Now that Edward Colston, late of Bristol, has been sent for an early bath courtesy of Black Lives Matter protesters (though for a BLM demonstration the chaps dragging the statue to the quayside, watched benevolently by Avon and Somerset Police whose riot control guidelines appear to be derived from those of the St Petersburg gendarmerie in February 1917, looked incongruously pale, male and stale), there is further business inviting the attention of progressive iconoclasts.
Edward Colston was cast down from his pedestal on the grounds of his having profited from the 17th-century slave trade through his involvement in the Royal African Company. But a fellow investor in that same slave-trading company was none other than John Locke, father of liberalism, advocate of toleration (for some), and the inspiration behind the English and American Revolutions – even, by extension, of the French Revolution. Surely it should be an urgent priority for progressive activists – the J K Rowling book-burning could be postponed for a couple of days – to see to the dismantling of all statues of John Locke, the most prominent of which stands in University College, London.
“No way! You cannot be serious – Locke was the most liberal guy in 17th-century England. Didn’t he call slavery ‘so vile and miserable an estate…’? Man, this dude was woke before Karl Marx.”
Er – up to a point, Lord Copper. In fact, the passage from Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, of 1689, that his apologists like to quote in the futile hope of excusing his profiteering from the slave trade runs as follows: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t.”
Well, you can’t say fairer or woker than that. Apart from a certain lack of inclusiveness in the use of the term “gentleman”, those sentiments would pass muster at a Momentum diversity seminar. Except for one fatal flaw: this passage has nothing to do with the slave trade or Africa, topics which were far from Locke’s mind when he wrote those words. The “slavery” canvassed is typical Whig hyperbole for the theory of Divine Right kingship and the passage is a long tirade against the book Patriarcha, written by Sir Robert Filmer, the leading royalist champion of traditional God-given monarchic authority – the principal aversion of Locke’s life.
Under the aegis of his patron the 1st Earl of Shaftesbury – after Titus Oates, the worst scoundrel unhanged in Restoration England – Locke, as secretary to Shaftesbury, drafted the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, imposing absolute power of masters over slaves and even establishing a feudal nobility. Both as secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations and later as a member of the Board of Trade, Locke was, in the words of philosopher Martin Cohen, “one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude”.
Locke was a major investor in the Royal African Company, in fact at one time his salary was paid in company stock, as well as the similar Bahama Adventurers company. So much for his denunciation of slavery as so vile and miserable an estate. Conscious of the need to preserve his liberal credentials, however, Locke casuistically declared that slavery was only legitimate if the slaves were taken prisoner in war. Since any raid by Arab traders on African settlements or conquests by one tribe over another could be represented as “war”, this hardly reduced the scope of the trade. Locke rejected hereditary slavery: he had little alternative since the whole focus of his political polemic was against the rights of hereditary monarchy and nobility.
Locke talked a good game on religious toleration too, but the small print contained certain reservations: “That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the Magistrate, which is constituted upon such a bottom, that all those who enter into it, do thereby, ipso facto, deliver themselves up to the Protection and Service of another Prince.” (Terms and Conditions Apply: no Papists shall enjoy toleration.)
This, so far from being an original insight by Locke, was the threadbare argument of Henry VIII and succeeding Protestant propagandists, representing the “power” of the Pope as a crippling encroachment upon English sovereignty. The pre-Reformation reality, over centuries, had been the near invisibility of the Roman pontiff in the everyday lives of Englishmen and the national public life, apart from occasional spats with Henry II, King John, et al.
Since those relatively rare disputes had almost invariably involved the Church resisting some excess of royal authority, it was hypocritical in the extreme for Locke, the inveterate opponent of “arbitrary” power, to condemn that moderating influence. Likewise, Locke himself did not hesitate to deliver himself up to the protection and service of another prince – William of Orange – when his religious prejudices and political interests impelled him.
Locke’s animus against Catholicism can hardly have been lessened when Pope Innocent XI, in 1686, launched a downright condemnation of the African slave trade on the back of which the great philosopher had enriched himself. That, of course, was the voice of atavistic superstition, whereas Locke’s more nuanced attitude to slavery prefigured the liberal Enlightenment, of which he was the living embryo.
The unchanging characteristic of liberals, for generations, has been a majestic absence of self-awareness. You could not ask for a more perfect encapsulation of that characteristic than the Locke-inspired American Declaration of Independence, when 56 men, 40 of them slave owners, without the least apparent sense of their arrant hypocrisy, penned the words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The role of the small boy who announces the emperor’s nakedness was assumed on that occasion by the outspoken High Tory and ferocious opponent of slavery long before it was fashionable, Samuel Johnson, who wondered: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes”?
Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the Declaration, inspired in its wording by Locke, had inherited 175 slaves and purchased almost 20 more, so that the domestic subjects of this apostle of liberty increased by procreation to more than 600, of whom he freed only two. Was he not conscious of any inconsistency? Of course not: he was a liberal, a mentality (more accurately, a mental illness) that carries with it an innate conviction of the unchallengeable rightness of all one’s opinions and actions.
The signatories of the Declaration of Independence were the woke elite of their generation; their spiritual descendants today are the grandstanding Democrats in Congress, the high-tech social media moguls and billionaire progressives, and the Hollywood groupthinkers in gated communities. Now their madness, which began with a history-erasing assault on Confederate monuments, has infected Britain.
Our government and police are being tested, calculatedly and forensically, by nihilist forces and have behaved like rabbits caught in the headlights. Every concession to violence will fuel further disorder. Appeasement will provoke escalation, as the balance of power shifts irreversibly. Already we have the establishment of a Soviet-style Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, assessing monuments in the capital for politically correct credentials.
The Tate galleries may be renamed since Henry Tate was a sugar refiner and sugar, somewhere down the line, was harvested by slaves. Churchill’s statue has been vandalised, others are being considered for removal, allegedly including Gladstone and Nancy Astor – so it’s not all bad news. Apart from the grotesque anomaly of the Houses of Parliament being fronted by a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the regicide and military dictator who dispersed Parliament, what must be the sentiments of Irish descendants of the victims of his genocide?
But if the woke iconoclasts are looking for further targets they can hardly ignore John Locke: as his portrait shows, there are sound aesthetic grounds as well for the removal of his image from public venues. Besides UCL, there is another Locke statue at the Royal Academy and two in Oxford colleges – an inviting double whammy for day-trip rioters targeting Cecil Rhodes.
There is an even bigger plum: Edward Colston, who now sleeps with the fishes in Bristol harbour, sycophantically gifted his Royal African Company shares in 1689 to William of Orange, who thus became a major investor in the slave trade. Pulling down all statues of the Glorious and Immortal Memory would provoke some fascinating street theatre in Belfast and Glasgow.
The intellectually objective suggestion that people cannot be judged by the ethics of later centuries, only by the moral assumptions of their own time, fall on deaf ears – as they will in some future generation when angry young people tear down plaques commemorating Marie Stopes and wonder how their ancestors could have tolerated 8.7 million abortions in Britain, 61 million (disproportionately African-American) in the United States, and 1.5 billion worldwide over the past half-century.
Meanwhile, look for an exponential increase in woke insanity. Before long, the left will be vandalising statues of Nelson Mandela because he took a conciliatory (i. e. sell-out, “Uncle Tom”) approach to South Africa’s displaced white minority. It goes without saying that all feminism’s recent heroines – now damned as “terfs” – will get short shrift as the Stalinist purges gather momentum. The one consoling feature of revolutions is watching Girondins being guillotined.
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