The author is an award-winning science journalist and the author of ‘Superior: The Return of Race Science’
Ministers’ fear of activists trying to bubble up British history has led the British government to summon the heads of national museums and other heritage institutions to ask how they will interpret and explain the new policy of preserving the controversial public monuments follow. This week’s summit, convened by the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, follows the overthrow of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol in June.
Scientific history has not been released from government attention. As scholars know, archeology, anthropology and the natural sciences have always been plagued by prejudices, which have influenced the way people and artefacts are presented. But critics are concerned that, as this history acknowledges, even big figures like Charles Darwin could be knocked off their pedestals because of their racist and sexist beliefs.
Last year I joined a steering group at the London Natural History Museum that judged the naming and representation. This is a problem that all institutions take into account. Last month, the British Science Association renamed the Huxley Summit for Thought Leaders to ‘For Thought’ on concerns about 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley’s role in scientific racism, which fed the dangerous ideology of eugenics. As more cases like this come to mind, museums rightly wonder if they can be fairer to the facts and broader with their narratives.
The government’s view is that rather than removing offensive memorials, it should be put into context. In 2019, I saw for myself how difficult it is for a national museum. Since 1940, the American Museum of Natural History in New York has had an impressive statue of Theodore Roosevelt, former president and nature lover, on its steps. He sits high on a horse, flanked at the bottom by an unnamed African man and an unnamed Native American man. The hierarchy is obvious. To answer this problem, the museum’s curators presented an indoor exhibition explaining the problems with the statue, including reactions from the public.
But it was easy to miss. The statue, meanwhile, was unavoidable. You could see it across the street. Last summer, the museum asked to take it down completely, with support from Roosevelt’s great-grandson.
If this sounds like politics forcing hands, do not forget the politics embedded in the statue. History is not written once. It is being rewritten every generation, not because the facts necessarily change, but because our perspectives do change.
Think of the way we view Alan Turing now. In 2019, 65 years after his death, the New York Times published an obituary for the computer scientist and World War II code breaker. What took them so long? This was not only because his achievements were classified when he died, but because his homosexuality – for which he was convicted – even in the decades after they were known, meant that people were not willing to celebrate him.
In 2009, the British government apologized. Turing has taken its place in British scientific history. The change in social attitudes has rewritten the past and helped Britain confront its mistake. The scientific history is still kept up to date with hidden figures, especially women and minorities.
“We can not – and should not – now try to change or censor our past,” said Robert Jenrick, community secretary, last month. But censorship is already intertwined in the way the past is written. Without understanding how certain people and ideas have been erased and others deliberately promoted, we are left with distorted narratives.
Moreover, it is difficult to maintain these fictions in our social media era, when visitors only have to go online for five minutes to know that some of the people who are glorified as scientific or philanthropic heroes in our museums were racists, eugenicists, who benefited from the slave trade. or had another great thought.
Perhaps a better way to display scientific history is to see science for what it is – a slow, collective struggle against universal truths, bitterly debated by scientists as they make mistakes until more information comes and inevitably affected by politics. Presenting research in this way can also help the public understand why some health experts this year, for example, disagree about treating Covid-19 or wearing a mask.
Darwin obviously has no chance of being canceled. But it would be good if we reconsider where the scientific history begins. Perhaps it should never have been with busts and statues, but with the debates and tensions between scientists and the wider world in their time.