As a small boy, I had no idea what I was looking at, though I knew it disturbed me. Why erase human faces, on precious and historic artworks? It didn’t make any sense, but now, of course, I know that I was encountering a famous moment of iconoclasm:  the mutilation of “idolatrous” Catholic monuments in the spiritual fires of the Reformation.

Today, sitting in my flat in London, I have been looking — once more perplexed and disturbed — at another iconoclasm (the word comes from the Greek: eikon, or image, and klaster, breaker): the toppling of statues around the western world, from Christopher Columbus in Virginia to Edward Colston in Bristol to King Leopold II in Antwerp. The latest vandalisation involved Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, and more is surely to follow.

As I write, this contemporary Iconoclasm of the Woke seems to be accelerating, particularly in Britain. There is a website advising the Topplers where else they might chuck statuary in rivers: maybe Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth, or Captain James Cook in Teesside. And it’s not just statues, for the New Iconoclasts are targeting street names, movies, sitcoms, art: one particular target, much lusted after by the Topplers, is the Winston Churchill mural in Croydon (a borough heavily bombed in the Blitz). At the weekend the threats of further iconoclasm, in particular against the image of Britain’s wartime leader, lead to large numbers of ‘statue defenders’ turning up in central London.

Where will this bizarre fury end, and how might it change us: as nations, cultures, peoples? To get an answer you need to examine iconoclasms through history, and in a lifetime of travel I have visited the scenes of several.

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The earliest known iconoclasm took place at the awesomely venerable site of Gobekli Tepe, in Kurdish Turkey, a grandiose sequence of megalithic circles, constructed, it is believed, by hunter-gatherers just after the end of the Ice Age (around 11,000BC). Gobekli Tepe presents many profound mysteries, but one of the deepest is this: why, in 8,000BC, did the presumed builders erase their own magnificent monument, by entombing it with tons of dust, a task which might have taken decades?

On my visit there in 2005, I sat in a tent by the stones, with the chief archaeologist of the site, the late, great Klaus Schmidt. Over sweet Turkish tea, Klaus outlined some theories.

It seems that at the time of the iconoclasm the once-fertile Kurdish landscape was undergoing climate change, the rivers were drying, the game dwindling. Perhaps the Gobekli Tepe builders felt that they had angered the Gods, who therefore needed to be propitiated with a prized offering. Like Celtic warriors throwing jewelled shields into the Thames, the men of Gobekli Tepe hurled their temple under the earth.

Relatedly, the region around Gobekli Tepe, at this time, saw the birth of agriculture: the first wild grasses being farmed, the first wild animals domesticated. This epochal change in human life, this expulsion from fruit-picking Eden, came at a price. Life became harder, even as food became more plentiful. There was more work, less freedom, and viruses leapt joyously from newly-stabled beasts to newly-sedentary man, causing the first epidemics.

The echoes of the era are distinct. Disease, upheaval and climate change, producing an efflorescence of guilt and mortification. The region of Gobeki Tepe also saw, at this time, the first human sacrifices. This may not be coincidence. Perhaps humans were cancelled, as well as images, because, again, the gods were unhappy.

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A very different iconoclasm, at the other end of history, was that of the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, which lasted four brief but terrible years, from 1975 to 1979, by which time the Khmer Rouge were killing each other, having murdered up to a quarter of the country’s population.

The scale of the Khmer Rouge iconoclasm was mind-boggling. They blew up the central bank in Phnom Penh and burned all the money in the country. They threw monks over cliffs and tore down thousands of Buddhist temples (though they spared Angkor Wat, whose spiritual power seemed to unnerve them). They also destroyed the ancient, splendid tradition of Cambodian dance, by slaughtering every single person who knew how to do it.

What provoked this national self-harm? Khmer Rouge leaders were steeped in a radical form of Maoism, acquired in Paris in the 50s. But that insane ideology needed a suitable place to breed, as mosquitoes need standing water. Cambodia in 1975 was a nation horribly traumatised by the neighbouring Vietnam War. Despite the nation’s neutrality in that conflict, the US government dropped more bombs on Cambodia than they dropped on Europe in all of the Second World War; the US bombing caused millions of refugees, and killed at least 250,000. A different kind of God was angry.

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For a third and final example, let’s go to Easter Island (alias Rapa Nui). Lost in the blue wastes of the Pacific, this is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world: it was also the scene of one of history’s strangest iconoclasms.

Many visitors to Easter Island come to see the famous moai, the huge, stylised statues, on their mighty plinths, embodying the spirits of Rapa Nui ancestors. But what most tourists don’t realise is that every standing moai was re-erected in recent decades, and many remain prone because, from 1730 to 1850, all of them were deliberately toppled.

Theories abound as to why: deforestation, religious war, the feared, potent influence of recently-arrived outsiders (Easter Island was “discovered” by Dutch explorers in 1722). Yet the haunted quality of Easter Island today, with its throbbing sense of desertion, suggests a compound answer: all these pressures together led to a total collapse of cultural self confidence. The civilisation died from within, and as it did, the failed Gods had to go. Never to return.

What do these examples tell us of the Great Topplings of 2020? First, iconoclasms are far from rare (I could analyse two dozen more). Second, iconoclasms often burn out quite quickly, because there is only so much denouncing you can do before the denouncers denounce each other, the Revolution devours its own, and the cycle is done. Thirdly, they are commonly caused by external factors, unrelated to the broken images themselves: war, invasion, disease and economic disaster, many things can provoke these frenzies.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, they often herald a major civilisational rupture, which can be negative, or positive.

If we are lucky, as we gaze down at the statues brusquely dumped by Mayor Sadiq Khan in London tips, we are, in principle, looking at the hacked off faces of the Hereford effigies. The iconoclasm of the Reformation destroyed many historic, beautiful things, but it ultimately led to truly Protestant England, and arguably parliamentary democracy, the industrial revolution and the export of liberal values around the world. That’s the positive spin on what we see today.

Yet I confess that on darker days, I am pessimistic. As I watch the fires, riots and graffiti spreading across the West, from New York to Paris, from Gothenburg to Brussels, from the Vietnam War Memorial to the Cenotaph in Whitehall, I sense that, for all the virtues of this campaign for racial equality, we are staring at a calamitous loss of civilisational confidence. That is to say: I hear the hot, mournful Pacific wind, whirring the silent and empty moorlands of Rapa Nui, where the moai used to stand.

The Gustav Eberlein statue from 1901-1903 is attractive if unsettling. I’m Jewish; my four grandparents fled Nazi Germany and many other relations didn’t make it out. So I find it hard to love Wagner’s music: an aural monument to an Aryan vision whose end point was the Final Solution. But I don’t wish either the music or the statues (there are many in Germany) banished.

The world is imperfect and the present — from our political and civic institutions to the arts — is built on history that falls well short of contemporary moral standards. Our cultural inheritance is complex; the bad mixed in with the good. The rabid Aryanism mixing with the soaring music in Wagner’s case; the racism mixed with the towering moral heroism in Churchill’s. If indulged, the urge to smash monuments to a tainted past will leave us with a bleak cultural tundra and the dreary narrowing of intellectual horizons to go with it.

Which is why, as the anti-racism movement in Britain calls with new intensity and power for the cleansing of our public sphere of any reference to people linked to slavery or imperialism, we should be shuddering. Not because we believe in celebrating slavery — of course not — but because of the implications for the rest of culture if there are moves to cleanse and destroy, rather than live with, the past.

This week, it became clear that there is institutional backing right the way through for the cleansing route. After Edward Colston was toppled and sunk in Bristol, the police stood back, deciding to let them get on with it to ‘avoid tension’. Bristol mayor Marvin Rees looked sympathetically towards the act, stopping short only ‘as an elected official’ of condoning law-breaking.

Then London mayor Sadiq Khan launched the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which is looking into having statues that ‘reflect Victorian Britain’ removed, getting new more ‘diverse’ ones erected instead, and renaming museums and other buildings named after people with connections to the slave trade.

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This signals a new era of approval for the destruction or removal of historical artefacts deemed offensive. And given that most of history is offensive by current standards, a lot of destruction is in the offing. Protesters have identified 60 statues to be removed in Britain, and a statue of the merchant Robert Milligan, an 18^th century slave-dealer, has been taken down from West India Quay in the heart of the Docklands he helped build.

The Tate galleries may be renamed, since although Henry Tate was never a slaver trader. But because he made his fortune as a sugar refiner, he is therefore deemed to have benefited. Oxford Council has invited Oriel College to submit a planning request to take down the statue of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, the subject of a five-year campaign for removal. Thousands have been gathering this week at the college demanding that Rhodes must go.

Some, like Christ Church anthropology post-doc Chihab El Khachab, are “calling out the white supremacists protected by academic institutions” and insisting that activism against the Rhodes statue is actually a rallying cry for the “the Palestinian liberation struggle”. Helped along by craven institutional compliance, these are the people now decreeing what the British public sphere should look like.

As our monuments tumble or are defaced, the arts are also being plucked and censored.

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Netflix, the BBC and the streaming service Britbox have removed David Walliams and Matt Lucas’s Little Britain and Come Fly With Me because,in the BBC’s tortuous lingo, they “include scenes where the comedians portray characters from different ethnic backgrounds”. The long-running American programme Cops has been pulled by Paramount. And Gone With the Wind (1937) has been taken off HBO Max. It will, however, eventually be returned — with a lengthy lesson and ‘denouncement’ of its depictions of slavery. Even Fawlty Towers, one of Britain’s best-loved television institutions, has found itself a victim of the iconoclasm.

As Matthew Arnold wrote in Culture and Anarchy (1869), in order to be worth anything, art has to be kept separate from the moral and political jockeying of the social sphere. Only then can it exist as an arena for creativity and dissent; for what he called the free play of ideas.

Forcing art to adhere to the contemporary political line, or expecting moral purity in its creator, destroys an essential outlet for critical freedom while also stifling the right to artistic interpretation. Taking Little Britain and Gone With the Wind off screen sends the strong message that art is to be evaluated in one way only, and enjoyed on one strict condition: that it is sufficiently diverse.

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In the end, the void at the heart of the present vision is complexity. Setting out to remove everything morally impure still visible on our cultural horizon is as babyish as it is authoritarian. Just like the past itself, most people are neither wholly one thing nor the other. Dickens was a misogynist, deeply racist, a committed democrat and deeply opposed to slavery. Trollope was rabidly anti-Semitic but wrote with stunning sensitivity about questions of money, power and gender. Michael Jackson was a sex offender who abused children but produced some of the most important pop of the last century. Reducing everything to ‘good/bad’ and ‘agree/disagree’ in the name of present social justice standards destroys not only art and culture but makes a mockery of the contradictions and complexities of life itself.

And where does it end? Those behind long-running calls to ‘decolonise’ school and university curricula seem to want the excision of the canon and the classics as too much the work of dead white men. But once we’ve cut out the Bible, the works of the ancient Greeks, the philosophers of the Medieval and Enlightenment periods, and Victorian thinkers and novelists — all of whom either harboured racist thoughts themselves or associated with racists — the picture looks somewhat thin.

Rather than tear it down and ban it, the lesson should be to learn to live intelligently with the past. I am glad I can see Wagner in plain sight in the Tiergarten, and have the chance to pair his statue’s history with what I know about him. I accept that Volkswagen remains a prosperous car manufacturer despite being one of the first companies to take full advantage of forced labour during the Second World War, profiting greedily off the work of Jewish concentration camp inmates. I am glad I grew up reading Trollope and Dickens, able to enjoy their wondrous, wise prose while also wincing at their sneering at Jews. I am the richer for it all. If, in contrast, we set ourselves the task of banning all history and culture that does not toe the present political line, the road to darkest depths becomes clear.

Until now. While the tearing down of the Colston statue may have superficially burnished the city’s hip, progressive credentials, it also illuminated the city’s dark side: a history of brutal imperial exploitation, worker rebellion and rampant inequality that never went away.

The city, in 1889, just before the statue was erected, had been described as “a seething centre of revolt”. Britain was in its imperial pomp, but the servants’ quarters were in revolt. The subversive creed of socialism was gaining ground among the West Country’s working class. Respectable Victorian society sought to counter that spirit of rebellion by promoting philanthropists and the paternalistic values of ‘great men’ – men like Edward Colston, who now finds himself sitting in the bottom of the marina while a new generation of rebels cheer.

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Today, Bristol is a ‘cultural hub’ in that rather hackneyed term. The artist Banksy, another Bristolian, is a representative figure when it comes to the pseudo-revolutionary aesthetic that seems to emanate from the city’s pores. It is beloved by a stratum of the upper middle class – which is smug, complacent, and not quite as revolutionary as it would like to think.

Because the poor are still very often airbrushed from the city’s public image. Behind the street art, cobbled lanes, ludicrously expensive housing and overpriced drinking dens is a city where many residents struggle to make ends meet.

This is an image carefully curated by the city’s last mayor, George Ferguson. Known for his bright red trousers, Ferguson’s agenda was notoriously light on substance. He created a buzz around the city, while increasing inequality and gentrification — as well as the hole in the city’s finances. Pedestrianisation, tree-planting and the promotion of high-profile festivals were all celebrated achievements – and largely preoccupations of an outer-suburban middle class who made up Ferguson’s voter base.

But five years ago, he was ousted by Marvin Rees, the son of a Jamaican father and British mother. He couldn’t have been more different from Ferguson; Rees was brought up by a single mother in the deprived areas of St Pauls, Lawrence Weston and Easton.

Rees won by focusing on two policy areas which had been neglected for decades: housing and transport. Back in 2016, when he was elected, house prices were increasing by 17%  a year. Great news for existing homeowners but less so for the city’s low income residents — and nearly a quarter of Bristol children (21%) live in low-income families. Rees has, since his election, overseen the building of 200 council homes with a further 900 currently being built. But it’s still not enough. There are 13,000 families currently on the council’s housing waiting list in Bristol.

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And yet the image the middle classes cling to is of high levels of life satisfaction. In fact, Bristol was recently voted the happiest city in the country to live by its residents; but, tellingly, it has also been voted the worst city in which to use public transport. And public transport is vital for those commuting from the deprived outer boroughs into the city centre. But services designed for the poor, are generally poor services. Buses are late or don’t turn up. And for those travelling to work, a frequently late bus can be the difference between a warning and a sacking.

Bristol is certainly a diverse city — 16% of the local population belongs to a black or minority ethnic group. Yet the fact that a statue of Edward Colston stood for 125 years ought to temper the idea that the city is some exceptional progressive ‘hub’.

Indeed, much has been made, since the toppling, of the importance of removing offensive monuments consensually. But that approach had already been tried in Bristol — over and again. The most recent stalemate was over a contextual plaque intended for Colston’s plinth. The Merchant Venturers — the organisation to which Colston belonged — engaged in filibustering pedantry in an attempt to water down the wording. Meanwhile,Tory councillor Richard Eddy, who said on Sunday that he was “horrified and appalled by the rank lawlessness” of those who threw Colston’s statue in the river, had encouraged pro-Colston vigilantism, saying in 2018 that vandalism of the new plaque “might be justified”. In other words, the status quo in Bristol has its own militant wing.

There was, of course, an element of revolution as play at work among those who romped around central Bristol at the weekend. A few of the white arms pulling down Colston’s statue were doubtless attached to hemp-shirted, dreadlocked out-of-towners who came to Bristol for the ‘vibe’.

To focus on them, however, and to obsess about “process”, is to ignore the fact that Bristol’s social problems run a lot deeper than statues, concert halls and road signs. Yes, black locals hated that statue — and for good reason. But they have other pressing concerns, too. A 2017 report by the Runnymede Trust ranked Bristol as the seventh worst local authority for racial inequality out of the 348 in the UK – and the worst ‘core’ city (self-selected core cities are: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield).

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Growing up poor in Bristol is hard. And growing up poor and BAME is a constant battle, despite the popular image of the city as ‘open’ and ‘tolerant’ and [insert woke corporate buzzword]. Bristol has 41 areas in the most deprived 10% in England. Despite graduates of Bristol’s prestigious university earning above the national average three years after graduation, Bristol was ranked in the bottom third of all local authorities in England by the Social Mobility Commission.

Because political activism is dominated by university students, more deep-rooted inequalities are sometimes passed over by campaigners in favour of headline-grabbing stunts. Spectacular public actions can galvanise opinion. But race equality campaigners will want to ensure that superficial change is not a substitute for what has been correctly identified as structural and institutional racism. Too often mere cosmetic change is a feature of liberal identity politics: the diverse boardroom but the overwhelmingly black, poorly paid shop floor. That isn’t equality; nor is the act of pulling down an objectionable statue in a city where residents from Black African and Black Caribbean families have persistently high levels of unemployment.

Another bleak irony about last weekend’s protests, was that so many protesters seemed complacent about the spread of a virus which, while perhaps not affecting them, has been disproportionately killing the old, the infirm, and, yes, black people. To point this out while protests were taking place was frowned upon as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘insensitive’ — further proof perhaps that we live in a shallow and unserious culture where raw feelings are given much too much credence.

Bristol at times encapsulates our culture’s contemporary shallowness. The city has a propensity to sate itself on its own progressive reputation – while simultaneously ignoring glaring inequalities that exist just beneath the surface. We must hope that the carnivalesque removal of Edward Colston from his plinth at the weekend will not adhere to this familiar Bristolian type: a self-satisfied pat on the back that quickly slips into complacency about the city’s more deep-rooted inequalities.