Should We Cancel All Dead White Men?
The battle between abundance and scarcity.
Written by N. Gonsalves (M.Ed.) and edited by: Leandre Larouche of Trivium Writing.
“I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension”
What do we do about all the dead white men in our curriculum? A recent trend in the culture wars ostensibly aims to balance perspectives between those considered to be the founding fathers of most academic subjects with marginalized voices left out of the standard post-secondary curricula. In practical application, the trend has taken the form of boycotting thinkers identified as male and caucasian—especially if they’re old or dead!. The rationalization for challenging the prominent role of such thinkers is based on the belief that they represent a euro-centric, white and male perspective that ignores the humanity of women and marginalized peoples.
It is indeed counterproductive to offer unreflective reverence to a select group of thinkers (1) and become myopic in our worldview. Dogma about a limited canon of knowledge can only take us so far. And as a matter of fact, contemporary scholarship has contributed in meaningful ways to our academic discourse. We should strive to add those contributions to the plethora of sources from which we develop our understanding on any given subject. But while there is little doubt that the voices, perspectives and scholarship of marginalized peoples should be included in standard curricula, the practice of subtracting rather than adding to the body of knowledge available to learners is a problematic trend for many reasons.
Let’s first address the elephant in the room: many of the thinkers commonly considered the behemoths of academic disciplines were imperfect human beings, and some were downright abhorrent in their disposition when measured against contemporary social values. Therein lies the problem, however. It is a curious strategy to posthumously condemn someone on the basis of a social standard that did not exist in their time.
Abiding by a social standard implies a rational choice between competing perspectives, but how does one choose a perspective that is not yet a common social standard? Is it really justified, then, to remove someone from the canon because they didn’t measure up to our current standard? Does the fact that they shared their contemporaries’ values invalidate their academic work?
Consider this thought experiment to illustrate the point:
Before you make your next statement, perform your next action or express your next opinion, evaluate how your thoughts, actions and opinions will be judged a couple of centuries from today. Then act in accordance with what a future society would consider acceptable.
Can you identify the challenge with such a strategy? Consider how you might even answer such a question; logically, you would have to presume to know what social values will remain unchanged, anticipate how future social movements will alter the prevailing social attitudes of that time and then make a range of assumptions about what a future generation, yet to exist, would find socially acceptable.
Ultimately, you would end up stacking assumption over assumption and give priority and preference to your own current values and morals as a guiding principle. So why would people in any other time approach this situation any differently?
Let me be very clear, though: I am not saying that some past attitudes and behaviours aren’t morally reprehensible to us in the twenty-first century. I am definitely not saying we should celebrate the atrocities that were inflicted upon millions of humans over history. What I am arguing against is the need to erase or censor every thought, opinion and theory on the basis that its creator was a product of their time and failed to meet the basic standards of decency that we expect in our times.
It goes without saying, thinkers had no way of knowing the prevailing social values of a twenty-first century society. They too would have been dumbfounded by the thought experiment I posed earlier. Arguably, they too might have made assumptions that the world would remain fairly consistent and their assumptions would have been based on giving their own morals and values priority and preference.
Consider that the world has followed strict, arbitrary and coercive hierarchies for most of known human history; this statement was true well into the twentieth century and in many places within our global community that statement is still true today.
In order for us to contend with the society we live in, we need to understand the systems that inform and structure it. Regardless of how we perceive previous generations, it is impossible to get away from the reality that much of western morality, political thought and social structures are based upon the teachings, writings and canonical theories of the founding fathers (1), flaws and all.
Were there great thinkers within the population of marginalized people whose voices were muted? Of that I have no doubt. And while we should strive to find these voices and bring them to life, we shouldn’t, by the same token, systematically reject the voices of scholars who, despite their influential work, turned out to be on the wrong side of moral history. Life has not always been equal, nor is it universally equal today. The history of the world is such, and in many ways the circumstances of our present (wishing it wasn’t so) does not change it.
But this begs the question: why study dead white men? Lindsay Johns, the Head of Arts and Culture and a fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African-American Research at Harvard University, whose main research interests include the black canon, the intersection of culture and race, and social mobility (2), argues that decolonizing the white western eurocentric canon is not a well informed decision for a number of reasons.
First, the past is unchangeable and needs to be accepted with a critical eye that promotes learning from the numerous practical applications it provides. Second, he argues that despite any character shortcomings, these thinkers’ ideas have stood the test of time because they had value and provided meaningful additions to human understanding (2). In other words, separating the quality of the idea from the person is a useful lesson in objectivity. Third and most saliently, he argues that solely utilizing representation based on skin colour, gender or sexuality is puerile and disingenuous.
Ultimately, accepting the thinkers of yesteryear and desiring to include contemporary scholarship does not have to be mutually exclusive; both can simultaneously exist and add value to our learning and understanding (2).
To argue that people of colour or historically marginalized people are one monolithic group who require only to hear and learn from our own, is both paternalistic and degrading. It fails to appreciate the intellectual diversity we have as humans. It fails to acknowledge our diversity of thought and opinion. And, most critically, it assumes that the colour of our skin or our shared history of subjugations makes us intellectually incapable of objective reason and nuanced discourse.
Now, it begs the question, why would people seek to erase dead white men when they could simply add marginalized voices. Though I can only make an educated guess, it is worth trying to answer this question.
The only good reason why we would want to erase dead white men as opposed to simply adding marginalized voices is to escape the inherent complexity of human nature. By showing competing perspectives, we inevitably run into complicated conundrums. We must be extremely critical and show a high degree of academic rigour.
Unfortunately, when we deal with such emotionally loaded topics, it’s easy to seek the easy way out. It’s easy to pick one side over the other because it feels right—though it isn’t right. Rather than unpacking the complexity of ideas, times, and phenomena, we cast blame, we shame, and we lament. In such an endeavour we wallow in righteous anger, but we never accomplish anything meaningful. We fail to do the very job we were meant to do—to educate.
We should approach life from a mindset of abundance, not scarcity. With a commitment to adding, not subtracting, from the vast amount of knowledge available to us. It can only help us reason more effectively, judge more critically and understand more completely.
I identify as a person of colour. I also identify as a husband, a father, an academic, a bibliophile and a dog lover. The intersections of all my identities are unique to me as they are to millions of others. But many people, myself included, reject the notion that the colour of my skin determines who I should read and what knowledge I should imbibe.
We are more than the colour of our skin, more than our gender, and more than our sexuality. We are people capable of hearing thoughts and ideas from others who do not look like us. And we are capable of being critical toward these ideas.
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(The views contained in this article are solely those of the author, intended for entertainment and opinion based editorials purposes only. They do not represent the views of any organization we are otherwise associated with.)
