David Lowenthal, author of "The Past Is a Foreign Country,” says it’s folly to scratch the names of slaveholders off buildings

... It is one thing to deplore past injustice, quite another to blame its perpetrators for falling afoul of today’s standards. If we arraign the deceased for failing our moral precepts, no one will escape condemnation. And censuring predecessors puts us at the like mercy of posterity. We cannot predict for what sins our successors will chastise us. “As we would have our descendants judge us, so ought we to judge our fathers,” advised the historian T. B. Macaulay. “To form a correct estimate of their merits, we ought to place ourselves in their situation, to put out of our minds, for a time, all that knowledge which they could not have, and which we could not help having.”⁷

The problem is that shifting morality leaves our hearts at odds with our heads. “We are all convinced that enslaving human beings is bad,” notes Noonan. “Can anyone today contemplate the slave trader and slaveholder without a shudder of disgust? Can anyone empathize with the bigot putting a torch to the stake where the condemned heretic will be incinerated? Abstractly, we may concede that the slave owner and the persecutor thought that they acted justly. In our bones we experience repugnance and even righteous rage.”⁸

Rage and repugnance fuel reformist zeal. But they blind us to our own biases and obscure our understanding of the conflicted history we inherit. “There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin reminds us, “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁹ Just as German history with Goethe but without the Nazis would be unpardonable, American history with Lincoln but without slavery would be incomprehensible. We must learn to live unflinchingly with past totality, as aware of and alert to its injuries and injustices as to its glories and virtues. We need to stomach the vile along with the valiant, the evil with the eminent, the sordid and sad as well as the splendid.

We remain accountable for the whole of our legacy. Rescinding honors was imperial Rome’s damnatio memoriae: destroying or defacing statues, coins, arches, and documents that honored discredited rulers. Renaming buildings does not rectify past wrongs; it forces us to forget them and to fancy ourselves free of them. Excising the unwanted past is a despotic ruse redolent of Orwell’s 1984.

Retrospective humility mandates not only remembering the authors of acts and views now condemned, but preserving the honors then or later accorded them, as cautionary reminders that many, perhaps most, previously lauded what we now loathe. So we do well to retain reminders of actions and agents once acclaimed but since repudiated. They are lessons in the transience of fame, the fallibility of repute, and the risks of hero worship. It is fanatical folly to erase or hide a disconcerting past, for “the good and bad of our past [are] inherently entwined,” as Annette Gordon-Reed said in urging Harvard Law School to retain the crest of the slaveholding endower’s family.¹⁰ History can be hard to digest. But it must be swallowed whole to undeceive the present and edify the future.