The War Against the Past: looking to the future

Recorded at the Battle of Ideas festival 2024 on Sunday 20 October at Church House, Westminster.

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Whether through toppling statues, decolonising curricula and institutions – or even erasing terms from our vocabulary – Western civilisation, and its past, is now regularly portrayed as a story of shame. Where once society boasted of its history, marking anniversaries and celebrating great achievements, today a bleaker and more apologetic view often prevails.

For Professor Frank Furedi, this assault on our cultural heritage is a problem. In his latest book, The War Against the Past: Why the West must fight for its history, he writes that ‘a society that loses touch with its past will face a permanent crisis of identity’. To be able to understand where we are today, and where we might move in the future, he writes, is impossible without an appreciation of how we got here.

Some worry that a detachment from a sense of a collective past might hamper a sense of social solidarity – preventing people from identifying as members of a common community. They argue that when human accomplishments – from Greek philosophy or the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment to the scientific achievements of modernity – are indicted for association with exploitation and oppression, we risk removing the building blocks that give us confidence to progress further.

If we deny a dialogue with history, despite how repugnant we now find experiences of slavery, religious dogma or colonialism, do we risk robbing society of an understanding of how to move forward? On the contrary, some argue a re-writing of Western history is necessary to forge a fairer future. As Jonathan Sumption put it in his review of Furedi’s book in the Spectator, those who argue for decolonisation don’t see slavery or colonialism as ‘just historical phenomena but symptoms of underlying attitudes whose persistence is held to be the main obstacle to the proper recognition of marginalised groups’.

What complicates matters is that history has never been a settled story. From a conservative orientation to tradition to a left-leaning belief in the future, including a modernist confidence in breaking from the past, how society relates to its history has long been contested. Are critics right to say that the defence of the past today simply amounts to a new generation of nostalgics taking refuge in their version of the past?

What is the role of our historical inheritance? Is a war against that past that devalues our ancestors and erodes humanity’s past achievements a fatal blow to the pursuit of political change today? Or should we be less concerned with the past and more about how to make the case for progress in the here and now?

SPEAKERS
Professor Frank Furedi
sociologist and social commentator; executive director, MCC Brussels

Dr James Orr
associate professor of philosophy of religion, University of Cambridge

Emma Webb
writer, broadcaster and presenter at GB News; fellow, New Culture Forum

CHAIR
Ella Whelan
co-convenor, Battle of Ideas festival; journalist; author, What Women Want