The current debate over Confederate statues vividly reveals the fundamental problem with organizing society through  compelled collectivism –  i.e. statism.

There is no “we.”

When it comes to Confederate statues, people hold widely divergent opinions. Some people see them as important historical memorials. They view Confederate soldiers as brave defenders of the homeland, fighting northern aggressors. They believe the monuments serve as an important way to remember Southern heritage. Others look at the statues and see slavery, racism and bigotry.

One side wants to preserve the monuments. The other wants to pull them down.

Who’s right?

That argument will probably last until the end of time. You will never find a definitive answer. The monuments serve as symbols. Symbols, by their very nature, are subjective. There really are no right or wrong answers. Only divergent points of view.

And herein lies the problem. There is no we. No universal point of view exists.  Either the statues stay or they go. You can’t have it both ways. There can be no compromise.

In the end, there will only be one side imposing its will on the other.

That’s the nature of statism .

When you have compelled collectivism, when everything centers around “public” spaces, when you try to force hundreds of individuals into a homogeneous “we,” you end up with government solutions imposed by force.

No matter what you do in a public space, somebody will end up unhappy, offended and left out. Those people will understandably harbor anger and resentment. So they will clamor after the levers of power. That way, next time, they can be the ones imposing their will on the other.

The moral of the story is you can’t create “civil” society at gunpoint.

So, what’s the solution?

Abandon statism. Abandon coerced collectivism. Stop trying to force everybody else to bend to your will.

Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute offers the only non-violent, civilized solution to the monument problem.

Privatize them all.

He argues that “the combined effect of public memorials, monuments, streets, and buildings function to turn public spaces into a type of large open-air social studies class, reinforcing some views, while ignoring others.”

He’s right of course. We see this playing out today in the Confederate monument debate.

In a sane world, varying points of view coexist side-by-side. A Confederate monument can stand in the same town as a monument to abolition. But within a society organized through coerced collectivism, only one viewpoint can exist. Only one interpretation of history. Only one dominant worldview. All others must be discarded. “We” can’t have it.

McMaken offers another way. Instead of using the strong arm of government to advance your ideas, you should utilize private space. McMaken uses the Catholic Church as an example of how private entities can successfully use this model. Nobody can tell the Church to take down it’s statues. People can be as offended as they want, but the monuments stay. Of course, opponents of the ideas Catholic statues represent are free to build their own monuments.

Once upon a time … people who actually valued their heritage did not sit around begging the government to protect it for them. Many were willing to actually take action and spend their own money on preserving the heritage that many now rather unconvincingly claim is so important to them.

A good example of the key role of private property in cases such as this can be seen in the work of the Catholic Church in the US — which has never enjoyed majority support from the population or from government institutions. If Catholics were to get their symbols and memorials in front of the public, they were going to have to build them on private property, and that’s exactly what they did.

In Denver, for example, the Catholics of the early 20th century knew (correctly) that no public park or government building was going to erect any Catholic-themed art or memorials on their property. So, the Catholics proceeded to erect an enormous cathedral on a hilltop one block from the state capitol. The new cathedral was highly visible and provided easy access to religious ceremonies for the few Catholic politicians and officials who worked at the capitol. It provided meeting space. It contained stained-glass art created by German masters. Moreover, the new building served as a huge symbolic middle finger to the anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klan which was growing in importance in Denver at the time.

So, did Church officials sit around whining about how there was no crucifix on the front lawn of the State Capitol? Did they demand that the taxpayers pay to maintain a central town plaza featuring a statue of Saint Peter? Some probably did. Those who made a difference, though, took action and acquired real estate in prominent places throughout the city. They put universities on that land, and cemeteries, and convents, and friaries, and schools, and even some memorials and statues. Today, next to the cathedral, on a busy street corner, is a large statue of a Catholic pope: John Paul II. It’s on private property. It’s seen by thousands every day.

And why should the self-appointed protectors of American “traditional” values think they deserve anything different? On the contrary, we’d all have been saved a lot of trouble if the organizations that demanded statues of Confederate generals everywhere had put them on private land instead of in public parks. We’d all be better off if the private owners of the Stone Mountain monument hadn’t sold it to the State of Georgia because they were too cheap and lazy to maintain it themselves.

In the past, had the purveyors of publicly-funded culture instead taken a principled and successful stand against using public lands and funds to push a certain view of history, no one would have to now waste his time sitting through city council meetings where politicians decide who deserves a statue, and who is to be thrown in the dustbin of history. Were we to quit using public parks as showcases for public indoctrination, we wouldn’t have to worry about the Church of Satan erecting a monument in the “free speech area” of a public park — as they recently did near Minneapolis.

The next time someone wants a statue of some politician, artist, or intellectual — whether they be communists, Confederates, or satanists — they ought to be told to buy a nice little plot of land somewhere — perhaps along a busy street or next to an important street corner in town — and put their statue there.

Photo by Billy Hathorn