When you say "by and large some kind of synthesis usually occurred between new peoples and old ones" - are you sure this is not just a case of (literal) survivorship bias? How would we even know today about the cultures that were totally exterminated and replaced?
Hmm, interesting point. Generally speaking the answer would be linguistic. We can tell the degree of cultural intermixing by the degree and extent to which the languages affected each other. For instance, English was profoundly affected by the viking conquest of much of the country--it was this which indirectly led to the dropping of noun endings from old English. There are actually a number of cases where the victorious language has almost no influence from the one it replaced. Anglo Saxon has almost no celtic influence and no Latin words stemming from the romanobritish era (all the Latin in English came in later, from clerical and Norman sources). For a long time the thought was that the Anglo Saxons had completely wiped out the romanobritish people in their territories, but recent DNA studies have shown that wasn't true. The DNA of people in England didn't change enough to indicate the population was wiped out. So we don't really know why so little of their culture remained! Cultural mixing was common but not guaranteed. At the same time, the peoples themselves obviously mixed, and the Roman past had a great influence on the Anglo Saxon imagination: one of my favorite poems is about looking at the broken ruins of some roman baths and imagining them as "enta geweorc" - - the work of giants.
This is a great essay, I particularly like the bit about GBs being"the curriculum of my own extermination." I think you're entirely right to say that a book belongs to whoever's reading it: a lot of my favorite authors would probably see me as a degenerate to be pitied at best, and those are the moderns! I get why people would be alienated, but yeah if we don't read these books the Chris Rufo's and the Ron DeSantises will be the only ones who do!
And if you've read books you know just how shallow some of these people are. Like I read Ben Shapiro's book on the greatness of Western Civilization and was like...this guy doesn't even understand the Bible of his own religion, and he's gonna tell me how to live? Sheesh,
That's just it isn't it? For so many of these people it's all just a cudgel, there's no genuine love for the source material. Which is not of course to say that you can't love and get bad stuff from the great books (they wouldn't have survived all these years if you couldn't) but that these people so often don't seem to particularly understand the ambiguities at play etc. It's all very frustrating
Yes, which isn't to say conservatives and reactionaries can't have a true feel for literature. Like, it's clear to me that Norman Podhoretz loved old books and loved ideas. Same for Joseph Epstein. And the same is true for some of the neo-rxn rogue's gallery that writes these days for Tablet and Compact and First Things (most amusing are the lost souls who come across as sleepy old academic types who have somehow, through their reading of Aquinas and St,. Augustine, argued themselves _into_ believing in illiberalism). But none of these folks are Ben Shapiro. I don't think you could be quite as crude and mean-spirited as Ben Shapiro if you could really understand literature.
As someone who is unfortunately something of a Podhoretz scholar, one of the fascinating things about him is that he really didn’t carry that spirit of love of culture into conservatism – he’s not one of those guys who draws deeply on Toqueville and Edmund Burke to justify his positions, he pretty much just defaulted into this kind of unthinking country club philistinism. He’s still clearly a cultured man who loves poetry and the novel, but his conservatism is closer to Trilling’s proverbial “irritable mental gestures” than even a lot of his contemporary first wave neocons
Making It is a lot of fun, as in a different way is his second memoir Breaking Ranks, which is partially about being the kind of intellectual/thinking person where you don’t really have a political home etc. I don’t think it’s the anti-Soviet stuff that’s really unforgivable with Norman, everybody in that milieu was-or what drove him to the right. I think it’s mostly a mix of racism and genuine concern for Jewish people at the kind of bien pensant cozying up to black nationalism Wolfe satirized in radical chic.
Perhaps I've had a subpar education, but I've never read the classics. I attempted to read titles like Frankenstein or The Prince in high school on my own time and didn't manage. I tried to read H.P. Lovecraft and failed miserably. Eventually I realized that reading anything pre 20th century would be a struggle for me. I don't know what that says about me, but knowing that I can't just sit down and read a pre 19th century text (much less anything considered "ancient" like Plato) has more or less liberated me from bothering.
I think also the culture of reading books prioritizes contemporary works vs older ones. I regularly see people doing "book hauls" of recently published books that most people have read or know about (so not really older 20th century texts, much less anything Greek). There was a Black man who I followed on IG (he has now since left) and he read all of Philip Roth's works, and he once commented pushback he had received for reading so many books written by a white man.
I think about this a lot. I follow almost exclusively Black women (with few exceptions) on bookstagram and they almost exclusively read contemporary fiction (or nonfiction) by Black or non-white writers. (The only exception might be SFF, but most readers I follow dont read a lot of SFF unless it's by a Black person).
So I guess this kinda proves your point? But the rejection of white people goes beyond Plato and well into the now. I have thought about how if I never wanted to read a white person again, I could conceivably do that. I distinctly remember, right after I graduated college, I was frustrated by the difficulty in finding Black SFF authors and didnt want to read books by white people. So I simply stopped reading.
(In retrospect, I could've just used the internet to find books. But today, you can go into any bookstore and see Black authors on display, which is what I wanted at the time versus being forced to search. But there are probably more published Black authors today than at that time).
Today, I pretty much dislike most/all 21st century books by Black authors, and think there is a huge decline in quality while white liberals prop up authors for identity reasons not because their books are any good. I met someone online who only reads books before post modernism took off (so I guess anything published before 1970s?).
I have gone off on a tangent. I think I agree with your conclusion, but I'm not sure. I think if all white people died tomorrow, there would be a push to make it seem as if they had never existed versus engaging texts traditionally considered white.
"I think if all white people died tomorrow, there would be a push to make it seem as if they had never existed versus engaging texts traditionally considered white."
This is such a good idea for a short story. Someone should write this. I think both tendencies would exist, honestly. It would depend on whether white people still existed in the rest of the world or not.
Yeah, the books that white liberals like and extol are a wasteland. If something is an NYT notable book there's a 90 percent chance it's bad.
The Sassanid Persians just erased their Parthian predecessors from history. Modified all the epigraphs on statues, etc. No reason our non-white successors couldn't do the same.
Another great essay. I've often wondered whether in China there is a comparable intellectual movement to stop people reading Confucius, Mencius, the six classic Chinese novels, etc. I know (albeit quite vaguely) about the Cultural Revolution, but that's not really something contemporary American liberals would seem to want to emulate (to the extent that the Cultural Revolution was even "opposed" to those classic Chinese texts - as I said, I am not sure). I wonder this because I recently met a rather well-educated Chinese woman living in the United States, and I did the typical annoying thing where I eventually got around to asking if she had read "Jin Ping Mei" or "Hong Lou Meng" in her Chinese university. She laughed and noted that while she had cultural familiarity with "Hong Lou Meng," it's way too hard/challenging to read in its entirety and that no one really does that. Fair enough! But what's interesting is that you were to ask a comparably well-educated American about, say, Socrates or Shakespeare, there's a nonzero chance that you will instead get a mendacious lecture about post-colonialism or something.
I've read enough non-Western literature to know that people (like that clown Rufo) who seem to think that only Western Europeans produce great art are dumb and deluded. But, weirdly, if anything, reading "Genji," the "Mahabharata," and those classic Chinese texts has actually fostered in me a greater appreciation for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and those other "dead white men" who comprise of the Western canon. It's hard for me to explain, but I do believe that there is something about literature - at least literature that at it's core focuses on human fallibility and human emotions - that transcends cultural boundaries. I would certainly never want to live in a DeSanticized-world where the only authors one reads are those "dead white men." But I also would not want to live in a world where the only authors one reads are a smattering of random contemporary authors (usually all American) speaking to very specific identity issues (also usually American in orientation). I don't know whether this makes me a conservative, reactionary, etc., but I have noticed that the more non-Western literature I read, the more comfortable I get defending some of my favorite Western writers.
Anything, interesting/insightful essay as usual ...
Thank you! I agree on all counts. Honestly your Chinese friend's answer is what I'd expect someone from a healthy culture to say: "I acknowledge these are important books, but they're not for everyone, or even for most people." And it's true--everyone ought to read Plato, but not everyone ought to read Aristotle or Cervantes or Thucydides. Simply not relevant to people who aren't looking to lead or influence people in some way (or who aren't searching for wisdom in and of itself).
The weirdest thing about the decolonial pose was...most people in America _are_ the descendents of white settlers. So...doesn't that mean they _should_ read this book? Like if everyone has their own literature, then aren't the old white people simply the natural literature of white Americans? It's precisely this latter implication that I resent. I think the OWM belong equally to all Americans (and, honestly, all people of the world, but especially to all Americans). The idea that I, as an Indian-A, wouldn't be as interested in Anglo-Saxon poetry as an Italian or Irish-A is simply bizarre.
The difference between your Chinese friend and modern American opinion reminds me of this long quote from one of Dag Solstad's books, where a teacher has a breakdown while teaching the Wild Duck in class:
"But the young people who were now, on this particular day, a rainy Monday in early October, sitting opposite him, in this damp classroom in Norway’s capital city, and were bored by his exegesis of Henrik Ibsen’s drama The Wild Duck, were bored in an entirely different way than previously. He could not recognize his own boredom from high school in them, not at all, and he could not recognize the boredom of drowsy class hours on Henrik Ibsen that had marked previous sets of pupils, down to just a few years ago. The young people who now sat here in all their immaturity, being bored by his elated interest in Dr. Relling’s function in The Wild Duck, did not look at their boredom as a natural consequence of being a pupil; on the contrary, they were indignant at actually having to spend this Monday morning being bored in Norwegian class at Fagerborg High School, despite the fact, which they could not disregard, that they were, after all, pupils in this school and accordingly had to turn up. There they sat with their soft, puppyish, youthful faces, their—as they thought—horrible pimples, and with a confused and inadequate inner life filled as likely as not with the most soapy daydreams, actually feeling offended because they were bored, and he was the one they were offended by because it was he, the teacher, who was boring them. And that was an affront that could not be blown away by a friendly remark like, Oh, don’t act so offended, Cathrine, or, Try to pretend you’re interested anyway, Anders Christian. For they were deeply offended. It was not just skin-deep but had completely saturated them, having become their dominant and fundamental attitude toward him, and thus their fundamental attitude as pupils in a classroom in which one of the foremost dramatic works of our literature was being studied. They quite simply felt victimized, and that was not to be disposed of lightly. Being bored was such an unendurable experience to them that their bodies, the bodies of absolutely everyone, and their faces, those of boys and girls alike, whether bright or less so, those good in school as well as those who just sat (or lay) there to pass the time, expressed a pent-up indignation. Why should they put up with this? How long should they put up with it? Does he have the right to do this to us? That, he could see, was what they were thinking."
Thanks for your response, and that's a great quote from Solstad.
I thought about your essay some more, and it brought back to my mind a remark by the Qing dynasty critic Zhang Zhupo: "Those who regard 'Jin Ping Mei' as pornographic read only the pornographic passages." I feel like the type of misreading that Zhupo is commenting on is soooo prevalent today among both rightwing and leftwing readers when it comes to the "great books."
When you say "by and large some kind of synthesis usually occurred between new peoples and old ones" - are you sure this is not just a case of (literal) survivorship bias? How would we even know today about the cultures that were totally exterminated and replaced?
Hmm, interesting point. Generally speaking the answer would be linguistic. We can tell the degree of cultural intermixing by the degree and extent to which the languages affected each other. For instance, English was profoundly affected by the viking conquest of much of the country--it was this which indirectly led to the dropping of noun endings from old English. There are actually a number of cases where the victorious language has almost no influence from the one it replaced. Anglo Saxon has almost no celtic influence and no Latin words stemming from the romanobritish era (all the Latin in English came in later, from clerical and Norman sources). For a long time the thought was that the Anglo Saxons had completely wiped out the romanobritish people in their territories, but recent DNA studies have shown that wasn't true. The DNA of people in England didn't change enough to indicate the population was wiped out. So we don't really know why so little of their culture remained! Cultural mixing was common but not guaranteed. At the same time, the peoples themselves obviously mixed, and the Roman past had a great influence on the Anglo Saxon imagination: one of my favorite poems is about looking at the broken ruins of some roman baths and imagining them as "enta geweorc" - - the work of giants.
This is a great essay, I particularly like the bit about GBs being"the curriculum of my own extermination." I think you're entirely right to say that a book belongs to whoever's reading it: a lot of my favorite authors would probably see me as a degenerate to be pitied at best, and those are the moderns! I get why people would be alienated, but yeah if we don't read these books the Chris Rufo's and the Ron DeSantises will be the only ones who do!
And if you've read books you know just how shallow some of these people are. Like I read Ben Shapiro's book on the greatness of Western Civilization and was like...this guy doesn't even understand the Bible of his own religion, and he's gonna tell me how to live? Sheesh,
That's just it isn't it? For so many of these people it's all just a cudgel, there's no genuine love for the source material. Which is not of course to say that you can't love and get bad stuff from the great books (they wouldn't have survived all these years if you couldn't) but that these people so often don't seem to particularly understand the ambiguities at play etc. It's all very frustrating
Yes, which isn't to say conservatives and reactionaries can't have a true feel for literature. Like, it's clear to me that Norman Podhoretz loved old books and loved ideas. Same for Joseph Epstein. And the same is true for some of the neo-rxn rogue's gallery that writes these days for Tablet and Compact and First Things (most amusing are the lost souls who come across as sleepy old academic types who have somehow, through their reading of Aquinas and St,. Augustine, argued themselves _into_ believing in illiberalism). But none of these folks are Ben Shapiro. I don't think you could be quite as crude and mean-spirited as Ben Shapiro if you could really understand literature.
As someone who is unfortunately something of a Podhoretz scholar, one of the fascinating things about him is that he really didn’t carry that spirit of love of culture into conservatism – he’s not one of those guys who draws deeply on Toqueville and Edmund Burke to justify his positions, he pretty much just defaulted into this kind of unthinking country club philistinism. He’s still clearly a cultured man who loves poetry and the novel, but his conservatism is closer to Trilling’s proverbial “irritable mental gestures” than even a lot of his contemporary first wave neocons
LOL, too bad! I really liked MAKING IT, and I did feel like becoming anti-soviet was a principled stance at some point, at least in some milieus
Making It is a lot of fun, as in a different way is his second memoir Breaking Ranks, which is partially about being the kind of intellectual/thinking person where you don’t really have a political home etc. I don’t think it’s the anti-Soviet stuff that’s really unforgivable with Norman, everybody in that milieu was-or what drove him to the right. I think it’s mostly a mix of racism and genuine concern for Jewish people at the kind of bien pensant cozying up to black nationalism Wolfe satirized in radical chic.
Perhaps I've had a subpar education, but I've never read the classics. I attempted to read titles like Frankenstein or The Prince in high school on my own time and didn't manage. I tried to read H.P. Lovecraft and failed miserably. Eventually I realized that reading anything pre 20th century would be a struggle for me. I don't know what that says about me, but knowing that I can't just sit down and read a pre 19th century text (much less anything considered "ancient" like Plato) has more or less liberated me from bothering.
I think also the culture of reading books prioritizes contemporary works vs older ones. I regularly see people doing "book hauls" of recently published books that most people have read or know about (so not really older 20th century texts, much less anything Greek). There was a Black man who I followed on IG (he has now since left) and he read all of Philip Roth's works, and he once commented pushback he had received for reading so many books written by a white man.
I think about this a lot. I follow almost exclusively Black women (with few exceptions) on bookstagram and they almost exclusively read contemporary fiction (or nonfiction) by Black or non-white writers. (The only exception might be SFF, but most readers I follow dont read a lot of SFF unless it's by a Black person).
So I guess this kinda proves your point? But the rejection of white people goes beyond Plato and well into the now. I have thought about how if I never wanted to read a white person again, I could conceivably do that. I distinctly remember, right after I graduated college, I was frustrated by the difficulty in finding Black SFF authors and didnt want to read books by white people. So I simply stopped reading.
(In retrospect, I could've just used the internet to find books. But today, you can go into any bookstore and see Black authors on display, which is what I wanted at the time versus being forced to search. But there are probably more published Black authors today than at that time).
Today, I pretty much dislike most/all 21st century books by Black authors, and think there is a huge decline in quality while white liberals prop up authors for identity reasons not because their books are any good. I met someone online who only reads books before post modernism took off (so I guess anything published before 1970s?).
I have gone off on a tangent. I think I agree with your conclusion, but I'm not sure. I think if all white people died tomorrow, there would be a push to make it seem as if they had never existed versus engaging texts traditionally considered white.
"I think if all white people died tomorrow, there would be a push to make it seem as if they had never existed versus engaging texts traditionally considered white."
This is such a good idea for a short story. Someone should write this. I think both tendencies would exist, honestly. It would depend on whether white people still existed in the rest of the world or not.
Yeah, the books that white liberals like and extol are a wasteland. If something is an NYT notable book there's a 90 percent chance it's bad.
The Sassanid Persians just erased their Parthian predecessors from history. Modified all the epigraphs on statues, etc. No reason our non-white successors couldn't do the same.
Another great essay. I've often wondered whether in China there is a comparable intellectual movement to stop people reading Confucius, Mencius, the six classic Chinese novels, etc. I know (albeit quite vaguely) about the Cultural Revolution, but that's not really something contemporary American liberals would seem to want to emulate (to the extent that the Cultural Revolution was even "opposed" to those classic Chinese texts - as I said, I am not sure). I wonder this because I recently met a rather well-educated Chinese woman living in the United States, and I did the typical annoying thing where I eventually got around to asking if she had read "Jin Ping Mei" or "Hong Lou Meng" in her Chinese university. She laughed and noted that while she had cultural familiarity with "Hong Lou Meng," it's way too hard/challenging to read in its entirety and that no one really does that. Fair enough! But what's interesting is that you were to ask a comparably well-educated American about, say, Socrates or Shakespeare, there's a nonzero chance that you will instead get a mendacious lecture about post-colonialism or something.
I've read enough non-Western literature to know that people (like that clown Rufo) who seem to think that only Western Europeans produce great art are dumb and deluded. But, weirdly, if anything, reading "Genji," the "Mahabharata," and those classic Chinese texts has actually fostered in me a greater appreciation for Shakespeare, Cervantes, and those other "dead white men" who comprise of the Western canon. It's hard for me to explain, but I do believe that there is something about literature - at least literature that at it's core focuses on human fallibility and human emotions - that transcends cultural boundaries. I would certainly never want to live in a DeSanticized-world where the only authors one reads are those "dead white men." But I also would not want to live in a world where the only authors one reads are a smattering of random contemporary authors (usually all American) speaking to very specific identity issues (also usually American in orientation). I don't know whether this makes me a conservative, reactionary, etc., but I have noticed that the more non-Western literature I read, the more comfortable I get defending some of my favorite Western writers.
Anything, interesting/insightful essay as usual ...
Thank you! I agree on all counts. Honestly your Chinese friend's answer is what I'd expect someone from a healthy culture to say: "I acknowledge these are important books, but they're not for everyone, or even for most people." And it's true--everyone ought to read Plato, but not everyone ought to read Aristotle or Cervantes or Thucydides. Simply not relevant to people who aren't looking to lead or influence people in some way (or who aren't searching for wisdom in and of itself).
The weirdest thing about the decolonial pose was...most people in America _are_ the descendents of white settlers. So...doesn't that mean they _should_ read this book? Like if everyone has their own literature, then aren't the old white people simply the natural literature of white Americans? It's precisely this latter implication that I resent. I think the OWM belong equally to all Americans (and, honestly, all people of the world, but especially to all Americans). The idea that I, as an Indian-A, wouldn't be as interested in Anglo-Saxon poetry as an Italian or Irish-A is simply bizarre.
The difference between your Chinese friend and modern American opinion reminds me of this long quote from one of Dag Solstad's books, where a teacher has a breakdown while teaching the Wild Duck in class:
"But the young people who were now, on this particular day, a rainy Monday in early October, sitting opposite him, in this damp classroom in Norway’s capital city, and were bored by his exegesis of Henrik Ibsen’s drama The Wild Duck, were bored in an entirely different way than previously. He could not recognize his own boredom from high school in them, not at all, and he could not recognize the boredom of drowsy class hours on Henrik Ibsen that had marked previous sets of pupils, down to just a few years ago. The young people who now sat here in all their immaturity, being bored by his elated interest in Dr. Relling’s function in The Wild Duck, did not look at their boredom as a natural consequence of being a pupil; on the contrary, they were indignant at actually having to spend this Monday morning being bored in Norwegian class at Fagerborg High School, despite the fact, which they could not disregard, that they were, after all, pupils in this school and accordingly had to turn up. There they sat with their soft, puppyish, youthful faces, their—as they thought—horrible pimples, and with a confused and inadequate inner life filled as likely as not with the most soapy daydreams, actually feeling offended because they were bored, and he was the one they were offended by because it was he, the teacher, who was boring them. And that was an affront that could not be blown away by a friendly remark like, Oh, don’t act so offended, Cathrine, or, Try to pretend you’re interested anyway, Anders Christian. For they were deeply offended. It was not just skin-deep but had completely saturated them, having become their dominant and fundamental attitude toward him, and thus their fundamental attitude as pupils in a classroom in which one of the foremost dramatic works of our literature was being studied. They quite simply felt victimized, and that was not to be disposed of lightly. Being bored was such an unendurable experience to them that their bodies, the bodies of absolutely everyone, and their faces, those of boys and girls alike, whether bright or less so, those good in school as well as those who just sat (or lay) there to pass the time, expressed a pent-up indignation. Why should they put up with this? How long should they put up with it? Does he have the right to do this to us? That, he could see, was what they were thinking."
"
Thanks for your response, and that's a great quote from Solstad.
I thought about your essay some more, and it brought back to my mind a remark by the Qing dynasty critic Zhang Zhupo: "Those who regard 'Jin Ping Mei' as pornographic read only the pornographic passages." I feel like the type of misreading that Zhupo is commenting on is soooo prevalent today among both rightwing and leftwing readers when it comes to the "great books."