Resisting attempts to woke-ify the Classics
My husband and I are big on books. Forget tech gadgets or "smart" anything or even television (we haven't owned a TV set since 1992) – we prefer books. At one point we owned about 5,000 volumes, stuffed into every nook and cranny of our house. When we downsized to a smaller place about three and a half years ago, we pared that down to our current inventory of about 2,500 titles.
One of my pride and joys in our personal home library is the complete set of the Harvard Classics, purchased for $1 per volume at a library sale many years ago. They make for surprisingly fascinating reading. I could NOT get into Adam Smith's seminal "Wealth of Nations," despite the impact it's had on modern economics. The "Golden Sayings of Epictetus"? Fascinating. The Greek dramas? Equally fascinating (who'da thunk?). The Greek comedies? I was clueless. But dipping into these books is both a link to the foundation of Western civilization as well as a glimpse into the human mind through the millennia.
Years ago when we were homeschooling our kids, dinner time often became fact-checking time. We would be discussing a subject, questions would arise, and next thing you know there would be volumes of encyclopedias or reference books or even novels appearing on the kitchen table. ("What were the names of the female cousins Jane Eyre meets toward the end of the book?") Nowadays all this information is available on the ubiquitous smartphone (which we don't own), but back then we depended on our personal library to find out.
That love of books has never waned. Even today my standard request for Christmas is a $100 gift certificate to a used book store. The older I get, the more I marvel at how little value people place on a home library for both reference and entertainment. Who doesn't want to just be able to pluck a book off the shelf and dive in? Books don't have to be expensive. Ninety-nine percent of our books were purchased secondhand.
One of the advantages of owning a book – a physical, paper, hold-it-in-your-hand book – is once possessed, no one can take it away, alter it, or ban it. In an era where everything is being woke-ified, physical possession of our books is more important than ever.
This issue was highlighted last week when it came out that some Ivy League professors were receiving $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to apply "critical race studies" to the classics. The complaint, apparently, is there is too much "whiteness" in these books.
The concept for the deconstruction of the classics started with a conference in 2017. The original description said, "The inaugural event invited participants to unabashedly center race and ethnicity in their research in order to counter the dangerously universalizing pretensions of 'Western Civilization' and other white supremacist ideologies suffusing the academy."
What kinds of books are in the crosshairs? The article didn't say, in part because the universities didn't respond to the reporter's request for more information.
Will classic literature be improved by this process? Of course not. That's the point. It's just another taxpayer-funded project to pound another nail into the coffin of Western civilization. Whether it's "Gone With the Wind" or "Robin Hood" or "Life on the Mississippi" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" or Shakespeare's plays, none of this literature will be improved by a woke-ification process. None. Guaranteed. Ain't it grand?
More importantly, there will be nothing of worth to replace these classics. That's why they're classics – they've stood the test of time.
Boise State political science professor Scott Yenor criticized the trend to rewrite classic literature. "We turn to the classics in order to have our prejudices challenged, not simply to confirm them," he said. "The classics among the Greeks spoke to the universal in man, not to the particularities that obsess us today. Clearly it is the job of teachers to ensure that minorities and really all students take the ideas of the great authors seriously, instead of only paying attention to our strange obsession with race and ethnicity. When race is so elevated, the results are predictable: The classics are corrupted and no one will be better off for it."
Seen in this light, our personal library of secondhand books just became far more valuable. I don't want our classics woke-ified. I want them just the way they are, a snapshot of cultural norms and values reflecting the times. (I'm still kicking myself for not getting the complete collection of Dr. Seuss books before the left decided to attack them for being "steeped in racism and harmful stereotypes.")
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Columnist Dennis Prager has stated that "leftism destroys everything it touches" including universities, the arts, literature, late-night television, religion, free speech, race, the Boy Scouts and basic human biology. He maintains the left attacks freedom, beauty, reason, the family, economic well-being and even goodness. It's hard to argue his point.
Why does the left destroy everything it touches, wonders Prager? He concludes, "Because it thinks America is essentially a bad country. But America is only bad compared to Utopia; and the left is Utopian."
To this I would add: Since Utopia doesn't exist, the left will destroy its way into the antithesis of Utopia, namely a perpetual state of misery. The left has already achieved this state for itself (the left, in general, delights in misery), and it's determined to bring everyone else down to its level. It's like the left wants to cultivate ignorance (having captured the education system, they're succeeding in that goal). Toward that end, they must rewrite classic literature to achieve its perceived state of Utopia/misery.
Speaking of classic literature, here's a quote from George Orwell's book "1984": "Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."
I rest my case. The left destroys everything it touches. Now excuse me while I dive into "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" – again.
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