Down With the Western Canon? Not So Fast Students can find a lot to learn from great books by ‘dead white men.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/down-with-the-western-canon-not-so-fast-11574812136?mod=opinion_lead_pos6
Editor’s note: This Future View is about teaching the “dead white males” of the Western canon. Next week, in light of the protest at the Harvard-Yale football game, we’ll ask, “Is it good for university endowments to become politicized?” Students should click here to submit opinions of fewer than 250 words before Dec. 10. The best responses will be published that night.
Who’s Afraid of the Western Canon?
If you wish to understand your world, you must read the books written by the men who shaped it. History is path-dependent. The ideas and decisions of the influential thinkers of the Western tradition directly influence the breadth of possibilities available to everyone born in the West today. Our government, culture, religion and philosophy all either arose from or in response to the ideas they put forward.
The same concept applies to literature. It isn’t independent of culture; rather, it reflects the culture of its period and builds on it. We are only the most recent link in a complex but unbroken chain.
The West is a product of a cultural conversation among the Greek philosophers, Church Fathers, Shakespeare, Enlightenment thinkers and Dostoevsky, to name only a few. To deny their importance betrays little understanding of history, and to deny it because they were white (leaving aside the anachronism, in some cases) assumes that race, or some conception of “social virtue,” is more important than truth. But even to argue the subjectivity of truth, or to subordinate it to some other value, one must engage with Plato, Aquinas and Dostoevsky—all dead, all white, all males.
There is room to disagree with the claims of the “dead white males” of the Western tradition, but these authors can’t be ignored. Theirs are the best and most beautiful attempts to answer the eternal questions. Is man good or evil? What is the purpose of life? How can men best live in concert with one another? Argue with their replies all you want. If they’re wrong, read them to challenge, refine and strengthen your own view; if they’re right, let them teach you.
— Nathan Williams, Hillsdale College, economics and classics
A False Choice
Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero and Virgil. These are the names that have greeted students entering Columbia’s Butler Library for the past 84 years, adorning its front entrance. All “dead white men.” What should today’s student make of that fact?
The answer is complicated. It’s unreasonable to define our increasingly diverse society as based only on great Western books. On the other hand, people have found meaning in these texts for thousands of years. They must have inherent and lasting value. So why not respect the Western literary tradition while also bringing in other viewpoints? Tradition and diversity—we needn’t pick only one.
This year, in addition to the first six books of Homer’s “Iliad,” Columbia College freshman were required to read essays by Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf and encouraged to bring them into conversation with more traditional Western texts. Morrison and Woolf have strengthened my understanding of the canon, helping me to examine it more critically.
If it would be parochial to celebrate only dead white male authors, it would be close-minded and self-limiting to refuse the best they’ve thought and said. In the words of that old dead white man, Cicero, “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
— Ian Springer, Columbia University, classics
The Gift of the Great Debate
Whenever students neglect the insights of the Western canon to focus on its authors’ race and gender, they lose a sense of companionship with these great minds of the past. Aristotle, Augustine, Emerson, Shakespeare and the like all shared in universal human experiences and attempted to answer questions that haunt us all. We miss that when we reduce them to a few characteristics.
The Western canon is more than a collection of people, traditions and ideas. It’s a great debate, continued throughout the ages, and students who have been given the opportunity to listen in are truly lucky. Proposals to junk the canon and silence the debate are wrongheaded. We need the wisdom of our intellectual ancestors to help find a direction for the future.
—Jordan Coy, University of Oklahoma, finance
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