The act of naming a building or place is first and foremost an honouring of worth. It is a positive judgment by one generation on the contribution of the honoree, a political statement arising from a particular time and context, but, as such, subject to the inevitable re-evaluation of history.
The decision by the board of Trinity College Dublin to “dename” the Berkeley Library is precisely that. It is a more nuanced understanding of the legacy of esteemed philosopher and former college librarian Bishop George Berkeley. The board concluded that, on balance, the context of the bishop’s support for slavery, and ownership of slaves on his estate in Rhode Island, makes the library’s name “inconsistent with the university’s core values”.
It will adopt a “retain-and-explain” approach to a stained-glass window commemorating him and continue to teach his philosophical work. His immaterialism – the conviction that matter is only to be understood as a product of thought – provided the basis of a key strand of epistemological thought, an alternative to Descartes and Locke’s dualism and Hobbes’s materialism.
The denaming process is part of a worldwide re-evaluation of the legacy of slavery and a more general acceptance that emblematic reminders are more than historical curiosities. On Thursday the US military base Fort Lee in Virginia became Fort Gregg-Adams after two black officers whose struggles paved the way for a more inclusive military. Congress finally parted company with the myth of the noble Confederate in 2021, establishing a commission which has renamed nine major bases named after Confederate generals like Lee.
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Trinity’s decision, based on a recommendation from its Legacies Review Working Group and pressure from students, has been criticised by some as virtue signalling and as succumbing to a “woke culture”. But a failure to respond to a genuine emerging consensus would be to signal, at best, an indifference to slavery’s continued malign legacy and, at worst, tacit support for the idea that this is not our problem.