Trinity College’s Berkeley Library is named, as we all know, after Bishop George Berkeley, the 18th century Irish Anglican philosopher cleric. Berkeley has several claims to fame, none of them which strike this writer as particularly impressive: As a philosopher, his great contribution was to postulate that nothing truly exists outside the human mind – that sheep, for example, are only sheep because we perceive them to be sheep. Things, for example, he argued, can change size and shape depending on how we perceive them – like if we are standing far from them. This is presumably where Father Ted learned to explain to his bemused curate about how the size of a thing changes depending on how far one’s eyes are from it. This writer will freely admit to either being too smart, or too dumb, to understand why this is a great contribution to philosophy. Too dumb, probably.
Berkeley went to America, at one stage, and bought some land in Rhode Island. He also bought some African slaves to work that land. Being a man of his time, of the protestant Irish aristocracy, he didn’t have much time for the complaints of Irish Catholics either, writing to them that they had been “treated with a truly Christian Lenity under the present Government, that your Persons have been protected”. The Catholics of his time, alas, did not find themselves in complete agreement that their treatment had been truly christian and lenient.
In any case, you might guess whether it’s his attitudes to Catholics, or his brief ownership of slaves, that has the denizens of Trinity College Student’s Union up in arms and threatening “escalated action”:
Trinity College Dublin Students Union (TCDSU) have announced it will be referring to the Berkeley Library as “the X Library” in all future communications.
This afternoon, sabbatical officers of TCDSU issued an open letter to the Provost Linda Doyle calling for the immediate de-naming of the Berkeley Library.
The letter names September 30 as the deadline to provide a plan “before escalated action is taken”.
The Student’s Union, presumably in the happy position of finding that Trinity Students have no more pressing concerns, voted in the spring to call for the library to be renamed, perhaps after David Norris or some other hero of the revolution. The college demurred. The Students, now, wish to make it clear that they will not take no for an answer. Poor Bishop George must be cast into the forgotten bin of history, where he belongs. Or else.
We should probably pause, at this point, to express our gratitude for living in such times. When I was a Trinity Student myself, just about twenty years ago now, there were all sorts of pressing concerns for students: Financial supports, access to education, getting wheelchair ramps installed, that sort of thing. That today’s great issue is the name of the library is probably a good sign of progress.
We should also probably be grateful, on behalf of the students, to the Americans: After all, if some whackadoodle American student hadn’t decided about two years ago to start demanding the removal of offensive statues and names, the poor Trinity Student’s Union would have nowhere to source their ideas.
Anyway, I’m most intrigued by the threat of “escalated action”. Hell, I’m practically looking forward to it: That’s just what the country needs – a lengthy public campaign by Trinity Students making clear that their biggest problem is that the name of their library inspires hurty feelings. It’ll make a change from us all worrying about housing, and the cost of living.
If we must take this argument seriously, though, here you go: What is it about the name of the Library that justifies slavery? Or glorifies it? Indeed, changing the name would do little other than to make it more likely that the less palatable aspects of Berkeley’s life would be forgotten. The best case scenario here is that a public de-naming ceremony would accomplish much the same as the trial, in the year 897, of Pope Formosus. For various crimes, real and imagined, Formosus was placed on trial for heresy, convicted, and had three fingers cut off, before being dumped in the river Tiber. The only problem was that the accused Pontiff was already dead, having died some years previously, and had to be disinterred from his grave to attend the trial in person. Today we regard it as a bizarre and darkly comic moment in history, or, if you’re a Trinity Student, an example to be followed.
That slavery is a very great wrong is no longer a matter that is debated, in the west, any more than whether burning at the stake is a legitimate punishment for witchcraft. The matter is settled, for good. Statues, and names, and all other monuments, do not exist to praise the wrongdoing of those they commemorate. They are in fact an explicit rebuke to Shakespeare’s aphorism that “the evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones”. They remind us that the people who came before us were both good, and evil, according to the standards of their time. We do not remember them for their good deeds only, we simply acknowledge their contribution to what we have become today. This used to be common sense, before the campaign to purify history began.
And, of course, we’re selective about the evils that we care about. In the aftermath of his great victory over the viking King Sytrigg Silkbeard in 999AD, for example, Brian Ború, per the histories, ordered the sacking of Dublin. “Sacking”, in those days, was generally interpreted by soldiers as a licence to loot, and rape. Perhaps the b’auld Brian was a feminist in his day, and held to higher standards, but there’s no particular reason to believe that true. I might suggest that a campaign to strike Ború’s name from Irish history on the grounds that he may well have turned a blind eye to the rape of migrant Viking women might not be quite as popular with Trinity Students as a campaign to dethrone poor Bishop Berkeley on the grounds that he owned some slaves for a while. And nor should it be.
Ború freed Ireland from the Norsemen, and that is his achievement, which we honour. Berkeley is one of Ireland’s most famous philosophers and that is his achievement, which we honour.
What will the great achievements of today’s Trinity Students be? “Emulating the Cadaver Trial of Pope Formosus” doesn’t strike me as a thing they’ll be bragging to their grandchildren about. We’ll let Karl Brophy have the last word.
When I was in UCD many many years ago the Trinity lot used to take the piss out of us for having lecture theatres named for letters rather than famous people.
Enjoy your Library X, chaps.https://t.co/vBkxYzpUoq
— Karl Brophy (@KarlBrophy) August 24, 2022