The War Against the Past:
Why The West Must Fight For Its History
by frank furedi
polity, 240 pages, $29.95
About halfway through Frank Furedi’s The War Against the Past, the reader is presented with a selection of words deemed unacceptable by the Local Government Association of England in its Inclusive Language Guide. The words include mum, dad, homeless, second generation, and lifestyle choices. Similarly, the University of New Hampshire’s Bias-Free Language Guide would have us erase old people, overweight, and tomboy. Reading these lists, I realized that—whether by direct instruction or by some kind of psychosocial osmosis, or more likely through some mix of the two—I was sufficiently well schooled in contemporary assumptions not to have to seek explanations for why any of these once innocuous terms could be treated as troubling holdovers from our wretched, prejudice-riddled past.
Furedi has assiduously recorded examples of the left’s victories in changing how the world thinks and talks. On the broadest canvas, the Council of Europe wishes to narrow history education to lessons in what is either “directly applicable to the personal aspirations, interests, or cultural experiences of students” or “connected in some way to real-world issues, problems, and contexts.” At the micro level, in 2019 the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists changed its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England, “in recognition of the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms ‘Anglo-Saxon.’” From his own life experience, the author recounts, quite dismally, how a hospital overruled his outdated, inclusion-endangering desire to be recorded as the son of his dying mother. He was instead her “carer.”
The hospital incident took place in 2007. Whether or not one finds the term culture war helpful, there is no doubt that the culture war has been going on for quite some time, and that it has become a war of attrition—but with one side better positioned and making many more advances. For warriors on the right, to hear of these humiliations heaped one upon the other must surely, sometimes, cause the heart to sigh and the head to bow, and perhaps bring a little closer the disposition to give in.
In theory, therefore, the sight of Furedi’s book being hauled toward the front should improve morale: Furedi is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, and The War Against the Past, in its size and scope, is a piece of heavy artillery reminiscent of books by Douglas Murray and Nigel Biggar.
And yet things are more complicated than that. For the conserving side in the culture war, there is no simple route to victory through open combat. And the fog of war can cause one to misread what one’s enemies are up to, where they might go next, and what their true capacities are.
At one point, for instance, in trying to identify where the left—and, with them, our whole civilization—might founder, Furedi claims: “The continuous serving up of the horrors of the past has the effect of lowering human ambition.” Really? It doesn’t always feel that way. After all, the great causes of our day, from net zero to instituting an entirely new paradigm of sexual identity, do not seem lacking in ambition. In a fine phrase, Furedi decries the left’s deliberate cultivation of “a gloom-ridden social memory.” Yet in Ireland, dispossessing the past of its redeeming features has, in fact, been the rocket fuel for the country’s dizzyingly ambitious ascent to the uppermost ranks of the hyper-liberal nations.
Perhaps, then, movements dominated by fury at “omissive histories” and “transwashing” or at “white-people-making” and “misogynoir” (two crimes of which Shakespeare has been accused) can sustain and regenerate themselves for longer than would originally have seemed likely, especially when the deployment of these concepts causes such angst on the other side. Seeing the right invest so much time and energy in anthologizing their feats of word-removal, language-policing, and lexicon-remaking might lead the radical left to conclude that they have the enemy on the run and should keep going.
If so, they will keep prosecuting a war that, as Furedi intuits, is vast in scale, conducted against the entire past of the West since the time of the ancient Greeks. It feels at times like a war against the past qua past.
Accepting these terms of engagement, Furedi finds himself fighting on an enormous front. My hunch, though, is that the past he is most attached to begins with the Enlightenment. Indeed, he repeatedly applies the term “crusade” to the activities of his enemies, and approvingly quotes a historian alluding disparagingly to the Dark Ages—which suggests that he has internalized some of the critiques of the past that the cultural left has ushered into mass acceptance. Furedi also invokes the paradox of the Thatcher-Reagan years—that is, when conservatives supposedly triumphed in the economic sphere while losing in the cultural—but without pausing to consider whether these purportedly conservative economic triumphs, by ripping apart settled communities and spending down their social capital, might have contributed to cultural and other defeats. The war against the past succeeds both on and under the radar.
More significantly, though, I am not convinced that a more open-minded, more measured study of the past on the part of the modern left would necessarily lead anyone on that side to sue for peace. It is (as Tom Holland and others have shown) entirely possible to read the history of the West as a history of ruptures, revolts, and secessions: the Reformation, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Age of Revolution, the breakup of the great empires, the 1968 événements. If the radical left were to grow more reverential about the past, and more assiduous in their study of it, they might—in addition to finding much in Western intellectual history that valorizes extreme individual freedom and self-actualization—conclude that their historic duty, as the newest revolutionaries, the latest secessionists, is to press on ever further. And perhaps—who knows?—finish the job.
I am no culture warrior, tactician, or strategist of the right. But at this point, and however heavy the ironies, the ghost of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci should perhaps come whispering to the minds of those who are. In his Prison Notebooks of the 1930s, Gramsci—like many on the left—wondered why the revolution that had succeeded in Russia had failed in the more advanced European countries. He concluded that decisive victory would not, could not, come from one great heave alone. Bourgeois class rule in Western Europe did not emanate from a single center, like the Winter Palace. It relied on popular acquiescence, achieved through the domination of a ramifying network of cultural institutions—schools, churches, newspapers, parties, associations. These made up “a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks,” the factories of the “hegemony” that must be undone for the revolution to succeed.
It is unclear exactly how much influence Gramsci’s analysis had on the German activist Rudi Dutschke when, thirty years later, he coined “the long march through the institutions,” but the phrase proved that some of the lessons the Italian had taught from his prison cell had been learned. Victory would come not from destroying the powerhouses of bourgeois class rule, but from infiltrating and eventually dominating them.
Furedi’s book appears to illustrate just how successful the left has been in capturing ideological control of one institution after another: local government, the academy, healthcare, and on and on. Perhaps the time has come for those who oppose the radical left to admit that those positions have been lost? To abandon the trenches that encircle the great captured institutions? To redirect some intellectual resources away from the war of attrition, or at least to reduce the reliance on heavy artillery and frontal attack, which seems to lead only to defeat?
After all, vast new fields of virtual and material abundance, unimagined and unimaginable to the cultural and political theorists of midcentury, mean that opportunities abound for building up new positions: mountain strongholds that are outwardly camouflaged or sufficiently discreet to leave putative enemies untroubled by, or uncertain of, or baffled about their true intent. From such positions, those who wish to protect and expand on the best of our inheritance might practice a new range of tactics: a kind of guerrilla warfare, based on targeted campaigns and minor sorties, subterfuges and temporary truces, festivals and bonhomie that sting the enemy by their carefreeness. These strongholds might be in the real world or online; they might come in the form of parish churches, or film studios, or, hey, journals of religion and public life. And much else.
From these strongholds, the cultural conservators—consoling themselves, perhaps, with Gramsci’s famous “pessimism of reason, optimism of will”—might beckon to certain segments of a confused enemy that has been, up to now, “so thoroughly invested in the invalidation of the identity of its opponents” (Furedi’s words) that it might not know what to do when these same opponents start ducking in and out of sight. There is no doubting the capacity of a fully fired-up radical left to eat itself. The chances of this increase when the external enemies are harder to find.
The beckoning, by contrast, would be addressed to more thoughtful souls growing appalled by “what success looks like.” But it implies that the boundary walls of the new strongholds would need to be permeable, which in turn implies the need for patience and dialogue. It also implies the need to offer something more specific and alluring than just The Past, enormous and undifferentiated, or even The Past as the subject of respectful and rational critical recollection and inquiry.
As it happens, there is no lack of hints and signals that the latest generations, those one might expect would be most formed by the left’s triumphs in the culture war, find specific aspects of the past, when coded with progressive reassurances, strangely and paradoxically attractive. The most obvious example is the Harry Potter novels, which mined a latent yearning for imaginative dreamtimes steeped in a Dickensian or Edwardian past. And in Hogwarts Castle itself, modernity, confusedly but unmistakably, bows to the lure of medievalism.
Though Furedi may be wrong in the short term about whether the war against the past lowers the quantum of human ambition, his contention surely has long-term validity. Jay Gatsby half-believed in “the orgiastic future,” whose eluding of us does not matter because “tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther”—but he doubted it, too, and someday that doubt will bite. The world might then whimper for the better parts of the past, its good sense and its glories, and those who guarded them may finally have their hour.
John Duggan writes from Surrey, England.
Image by Tony Webster, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
