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I’ve spent too much time thinking about this column that ends by saying we need to maintain a measure of gratitude to Columbus and keep his statues in our towns unless we mean to endorse “the expropriation of white property” and issue an implied invitation to the Khmer Rouge. https://twitter.com/douthatnyt/status/1278002079605366784
So fwiw, a couple responses: First, Douthat would do well to try to address a broader audience than the descendants of white settlers. Do his concepts map to a Cambodian student at Princeton’s international school, a Native American resident of New Haven, a Black student at Yale?
Second, all the discussion of debts owed to dead men put me in mind of entailed estates. Forgive an extended analogy.
English law framed in 1285 allowed a man of the gentry to ensure that his property passed to his male heirs forever, meaning if any heir died without a legitimate son the estate would get yanked back and sent to a more fertile branch of the original patriarch’s family tree.
This is the part of property law that launched a hundred English novels. It’s super for the dead patriarch—the family settlement he built stays together. But it’s a huge burden to the living. Daughters and adopted sons can’t inherit and face penury. Mortgages are impossible.
Eventually the society tired of this and the law started developing ways to break the entail—to set aside their obligations to the dead men—and live a more modern life. This is what Douthat, fearing the millennium, would forbid. But it didn’t turn the UK into a rootless dystopia.
This isn’t to say that the past should be forgotten or that anyone trying to build a more just society has a monopoly on wisdom or know-how. But can purported debts to terrible, dead men be canceled? Absofuckinlutely.
