Tonight people will gather for Burns Night to remember one of Scotland’s national heroes. But should this man’s flaws cause us to rethink his place in national mythmaking and nationalism in general?

Last month Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—” was scrubbed from a mural at Manchester University because students believed that Kipling stood “for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights.” But his “The Ballad of East and West” can hardly be racism.