Defying unjust laws, he read in secret
Cornel West and Jeremy Tate in the Post last April:
Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
Sadly, in our culture’s conception, the crimes of the West have become so central that it’s hard to keep track of the best of the West. We must be vigilant and draw the distinction between Western civilization and philosophy on the one hand, and Western crimes on the other. The crimes spring from certain philosophies and certain aspects of the civilization, not all of them.
The Western canon is, more than anything, a conversation among great thinkers over generations that grows richer the more we add our own voices and the excellence of voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America and everywhere else in the world. We should never cancel voices in this conversation, whether that voice is Homer or students at Howard University. For this is no ordinary discussion.
Don’t cancel the discussion, join it, expand it, add to it, improve it.
Attempts to cancel the literary canon strike me as little different from complaining about someone’s speaking a language you don’t personally understand. Having English/literature profs assign books they favor or deem important to their students utterly fails to look at what a canon is and does.
A literary canon is more than just a list of books “wot we fink is good innit” or even a list of books we think are of exceptional quality. A canon forms the basis for a shared corpus from which we derive a language of symbols, idioms, and archetypes. That language, however, falls on deaf ears when the listener is unfamiliar with the canon. Allusion to canon can express (or aid in the expression of) complex ideas, differentiate among subtle shades of nuance, and grapple with ineffable enormities. In truth, it is not the quality of individual canonical texts that matters, but instead the breadth of life to which the whole applies. One might think this suggests that we should continually add to the canon, but there is a practical limit to a canon’s size: education.
To best serve its function, a canon should be broad in scope, so as to maximize its descriptive relevance. On the other hand, in order to use the canon, people must be able to read the whole of it. In fact, merely reading it is insufficient, much as reading a Russian vocabulary list is insufficient to let one understand Russian (let alone speak it). To speak the canon requires engaging with the canon, and so the canon must not be of a size too unmanageable to fit within a typical education. It is partly the fact that elements of the canon have been studied, puzzled over, loved, loathed, told and retold in a thousand variations, forgotten, rediscovered, torn apart, and reassembled that lets them punch above their weight vis-a-vis the depth and breadth they provide.
In any period of history, political control has rested on control of information. Demagogues, jailers and authoritarians have known that. So they have purged libraries, burned books, got rid of dissidents and freethinkers, and have censored and bludgeoned all the arts.
As the old German student song put it so well: Die Gedanken Sind Frei: Thoughts are free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbwQXVcbkU0
At least that’s how it used to be, back in the pre-posttruth era when facts still mattered…
More accurately, it rests on control of talking points and language.