Morality, Retrospective and Selective

Applying present day morality to someone from the distant past is, of course, unfair. Unfortunately, that’s just human nature. But nowadays, it’s even worse, says Andrew Sullivan:

“Discrediting a thinker’s broad worldview or legacy by discovering some statement from the distant past revealing him or her to be a bigot by today’s standards is a depressing degeneration in our intellectual life.”

As an example, he cites Picasso:

“Picasso was morally monstrous; but his painting is transcendent. And if you cannot disentangle the two, you are attacking a key liberal principle: that ideas and works of art should be considered on their merits, and not on the virtue or vice of their proponents.”

Other such examples include “excoriating Thomas Jefferson as a bigot and hypocrite, David Hume as a vicious racist, Immanuel Kant of all people for white supremacism”. What’s next, asks Sullivan, should we throw out Plato and Aristotle because hey, they supported slavery?

 

Sullivan wonders why the left doesn’t do this to one of their patron saints, Karl Marx. He cites a few of Marx’s “greatest hits”:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money… The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

That could have come from a Nazi manifesto. But wait, Marx didn’t approve of multicultural society either: he lamented that the Balkans had “the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races”. On colonialism:

“The question is not whether the English had a right to conquer India but whether we are to prefer India conquered by the Turk, by the Persian, by the Russian, to India conquered by the Briton. England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating: the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”

 

All of which is why Sullivan says:

“If you are going to cancel a thinker for bigotry by today’s standards, Marx is far more cancelable on leftist grounds.”

Is that happening? Nope:

“Among the top (Western) schools, The Communist Manifesto is the third-most taught book in history, and first in sociology.”

 

These lines by Sullivan apply all over the world, left and right alike:

“Once you begin to see these deliberate and grotesque omissions, you realize just how deep the bad faith lies… While good liberals continue to look the other way.”