Whigs One, Tories Nothing

Sapere aude (Dare to know).

— Horace

Yesterday marked a big win for the Whigs.

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled that the governor can remove the Robert E. Lee Memorial from Richmond's Monument Avenue.

In a seven to zero decision, the court cited testimony from historians who said the statue memorializes nothing but the Jim Crow South, a time and place anathema to the majority of Americans today.

"Values change and public policy changes too," the court concluded.

The 60-foot high colossus will be removed from its pedestal and trucked to a warehouse, according to the governor's office.

Throughout English history, the Whigs have stood for dissent (even the Americans who rebelled against the crown in 1775 were called Whigs).

The Tories, on the other hand, have stood for the natural order (the monarchy and aristocracy).

Yesterday, the Whigs won.

I'm no Tory, but when I read the breaking news about the Virginia Supreme Court's decision (on Facebook), I was saddened—saddened to learn that this particular monument would disappear from its place in public.

I read a slew of the Facebookers' comments below the news story (more than 250 of them) and noticed that the overwhelming majority were gleeful about the court's decision and echoed the historians' testimony.

Silly me, I joined in, expressing my sadness about the decision and saying that the monument shouldn't be erased, but allowed to stand as a cultural reminder of America's troubled past.

My comments unleashed a barrage of repudiations. The sameness of the angry comments was striking. Almost all were misinformed. And almost all were circular arguments that sounded like this:

Everything Southerners ever did was a form of Black suppression. Southerners erected the memorial; therefore, the memorial is a form of Black suppression.

I tried to counter-argue—to no avail—that the Robert E. Lee Memorial was unique among all the Confederate monuments, and a special case worth preserving in situ:

The Lee Memorial was erected in 1890. Lumping it in with all the rest of the Confederate monuments built by White Supremacists in the 20th century disregards its unique nature. Confederate veterans paid for it—raising $52 thousand ($1.5 million in today's money)—not to intimidate Blacks, but because they idolized Lee for his self-sacrificing conduct during the war. At its dedication, the speaker said, "Let this monument, then, teach to generations yet unborn these lessons of his life! Let it stand, not as a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects."

But—no more than you can fight city hall—you can't argue with an angry Whig mob (just ask George III). It will only respond with Whiggishness.

Whiggishness insists that history represents unfolding progress—progress toward perfect equality, the end of hierarchies, and the triumph of liberal democracy.

Whigs believed this in the 19th century, as did Hegel and Marx.

Whiggishness is also a form of presentism, a foolishness known to historians as the nunc pro tunc (now for then) fallacy.

Presentism projects our current values and ideas onto the past, condemning people who preceded us for not sharing those values and ideas.

Presentism, for example, condemns Union physicians for not knowing germs spread diseases (they thought gases did) and Confederate veterans for idolizing Robert E. Lee (they weren't woke to the fact that, in defending the Confederacy, he was defending slavery).

I'd love to believe Whiggishness were true; but I cannot. History is full of dead ends, mistaken beliefs, failed theories, and lost causes.

It's why I hate to see history—and this particular memorial—erased. 

Sapere aude.

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 8, 2021: The statue of Lee was removed today.