Where It Leads

Trying to mount a defense of the Greek and Latin classics against the onslaught of criticism launched by Wokedom against them, Andrew Sullivan does make one excellent observation: if you’re going to throw them out as supportive of white supremacy, you’ll also need to discard famous black figures who endorsed them. That would include Martin Luther King, Jr.:

One of the more eye-opening documents you can find online is Martin Luther King Jr’s hand-written syllabus for a seminar he was teaching at Morehouse College in 1962. It’s a glimpse of what King believed an educated black man should know. It’s a challenging list: Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s City of God, all the way to Bentham and Mill. There’s also a copy of the exam questions he set. Among them: “List and evaluate the radical ideas presented in Plato’s Republic”; “State and evaluate Aristotle’s view of slavery.”

What King grasped, it seems to me, is the core meaning of a liberal education, the faith that ideas can transcend space and time and culture and race.

and W. E. B. Du Bois whom he quotes:

I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

If you’re going to cancel Plato and Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Milton, you’ll need to cancel King and Du Bois, too.

Don’t dismiss the move to cancel anyone not explicitly “anti-racist” as an irrelevant crackpot fringe. It’s informing the curricula in many public school systems and has motivated mass renamings in more than one public school system.

I should also mention that neither the Hebrew Bible nor the New Testament are explicitly anti-racist but they’re not alone. Not only are Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism tolerant of slavery, at least there is presently no country with a Christian (or post-Christian) majority in which slavery is practiced openly and without legal consequences. Meanwhile slavery is practiced openly in some countries with Muslim and Hindu majorities and although it’s illegal in China slavery in all but name continues to be practiced there.

Returning to Mr. Sullivan’s original subject, for the ancients Greek, Roman, or Egyptian were not descriptions of races, ethnic groups, or even bloodlines. They were linguistic communities. Egypt was wherever the Egyptian language was spoken. That’s somewhat the way in which “Arabic” is used now. Anywhere in which Arabic is spoken by the majority of people is an Arab country.

My concerns about Wokedom are that a) I think the standards that they’re applying are artificial and capricious and b) I don’t believe that what they’re advocating leads to a good place.