By Samuel Buntz
Friday, August 25, 2017
When the white supremacists assembled on the pleasant
greens of Charlottesville were not spluttering racial invective and inciting
violence, they occasionally tried to explain their ideology—which, admittedly,
does not differ greatly from spluttering racial invective and inciting
violence. Yet there is a sliver of argument amid all that hate.
Some have taken to wearing T-shirts urging us to “Defend
Europe” or “Defend the West.” These statements imitate conservative arguments
about preserving Western civilization against decline, while contradicting the
meaning of those arguments and tarnishing them with racist associations. The
insights of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson, Sappho and Leo Tolstoy are
not valuable because of their association with an identity. They are valuable
because they represent the mind discerning Truth.
The white supremacist pose towards cultural “defense” is
a shame and a sham, while the project of defending Western, Eastern, and
African civilization against ignorance and decadence is well worth pursuing. By
yoking the idea of civilization to racial collectivism, white supremacists do
immense violence to the very idea of culture.
Dead White Males
and Their Ignorant Champions
Consider the phrase “Dead white males,” often used by
campus leftists to disparage and dismiss the Western canon (particularly,
collegiate “Great Books” courses) by implying that “The Divine Comedy,”
“Hamlet,” and the rest are simply the stale work of lame, boring, white guys
trying to mansplain the human condition. Eager to reflect the worst possible
version of an argument for the West, the white identity-obsessed embrace only
the supposed whiteness and maleness of Western culture.
In response, the identity-obsessed wing of the Left
rejects Western culture based on that same white identity. The white
nationalists praise Richard Wagner’s music and credit the white race with
“great literature,” as white supremacist leader Richard Spencer did in a recent
interview, which insults the individuality of genius, something wholly
unrelated to race. As for the campus Left, the woke millennial of today has no
need for such literary intrusions on the urgent crises of the moment: Frat guy
X wore a sombrero to the Cinco de Mayo cookout. What penetrating light can John
Donne shine on such violations?
Here is Emerson expressing an important idea now in
jeopardy from white nationalists and the campus Left: “It is only as a man puts
off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see him to be strong and to
prevail. He is weaker by every recruit to his banner. Is not a man better than
a town?” A racial collectivist cannot grasp this principle, common to classical
liberalism and modern conservatism. The group does not attract our sympathy as
directly as the individual.
While not yet great in numbers, racial collectivists are
poisoning the national discourse by associating any defense of a Western
thinker with a defense of white identity. Of course, in the trite phrase “Dead
white males,” it isn’t the whiteness or maleness that matters. African-American
writers like W.E.B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston are part of the Western
canon, and so are Latin Americans like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz,
to name just a few. What matters, solely, is the “dead” part of the formulation:
the fact that the “dead” past can still speak to the living present.
The specter of Charlottesville will only shore up the far
Left’s argument that the canon consists of useless, oppressive white people
knowledge. But between the pages of Homer and Dante, we actually encounter
universal truths—not just moral advice, but eternally valid observations about
the way people are. Archetypes of
character. The landscape of the soul. Explorations of identity that go beyond
race and sex and focus on inward identity.
As T.S. Eliot once put it, “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with
fire beyond the language of the living.” Through their books, the dead are
still relevant. In fact, they’re still alive.
Both Identity
Groups Are Arguing about Time
Look at the effects of identity politics of a different
stripe. A quick note, first: I want to make it clear that I’m not drawing a
moral equivalence between the campus Left and white supremacists.
Identity-driven thinking fuels both movements, but I assume highly misguided
positive intentions from the former and actively evil intentions from the
latter.
This example isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it played out
over and over again on college campuses as students call for the removal of a
revered “dead white male.” In 2016, students at the University of Pennsylvania
stormed the English Department and replaced a portrait of Shakespeare with one
of Audre Lorde, a black feminist whose influence on the English language has
been decidedly less extensive.
To her supporters, it is Lorde’s identity that matters,
not her ideas, literary merits, or insights into character. Those weren’t part
of the debate. No one bothered to dispute Shakespeare’s literary eminence. They
simply shrugged it aside. After all, what could this dead, wordy lame-wad
possibly tell us about racism? (cough, “Othello,” cough). Today, 400 years of
influence are hopelessly outclassed by the academic cred that comes from being
non-white and a lesbian. Would Lorde appreciate having her literary significance
based entirely on these non-literary criteria?
The racial collectivist element from white supremacists
and the campus Left are both arguing about how we interpret time. The
supremacists want to return to an idealized past. The worst form this takes in
America is nostalgia for the slave-owning South. They want to abolish the
present in favor of a past that never really was, nor could be.
This is a dark mirror image of the campus Left’s desire
to eliminate the past (and present) in favor of an idealized future. Both sides refuse to seek
meaning in the living present. They want to make an entirely fresh start and
begin again at “Year Zero” like the Khmer Rouge, erasing all of history.
Yet history will remain stubbornly there, in its
unchangeable pattern, whether acknowledged or not. The French Revolutionaries
too, in their war against the Christian past, attempted to rewrite the days of
the week, eliminating the Sabbath and changing the number of weekdays from
seven to ten. Instead of naming the days in the Greek and Roman tradition, as
in most romance languages, they boringly reduced the names to “primidi,”
“duodi,” “tridi,” etc.—meaning “first day,” “second day,” “third day,” and so
on.
In China, the Cultural Revolution demolished vast numbers
of priceless statues and artifacts spanning thousands of years of history, and
destroyed nearly all the monasteries in Tibet. This was in the name of rooting
out “old ways of thinking.”
To give a smaller and less lethal example: although a
witty and brilliant writer, the socialist George Bernard Shaw wanted to reform
English spelling to be entirely phonetic (you would spell “enough” as “enuf”).
This would have had a similar effect to altering the calendar—changing all
words to pure phonetic spelling destroys the sense of their root meanings and
linguistic background. While a seemingly eccentric example, the impact of such
a change would be huge. It would leach history out of the words.
The Past Is a
Different and Horrible Place
The erasure of the names “Jefferson” and “Jackson” from
the Democratic Party’s former Jefferson and Jackson dinners is an infinitely
milder example than Pol Pot’s killing fields, but it evidences the creeping
influence of a mentality that thinks the way to get to the future is by making
war on the past. Along similar lines, Al Sharpton called for abandoning the
Jefferson Memorial during a Charlie Rose interview on August 15. Both
presidents were too compromised by their historical context to have their
present-day relevance noted, let alone proclaimed.
Jefferson’s moral failings receive more attention than
the ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and his Virginia Statute
for Religious Freedom, even though those ideas have had a much greater impact
on history than the man’s flaws. If Jefferson had lived up to his ideals, he
would not have had those failings, but he still possessed valor in stating a
vision that was ahead of its time.
Sadly, in their fervor for identity, these fringe
movements have shuffled aside words like “wisdom,” “insight,” “character,”
“personality,” and “human nature.” (“Ideas” isn’t doing well, either.)
Consequently, the far Left can’t look to the past for anything—it can barely even summon the effort to look to FDR. Too
“problematic.” Even Karl Marx and Eugene Debs are likely “problematic” by their
standards.
The campus Left unfortunately can’t see history as a
crucible of pain that gives birth to enduring ideas and beauty. It only sees
the waste and shame of oppression and victimization. Neo-Nazis revel in
oppressing and victimizing people, which provides ammunition to the campus
Left’s arguments. From there, it’s a short leap to assume that everything that
has ever happened has been a sorry mistake. The only hope is to erase the past
and replace it with a perfect present, unrelated to all that went before it.
What Abolishing
the Past Means for Us
Of course, to create an ideal present you have to abolish
the actual present—as the Khmer Rouge attempted to do with their genocidal
“Year Zero” schemes. Pol Pot’s minions are an obviously extreme example: the
campus Left lacks the martial spirit of Communism and prefers to wage its war
on time through higher education and the media. But in both cases, it’s the
future, the golden future, that truly matters. Yet the future has one major demerit:
it never arrives.
We are confronted instead by this strange, concrete,
irritating, obstinate thing: reality. Frustratingly, it turns out that the
peasants aren’t entirely keen on having their farms and markets collectivized.
But if we cut off a few more heads, build a few more piles of skulls, we’ll get
to that Never Never Land. A similar kind of arrogance is present in erasing the
cultural past and in filling mass graves. Both activities put too much faith in
the human ego and its ability to build an entirely new culture from scratch. It
needs a stronger foundation.
An enlightened person of any political persuasion can
take the best approach: turning to the past’s accumulated wisdom and using it
to enliven and refresh the present. He or she approaches it as a source of
strength.
After all, that’s the fatal flaw in the campus Left and
white nationalist designs. They think they can deny the wealth of mental and
spiritual resources provided by individual genius (distinct from race and
gender) and turn to some new set of resources. Yet, judging by the increasingly
shrill and anxious tone of discourse, they are desperately short on real
thoughts.
Refusing acquaintance with ideas, since they were formed
in the nasty old past or conceived by Jews, does not seem like a sturdy program
for generating new ones: if innovative thinkers stand on the shoulders of
giants, identity-based collectivists are trying to kill the giant. In the end,
they will be left trying to re-invent the wheel. The task of recovering past
wisdom will remain, as always, for the solitary individual, who seeks out the
wisdom of the dead and makes it live again. As William Faulkner said, “The past
is never dead. It’s not even past.”
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