Borborygmus will be the reaction on the far right at the denaming of Berkeley, Trinity College’s central library. Bishop George Berkeley’s name will no longer be on Ireland’s Trinity College, because of his enslavement and enthusiasm for enslaving people of African descent — in order to Christianize them, of course. It is a great posthumous blow to his reputation on the Emerald Isle, considering that he was a librarian and Fellow at Trinity.
The left this time has gone too far, they will argue with churlish (white) pride.
Eighteenth century philosopher Bishop George Berkeley, the Anglican bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753), was a profoundly serious, methodical thinker. Bishop Berkeley’s metaphysical idealism — in contrast against the materialism of his day — is carefully argued and a major revolution in the history of Western thought. From the New York Times:
But last month, the governing board of Trinity, Ireland’s oldest university, announced that it had voted to “dename” the library after months of research and consultation by a group established to review problematic legacies. The group based its recommendations on an analysis of historical records, already in the public domain, showing that Berkeley had purchased several enslaved people for a plantation that he operated while living in Rhode Island from 1729 to 1732.
Already a noted scholar, Berkeley went to America with plans to use wealth from the plantation, as well as public donations, to open a school in Bermuda that would take Native American children — by force if need be — and convert them to Christianity.
By any means necessary, it would seem. The conversions did not ultimately happen. The great Bishop and Philosopher of abstraction “donated” the human beings to Yale in 1731, which continued to not admit significant amounts of African-Americans until 1964, roughly 233 years later. From YaleSlavery, which chronicles how Yale University benefitted from the institution of slavery:
Bishop George Berkeley bought 3-5 slaves during his brief stay in the New World between 1728 and 1731, to work on his Rhode Island plantation, Whitehall (14). When Berkeley returned to Europe in 1731, he donated the plantation to Yale.
… George Berkeley had slaves working his plantation until he left in 1731. The profits earned by leasing the Whitehall plantation after 1732 funded Yale's first scholarships. The person leasing the plantation around the time of the 1774 census included four black people as members of his household, and most black people so listed were slaves.
Assuming slaves worked the old Berkeley plantation, then Yale's own land was worked by slaves, and Yale's first scholarship was funded for up to 50 years with money earned from slave labor. It is for the gift of this plantation that his name is honored today with the name of "Berkeley college".
As serious a metaphysician as the Bishop was, he was not serious enough to have come up on the right and moral side of the issue of human slavery. How does one square this sort of monstrous intellectual compartmentalization? The argument on the conservative side of the aisle that slavery was a common institution and therefore Berkeley should be exempt from postmodern judgement falls short when you factor into account that Berkeley was the Anglican bishop of Cloyne, allegedly a moral-spiritual paragon. From Tigerlilly Hopson of the Yale Daily News:
George Berkeley — Dean of Derry, Bishop of Cyclone in Ireland and famed 18th Century idealist philosopher — started his American journey with the purpose of setting up a seminary in Bermuda to “educate” and Christianize indigenous people. In his 1725 proposal, he outlined his strategy of kidnapping Native American children to gain pupils; he planned to procure indigenous youth “by peaceable methods” when possible, “or by taking captive the children of our enemies.” It was the colonizer’s duty, Berkeley believed, to “reclaim these poor wretches.” However, only “such savages” under 10 would be allowed into the seminary, “before evil habits have taken a deep root.”
Similarly, Berkeley believed that slavery was the best way to Christianize Black people and vigorously declared in his Bermuda proposal that enslaved people “to the infamy of England, and scandal of the world, continue Heathen under Christian masters,” because they had not been converted. To baptize enslaved people, he wrote, would be to the benefit of “their masters.” He concluded, “their slaves would only become better slaves by being Christian.”
And so on. No one, by the way, is suggesting we collectively cancel Berkeley, one of the greatest metaphysical thinkers in the history of the West. Even I, as an African-American, acknowledge his intellectual accomplishments. In the pantheon of thinkers he will, to be sure, remain. But it does raise grave questions about, perhaps, the limits of abstract philosophical thinking and the degree to which it contributes to dehumanization. Is that what is going on here? How are we to think of The Right Reverend George Berkeley, Late Lord Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, author of A Letter Concerning Toleration?
The conversation will, of course, continue. And I can think of no better place for that conversation to continue than in the University systems throughout the West. The University of California at Berkeley, one of America’s most competitive public universities, will soon have to have a serious conversation on this very same subject.
One final note about moral reckonings at Universities. Earlier this year, Trinity College Dublin also returned 13 skulls stolen a century ago from the Irish island of Inishbofin. It is perhaps a sign of our collective humanitarian growth — and the moral seriousness of universities — that the colonial-era violations of the ancestral remains of a people is now regarded with opprobrium.
Does Trinity’s return of the stolen skulls of a poor people from a remote island open up other cases of wealthy universities rethinking their possession of ancestral remains? And is the missing skull of Geronimo in the possession of Yale's Skull and Bones society? From 2009, in the New York Times:
The descendants of Geronimo have sued Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University with ties to the Bush family, charging that its members robbed his grave in 1918 and have kept his skull in a glass case ever since.
The claim is part of a lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington on Tuesday, the 100th anniversary of Geronimo’s death. The Apache warrior’s heirs are seeking to recover all his remains, wherever they may be, and have them transferred to a new grave at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico, where Geronimo was born and wished to be interred.
“I believe strongly from my heart that his spirit was never released,” Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo, 61, told reporters Tuesday at the National Press Club.
The lawsuit never resolved the question of Geronimo’s remains. Legend holds that Prescott Bush, the father of George HW Bush, stole the head and some bones from Chief Geronimo, the great leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Ndendahe Apache people, and brought it to the headquarters of the Skull and Bones secret society. It remains an unsolved mystery, one that (also) involves Yale University. From Diane Orson of NPR:
For decades, mystery has surrounded an elite secret society at Yale University called the Order of Skull and Bones. One of the organizations most storied legends involves the skull of Apache warrior Geronimo, who died in 1909 after two decades as a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Okla.
As the story goes, nine years after Geronimo's death, Skull and Bones members who were stationed at the army outpost dug up the warrior's grave and stole his skull, as well as some bones and other personal relics. They then sprinted the remains away to New Haven, Conn., and allegedly stashed the skull at the society's clubhouse, the Skull and Bones Tomb.
boola boola.
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