The death of the Most Reverend Desmond Tutu, retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, evoked a response worthy of the passing of a Roman emperor, mutatis mutandis to accommodate a secular age. No incense will be placed on altars for the late clergyman. In lieu of that, he is lauded as “Africa’s moral compass”. It may be that the compass pointed his country toward a dysfunctional future, but, at the high tide of apartheid, the archbishop lived in a dysfunctional present. “Few people believed that apartheid could be ended without bloodshed.” Archbishop Tutu deserves much of the credit for the fact that the old regime gave way peacefully. Whatever South Africa’s troubles today, civil war would have made them worse.
An historical figure who was celebrated to a comparable degree when he died was George Washington, first President of the United States of America and the “indispensable man” in winning its independence. In some important ways, Washington does not parallel Tutu: On the one hand, the “tyranny” of King George and the British Parliament would have impressed any black Soweto resident circa 1980 as an extravaganza of liberty. On the other, Washington set his country on a course that led to the freest, most prosperous and most humane polity in the entire history of the world. Had he never lived, there is a strong likelihood that the very idea that “all men are created equal”, the idea for which Archbishop Tutu struggled, would have remained the exotic and implausible theory of a cadre of philosophes. Indeed, its mutilation at the hands of the French revolutionaries might well have discredited it forever.
Each man also had his darker side. President Washington accepted slavery as a fact of life, owned a large number of slaves and, if he sensed the contradiction between the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the reality of black Americans’ lives, never expressed it. For this lapse, he is now fiercely condemned by “Year Zero progressives”. Statues in his honor are defaced, destroyed or removed from public view. It will be no surprise if a movement soon springs up to rename the nation’s capital and the state that sits at its northwest corner.
Archbishop Tutu, a political and religious progressive (unlike most Christian leaders in Africa), accepted what has become the common progressive opinion of the state of Israel. Although that country is the only place in the Middle East where non-Jews can vote in democratic elections and live under the rule of law, he condemned it as an “apartheid regime”. He blamed the “Jewish lobby” for American support of Israel and championed Palestinian radicals who, wherever they hold power, lionize and subsidize murderers of random Jews and look forward to the advent of a judenrein state. His antisemitism was undisguised. (See “Further Reading” for details.) It was not, in fairness, the racialist antisemitism of a Hitler but a combination of archaic “Christ killer” imagery and unthinking acceptance of progressive orthodoxy.
To the extent that admiring obituarists took any note at all of the Archbishop’s Jew-hatred, they tended to brush it aside. One particularly galling piece claimed that he “identified with Jews”, because he likened apartheid to the Holocaust. If he sincerely believed that, then his accusation that Israel practices apartheid is tantamount to accusing the world’s only Jewish state of mass murder, a strange way of “identifying with Jews”.
We have, then, two men of admirable accomplishments who were not free from fault. According to some, we should evaluate their eligibility for posthumous honors by weighing the faults heavily and the accomplishments lightly, if at all. Progressives who apply that standard demand that Washington be exiled from the Hall of Fame. Consistency might seem to require that they demand the same for Tutu. They don’t, because they regard antisemitism as a venial sin when indulged in by their allies and, moreover, regard most consistency as a foolish hobgoblin. The rest of us, though, might want to ponder whether there are reasons to treat the American statesman and the African cleric differently, along with the broader question of what it means to erect a statue of, or name a town or a park or a street after, an historical figure.
Aside from quotidian concerns – places need designations, and unvaried numbers are boring – honors for the dead serve, I think, two purposes: They remind us of the depth of our history and serve as an incentive to leave footprints, however faint, on the sands of time. Accentuating the negative erases history or turns it into a merry-go-round focused eternally on the opinions of the present moment. It also reinforces the contemporary impulse to treat all opinions one disagrees with as moral failings to be exorcised by persecution rather than argument.
There are occasions for blotting out unmitigated villains. Josef Stalin scattered his name and images all over Russia. His millions of murders more than offset whatever worthy deeds can be found in his record. But the Stalins, Lenins, Hitlers, Maos and their devoted henchmen are exceptional cases. The default position ought to be that anyone once thought deserving of affirmative remembrance is entitled to retain it. Let condemnations be written in history books rather than by vandalizing the public square.
Further Reading: Jeff Dunetz, “What The Media Didn’t Tell You About Bishop Desmond Tutu”
Alan M. Dershowitz, “Should the Late Bishop Tutu Get a Statue?”
Judith Brown, “Desmond Tutu – an honored anti-Semite?”