Moral Preening and Posturing

It is a strange intellectual deformity, presented clearly by Pico Iyer in The New York Times.

It involves judging the past according to present values. You might call it a form of malignant narcissism, the fervent belief that we are better, more enlightened and more virtuous than our forebears, not necessarily because we have accomplished anything of note, but because we do not need to accomplish anything of note. We have reached peak intellectual virtue, and we can rest on our laurels.

For example, in an ironic twist ripped from today’s headlines, American leftists are prone to denounce people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison because they owned slaves. Or, at least they did until they decided to use the framers as a cudgel against Donald Trump. All of a sudden, Madison, in particular, was a great man, a man to be venerated… regardless of how many slaves he owned.

Today’s left is unabashedly hypocritical and does not have enough of a sense of shame to recognize their pathetic stupidity.

In the meantime, we might suggest that America’s founders created a nation. And that the nation has lasted for more than two centuries. The nation has accomplished many good things. It has also done some bad things. On balance, I think we can agree that the American nation has been a success.

Ought we now to laud those who created the nation, regardless of their manifest flaws. Or should we cancel them out, by the terms of what is called cancel culture, because they did things that, while acceptable to some at the time, have since been considered abhorrent. Keep in mind, slavery was not a novel practice, limited to the American South. In the year 1700 something like 70% of the world’s people were enslaved. 

Ought we, in other words, to judge the American nation and its constitution according to pragmatic standards or ought we to judge them according to the vices and virtues of the people who produced them. If America worked, what virtue can we gain by dismissing it in toto because some of its founders were slave owners? Or else, you might ask yourself which group of human individuals did a better job than did America’s founders, a mix of slave holders and abolitionists? 

One suspects that cancel culture has beenis designed by the unaccomplished to diminish and demean the work of the accomplished. Today it seems mostly to be directed against those of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion. It seems designed to puff up the self-esteem of those whose ancestors did not build a great nation, make great scientific discoveries, produce the Industrial Revolution or initiate free enterprise economic policy.

For a less Anglo example, take the fact that Aristotle once made some decidedly politically incorrect statements about slavery and even about women. Ought we therefore to toss the works of Aristotle in the wastepaper basket of history?

But, if Aristotle’s thought was the basis for modern science and empirical thought ought we also to forswear the use of any inventions, from labor saving devices, to telecommunications and transportation systems, to industrial sanitation, because the man who laid the groundwork for these inventions had said something that we consider to be morally reprehensible.

At some point to lead to detach the work from the human being. To dismiss the work of an individual because he was communicating ideas that we now consider aberrant is a bad practice indeed. After all, what do you think that pogroms and book burnings were about?

It’s better and much easier to denounce the past than it is to study it, to learn from it, to expend some intellectual labor in acquiring its wisdom. Cancel culture is the fallback position of the ignorant, of those who are simply not smart enough to learn much of anything, who refuse to do the homework because they cannot do the homework. Naturally, some people who can do the homework sympathize with cancel culture because they feel great empathy with those who cannot.

Anyway, cancel culture manifests the self-importance of the ignorant. Pico Iyer explains it:

Even as many strive so hard to cultivate tolerance when it comes to race, religion and gender, however, those same people seem ever more ready to countenance intolerance when it comes to earlier times — on the grounds that they were intolerant. The shaky assumption behind such chronocentrism is that we have advanced beyond our forebears to a state of relative enlightenment.

It’s not about learning anything. It’s about feeling the right feelings of tolerance. It’s not about studying Shakespeare or even about writing better plays and novels. It’s about feeling superior to Shakespeare because he committed certain sins:

I’m less thrilled, though, when people fault Shakespeare, say, for daring, in his job as writer (and actor), to try to enter the souls of a woman, a Moor and a devil from Italy (which he does in “Othello” alone). I’m wary of assuming that, just because T.S. Eliot held some positions that we now find offensive, we are more “moral” or attuned to the complexities of human nature than he was. 

We have dumbed ourselves down. We have turned the educational system into an indoctrination mill. We know less. We accomplish less. But, we happily cover it up by explaining that we have reached peak moral superiority… and can bask in our self-righteousness.