collective pitchforks

I'm sort of struggling with this developing meme in internet culture.  This idea, I don't know how to put it, that if someone has some belief you find distasteful or if you dislike them as a person, then you should chuck out all they've done as worthless. This motif has cropped up at least 4 times in the last two weeks and it keeps making me more and more uncomfortable. Most recently, the revelation that one of the developers of a game called Flight Rising is sort of a transphobic dick. (Though can I be blunt? Being surprised that a developer of a game whose premise requires the erasure of any sexuality other than heterosexual pair bonding for reproduction is sort of heterosexist is...a bit like being STUNNED to find that a developer of Call of Duty is into guns).

Let's do a thought experiment, okay? Let's take a look at the Western Literary Canon, and let's NOPE anyone who is a misogynist, imperialist, capitalist, racist, anti-Semite  or homophobic.  OR, just generally an asshole.

NO Greek lit: those Athenians didn't grant women full status, and they kept slaves.
No Roman lit: imperialists, the very model of a culture co-opting the cultures it colonizes.
No Medieval lit: homophobic, misogynistic, viewed any racial other as sub human.
No Shakespeare: no, no oh my no. Racist (Caliban, Othello), Imperialist, capitalist extraordinaire, trivializes rape
No Chaucer, of course: imperialist, sexist.
No Margery Kempe: internalized misogyny, homophobic.
No Dryden: imperialist, racist
No Pope: trivializes rape
No Swift: racist, also an asshole.
No Austen: classist, imperialist, heterosexist
No Bronte: racist (oh god Bertha), heterosexist
No Lawrence: misogynist, major asshole, his depiction of Mexico in the Plumed Serpent's pretty racist, too.
No Woolf: okay I just put here here because she thought birds spoke Greek. 
No Joyce: trivializes mental illness, racist, anti-Semite
No Wharton: anti-Semite
I'm assuming you know that no early American lit would make the cut for racism (Jefferson kept slaves, Melville's Queequeg makes Tonto look good, The Last of the Mohicans is just....argh.)

Okay, I think maybe you get the general trend here?  Now, in most cases, I can point to places in their works where these beliefs are expressed.  In some cases, no. Wharton never discusses religion in her novels, so her anti-Semitism is never 'on the page' as it were.  And I've....kind of gutted the entire Western Canon. 

Maybe it's, you know, the bias of my job, but I don't think that's quite a good idea? . I find a wonderful coziness in Austen, I adore Wharton, and Pope? Well, he won my heart by his life story (as a Catholic, he was marginalized, not allowed to own property, and was the first writer to earn his entire living from his pen. His friend had to sign for his house.  He was also crippled. Also Essay on Man is amazing.)  Is there NOTHING good in Shakespeare? Is there nothing good in any American lit?  Is there nothing wonderful in Plato or Socrates? 

It's the whole 'baby out with the bathwater' thing that distresses me. Because I can look at these people and say whoa, problem, son, but I can still find worth and value and beauty in their works.  Maybe I look at my bookshelf and feel like I'm somehow a rotten person for loving these people despite their beliefs that I don't agree with.  I feel guilty, like I'm somehow complicit in their worldview.  But I know I'm not.  I think that no one's perfect.

At first I was going to say, well, you know, they're products of their time.  Singling out Wharton or Jefferson or The Bard when the majority of the culture they lived in believed the same thing is kind of unfair. 

But then I thought, well, that's true.  They were products of their time. And guess what else was a product of their time? Their wit, the beautiful words they created, those fantastic characters that have become, as Shakespeare gives us 'household names'. The time that created the good in them was the same time that created the 'bad' in them.


More than that, I worry about where this leads. Not just the idea that now we throw out the Western Canon and I guess we twiddle our thumbs in lit classes, unable to read anything, but this newfangled censorship.  People WILL disagree with you in life. People WILL have opinions maybe you don't like.  (My grammy was racist: am I supposed to not love my own grandmother?) I find as I get older I want to look for the good even in the bad. Because someone believes something I don't care for doesn't mean they are worthless. I mean, didn't it make like WORLD NEWS the other week that the Dalai Lama said he'd be okay with a female successor? It was news because, guess what? The Tibetan Buddhists are....oh boy howdy, pretty sexist. Does that mean there's no value in ANY of their teachings?

Good lord, I hope not. 

And I worry where this goes, because this strikes me as the thought police, as a form of rage-based censorship, that can only lead to burning books. I mean, they're already wishing this Thrage man dead.