The age of de-enlightenment

Depictions of Thomas Carlyle and David Hume in the Scottish Portrait Gallery will be altered to make it clear they were horrible racist bastards, apparently. All of the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers are under review, including Adam Smith, who thought that people living beyond Europe were largely savage.

I am not sure how they will alter the bust of Carlyle — perhaps chisel a swastika on his forehead? Carlyle was certainly rightish on many issues: you don’t get Friedrich Nietzsche in your fan club if you’re woke. But when I started reading the chap, back in the late 1970s, it was for the witty and sharp Sartor Resartus that I loved him, and his essays on heroes and hero worship. ‘All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.’

Perhaps, Tom, old chum — but not for long now. The Year Zero lunatics are busy ripping the pages out, possessed by an absolutist monomania that renders them inchoate with rage when they discover that people living 200 or 300 years ago somehow possessed opinions which differ from their own. James Watt had a few interests in slave plant-ations, so let us expunge the steam engine and thus the Industrial Revolution from history. This cancelling of history is, aside from being an expression of almost exquisite stupidity, a religiously inspired pogrom more damaging than anything we have done since the looting of the monasteries. Every figure from our past, every achievement, seen through one profoundly warped lens.

In the USA right now they’re getting Homer kicked off the curriculum and pulling Upton Sinclair and Nathaniel Hawthorne from the libraries. One might have hoped that Scotland, with its fierce and perhaps overweening national pride, would have been more protective of its astonishing history.