Abandoned Books: A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues by Peter Hughes

It's been a few years, but I had to punt on a book again. I don't have to love a book to finish it, but I think if I find myself talking to the author, in my head: "Jesus Christ, Hughes, read the fucking room," then the book has lost an essential connection to me as a reader and I shouldn't try to make larger statements about it.

A History of Love & Hate in 21 Statues has a neat idea, and a strong pedigree. Peter Hughes is, his biography in this book tells us, both a philosopher and a psychologist with a PhD in the former and a membership in the British Psychological Society. He seems to be less of an academic and more of a talking head (which reinforces some feelings I have about this book) - I did a quick search now and found his site.

The book has, as you might guess, twenty-one chapters, each telling the story of one statue, which was created by someone at one point and destroyed by someone else at a later date. It is, I think, roughly organized by the date of the creation of the statues, though does not tightly fit that timeline.

I read about half of it. I was getting an impression in my head over the first half of the book, and I wanted to make it to the chapter on The Confederate Monument of Portsmouth, Virginia - eleventh, right at the mid-point - to see if my concerns continued to be borne out.

In the middle of the chapter on the Confederate Monument - one of the hundreds put up, mostly in the American South, around the turn of the 20th century to reinforce white supremacy and uphold the ahistorical "lost cause" myth - Hughes mentions another statue, which is like his chapter's subject but even more so. Called "The Good Darky," it was erected in 1927 in Natchitoches, seems to be just as horrible as you might be imagining, and was damaged and then removed in 1968.

Hughes chooses not to focus on that statue because, I think, it doesn't fit the overall point he's trying to make. And that overall point is what I was objecting to in the first half of this book. I don't want to mischaracterize his argument, but I will note this book was published in 2021, seems to have been written in 2020, and has many references to BLM protests as (roughly his repeated language) "protests after the death of George Floyd that led to calls to tear down statues."

Now, Hughes is writing a book about statues, so I don't mind him for focusing on his topic. But I found his framing more and more disingenuous as I went along, and I finally couldn't keep going. As far as I read, Hughes seemed to be saying that the biggest threat to civil society in the modern world are "fanatics," whom he tends to characterize in terms leaning to the left (authoritarians, references to communism, and so forth).

There's a version of this argument in many of the chapters; this one is from early in the book, about a head of Athena:

To be merciful and forgiving requires us to see the world from the point of view of another person. This leads to understanding and when we understand other people, we humanize them, we look for common ground and a way to build bridges. When, on the other hand, we need to be absolutely certain we are right, that our beliefs are the only true ones, then it becomes impossible to fins a common humanity with people who do not share our beliefs. As our world-view narrows and our frame of reference shrinks, we become desperate to justify our increasingly fragile identity. The result is violence and bloodshed.

That argument superficially seems even-handed and unobjectionable. But Hughes drops into these arguments at specific times, and with reference to particular actions - and not to others. Also note the word "identity," which I detect Hughes using repeatedly in a left-coded way. He isn't quite all the way to "abolish DEI," but he seems to be somewhere on that spectrum.

In particular, the Confederate Monument chapter does mention that it was put up in an era of repression and even gets a bit into how common lynching was in the era. But he uses the word "Black" never, "Negro" once, and never gets anywhere near "white supremacy." The generous view is that Hughes wants to avoid writing about specific ideologies, and keep his focus on being open and loving and merciful and forgiving.

The less generous view is that one side gets the benefit of that doubt over and over and over again, while the other other side is the reference for all of the aspersions and fear-mongering. In particular, Hughes, I am morally certain, is quite familiar with Popper's Paradox of Tolerance - he has a Philosophy PhD, let us remember - but he neglects to mention it at any point, even when it would be massively relevant.

Again, I only read half the book. Hughes may have turned the whole thing around in the back end and explicitly called out rising fascism worldwide. But I really doubt it. So I stopped reading.