Monday
One of my conservative readers wrote me recently asking me how I felt about leftist insistence that Virginia governor Ralph Northam resign for having posted a racist picture in his medical school yearbook years ago. After all, hasn’t Northam lived a fairly exemplary life since then? The reader also sent me a Quillette article about purity policing, which concludes as follows:
None of this should be taken to suggest that we should not try to improve our culture and promote tolerance and respect. It just means that we shouldn’t try to destroy people who, at some point in their life, had neurons firing in the brain differently, and so didn’t share our exact worldview about what is offensive and what isn’t.
The Left claims to believe in compassion and rehabilitation—and purports to represent the broad working class of America. The more it demands the personal destruction of individuals who committed offensive but symbolic acts, the more hollow these representations appear.
Later, my reader sent a second article that brings the point home in another way. Brian Morton of Sarah Lawrence’s writing program tells of a student throwing Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth in the trash for the author’s anti-Semitism:
The student explained that he had been sailing along until he came to a description of one of Lily’s suitors, Simon Rosedale: “a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with … small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.” At that point, the student said, he lost sympathy not only for Lily, but for the novel as a whole.
As a professor of early British literature, I of course enthuse about works that contain material that offends us today. My defense is that the classics are much more than the ugly sentiments found in them, and we need to separate out the good from the bad.
Not all readers agree. For example, I was recently taken to task for defending Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:
No Shakespeare’s shylock remains antisemitic crap to this day and you dear Christian professor w yr PhD are an American antisemite to this day too deep down. It shows. Get thee to a nunnery.
I countered by citing Stephen Greenblatt’s defense of the play, which occurs within an account of his own brush with anti-Semitism at Princeton. Rather than defend myself at this juncture, however, I’m more interested in determining when one should drop a metaphorical death sentence on someone and when one should be understanding.
I’m grateful that I have had friends point out to me where I have been insensitive with regard to race, gender, class, religion, and sexual identity. Some of what I have thought and said over the years now makes me blush crimson upon reflection, but people were merciful, even when it took me years to hear what they were saying. In other words, I’m all in favor of more understanding.
As tempting as it may be to occupy the high moral ground, it’s always possible to find someone with grievances you are blind to and who can call you out in turn. I make this point when teaching Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, where no one, including the narrator Behn and the slave prince Oroonoko, is immune from exploiting others. When we pronounce judgment, then, it is good to do so with a fair amount of humility and to see the mote in our own eye. Morton advises such an approach when it comes to literature:
If we arm ourselves with a little bit of knowledge and a little bit of curiosity (those essential tools of the time-traveler), we’ll be able to see the writers of the past more clearly when we visit them, and see ourselves more clearly when we get back. We’ll be able to appreciate that in their limited ways, sometimes seeing beyond the prejudices of their age, sometimes unable to do so, they — the ones worth reading — were trying to make the world more human, just as we, in our own limited ways, are also trying to do.
I’m not suggesting that we suspend judgment altogether. If there’s a consistent pattern of misbehavior, then there must be consequences. It’s a balancing act that Squire Allworthy teaches Tom Jones at the end of the novel. Tom is only too ready to forgive his half-brother Blifil, who has attempted to have him hanged (!). Allworthy draws the line at that:
“Child,” cries Allworthy, “you carry this forgiving temper too far. Such mistaken mercy is not only weakness, but borders on injustice, and is very pernicious to society, as it encourages vice. The dishonesty of this fellow I might, perhaps, have pardoned, but never his ingratitude. And give me leave to say, when we suffer any temptation to atone for dishonesty itself, we are as candid and merciful as we ought to be; and so far I confess I have gone; for I have often pitied the fate of a highwayman, when I have been on the grand jury; and have more than once applied to the judge on the behalf of such as have had any mitigating circumstances in their case; but when dishonesty is attended with any blacker crime, such as cruelty, murder, ingratitude, or the like, compassion and forgiveness then become faults. I am convinced the fellow is a villain, and he shall be punished; at least as far as I can punish him.”
A number of years ago, Times art critic Robert Hughes accused both the left and the right of excessively indulging in moral indignation. For the left it was political correctness, for the right it was family values rhetoric, and both he traced back to America’s Puritan roots. Whether or not he’s right about the origins, it’s certainly the case that we should strive to see the full humanity in others. Literature helps us do so.
Oh, and on those grounds I think Northam should be given another chance. He hasn’t pursued racist policies as governor and may do some good.