“Triumphant social boredom is at once death and hell for a civilization,” Russell Kirk writes in the final chapter of The Conservative Mind. “So the conservative seeks to look beyond humanitarian sociology. Not to the statistician, then, but to the poet, do conservatives turn for insight.”
The roots of conservatism and of all intellectual discourse thus rest in the poet and, as Kirk would implicitly argue, in the philosopher. Turning to the poet rather than the statistician would, for modern lawmakers, be totally impracticable. What do Frances Harper and John Milton have to do with federal budgets? But Kirk’s point should be taken that ideas drive politics. And the most compelling ideas, those dealing with questions of human nature and the like, which have to be addressed long before ever getting to what a statistician’s offers, are to be found in the humanities.
These disciplines are constantly being shrugged off, and surely they had no chance of escaping the cancel culture era unscathed. A few thousand people have now signed a petition to remove a statue of poet Walt Whitman from Rutgers University’s Camden campus. “By removing this statue the administration will show that they care about their students and function to provide the best environment possible for student success,” the petition reads. Perhaps, but what will it show about the administration’s care for learning? Undergirding the petition is the notion that we’d really be better off not reading people such as Whitman or forgetting about them altogether.
The petition offers a quote attributed to Whitman that has some pretty nasty words about Native Americans and black people. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Whitman’s racial vision was foolish, even cruel. To some extent, he was a product of his time. But even if he wasn’t the perfect man, American poetry still wouldn’t be what it is without him. Not one scholar would tell you otherwise. And who is right about everything, anyway?
Plenty of other heavyweights have been so challenged. Aristotle’s cancellation was contemplated a few days ago in the New York Times. “The Greek philosopher Aristotle did not merely condone slavery, he defended it; he did not merely defend it, but defended it as beneficial to the slave,” wrote Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy. In his defense, he did live more than 2,300 years ago.
Thankfully, Callard does not conclude that Aristotle should be canceled. In fact, she made a proper case for engaging with him in what I would say is almost an act of courage, considering the publication in which it appeared. Still, there’s hardly a need for a footnote on his view of women or of slavery. It’s all over the first pages of his Politics.
Whitman wasn’t always right about everything, nor was Aristotle. Neither are any of the cancel culture warriors, and neither are you or I. The cancellation is merely a form of self-aggrandizement, bereft of humility and self-awareness. The question about forbears should be, “Is the sum of what these and others contributed to civilization worth remembering, even worth memorializing?” The answer for Aristotle and for Whitman is a resounding yes.
