Diversitas et Multiculturalismus

This isn’t the Summer of Love; it may be the Summer of Bad-Tempered Arguments About Classics and Racism. Over in the US, Sarah Bond‘s articles on the ‘white-washing’ of classical statues – that is, why do we think of them in terms of gleaming white marble when they were actually painted? – have provoked a furious backlash from the far right, including death threats.* In the UK, an alt-right blogger objected to the fact that a BBC educational cartoon on life in Roman Britain included black people – “I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?” – and was carefully schooled by @MikeStuchbery_, Matthew Nicholls from Reading, Mary Beard and others – with the result that Mary, at least, now seems to be spending six hours a day responding to people on Twitter about this.

What is surprising about these two arguments is that the substantive issues – ancient statues were painted, the Roman Empire (including Britain) was ethnically diverse – are such old hat. This is stuff that today’s professional classicists and ancient historians take pretty well for granted, as a starting point for more detailed and interesting investigation – and yet the statement of such facts appears as an extreme provocation to certain people. The instinctive response is “That cannot possibly be right!”, followed by speculation about why someone would nevertheless promote an idea that cannot possibly be right (tl;dr: it’s all about the Political Correctness).

I’m not proposing to discuss these issues – because they’re banal, and because other colleagues are much better qualified to do so. What interests me is the framing of such historical arguments, and the dynamics of the encounter between academic studies of the ancient world and (certain sections of) the wider public. In brief, why do some people start from the position that painted statues and multi-coloured Romans cannot be right?

Because ideology. Because the Greeks and Romans were like us (sc. white Europeans and/or Noble Britons), and their culture is the basis of our ethnically pure civilisation and must be preserved from left-wing assault, and all attempts at mixing races are doomed to end in bloody failure because innate human nature and just look at Birmingham. Etc. Not a lot to be said here.

Because education. This is more interesting; the statements of academics seem wrong to people because they flatly contradict what someone has been taught. It’s a crucial part of Sarah’s argument that we tend to assume classical statues were white because that’s how they’ve been presented for centuries (and I would readily admit that’s how I instinctively think of them), and likewise Romans have been depicted for generations as just like us (if anything, more like us than the hairy Britons; civilisation, neat haircuts). The academic approach here is to say, yes, but we now know better, as a result of further research (e.g. evidence for wide range of different ethnic groups revealed by Romano-British epigraphy) and because we can now see how past historical interpretations were distorted by contemporary ideologies. For us, contemporary ideas – certainly if they’ve become widely accepted, rather than just being the brainwave of a single individual – are more likely to be more correct than those of a century ago. But is this view necessarily true of non-academics? The past doesn’t change, one might assume, so how does one explain interpretations of the past changing except by reference to external factors, like intrusive PC-ness?

Because equivocation. Our knowledge of the past, especially the more distant past, is patchy to say the least; further, academics are trained to consider the whole range of possibilities, to be honest about the limits of knowledge and the uncertainties of interpretation, and generally to insist on qualifying even simple answers. All of which invites the response “You mean you don’t know? Why should I take any notice of anything you say, then?” This then justifies a return to the (apparent) certainties of one’s existing ideas about the past, which were probably taught as straightforward fact without any of this shiftiness about probability and likelihood.

Because science. The latest twist in the debate on Roman Britain has been the arrival of the ‘genetics trumps humanistic waffle’** argument, some of them genuinely convinced that science offers a solid foundation of Objective Truth that renders everything else irrelevant, and others just seizing on it as a convenient prop for their existing views. I’m vaguely hoping that a specialist in this field is going to write a detailed piece of what we really learn from studies like the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics project on the genetic structure of the British population (see e.g. this New Scientist summary; full publication here for those with access to scientific journals). In the meantime, very briefly: (1) scientific results are also a matter of interpreting data sets, albeit better data sets than historians and archaeologists get to play with; we need to ask questions about sample size (2039 individuals in this study, carefully selected to try to ensure geographical coverage), confidence intervals and the like – note that the scientists themselves use words like “estimate” and “suggest” as soon as they move from describing the data to interpreting them; (2) the data tell us what they tell us, not more; in this case, that a particular analysis of the DNA of this sample shows little (not no) trace of African heritage, and also little trace of Mediterranean or Viking (except in Orkney) or Norman heritage – which clearly doesn’t show that all those people were myths or never invaded, but simply that they did not have much impact on the genetic makeup of the modern British population. We then, as the scientists did, can speculate on why this might be: how far is it a matter of numbers (how many Romans in proportion to total population?),  or of behaviour (how far did Romans interbreed with existing population?) or of other events (how many people, precisely those with Roman heritage, may have evacuated to continental Europe when the legions were withdrawn?). Jumping up and down yelling that “DNA shows there wasn’t any ethnic diversity in Roman Britain!” is completely wrong on multiple counts, even if you take the scientific results entirely at face value.

So, at least four reasons why these sorts of debates blow up. What do we academics do about this? In many cases – I’m going to be optimistic and say ‘most’ – it calls for explanation, helping people move beyond the myths and half-truths they may have acquired at school or from the media, to understand how historians (and scientists) actually go about investigating and reconstructing the past. This may not be easy, as I suspect many people want more certainty than we’re ever happy to give them, whereas we feel quite comfortable with debates and competing interpretations – and part of the task of taking our research to a wider public is to recognise this gap in expectations, and think of ways of bridging it.

This applies to those arguing or asking questions in good faith, which unfortunately doesn’t include everyone. Bluntly, those arguing on the basis of ideology are unlikely to be persuaded by evidence or logic; they already know why academics are saying these things, as part of our cultural Marxist campaign against civilisation and traditional values, and are simply trying to elicit some sort of admission to this effect. Which is why we have ‘mute’ and ‘block’.

*Yes, I know the original article was published in April, so not exactly summer, but the worst of the online fury seems to have extended well into June…

**Or ‘history is written by the winners, genetics is the history of the masses’, as Peter Donnelly, the lead scientist on the Wellcome project, suggested,