In our desire to reconcile attitudes of the past, we often throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This is true with many artists. Rudyard Kipling is one of my literary heroes, but he was at best, a social Darwinist who thought that anyone not of the white race was naturally inferior.
Ezra Pound supported Mussolini, but inspired one of the greatest works of modern poetry, T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.
And his own body of work was none too shabby, either.
Abraham Lincoln did not believe that black people and white people were equal but he did free African slaves from bondage.
I took a class in undergrad where we deconstructed the attitudes of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Many works of fiction during the period were neglected out of a desire to not offend.
No one talks about Joel Chandler Harris anymore even though his works of southern literature defined a generation. Tar-baby has become a racial epithet when its practical application, in my humble opinion, was not to stigmatize a race of people but rather to reveal the inherent foolishness of pride and the human condition.
As I mentioned last week in this blog, my own great-great-grandfather, an Alabama native, fought for the North during the Civil War, not because he felt that the cause of Emancipation was just but mostly just because he had no allegiance to wealthy Southern planters with money to own slaves. He was born dirt poor in the northeast Alabama mountains and considered sub-human by the genteel, mint-julip drinkers.
I suspect had he been born into wealthier circumstances probably would have taken the time to buy a few human beings.
And many of us would choose unethical means if it meant securing ourselves in positions of wealth and power. It happens in politics, corporations, and life itself. Yet, one does have to live with oneself at night. We all have crises of the soul and the ultimate fight one faces is with oneself.
Humanity is full of these contradictions. Each of us has our own private flaws and prejudices but the key, as I see it, is to be able to overlook these and see the inherent spark of wisdom and artist genius that all of us are capable of.
My challenge has been to find the inherent goodness within people. It's very easy to locate the jaded, pessimistic parts of those around you.
The secret to seeing these people in the proper perspective is to compare them to their contemporaries, not to modern sensibilities. Take the first one you mention, Kipling. To begin with, he was a Darwinist but not the kind of racist you seem to think- remember
ReplyDelete"By the living God that made you, you're a better man than I am Gunga Din!"? He judged people as individuals- but he did believe our CULTURE was superior. And he was a sexist. Perhaps he wasn't as PC as we are today, but how many other Victorian Britts would have ever told a Pagan Wog "You're a better man than I am"? Compare him to their standards, not ours.
Excellent point.
ReplyDeleteI think you summarized what I meant to say much more eloquently.
You have to judge them in their own contemporary standards, not our own.