Cancel culture: the road to obscurantism
Late last month, a Massachusetts high school teacher boasted on social media that she was, “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!”
In her view, Ancient Greece’s blind master storyteller, Homer, and his works, were guilty of “indulging and spreading sexism, racism, ableism, and Western-centrism”. She came to the conclusion that canceling the classics seemed to be the most effective way to make sure that today’s young generation could not, again in her view, be poisoned by the entirely fictional and mythical “sins” of Odysseus, Menelaus, and Priam.
Without engaging in a trial of Homer – including his intentions, morals, and even his very existence – during which many exculpatory pieces of evidence could be openly discussed, including the presence of strong and brave women in The Odyssey, the humanity of its defeated enemies, and Odysseus’ complete unawareness of the concept of “Westernism” or Western imperialism – it is clear that the author of The Iliad and Odyssey is far from being the only defendant in the iconoclastic court of cancel culture that is being pushed.
The movement represents a contemporary form of ostracism by advocating for the boycott of personalities or works which are deemed to have acted in a questionable manner or conveyed controversial ideas. While its supporters’ intentions, which are aimed at creating a more respectful and inclusive cultural environment, might be justified to some degree by noble motivations, their own extremism and acritical contemporary moral applications to people and works of cultural heritage from the distant past are highly problematic.
Along with Homer, other literary and artistic heavyweights, including Shakespeare to Cervantes – have been regularly attacked by an Inquisition-like group of radical moralists who utterly ignore the concepts of time and context and are unable to distinguish the difference between artifex and artifact.
The key assumption of these modern-day moral inquisitors is that it is not only possible, it is entirely necessary to apply and absolutize today’s many moral compasses across space and time. Accordingly, anything and anyone that does not fit the increasingly stringent contemporary tenets of taste and morals should be condemned to the ash heap of history and without the right of appeal.
The concept of casting these individuals and their works into oblivion is important when understanding the corrosive cancel culture movement. According to their logic, Homer, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Cervantes, and countless other giants of Western culture – and their irreplaceable contributions to the development of civilization – ought not to be discussed, criticized, contextualized, or confronted. Rather, they should be immediately canceled and condemned to a pre-emptive damnatio memoriae – a condemnation of memory.
This same perverse obscurantist logic was previously well-known during the Soviet Union when Boris Pasternak’s iconic Doctor Zhivago was deemed subversive and anti-Soviet by the state-owned press. That move later led to the humorous Russian saying, “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him”.
This attitude highlights the dangerous limits of the cancel culture movement and its need for the ‘safe spaces’ that are central to its iconoclastic tendencies and vindictive insecurities.
The movement’s incapacity to engage in dialogue and with our uneasy and problematic multiple pasts by relativizing a moral lens which is – by definition – the product of a given time and space. While love and hate, friendship and enmity, belief and faith are universal states of mind that we have in common with our most distant ancestors, the way they have been expressed and have manifested themselves across the ages vary greatly to a degree which is often incomprehensible and morally unacceptable to us. A good question for the cancel culturists is, will our way of views of historical and literary figures be acceptable to those who will come after us?’
The cancel culture’s inability to differentiate between Homer or Shakespeare as men of their times, whose pages speak to different generations in very different ways, and whose works carry multiple meanings and varying degrees of significance, is as dangerous an inexcusable as any of the pre-Rennaissance and pre-Enlightenment superstitions that kept much of humanity wallowing in a dark age for centuries.
The practical implication of this iconoclastic attitude is the imposition of collective ‘safe spaces’, whose borders are defined by the moral compass of a specific ‘cultural tribe’, on modern, complex, diverse, and multi-cultural societies whose universal and uncompromised applicability is assumed only by the members of that very tribe.
What we have witnessed in recent years is also a constant struggle within the cancel culture movement – a sort of war of religion between tribes of zealots accusing each other of not being pure enough in an endless search for the purest of the pure. The perverse effect of such a struggle is the growing cultural alienation and tribalization of Western societies that, instead of serving a productive cause, paradoxically empowers reactionaries and populist demagogues.
As I was reading the news about The Odyssey’s cancelation in a Massachusettes school, I recalled an episode involving one of Homer’s fellow Hellenes in Umberto Eco’s masterpiece The Name of the Rose.
During the apex of the thriller, which is set in medieval Italy, the novel’s protagonist and monk-investigator William of Baskerville discovers that the chain of mysterious killings in an Italian monastery are all connected to a dangerous volume – the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on Comedy, whose only surviving copy is hidden in the monastery’s library and whose pages have been poisoned to punish its sinful readers.
When asked about his motivations, the killer and blind monk Jorge de Burgos explains his iconoclastic fury in these terms: “Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith, because, without fear of the Devil, there is no more need of God.”
Burgos pushes for the ultimate destruction of Aristotle’s book on comedy by saying: “Laughter will remain the common man’s recreation. But what will happen if, because of this book, learned men were to pronounce it admissible to laugh at everything? Can we laugh at God? The world would relapse into chaos! Therefore, I seal that which was not to be said.”
According to the fundamentalist logic of Brother Jorge, the destruction of the book is justified by the protection of the social and religious order and – ultimately – by the salvation of his contemporaries and of the future generation.
In the 1986 movie based on Eco’s novel, one of the last scenes depicts an orgy of fire – started by Brother Jorge – destroying the monastery’s library and its enormous collection of books, and William of Baskerville – played by Sean Connery – engaged in a futile attempt to extinguish the fire and to save a handful of books. The fury of the fire and the efforts of William seem to epitomize our inescapable duality and a human contradiction that stretches across the ages; torn between preservation and destruction, engagement and rejection, and in a perpetual struggle between anti-intellectual and anti-democratic obscurantism and enlightened renaissance.
Beyond Eco’s fiction, it is a fact that the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics on Comedy – along with an uncountable number of Latin and Greek authors’ classics – did not survive the oblivion of the Middle Ages and are lost forever.
While the monasteries of Medieval Europe represented formidable mechanisms for the preservation and the divulgation of the official culture, they also served as effective cultural filters to discern what – among the heritage of the antiquities – was deemed acceptable to the Church’s obscurantist moral of the time and what was not. The former would be copied, multiplied, and diffused. The latter would be condemned to oblivion, canceled, and lost forever. Because of the medieval inquisitors’ absolutist moral compass, which disregarded the importance of time and space, today we still pay the price of that cultural tabula rasa justified in the name of fundamentalist certainties – all of which appear today as irrational and incomprehensible.
It is not too late to ask ourselves whether our societies are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of Brother Jorge or whether they will instead embrace the spirit of the of the Age of Enlightenment and follow Voltaire’s advice: “doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one”.