Furedi, these were developments that encouraged an increasing emphasis on acting in accordance with one’s individual conscience. It is precisely these qualities that we need today to help overturn the dogmatic and divisive war on the past.
Frank Furedi ends his book with the following words about having a sense of the traditions we should value:
This … is not to be confused with any backward-looking antiquarianism; I am not recommending an uncritical embrace of tradition or the association of the past with a golden age. Instead, we must recognize that when we appreciate and understand tradition, we see how future possibilities might be grasped.
His book is a valuable addition to the range of books that critique ‘woke’ trends in contemporary society. Rich, detailed, The War Against the Past deserves to be read.