“Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehen,
daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.
Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst,
blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.”
(F.W. Nietzsche)
There is a trend, already since some time.
Funnily enough, lately I often read the expression “great reset”. While I am not completely sure what it is meant by that, I would definitely use it to describe the treatment that our origins, our history, is receiving. What the aware or unaware intent could be behind these attacks on culture. More than a reset, it could even be a “format c:”.
Homer is a racist. Dante is uneducative, because of his religious intolerance. Mozart and Beethoven are supremacists, according to the University of Oxford. I wonder when they will discover that Aristotle supported and justified slavery. That might be a too complicated read. The knowledge of Homer might come from children books, of Dante from Netflix, and of classical music from Hollywood: Tarantino, Coppola, Kubrick.
The ones who are familiar with the expression “the banality of evil” will be able to follow better.
Mass destruction for its own sake, monsters of pure evil. Those are concepts that exist only in video games, Hollywood movies and fantasy books (religious ones included). No emperor, no dictator, no general, no president, no government in history has ever unleashed destruction for its own sake, for the pure pleasure of the act itself, more for what they thought it would have been the greater good. In order to create a better world a sacrifice is needed, of course. Everything looked understandable, reasonable and legal for the vast majority, and carried out with a higher purpose in mind. Of course it did, it had to, or else we would not talk about it now, would we?
Nothing new, I would say. Ignorance and stupidity are and have always been important parts of the world we live in. My concerns started when I came across a particular article1. I read that a fellow classicist came to the conclusion that racism can be eliminated by basically murdering the classics, and I quote: “Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together.”
The mythical Phoenix rising from ashes
There is a trend, and the trend is the rejection of our origins.
The purpose is new, maybe, but the means are as old as history accounts go. On the surface is political correctness, which is supposed to lead us to a higher level of equality. Deep inside it is exactly what already happened many times before: the many and various processes of damnatio memoriae, iconoclasm, obscurantism, taboo. Different and similar at the same time. Everything, in a more or less concrete way, in a more or less deceitful way, aims to destroy knowledge.
Humankind has the tendency of letting itself overcome by basic animal instincts: what we hate and do not understand, we destroy. Destroying knowledge can be done either by materially obliterating it, or by facilitating ignorance. Ignorance as in ignorare, “not knowing”, which can be also reached by ‘darkening’ (obscurantism) and forbid knowledge (taboo).
As many other crimes, this also starts with a good intent: the elimination of racism. We are pretty aware that the world has been plagued since ever by classism, sexism, racism. Discriminations of any kind that need to be defeated and corrected. Slowly, after thousand of years, we came to the development of human rights. For sure, the world we live in these days is much better than what it used to be at many other moments, if not all, in history. Even very recent ones. Who would argue against it? We are better off now than before, but is this necessarily true everywhen and everywhere? I bet that some people in Iran would object, just to make a banal example.
Are history, development and evolution always linear? I doubt it. Advanced civilizations have already been succeeded by less developed ones, and mass extinctions already happened many times on earth. The only thing that never changed, when we talk about recorded human history, is that, if you have a reasonable amount of financial means or power, better both, you could consider yourself quite safe anywhere, anytime. There are exceptions, Marie Antoinette and the Romanov, but those are just exceptions. Are we destroying and burning in the hope that we will rise again, like the mythical Phoenix? A new and better culture, raising from the ashes of old books?
Destroying memory instead of facing it appears to be a more practical solution, but indeed not a clever one. The error of arrogance of us, as humankind, thinking not only that we know better than our ancestors, which could even be true, but also that it is a moral imperative to dismiss or destroy everything that came before, is revealed by the simple fact that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
History repeats itself
After reading the above-mentioned article my first reaction, my first thought, was: “Well, professor Padilla, you would be in good company, from the Nazis of Opernplatz, to Mao, to the ISIS, and so on”. After a first moment, I soon realized who the person is, and it surprised me. This is a person who did his whole cursus honorum: degree, PhD, postdoc, publishing a number of articles and books, being a professor. The second thought, at this point, was: “So, everything that you know and you ever studied are basically pure notions. All of that knowledge is just an end in itself”. I think that I also went in denial, if it was denial, telling myself that it cannot be as it appears, that it must be only the interpretation of the journalist.
Be that as it may, whether or not this is a faithful representation of professor Padilla’s ideas on the topic, we cannot deny that this is an example of what is going on these days. The old good arrogant approach to the past taken to its extremes. Everything that came before us is inferior and we are the peak of civilization. This is what happens when, instead of studying and understanding books, you burn them, metaphorically or not. Of course, you burn them with the best intentions in mind, but you still burn them. Eliminating racism, as eliminating any other kind of discrimination, is a good intention, but not every single mean used to pursue this objective is, though.
Summarizing all of this is quite easy, unfortunately: it is the process of destroying the cultural heritage that does not fit the political agenda of the moment. It happens now, it happened before, and most likely it will happen again. It is one of the reasons why we, as humankind, keep making the same mistakes. We do not face them, we destroy them and their memory, obviously confusing memory with celebration. Once any trace of it is eliminated from the collective memory, we feel safe for a short or long period, until we come to a moment in which we make the same mistakes again. If we knew, and most importantly understood, how they happened, we might have a chance at preventing them, but we do not, because we burnt the books. That is the moment when history, or at least this aspect of it, starts repeating itself.
The ironic destiny of Monsieur Guillotin
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a French scientist and politician of the XVIII century. He developed a machine that, in his intentions, would have made the world a better place. This invention was the guillotine, which has been used until the 1970s. Monsieur Guillotin considered himself a humanitarian, and in fact he has been one. It sounds weird to us, and it should, but he did make the world a better place. Apart from the fact that decapitation was at that time one of the most humane form of capital punishment, even it, before the guillotine has been invented, was not a very immediate process, as it often required multiple strikes by sword or axe to cut off the head. Instead of remembering his effort for making the world a less cruel place, or any of his other merits, we associate his name with the horrific practice of beheading, and there is not much we can do about it.
Supposing that the maturing of human rights will continue to follow a linear development, as I hope, are we fated to suffer the same destiny as Monsieur Guillotin? Probably, yes.