Post by sloopjohnc on Mar 30, 2021 15:03:00 GMT
Maybe. Maybe I am imagining things a bit - I get that.
I also think, deep down, that the electorate of Britain will have nothing to do with this for now. But in a generation's time it might be different.
Sure. Same in the U.S. - though it seems to be changing faster.
So allow me to try and shift your perspective a bit. I won’t ask you to sign-on to my views. I just want to see if I can get you to understand them...
Ask anyone who has talked to me about music or religion - I have a relatively conservative temperament. I am not quick to toss aside the old ways in favor of novelty. But I DO think this urge we have to protect our culture from the encroachment of excessive social justice concern is a really problematic urge.
I don’t know a single conservative of good faith who won’t admit that society is flawed, and that women and non-white people often get the short end of that stick. Those people will join me in lamenting these inequities, then remind me that fairness is actually pretty close to impossible to achieve. Then they’ll point to the progress made and argue that all are lucky to live in the time we do.
All well and good - but the subtext of that is that the existing order deserves to be defended. But the existing order is a system. A system whose contours were shaped by the folks immortalized by these statues we debate. We’ll freely admit that some of them had retrograde ideas that were “normal for their time.” But we don’t account for the fact that those were the values that informed the structure of the system we inherited.
So the choice to protect that system from the exhausting complaints of people who are disadvantaged by it is ultimately a choice to entrench advantage to some and disadvantage to others.
Put another way - If the world was designed by very short people, a six-foot person would have to duck in every doorway. The path is always glided substantially for the person who fits the basic profile imagined by its architects. There is power in being the default.
So in my mind, that is the issue here. I don’t think we should rush to tear down our culture either. But we really do need to account for the assumptions embedded within it.