Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Filmed at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023, this impressive panel discuss what's going on.
Today, historical figures and the intellectual legacy of the past are presented as ‘problematic’. Towering figures such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant are casually dismissed from the curriculum as racists; buildings or streets renamed because scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley failed to live up to modern values; galleries rearranged or even shuttered because an Athenian figure or Victorian explorer exhibited racist, sexist and ableist behaviour.
Is there anything intrinsically wrong in updating backward attitudes of the past? Is our only hope of looking to the future in regaining some clarity about how to draw the line between the then and the now? Without a knowledge of the past, can we know ourselves?
The speakers are:
Dr Ashley Frawley - sociologist; author, Significant Emotions and Semiotics of Happiness
Ivan Hewett - writer and broadcaster; chief music critic, Telegraph; professor, Royal College of Music; author, Music: healing the rift
Ivan Krastev - political analyst; permanent fellow, Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna; chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies; author, Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe
Dr Sean Lang - senior lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University; author, First World War for Dummies and What History Do We Need?; fellow, Historical Association
Professor Robert Tombs - emeritus professor of French history, Cambridge University; co-editor, History Reclaimed
The chair is: Jacob Reynolds - head of policy, MCC Brussels; associate fellow, Academy of Ideas
This debate was filmed by volunteers working with Worldwrite. Please help ensure the charity is able to edit a further 32 debates by hitting the THANKS button above and donating whatever you can afford.
Filmed at the Battle of Ideas festival 2023, this impressive panel discuss what's going on.
Today, historical figures and the intellectual legacy of the past are presented as ‘problematic’. Towering figures such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant are casually dismissed from the curriculum as racists; buildings or streets renamed because scientists such as Thomas Henry Huxley failed to live up to modern values; galleries rearranged or even shuttered because an Athenian figure or Victorian explorer exhibited racist, sexist and ableist behaviour.
Is there anything intrinsically wrong in updating backward attitudes of the past? Is our only hope of looking to the future in regaining some clarity about how to draw the line between the then and the now? Without a knowledge of the past, can we know ourselves?
The speakers are:
Dr Ashley Frawley - sociologist; author, Significant Emotions and Semiotics of Happiness
Ivan Hewett - writer and broadcaster; chief music critic, Telegraph; professor, Royal College of Music; author, Music: healing the rift
Ivan Krastev - political analyst; permanent fellow, Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna; chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies; author, Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe
Dr Sean Lang - senior lecturer in History, Anglia Ruskin University; author, First World War for Dummies and What History Do We Need?; fellow, Historical Association
Professor Robert Tombs - emeritus professor of French history, Cambridge University; co-editor, History Reclaimed
The chair is: Jacob Reynolds - head of policy, MCC Brussels; associate fellow, Academy of Ideas
This debate was filmed by volunteers working with Worldwrite. Please help ensure the charity is able to edit a further 32 debates by hitting the THANKS button above and donating whatever you can afford.
