Monday
Last week I promised a response to a Princeton historian who supposedly (this according to how I heard him characterized) was attacking Greek and Roman classics as ““instrumental to the invention of ‘whiteness.” While the New York Times article triggered a passionate defense of the classics from University of Chicago classicist Shadi Bartsch, it turns out that Haitian-born Dan-el Padilla Peralta has been saying saying no such thing–at least if, by “instrumental,” the texts are somehow held responsible for whiteness’ invention. True, fascists have used classic texts to promote white supremacy, but that’s another matter.
As Sir Philip Sidney would say, texts can be abused in the same way that a physician can use his knowledge of physic to poison or to cure, that a preacher can use God’s word to breed heresy or raise people up, and that a man can use a sword to kill his father or defend his prince and country.
It so happens that Padilla is a historian rather than a literary scholar so he’s talking more about the “ideal of Rome” and the “ideal of golden age Athens” rather than Virgil and Sophocles. Still, many have enshrined the political ideals no less than the literary works. The New York Times article profiling Padilla provides some examples of how the far right has been misusing history:
Classics had been embraced by the far right, whose members held up the ancient Greeks and Romans as the originators of so-called white culture. Marchers in Charlottesville, Va., carried flags bearing a symbol of the Roman state; online reactionaries adopted classical pseudonyms; the white-supremacist website Stormfront displayed an image of the Parthenon alongside the tagline “Every month is white history month.”
Chicago’s Bartsch offers another example, pointing out the Capitol invasion rioters who
wore Greek helmets and carried flags with the phrase “molon labe” (“come and get our weapons”). This distorted reference to the Spartan stand against the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. reflects the supremacist belief that the Spartans saved “the white race” from barbarians.
Apparently the only reason that Padilla attracted publicity is because the alt-right wants to add him to their culture war battles. First Mr. Potato Head, then Dr. Seuss, now Cicero. Rightwing publication Breitbart seized on the following instance of an independent historian confronting Padilla at a conference:
She protested it was imperative to stand up for the classics as the political, literary and philosophical foundation of European and American culture: “It’s Western civilization. It matters because it’s the West.” Hadn’t classics given us the concepts of liberty, equality and democracy?
One panelist tried to interject, but Williams pressed on, her voice becoming harsh and staccato as the tide in the room moved against her. “I believe in merit. I don’t look at the color of the author.” She pointed a finger in Padilla’s direction. “You may have got your job because you’re Black,” Williams said, “but I would prefer to think you got your job because of merit.”
To which Padilla replied,
Here’s what I have to say about the vision of classics that you outlined. I want nothing to do with it. I hope the field dies that you’ve outlined, and that it dies as swiftly as possible.
Padilla is talking about a vision of classics that has ignored, among other things, the role that slavery played in the Roman empire, which his own scholarship has now illuminated. That he himself is the descendant of slaves shows why it’s so important to have diversity within the university ranks: people of color often open up perspectives that previous people have downplayed.
Chicago’s Shadi Bartsch is another breath of fresh air. By noting how different historical actors have use The Aeneid and The Odyssey for their own ends (I blog about that here), she shows how they remained relevant. If, in enshrining them, we were to confine them to the dusty shelves of a museum, we would destroy them just as effectively as if we outright banned them. Maybe more so since banned works are more likely to attract attention.
Anyway, history and literature are not served when people either demonize or worship them. Scholars like Padilla and Barsch, with their balanced approaches, are more likely to save the field of classics than destroy it. The real enemy, however, may be, not fascist appropriation, but budget cuts, which is leftwing scholar Cornel West’s lament in another Washington Post article.
His target is Howard University dissolving its classics department on the grounds of “educational prioritization.” Writing in collaboration with Jeremy Tate, West observes,
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classic 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.
West gives two dramatic examples of how classics served the cause of freedom:
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.”
As an aside, I can report that in 1981 I taught an Introduction to World Literature course at King’s alma mater, Morehouse College, and so feel indirectly connected with his use of Plato. I don’t know if that course is still required of all students but hope that it is. But back to West and Tate, who write,
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.
And further on:
The removal of the classics is a sign that we, as a culture, have embraced from the youngest age utilitarian schooling at the expense of soul-forming education. To end this spiritual catastrophe, we must restore true education, mobilizing all of the intellectual and moral resources we can to create human beings of courage, vision and civic virtue.
The authors conclude,
Engaging with the classics and with our civilizational heritage is the means to finding our true voice. It is how we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great.
Amen!