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The iconoclastic fury of these years is as understandable as it is historically unprepared. It is based on an unfair premise, which I would call "moralism of hindsight": judging, with today's parameters, epochs that could not have them. Or, at least, times when these parameters were not the rule but an exception. In the anti-Semitic Middle Ages, some defended the Jews. But it was an exception. And in the sixteenth century, when everyone thought that Amerindians were only half-human, there were some, very few, who instead considered them fully human, just as today, few recognize that even unborn children are not already human beings in half, but people like us. And which of us today looks at children with the same attention as adults? Why, for example, are we more sensitive to gender differences than to age differences? Why does the gender pay gap scandalize us and concern us more with exploiting child labour in the world, in which, moreover, children often even lose their lives?
While he fought gloriously against the Nazi-Fascist dictatorship, Churchill was banally unfair to the Indians, making himself strong in his still lack of moral sensitivity towards the subjugated peoples in the colonies. It is not unlikely that one day, educated by history, even our descendants will accuse us of the same moral squint. Nowadays, once it is accepted that it is possible to incriminate those who, yesterday, could not realize as quickly as we can the harm they did, then there is no more escape for anyone. Today, rightly, we huddle around those who are guilty of the mere fact of having a skin different from ours. Still, we do not show the same sensitivity towards our fellow men, guilty only of not being born yet or being only children.
When we judge past crimes, we cannot be so sure that, in the future, it will not be discovered that we were also committing others. It would be enough to examine conscience, to find out that, in addition to areas, such as anti-racism, in which we are almost all morally in agreement, there are others in which already today someone considers us criminals. From this point of view, it is all too easy to point out that the material removal of a statue in the context of anti-racism is equivalent to a psychological removal of one's own faults in other areas.
History is full of discriminated categories which, then, the passages of the era have gradually imposed attention. However, it would be naive to think that in this process, one always passes triumphantly from worst to best. Progress in some areas is often accompanied by regress in other areas. In our relationship with one another or with nature, we are not always necessarily "ahead" of those who preceded us in history. What kind of presumption would it be to believe that ours is the most enlightened generation in all of history? What would be different, in this presumption, from the presumption of some whites that the best race is the white one for the simple fact that it is the one to which they belong? Belonging to the present generation rather than to that of Christopher Columbus does not endow us with any license of moral superiority.
And it is good that this is the case. In fact, what irritates most in these necessary battles is the false idea that good and evil, in the life of each of us as well as in history, exist in their pure state, rather than in the concrete chiaroscuro of humanly complex events. It seems that it is inconceivable that characters who have done good things can also have done bad things and vice versa. Or all saints, in short, or all criminals. Spider-Man and Captain America are spotless. What sense would it make otherwise?
The limits of this moral Manichaeism, certainly reassuring for those who call themselves "good", are evident. Is Churchill the hero who saved Europe from Nazi fascism or a squalid colonialist? Of course both. In a hundred and fifty years, somewhere, perhaps people will denounce our moral hypocrisy as anti-racists favouring the death penalty for white racists or conservative environmentalists who, while fighting for some endangered botanical species, do not move a finger against the poverty and hunger of billions of people in the global South, or against the lack of education and the exploitation of child labor, which currently affects millions of children. If the name of Iqbal Masih still doesn't tell us anything, our posterity already has excellent arguments to stage their retrospective tirade.
I'm not saying, mind you, that if I fight for someone, I have to fight for someone else. We can't all do everything. I'm saying that I can't fight for someone by stating that someone else doesn't even exist, or worse, that whoever fights for him is wrong because someone doesn't deserve any attention. Anyone, for example, who does not materially join the Black Lives Matter movement, should do so, at least morally. But he can't stand there criticizing him just because he doesn't also deal with the protection of white child labour. And the purifying iconoclasm of history and memory is fine too, which does not, however, exempt us from our faults. Let us not be deceived by the laudable intensity of our anger: we are not saints in the face of criminals, present and past. And so? Perhaps the Churchill statue could be removed in half, and at the monuments of the founding fathers in the South, in the United States, only the arms could be amputated ...
Written by Edoardo Rossi
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