A group of students at Brown University in Rhode Island have condemned statues of Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius as White supremacists, and want them removed from campus.
The group, Decolonization at Brown (DAB), asserts that the two Italic emperors represent White conquest and oppression, and have no place on their liberal Ivy League campus. Fortunately, they didn’t have enough votes on the Student Council to get support for removal. The statues were erected in 1906 and 1908, back when honoring Greco-Roman civilization was respectable.
As near as I can determine, the members of DAB are an ethnically and religiously diverse bunch dedicated to the proposition that White people are the ruination of the world. We have seen how kindred groups across America have dealt with statues of Columbus and America’s pantheon of heroes. We didn’t have to wait long for their wrath to attack the very heart of Western Civilization – Rome. Of course, Hollywood has been eviscerating the Roman legacy for decades. Try to name any “sword & scandals” movie that hasn’t had a mad Roman emperor or endless cruelty as its plot. Augustus and Aurelius were two of our best – one founded the Empire, the other successfully repelled the barbarian hordes.
I don’t know what college students learn these days besides identity politics and Euro-bashing, but there was a time when they were taught the origins of our free society, from ancient Greek thought to the Founding Fathers. They learned how classical Europeans adopted or rejected the various fanatical creeds of the Near East, how they chose science over superstition, how they patterned our laws and government on the Roman model. It was a long and complex continuum that we, and the world, ultimately benefitted from – and still do!
That continuum is slipping away, with nothing much to replace it. For today’s generations, the good life they enjoy just appeared out of nowhere. The liberty, the material comforts, the medical breakthroughs, the amazing wonders of technology do not impress them – how they came about interests them even less. They are only concerned with restoring a mythical paradise that never existed, whether it was in the jungles and savannahs of Africa, the horseless/wheel-less Americas, the caste society of India, or the anti-individual Asia.
No use calling them “liberals” because it’s too dignified a word. Rather, they are either utopians or just anarchists. Student Mario Savio pioneered the free speech movement on campus in the 1960s. Back then, it meant allowing every political perspective. Now, it means ignoring all building blocks of civilization and revising history to suit the latest social cause. In 1968, when universities like Columbia in Manhattan were literally taken over by radical students, administrators jettisoned classical education to save their jobs. Even the hint of campus unrest will prompt a university president to chop another thousand years off European civilization to satisfy the mob.
Brown University discovered in 2006 that it, too, flourished on the slave trade. When it was founded in 1764, some 30 members of Brown’s governing board had interests in slave ships, and donors sometimes contributed slave labor to help in construction, according to Brown’s Committee on Slavery and Justice. The Brown family, itself, owned slaves and engaged in the trade. Perhaps renaming the university is more apropos than eliminating Roman statuary.
But, why are students demanding anything? They are only temporary residents of a university – customers, if you like. They are half-baked adolescents who enrolled to seek knowledge, not to dispense it. We saw the same haughty students at Notre Dame who took offense to the Columbus murals. It’s bad enough to endure utopian professors condemning Western values, without adding sophomoric students to the mix.
As the United States and the Western World become more diversified, the newcomers inexorably evolve from grateful immigrants to critics. Crusading Euro-Americans supply the guilt, and society is told to remake itself. Our deep Western history and traditions are not only becoming irrelevant, but insulting. To play catch-up in this multi-ethnic society, history needs to be shortened – perhaps to only 100 years – so every continent and religion can participate without acknowledging its debt to Western culture. But, not short enough to omit White oppression.
Our schools and universities used to be the repositories and transmitters of Western Civilization, now they function as weather vanes. –JLM
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