We all know it is those nasty people on the right of politics — centre right, hard right or far right, depending on the level of hyperbole we wish to stoke — who keep starting culture wars. They wade in to sensitive topics they never studied at university and oafishly mouth all the wrong words. They invent a panic about ‘cancel culture’ and then, in evidence, point to a few isolated examples of highly paid celebrities being held accountable for their invalid views. What’s wrong with that? And don’t get me started on ‘critical race theory’. These people have never read Derrick Bell. They wouldn’t know Peggy McIntosh’s knapsack if it wheeled around and bit them on the arse. Unlike these coarse provincials, we all know that critical race theory is a highfalutin academic discipline based on the study of law. It has nothing to do with tangible aspects of everyday life such as schools or universities. Yes, a few statues have been toppled here and there, but nothing is forever, urban planning moves on and anyway, the statues that were toppled deserved to be held accountable for their invalid views.
Except… there may just be something going on with museums — specifically museums in Britain.
Safely out of the reach of eeevil Tory politicians and far along the road mapped by Robert Conquest’s second law of politics — any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing — the Wellcome Collection has now literally cancelled one of its own exhibits known as ‘medicine man’.
There is a remorseless logic to these things. Embarrassed at somehow finding themselves in charge of such a bastion of whiteness, the curators had initially sought to disrupt the exhibits by replacing some of them with a series of didactic and accusatory think pieces by a diverse range of artists.
[I wonder whether the curators would argue for replacing the Egyptian pyramids with blue texts written by diverse artists on the basis that each is a memorial to one man’s extreme privilege]
But that was not enough. Not for a moment was it going to be enough. The only way to purge such sins is to close the whole thing down. It was never going to be sufficient just to quench the burning incense and stop the bells. It doesn’t even end at whitewashing the nave. Even when every idolatrous artifact is removed and we are left with bare walls to contemplate, our thoughts must turn to half-imagined, half-remembered sins memorialised by those very walls until they, too, must go.
It must all go.
It is mysterious why more people cannot see the harm caused by uprooting and trashing our culture. But they did not see it during the reformation — or at least not enough people did — and history bears the repeated scars of year zero projects, each more darkly absurd than the last. At least no blood has been shed over the Wellcome Collection. All we have lost are ideas, thoughts and a space where anyone was able to freely view an unparalleled range of historical artefacts. No damage done, then.
If it was one gallery, it wouldn’t matter all that much. But it’s not, is it? Like the Nothing in The NeverEnding Story, the year zero rage of our cultural curators is aimed at infiltrating and greedily consuming the whole of Fantasia. For now, sated by the humanities, it seeks to feed on mathematics. Based on the lie that contemporary western culture — a composite product of a thousand other cultures and countless minds — is an expression of ‘whiteness’, the zealots rage that instead of building on it, we must tear it down and start again. They talk of ‘decolonizing’ it, as if culture was a place and not a collection of powerful and transformative ideas that are the birthright of every human being on this planet.
And for this reformation to be complete, education must be transformed. To rid ourselves of thousands of years of culture means to rid the classroom of it too.
I wish you could find a way to make the argument more broadly appealing. Yes in any cultural reform movement there are people who go to far and people making an industry out of it. There are also people making an industry out of trying to stop all change.
But using the extremes to dismiss all concerns is addressing the worst counter arguments to your view rather than the best.
Henry Wellcome is one of the worst rich white men to complain about. It would be difficult to live a more all around positive life than he did even now. We should be able to address the crap at the museum with resorting to caricature.
Similarly with decolonizing mathematics education. Fighting the terminology is a lost cause. Colonizing bad so decolonizing good is a clever phrasing. Give them credit and push for something worthwhile from the effort.
Besides producing such worthwhile people as Henry Wellcome one of the things we can value about our culture in western countries is our ability for cultural progress. We can see this so clearly in areas like discrimination where in a short time ideas like prohibition of homosexual activity or prohibition of same sex marriage have become both illegal and unpopular.
We can rightly claim that western countries are world leaders at social progress at the same time noticing any of it could have come sooner.
Individually we can either be part of what slows it down or part of what helps it.
We can complain that there is no need to diss Henry Wellcome while asking how we might help rather than hold back progress.
If someone wants to create a pile of mathematics problems covering a more diverse range of situations we should be thrilled.
If someone wants to highlight the cultural diversity in the history of mathematics that’s great.
If someone wants to insert more material in a curriculum then the best answer is to suggest we focus on getting people through it faster by improving instruction. All those that want to cover more should be allies in getting the best ways to teach to be ubiquitous.
Progress doesn’t have to be a zero sum game given the current state of mathematics education.