Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us, Marie Kawthar Daouda, Polity Books, £20

It was Archbishop William Temple who is supposed to have said that ‘All our problems are theological ones.’

Western society at present is certainly not short of problems. There exists an institutional disdain for long-standing culture and tradition. In a frenzy of self-loathing, elites insist on the disposal of all inherited things. Literary canons must be struck out. Received notions of liberalism and free speech are recast as oppression. Statues of military heroes, explorers and civic benefactors are now regarded as symbols of society’s evil infancy, fit only for destruction at worst and neutralisation in a museum at best. Merit follows not the pursuit of lasting excellence in one’s own culture, but how much one can denigrate, destroy and undermine it while advancing the claims of others, no matter how hostile, to primacy.

Marie Daouda’s new book offers a brilliant anatomy of many of these problems, and gets immediately to their root. Whatever factors might have contributed to them, whether changes in demographics or technology, she recognises from the beginning that they spring from spiritual and theological causes.

The decline of Christianity in the West has robbed its people of the customary means whereby they were able to deal with feelings of sin and guilt. The concept of original sin as an explanation for the origin of evil and human suffering, along with guilt and shame, are now personae non gratae in received discourse. These feelings, however, do not go away. Instead of being explained by the account of Genesis and expiated through religious exercise, they are projected onto more recent history. No longer are issues of empire, slave-trading, or international conflict examined by complex discussions of motive and effect among scholars. Instead, such issues are conscripted to play a part in a Manichean origin drama, mythologised and emptied of nuance to explain the existence of present-day evil and suffering. From such causes spring the new, post-Christian conceptions that ‘white men are bad, and… everything that is neither male nor white is good’.

As much as this thinking is apt to unjustly portray white men as apex victimisers, it also requires people of different minority backgrounds – like Daouda herself, a Moroccan woman who has migrated, via Paris, to Oxford – regardless of the complexities of their own stories or histories, to play the part of a victim. Daouda’s object in writing the book is to stand against this tendency of misplaced guilt to drain complexity and nuance from discussions of history. She hopes to ensure that younger generations in particular, by embracing ideas of complexity, will be diverted from wallowing in an induced sense of grievance and victimhood that could ultimately lead to the dissolution of a cohesive society. It is only through an embrace of the complexities of western history, she argues, with an acknowledgement of its riches as well as its flaws, that the young will be willing to engraft themselves into the society that springs from it, and exist as individuals who will build a legacy for future generations.

Daouda is an incisive chronicler of how these theological urges of misplaced guilt play out in practice. For example, as a don at Oriel College, Oxford, she is able to give us a ringside account of the recent and mercifully failed attempt by campaigners to remove the college’s statue of Cecil Rhodes, visible from the High Street, not to mention another plaque erected to his memory around the corner, in King Edward Street.

Daouda lays out the moral complexity of his life, some of whose actions, in Rhodes’s own words, ‘have partaken in the violence of their age, which are hard to justify in a more peaceful and law-abiding age’. She balances this against his friendships with individual Africans, his support for their right to vote, and his endowment of the Rhodes scholarships, which continue to be awarded, without regard to ‘race’.

This nuance was bulldozed by the anti-Rhodes campaigners, who had no compunction in using fabricated and misreported quotations to paint Rhodes as absolutely evil, and his statue as an epitome of horror, damaging to every ethnic minority that should fall under its gaze. Daouda expounds how not only the nuance of history in the treatment of Rhodes himself has been flattened in this hunt for an absolute, but also the nuance of the monument’s own context. The statue is part of a wider early 20^th-century scheme of decoration that includes monuments to Catholic Cardinal Newman and Anglican Bishop Joseph Butler – in the context of the time a striking gesture of reconciliation. Similarly, the King Edward Street plaque was the first Jewish gift to the university, made by one of Rhodes’ friends Alfred Mosely – again, another monument that, properly understood, is a sign of progress and religious reconciliation.

Daouda highlights the cult-like absurdity of the desire to have these monuments removed; in her words, describing the similar case of the statue in Bristol of Edward Colston, ‘the overlapping of a political issue and of an anthropological phase, combining to create a form of iconoclasm intimately intertwined with a desire to vindicate one’s own guilt for belonging to a high-status group by signalling one’s innocence’.

In addition, she makes it clear how ridiculous, and indeed outrageous, it is that such campaigners should view people like Daouda herself as being so vulnerable that they would be ‘threatened by the visual traces of England’s history’. While Catholics can live with statues of Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, and Muslims visit the Alhambra every day, are some people ‘because they are not white… expected to feel triggered by a four-foot-high statue in Oxford’?

Daouda’s analysis of our cultural malaise benefits from her own breadth of knowledge. She brings to bear insights from her own academic knowledge of anthropology, French literature and history, particularly the colonial background of France in North Africa. Her comparison of the present moment of cultural change with the French Revolution and its means of dealing with the historic artefacts of the Ancien Régime (it is from the strange contortions of the French 18th century that we have the word ‘Vandalism’, with the Revolution’s attempts to cast the blame for its iconoclasm on external forces). Her critique of Neo-Orientalism – the attempt of minorities to claim absolute characteristics which they then use to advance their own interests – is particularly valuable and apposite.

Beyond her pure knowledge, it is Daouda’s expression of her own cultural development and the love of the life and literature which she has found away from her origins in Morocco (while by no means setting this origin at nothing – quite the contrary) that moves this book from being a simple polemic to a powerful vision of the transformative power of culture, place and beauty. Daouda is able to accept the complexity of her own past and embrace the culture of the places to which she has come: Paris and Oxford. She writes movingly of coming to love John Keats, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill (himself a lover of Morocco), Elizabeth Anscombe and John Henry Newman. The narrative of her own story, gently interwoven through the book, is a vivid demonstration of how one can rejoice in the complexity and culture of place which has been transmitted to us by our ancestors. In doing so, rather than trying to flatten it in a destructive and quixotic quest for moral perfection, one follows them in contemplating what is ‘beautiful and true, against the indifference of the wise and the raging yells of the crowds’.