Speaking of the end of our Civilization…….Newsmax has just reported that, according to the School Library Journal, a host of teachers across America has decided that the works of William Shakespeare promote “misogyny, racism, homophobia, classism, anti-Semitism and misogynoir.” As a result they are either refusing to teach his works or including in their courses lengthy critiques of the various inequities implicit in his cultural assumptions. Shakespeare, who wrote 400 years ago, apparently ought to have seen the world as a 21st Century “progressive.”
Of course when I studied Shakespeare his works were understood in the context of their era. No one for an instant would have considered holding him responsible for the various cultural assumptions and moral strictures to which he quite naturally submitted his characters. I am certainly not suggesting he meets the criteria of 21st Century “Wokeness” but, quite aside from his amazing verbal ingenuity and dramatic flare, his transcendent empathy for the human condition is evident on every page of every play he ever wrote.
To dismiss Shakespeare for ideological reasons is to betray an Ideology utterly unconcerned with anything other than “inclusiveness.” Such is the nihilistic “ethos” of “progressivism” which reduces us to the level of mere animals for whom creativity, imagination and the pursuit of “truth” and “beauty” are mere delusions, what Marx would no doubt have defined as comforting “opiates.”
But would not the “principle” which led our “educators” to take issue with Shakespeare, compel every Civilization on the planet to renounce its past? As I have said repeatedly, no one is exonerating Western European Man his many sins, but our Cultural Heritage as it has evolved is, to anyone not debilitated by bias, demonstrably more enlightened, more conducive to an enriched life, more conducive to genuine progress, indeed more humane, than any other in History. If we cannot celebrate our Cultural past because it fails to meet the standards of 21st Century “Wokeness,” why should any other group, however defined by race, religion or geography, be allowed to celebrate its past? Yet apparently, given the White guilt relentlessly cultivated by our “liberal intellectuals” for decades now, we must simply admit even the most cherished of our cultural icons [i.e., Shakespeare] to be oppressive in a typically Western way, while sparing the rest of the world of any criticism [i. e., “hate speech”] whatsoever.
Such is the grossly simplistic narrative we are being asked to accept by the likes of Antifa, B.L.M., Ibram X. Kendi, A.O.C., Kamala Harris, the Obamas, etc., etc., and of course those “useful idiots” [ Biden, Trudeau, the Mainstream News, Facebook, Twitter, etc.] who dance to their music.