More Rumblings at the National Trust

Having posted earlier about the National Trust and the path it appears to be taking I now see in a link from The Independent that some of its members are getting irritated. The report can be read at Subscribers cancel National Trust memberships accusing organisation of ‘getting political’ over slavery. Being The Independent it is, of course, favourable to that which is politically correct but it does show that the ‘culture war’ has made its way into the National Trust. The seemingly obsessive contemporary concern to highlight the fact of slavery in the time when many country houses were being built and furnished is a good example of Presentism. That is to say the idea that we twenty first century beings, being modern and enlightened, know so much more about being humane than people in the past - and that we are entitled to deconstruct and indeed abolish a past about which the main advocates of changing attitudes to such things are either unhealthily obsessed or staggeringly ignorant.