Statues, Philosophy & Civil Disobedience

I look at the Black Lives Matter protests and the controversial debate around statues like Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes, and King Leopold II. What can the philosophy of history and civil disobedience tell us about this moment? What exactly is a statue for? What is public history? How do we think about them ethically? And when is Civil Disobedience justified? I look at John Rawls, W.E.B du Bois, and Malcolm X in particular for some answers. Statues are philosophical objects. They are clearly symbolic of something more than the material they’re cast in. They embody phenomena that philosophers often try to understand– publicness, memory, the nature of history, the abstract and the concrete. Across the world – from the coloniser Cecil Rhodes to slaver King Leopold III and confederate president Jefferson Davis - inanimate busts have become a battleground. To their more mainstream defenders, the argument is usually twofold. That first, these monuments are legitimate because they memorialise a past that, for good or bad, is our history. And second, that even if memorialising a particular figure was not legitimate, removing statues extrajudicially at the whims of the mob is itself unethical and, furthermore, has dangerous consequences for democracy. Then & Now is FAN-FUNDED! Support me on Patreon and pledge as little as $1 per video: http://patreon.com/user?u=3517018 Or send me a one-off tip of any amount and help me make more videos: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JJ76W4CZ2A8J2 Buy on Amazon through this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/2ykJe6L Follow me on: Facebook: http://fb.me/thethenandnow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thethenandnow/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/lewlewwaller Credits: Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from https://www.videvo.net Sources: Carole Steedman, Dust. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History W.E.B du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X John Rawls, A Theory of Justice https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/bristol-spoken-most-people-glad-4217554 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/11/i-shared-my-home-with-edward-colston-for-more-than-20-years-good-riddance https://www.ft.com/content/8208d320-a964-11ea-a766-7c300513fe47 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguistics-and-philosophy/24-235j-philosophy-of-law-spring-2012/reading-notes/MIT24_235JS12_Session11.pdf http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/when-the-statues-went-up/