December 3, 2021
Last week I examined the strengths and weaknesses of the conservative attempt to preserve what it sees as universally valid in the Western tradition. This week, I turn from the right to the left, to the radical leftist position currently marching under the banner of “critical race theory.” The discussion takes off from an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on February 2, 2021, called “He Wants to Save the Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?” The article is about Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a professor of classics at Princeton, who accepts what has been the radical left’s assumption since the 60’s, that if we decreate the ideological errors out of the classics there will be nothing left. The classics are nothing but error, in this case the error of “white supremacy.” As Rachel Poser, author of the article, puts it, “Padilla believes that classics is so entangled with white supremacy as to be inseparable from it.” Therefore, “to see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror: it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves.” Padilla is not a lone voice crying in the wilderness: Poser quotes another academic as saying, “Classics is a Euro-American foundation myth…Do we really want that sort of thing?” Yet another asserts that “Enlightenment thinkers created a hierarchy with Greece and Rome, coded as white, on top, and everything else below. ‘That exclusion was at the heart of classics as a project.’”
I am no detached spectator of this debate. I am not a classicist, but since 1991 I have been teaching a classics-in-translation course in the Western epic tradition, covering Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the Expanding Eyes podcast, I have discussed the Divine Comedy and the Odyssey, and am now embarked upon the Aeneid. A long career has apparently come full circle, from a first wave of protest against the work of “dead white males,” driven largely by feminism, to a second wave driven largely by race studies. My teaching of the classics is partly revisionist, and addresses what I see as their errors, yet I also continue to value these works and intend to keep teaching them so long as anyone is willing to listen. I think the radical attack on the classics is itself an error, and a tragic one, because radical thinkers have been tempted into accepting the vicious and delusional view of them by their enemies on the far right. It is the tragedy of Othello, tempted, not just into believing Iago’s lies, but into adopting his destructive, reductionist, literally black and white way of thinking. I hasten to add that the analogy is imperfect: the classics are no innocent Desdemona, and what is wrong in them needs to be confronted and neutralized. But ideological obsession on either the right or the left reduces everything to the either-or terms of its obsession, resulting in the kind of single-cause thinking that cultural historian Jacques Barzun condemned as bad history. It is also bad literary criticism and bad social theorizing, despite its occasional attractiveness to undergraduates because it makes everything simpler and easier: in the first year that I taught the Odyssey, I heard a rumor that students at Oberlin College, about 45 minutes from Baldwin Wallace, staged a demonstration against a group reading of the poem. We need a larger perspective in order to understand history. The critics who regularly complain that Big Picture thinking reduces everything to a single pattern have it exactly backward. It is single-cause ideological thinking that does that. A real Big Picture provides a larger context capable of comprehending, in all senses, something of the complexity of historical patterns.
That said, I try to listen to the anger of thinkers like Padilla. I do not say that I understand it, because I will immediately be told that I cannot “understand how you feel,” because I am in a position of privilege and can never really know what it is like to be marginalized or oppressed. But I do not ignore or reject out of hand. The rise of radical race theory is a backlash to the increasingly brazen flaunting of white supremacy on the radical right, which has explicitly identified itself with the classics understood as “white civilization.” Greek helmets were seen among the bizarrely costumed insurrectionists of January 6. For a good while, the far right has been particularly fixated on the battle of Thermopylae, in which the Spartans, in alliance with the Greeks, vastly outnumbered, stood against the invading army of the Persian empire and were wiped out to the last man. When the Persian commander ordered the Spartans to lay down their arms, the Spartan general replied Molon labe, come and take them, which has become a catchphrase of gun-rights advocates. Thermopylae was romanticized in the film The 300 by Zack Snyder (2006), but the film was based on the 1998 graphic novel by Frank Miller. In a blogpost dated November 13, 2011, science fiction writer David Brin quotes Miller as saying this about Occupy Wall Street: “’Occupy’ is nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America." This is the man, by the way, who gave us the Dark Knight version of Batman, the psychotic vigilante who is the lone defender meting out very rough justice in a corrupt and collapsing America. The right wing has thus made Thermopylae into a symbol of its own macho nihilism: it is glorious to go down fighting in an insurrection in which you are outmatched by the powers of an evil empire.
Padilla has his eye on such developments, but he has lived the reality of white supremacism in a harrowing personal manner, having grown up in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo dictatorship. Poser writes that Trujillo saw himself and his people as “inheritors of a grand European tradition that originated in Greece and Rome. In a 1932 speech, he praised ancient Greece as the ‘mistress of beauty, rendered eternal in the impeccable whiteness of its marbles.’ Trujillo’s veneration of whiteness was central to his message. By invoking the classical legacy, he could portray the residents of neighboring Haiti as darker and inferior, a campaign that reached its murderous peak in 1937 with the Parsley Massacre, or El Corte (‘the Cutting’) in Spanish, in which Dominican troops killed as many as 30,000 Haitians and Black Dominicans.” How easy would it be to maintain an attitude of scholarly detachment in the face of such experience? Why would one not just want to pull the whole damned edifice down, to adopt the sentiments of folk singer-songwriter Richard Thompson’s “House of Cards”: “The very fine house / Of great renown / It’s cracked and shaking / And a-tumbling down / Ah blow down this house of cards.”
And yet I would hold my breath, for it is easy to foretell that there would be no end to the blowing. The very fine house has many mansions: it includes not just the classics but all Western literature, and in the end Western culture itself, all guilty of the same attitudes. If we bring it all down, we are doing the nihilists’ job for them. Padilla is certainly quite genuine when he says he does not merely want to destroy, but any proposed replacement of Western tradition would eventually fail the moral purity test. As I will try to suggest, white supremacy is merely a color-coded version of a larger pattern: what is wrong is endemic to the human condition. Fear and hatred of the Other that results in scapegoating is the primary corruption of the human race, the psychological truth behind what Catholicism calls original sin. Nnedi Okorafur’s fiercely powerful fantasy novel Who Fears Death? is set in a kind of alternative Africa, in which one group perpetrates racist ethnic cleansing upon another—yet both are dark-skinned, one merely darker than the other (there is not a Caucasian in the entire novel). And the persecuted group practices female genital mutilation while also persecuting any woman who is the victim of rape, along with her offspring. There is no question of white supremacy, yet the patterns are exactly the same, which is surely part of the book’s point.
The real pattern visible in an expanded imaginative perspective is one of a will to order and control, defined as “civilized,” threatened by “barbarism” or “savagery.” In the famous canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses exhorts his aged crew to embark upon a final, dangerous adventure by saying, “You are Greeks! You were not born to live like mindless brutes.” We get our word “barbarian” from the Greeks: it originally meant simply “not Greek.” The attitude is that of the old Saturday Night Live skit with the tag line, “If it ain’t Scottish, it’s crap!” Indeed, Ulysses will not condescend to speak to Dante directly: he spouts his monologue to the air, really to himself. “Savagery” or “barbarism” is always characterized by two traits: (1) poor impulse control of the twin drives of the Freudian unconscious, violence and sex; (2) irrationality, leading to a tendency to superstition. The same pattern of paranoid fear and hatred of what is clearly a psychologically projected Freudian id is evident in the white man’s treatment of African Americans and Native Americans, in the colonialists’ treatment of the non-white peoples of the British Empire—but also of the English fear and hatred of the Celtic peoples, where skin color is not a factor. Color coding is optional, according to convenience—and is not applied rationally. The Persian enemy at Thermopylae was Indo-European, probably no darker-skinned than the Spartans and Greeks. “Aryan” became a synonym for white, but the first Aryan civilization to be discovered, far older than the European, was that of India—and the people of India are not white, at least not as Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Scandinavian people are white. If a color distinction is wanted, it will be fabricated.
This fear and hatred of sexual, violent, and irrational impulses, projected onto other people, is indeed evident in the classics themselves at times, but calling it “proto-racist,” as some contemporary scholars have done, obscures the real issue. The central text in this argument is the one I am exploring in my podcast right now, Virgil’s Aeneid, probably the most influential of all works of classical literature. The Aeneid is an apology for the newly-born Roman Empire, commissioned by the emperor Caesar Augustus himself. Yet it is a deeply conflicted work, with a subtext of ambivalence approaching at times to outright despair that undermines the surface of imperialist propaganda at every point. That is exactly the reason why it should continue to be read, because Virgil struggled with the same issues with which we struggle. A reading that dismisses it as “white supremacism” and nothing more is simply incompetent. Virgil grew up in a period of Roman civil war comparable to the “time of troubles” in northern Ireland, and he was clearly grateful for Augustus’s imposing of the pax Romana on various factions driven, as he saw it, by selfishness and the will to power. Virgil’s Aeneas is a new kind of hero: the hero of disciplined self-sacrifice, who suppresses his personal desires and impulses because he is devoted to a larger cause, a historical destiny that will benefit his people, though not himself. This kind of self-sacrifice for the collective good became the model for the British Empire almost two thousand years later: “An Englishman will do his duty, sir!” and will keep a stiff upper lip while doing it. It can also, however, become the collectivist, insectile devotion to the State praised by so many authoritarian dictators.
We know this perhaps better than Virgil. What he saw, and feared, was the narcissistic devotion to one’s own impulses and gratifications so typical of the would-be dictators themselves, then and now. The four main characters who become Aeneas’s antagonists are mindlessly, aggressively driven by their own impulses, starting with Juno, queen of the gods, who hates anything Trojan out of her wounded narcissism at having lost the beauty contest judged by the Trojan Paris. When she goes to the Underworld to fetch a female spirit of hatred to let loose among the Latin tribes, she says, “If I can sway / No heavenly hearts I’ll rouse the world below” (book 7, 425-26), a line that Freud made the epigraph of The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud’s late work Civilization and Its Discontents is a work of true Virgilian melancholy, the discontents arising from the need of civilized people to sacrifice individual impulses for the greater good.
But desire can only be suppressed for so long, after which the impulses of sex, violence, and superstition return and the civilization becomes decadent, headed for decline and fall. Juno’s demon, Alecto, possesses Queen Amata and Aeneas’s arch-enemy Turnus, who is a creature of rash impulse that I am convinced was a model for Shakespeare’s Hotspur. Finally, there is Aeneas’s lover, Dido, whose intense, irrational passion for Aeneas dooms not only herself but her people. Aeneas is an attractive figure contrasted with these narcissists. And yet the weight of his melancholy self-repression raises the insistent question, “What price empire?” There are moments in which Virgil praises Rome for its assumption of the burden of spreading and maintaining the civilized order, and they read very badly in our present post-colonial age. And yet the price is so obviously great. We are not done with such ambivalence: it even shows itself in the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die, in which Bond, for all his disillusionment with MI6, dies a self-sacrificing death to preserve civilization from villains characterized by exactly the same kind of narcissistic selfishness we see in the Aeneid—or in Donald Trump and his minions.
The Roman Empire came into existence at the battle of Actium in 31 BCE, in which Octavian defeated Mark Antony, who had allied himself with Cleopatra of Egypt, and ascended the throne as Caesar Augustus, first Roman Emperor. The one time that Virgil depicts his patron Augustus in the Aeneid is a portrayal of Actium on Aeneas’s shield. The portrayal is indeed proto-racist, Western values in battle with foreign barbarism:
Then came Antonius with barbaric wealth
And a diversity of arms, victorious
From races of the Dawnlands and Red Sea,
Leading the power of the East, of Egypt,
Even of distant Bactra of the steppes.
And in his wake the Egyptian consort came
So shamefully. (8.926-32)
Cleopatra calls her navy on with a drum beat, “a frenzy out of Egypt,” “while monster forms / Of gods of every race, and the dog-god / Anubis barking, held their weapons up / Against our Neptune, Venus, and Minerva.” After Caesar’s victory “Conquered races passed / In long procession,” including “Afri with ungirdled flowing robes” (8.976-77, 980).
But in teaching such moments, the thing to do is pose them against the countervoice. Sometimes the countervoice is within the Aeneid itself: at other times, it is outside, as in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which turns the value system expressed in the previous quotations exactly on its head. Shakespeare dramatizes the same contrast between Rome and Egypt, exactly reversing the sympathies. The Cleopatra who is Antony’s lover and ally is metaphorically dark, associated with the fertile mud of the Nile, even though Shakespeare knew perfectly well that Cleopatra was Greek, racially not Egyptian, a member of the royal line descended from Ptolemy, the general of Alexander the Great. But metaphorically she is dark, and embodies all the values antithetical to the methodical, practical, disciplined, pathetically repressed Romans. Color coding, once again, is according to convenience. She is pure impulse, emotional, rash, erotic, associated with the power of imaginative fantasy, and to Antony—and the audience—irresistible. even when they don’t approve of her. The battle of Actium is lost due to her impulsiveness, and Antony and Cleopatra die. Rome and its values of law, order, and civilization have triumphed—but Augustus mourns Antony, knowing that Antony is a greater man, though he will never really quite understand why. Nor will he understand the vitality, sexual exuberance, soaring imagination, and laughter, all associated with the “black” world of Egypt, that have gone out of the world with Antony and Cleopatra’s demise.
The far right and the far left agree in finding a single message both in the classics and the works influenced by them. By this point in the argument, however, it is becoming clear that both the classics and their literary offspring instead reveal a historical conflict of opposites, called the Apollonian and the Dionysian by Nietzsche, a philosopher who was by training a classical scholar, in his book The Birth of Tragedy (1872). The Apollonian is the spirit of reason, control, form, and restraint. The Dionysian is the spirit of emotion, impulse, energy, and spontaneous release. What is wrong with the “neo-classicism” of the significantly named Augustan period of the early eighteenth century is that it is all Apollo and no Dionysus, and therefore artificial, overly sophisticated, and sterile. The Augustan period, as its name suggests, begins the identification of the British Empire with the Roman one, and from then to this day young Englishmen at elite universities are educated in the classics because the “right” classics, read in the “right” way, teach and reinforce the values of empire, the white man’s burden. There is a YouTube video of Boris Johnson on a talk show reciting in Greek the first hundred or so lines of the Iliad. He hams it up delightfully, having a great good time, but his knowledge of a passage of Homeric Greek derives from an elite education that has always had an ideological motivation.
But that is not the only kind of education you can get from the classics. When a cultural tendency becomes exaggerated, a reversal always sets in, and Romanticism reversed all the Augustan values in favor of Dionysian ones. The Romantic poet Shelley derived from the classics—significantly, from the Greek rather than the Roman—an antithetical set of values. Politically, this meant a contrast between Roman imperialism and Greek democracy, however imperfect the latter might have been. Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound to celebrate the overturning of dictatorship in the form of Jupiter, king of the gods and symbol of the providential imperialism of the Aeneid. His friend Byron died in the cause of the liberation of Greece from the tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. In Nietzsche’s terms, Prometheus unbound signifies the release of Dionysian energies, not just political but erotic and artistic.
We may seem to have left the issue of race behind, but that is not true—unfortunately. There is indeed a danger in the release of Dionysian energy from below, below meaning, clearly, the human unconscious. It can result in love, liberty, and creativity, which could be called the Romantic form of the Trinity. But energy is power, and power corrupts. The release of the Dionysian can result in what the depth psychologist Jung called “inflation,” a demonic possession of the conscious mind by the energies of the unconscious. There is a reason that the law-and-order people fear an uprising of “barbarism” and “savagery” from below. The classical tradition is not all “sweetness and light,” as Matthew Arnold deemed it in Culture and Anarchy. It has a dark underside.
Out of that mysterious depth may arise liberation and renewal: Shelley’s Prometheus is unbound by an enigmatic figure named Demogorgon who comes from below to topple the tyrant Jupiter from his throne. But out of the same depth may arise demonic possession. To put it in modern terms: you can become a Jedi knight—but you are always in danger of going over to the dark side of the Force. I characterized the “barbarism” and “savagery” feared by white supremacists and other reactionaries as lack of impulse control leading to violence and sexual transgression, combined with irrationality and superstition. Yet who does that describe? Not the people in the ghetto or in Black Lives matter; not the antifa, who don’t even exist; not the homeless. No, the description fits the insurrectionists of January 6, as well as their many supporters in Congress and state legislatures. The obsession with guns; the frequent history of sexual harassment and sexual abuse; the insane conspiracy theories. The real violent, lustful, conspiracy-theory-mongering savages are not in “darkest Africa” or the ghetto. What the right-wing radicals really fear is themselves. They have demons inside them that they dare not admit to, and so must expel by projecting them on others. Why do we need to study the classics? Because we desperately need to learn how to embrace the Shelleyan outcome and avoid the demonic one. The key lies in the theme of The Birth of Tragedy: that the Apollonian and Dionysian, form and energy, law and impulse, ordinarily in conflict, may potentially unite as what Blake called Contraries. That union is the imagination itself.
Let us neither abolish the classics nor read them reductively in the name of social justice. The imagination’s task is what William Blake called the “Consolidation of Error,” by which he meant that literary interpretation is not a passive act of perceiving what is supposedly there, “in the text,” but an active wrestling with an otherness, attempting to recreate what is genuinely visionary in it by decreating its errors, blind spots, and ideological biases. Reading in this active sense is expansive rather than reductive. It is also historical and progressive and can result in the kind of paradigm shift that is what I think scholars like Padilla are really looking for. It is a way of remaking reality by remaking our perception of it, a process both personal and social, textual and experiential, the meaning of my signature phrase, also taken from Blake, “expanding eyes.”
Note: Quotations from the Aeneid are from the translation by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Random House, 1983).