The news that a former Islamist warrior in northern Mali has pleaded guilty to – and apologized for – the destruction of ancient architecture in Timbuktu is mild vindication for all of us who were outraged by the continuing destruction of valuable art and sculpture across the Middle East by religious fanatics.
It has been easy to denounce the blowing up of precious libraries and temples by ISIS and gorgeous Buddhist statues by the Taliban – that is obviously wrong, Philistinic, uncivilized. Sensitive people of all political stripes are against it. It is officially a war crime now. We are all for the preservation of the past and of the hand-worked artifacts of foreign cultures. Even if those cultures had values antithetical to our own (as the priceless Islamic libraries of Timbuktu, being themselves pretty sexist, surely did), we believe that history in itself is valuable.
Or do we? It's funny: People who denounce the cultural cleansing of ISIS and the Taliban are often just as likely to demand the removal of old-fashioned artwork from their own public spaces. Our Western reasons are far more sensible: We want the removal of murals and paintings that perpetuate dangerous racial or gender stereotypes (noble "natives" leading European explorers, contented cotton pickers in the U.S. South, socialist-realist mothers clasping babies behind their warrior men…). These are no longer valuable; indeed, they are offensive and may cause harm.
There are two schools of thought on their treatment: Remove them altogether, or preserve them as a kind of museum of injustice with explanatory texts for context. (As happened to the death camp at Auschwitz.)
We tend to take the latter position in Canada. A sculpture of Samuel Champlain and his First Nations guide, erected in Ottawa in 1918, caused offence because it had the guide kneeling subserviently and the European standing. The two parts were separated and the still-nameless guide was placed in a different location in the 1990s. This way we keep the history but minimize the visual offence.
Just recently at Yale University, an old piece of stained glass in a college dorm was smashed by a university employee who found it racist. The piece depicted two people of colour in 19th-century garb carrying bales of cotton on their heads. It was part of a series of glasses portraying the life of the hall's namesake, John Calhoun – a known advocate of slavery. The university had provoked controversy a couple of months earlier when it announced that it would not be changing the name of Calhoun Hall, in an effort to "address the legacy of slavery." The glass-smasher, a dishwasher in the dorm's cafeteria, is ether a vandal or an anti-racist hero depending on your political stripe.
Yale's conservative approach to the college name is the "museum" approach. It holds that the past, with all its horrors, must not be hidden, but with appropriate elucidation (i.e., official condemnation) for context. In this spirit, Germany has finally allowed the publication of Mein Kampf – as long as it comes in an annotated edition that explains its failings.
But this careful annotation of and apology for everything old-fashioned would be impossible to implement everywhere. There is just too much of the past, it is everywhere and it is all frightening. You would have to put an apologetic note on every bridge and building and public garden ("Built by an architect who would not allow his wife the vote" would have to be ubiquitous). And on every Catholic church. Especially on every Catholic church: Every one is a monument to the Inquisition and the crusades.
As a matter of fact, between 1992 and 1994 in Norway, a group of pagans associated with the black-metal music scene committed around 50 arson attacks against churches. At least a dozen churches were burned down; many of them were beautiful old wooden structures with a distinctive local architectural style. Their loss is a great loss of art and culture.
The ideology of the arsonists is to this day unclear: They were just generally antisocial, and a very few of them were neo-Nazis. But many of them were environmentalist anarchists with genuine beefs against the repressions of Christianity; I know lots of people who would call their values progressive. And they were really offended by those churches. Frankly, I find churches offensive, too.
It's hard for Westerners to fathom how a Buddhist statue could be offensive. Buddhism is the least offensive of religions! But to a crazed fundamentalist Islamist, of course, it is offensive – insulting to Allah, to the point of causing great emotion. We don't take their offence seriously because we are so distant to them and we don't share their religion. But their indignation is nonetheless genuine.
It's strange that a culture so currently obsessed with taking offence, one in which taking offence is seen to be the most progressive and sensitive of stances, would be so insensitive to this indignation. I am not demanding sympathy for this passion: quite the opposite. I am suggesting we regard this destruction as a frightening warning of the danger – the dark side – of taking offence.