Why stop with Cecil Rhodes? How can we tolerate that adulterer Nelson on his phallic column?

A healthy culture doesn’t memorialise only those it agrees with

A statue of Cecil Rhodes outside Oriel College, Oxford (Rex Features)

Welcome to the New Barbarism. I say the New to distinguish it from the Old, whose destructiveness was primarily confined to habits of mind, slips of the tongue, proper nouns, pronouns, modes of address and works of literature that omitted to mention slavery. And I could have talked about Our Barbarism to distinguish it from that of Isis and the Taliban, who set the standard for thoroughness and celerity when it comes to removing evidence that others think differently from them.

Our Barbarism is more shocking than Their Barbarism because we make a show of difference and tolerance and they don’t. And the New Barbarism is more brutal than the Old Barbarism because the words and attitudes policed were hurried out of sight, whereas what faces us now is the blood-stirring spectacle of falling bronze and concrete. Welcome to the Cultural Revolution, Britain 2016, and we don’t even have a revolutionary government in power.

Last year looked to be shaping up to be one of the most culturally brutal years in living memory, but it already has a tame look about it. Perhaps we will look back on 2015 as the year of the practice run. What would happen if we tried to get rid of a Nobel Prize winning scientist on charges of gender facetiousness? Would anyone stand up to us? Nope. What would happen if we tried to ban lectures by people whose views we didn’t share? Would anyone stand up to us? Nope. In preparation for the Great Barbarism, the Great Pusillanimity.

Thus empowered, let’s turn to Cecil Rhodes, architect of empire, diamond miner, white supremacist and benefactor to Oriel College. You might think the benefactor part would make it tricky, but colleges are soft touches today. We shall see. But the wind is behind those who with a huff and a puff would blow Rhodes down.

Among the many arguments to be made against cultural revolutions is that they are monotonous in spirit and monomaniacal in intention. In this case the monomania is racism. I don’t minimise it, but it isn’t mankind’s only story. What about destroying statues of the sanctimonious and the censorious, the sectarian and the dogmatic, the ideologically driven and the lily-livered? Down, down, with the lot of them.

I am not concerned to salvage Rhodes’s reputation. Let him be as bad as those who want his page torn from the book of life insist he is. Most people to whom a statue has been erected are undeserving. Use every man after his desert, and who would ’scape whipping? There’s a case for erecting no statues of mortal men at all, though I would argue in their defence that they constitute monumental history lessons and in that regard are of more associative interest than such exercises in conceptual trivia as get a plinth in Trafalgar Square. Speaking of which, how much longer must we tolerate that vainglorious adulterer Nelson on his phallic column? Down with him, too.

That a nation’s statuary will reflect beliefs and attitudes that are no longer current or congenial hardly needs arguing. In most instances it doesn’t at all imply a continuing reverence. A healthy culture doesn’t memorialise only those it agrees with. So when the journalist and broadcaster Bidisha weighs in on the side of the statue-breakers, lecturing the West on its unthinking racism and furiously declaring herself unwilling to see “our educational institutions decorated with plaques worshipping white racists”, she loses the argument. “Worship”? Does she really mean “worship”? How many adherents of the cult of Rhodes, one wonders, has she seen lighting candles or genuflecting before his name or image? It tells you something about the fanatic mindset which is revisionist iconoclasm that it must invent an opposing mindset of fanatic reverence to justify itself.

In such cranking up of injury we can detect the influence of Edward Said, the author of Orientalism, who ransacked works of Western art for inscriptions of cultural condescension and contempt and single-handedly turned the study of literature into grievance soup. The day Eng Lit morphed into post-colonialism was the day the Lit part died. Though I suspect even Said would have blenched before the latest expression of aesthetic recoil in which “survivors”, as they melodramatically describe themselves, complain of the “oppression” of having to walk past an offending statue in a college or a public street. In addition to their original injuriousness, such statues, it is argued, go on revisiting their offence on the injured, forcing them to bear again “the burden of violence committed on them”.

But soft! By this logic mustn’t I, a Jew, tremble every time I pass a place of Christian worship? “Worship” in its proper meaning, reader – incense, candles, prayers, in service of a religion that for 2,000 years has done Jews violence. How long can I be expected to tolerate altar paintings and murals depicting Jews as deicides, baying for the blood of Jesus, or filling their purses with silver earned by betraying him? Why, unless a Jew covers his eyes he will even see a Judas – the Jew whose name means what it sounds it means – sitting knees parted at the Passover table failing to conceal that hard-on Jews are known to get whenever they turn a profit. Whoever would look for the inscription of racial sterotyping or evidence of misappropriation in a faith’s or culture’s artefacts will surely never go home empty-handed, but imagine the burden of violence I bear every time I visit Canterbury or Chartres, knowing I’m in the vicinity of a gargoyle that’s the spitting image of my uncle Solly.

My oppression cries out! Must my pain not trump these monuments of stone and plaster? Down with them, I say. The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, and finally the great globe itself. Down with everything that isn’t me.