The “woke” crowd is now intent on tossing out Homer’s “Odyssey” and challenging classical literary tradition. They want to inculcate a Jacobin uniformity of belief in the minds of future generations. How much easier will it be to recast history in the rigid terms of oppressor and oppressed, of exploiter and exploited, when no one has the intellectual wherewithal to understand history in all of its facets and contours?
For well over a century, Homer’s Odyssey has been a mainstay of American high school education. Indeed, although it is common to allow educators a significant degree of independence with regards to which books they choose to include in their curriculum, the Odyssey occupies an almost hallowed place in American cultural life, symbolizing as it does the value of the quest, or journey, and the realization of the goal to which it leads. As an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal this past December makes alarmingly clear however, the burgeoning “cancel-culture” or “woke” crowd is not content to merely silence the voices of the living. Now, they have set their sights on Homer and the classical literary tradition.
The article, authored by the essayist Meghan Cox Gurdon and entitled “Even Homer Gets Mobbed,” details a recent Twitter exchange in which a high school English teacher implored her followers to “Be like Odysseus and take the long haul to liberation, and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash.” In response to the latter, a second teacher, employed at a public high school in Massachusetts, declared: “Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year.”
Far from an isolated incident, Ms. Gurdon is keen to point out that this exchange reflects the most recent examples of a “sustained effort” to deny young people the pleasure of engaging with the literary treasures of the past. As one critic bluntly put the matter in an edition of the School Library Journal published this past June: “Challenging old classics is the literary equivalent of replacing statues of racist figures.” In addition to Homer, Ms. Gurdon suggests that authors ranging from Shakespeare to Nathaniel Hawthorne are seemingly at risk of being consigned to the rubbish bin of history.
In place of the classics, those hankering for their disposal appear to be advocating for a more “inclusive” curriculum consisting largely of young adult fiction and socio-political tracts that expound on various hot-button political themes. While there is certainly nothing wrong with teaching such works, the Twitter conversation Ms. Gurdon describes makes it clear that simply diversifying the curriculum isn’t the motivation here. Rather, it is to reduce the “subtle complexities of literature” to the “crude clanking of ‘intersectional’ power struggles.”
Indeed, as those of us who read dystopian novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984 should recognize, power is the bottom line. To those who want to dispense with it, the emphasis that the principal works of the Western Canon have historically enjoyed is not a reflection of the intrinsic worth of the texts themselves, but of who wields the most power in society. Pursuing this Machiavellian logic through to its conclusion, it follows that if those who are critical of “old classics” can successfully disparage them in the public arena, the amount of power they possess will increase relative to those who allegedly have an interest in the perpetuation of such works.
But the degree of wisdom that a society has attained is not a question of power. Rather, we ought to consider its capacity for wrestling with nuance and complexity. Tempting as it may be to view the world through the black and white lens of “us vs. them” or “good and evil,” reality invariably proves itself to be one or more shades of grey. Homer’s poetry is a testament to this enduring truth. Consider, for example, the Iliad, which recounts the story of the Trojan War. The final scene of that epic is famous, not for a hair-raising depiction of combat between the Greeks and the Trojans, or of one side triumphing over the other, but for the fleeting moment of compassion in which the Greek hero Achilles finally lets go of his overbearing wrath and turns the body of Hector over to Priam, the aged Trojan King. Thus Homer shows us that even in the midst of the most protracted and bitter conflicts, humanity’s capacity for love and mutual understanding prevails over its baser instincts, at least momentarily.
Those intent on tossing out the classics don’t want nuance however. They want to inculcate a Jacobin uniformity of belief in the minds of future generations. How much easier will it be to recast history in the rigid terms of oppressor and oppressed, of exploiter and exploited, when no one has the intellectual wherewithal to understand history in all of its facets and contours? How much easier to keep society polarized when its members lack common cultural reference points or a willingness to engage with perspectives that clash with their own?
Though all indicators suggest that the assault on the classics will only continue to gain traction as the culture war drags on, such efforts may ironically do these time-honored texts a great service. As history attests, attempting to suppress something or construe it as “forbidden fruit” more often than not only serves to make the object of derision that much more alluring to those who are kept from it. That aspect of human nature at least is not so easy to re-program. Given the overwhelmingly positive response that Ms. Gurdon’s article has received, this appears to be no less true where Homer is concerned. As a simple Google search reveals, at least ten articles have already surfaced coming to Homer’s defense against these most recent ideological attacks.
Indeed, although Homer was traditionally said to have been a blind poet, his vision was seemingly prophetic when he composed these immortal lines:
Yea, and if some god shall wreck me in the wine-dark deep,
even so I will endure…
For already have I suffered full much,
and much have I toiled in perils of waves and war.
Let this be added to the tale of those.
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The featured image is “Odysseus and Polyphemus” (1896) by Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901) and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Why does it seem that The Woke are actually sympathetic with the parasitic Suitors?
But did you vote in your last local school board election?
Doesn’t Homer’s blindness qualify him as a disabled person? So perhaps this minority status means he should be left in the curriculum.
Not only, but he may have been a “she” – so there is that.
The goal is to eliminate any imagery of white males appearing as heroic archetypes for today’s little boys. Similarly, in commercials and film white males are now depicted as weak, uncertain, silly, in need of correction & instruction by their female and colored betters. The New White Male is to be raised as feeling embarrassed & ashamed of his history, thus providing all others with social & political leverage.
Then we came to the land of the Wokeclops, an overweening and lawless folk, who, trusting in the immortal gods, plant nothing with their hands nor plough… Neither assemblies for council have they, nor appointed laws, but they dwell on the peaks of lofty mountains in hollow caves, and each one is lawgiver … and they reck nothing one of another.
“A fool art thou, stranger,” screamed the many voices, “or art come from afar, seeing that thou biddest me either to fear or to shun the gods. For the Wokeclops reck not of Zeus, who bears the aegis, nor of the blessed gods, since verily we are better far than they. Nor would I, to shun the wrath of Zeus, spare either thee or thy comrades, unless my own heart should bid me.”
Not to mention the monocularity of the wokeclops.
“Be like Odysseus and take the long haul to liberation, and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash.“
By the Gods! And people who utter such ignorant rubbish are teachers?! I always found the classics to be convoluted, sometimes trite, but I NEVER saw them as racist, sacrilegious, misogynistic or any other -ism they make up along the way. Now I wish I paid more attention to the Odyssey and other classics when I was at school….
Never too late to pick them up!
Excellent essay……One purpose of studying old classics in class is to stimulate moral reflection and conversation about the present. I’ve found that pairing Homer’s with Tennyson’s treatment of “lotus-eating” gets the talk going. In Homer, Odysseus “just says no” to his crew’s flirtation with the drop-out life style and drives them back to their oars and their duty. In Tennyson, we feel the appeal of the effortless drop-out life. His use of long, languid vowels and seductive images is meant to lull the reader, or at least bring him to an understanding of the drugged, unreal existence which still has deadly appeal to youth who “are going to San Francisco.” Lotus is the flower, then and now, that garlanded their hair. Eliminate the classics and you abandon the students in their own lotus land–adrift in the present, with no direction home.
I wrote an essay about just this theme- it is called “In the Land of the Lotus Eaters” and was published by the Imaginative Conservative. Would welcome your thoughts on it!
Teachers who don’t want the burden of teaching anything that might actually be difficult or require in-depth thought and analysis. They’d rather entertain their students and feed their current social trending. But these “Classics” teach constant truths that are a valuable lesson throughout life. Even as “The Scarlet Letter” teaches about prejudice and judgmentalism, and demonstrates that it’s been around for hundreds of years, suppressing it only condemns us to the old adage “Those that fail to learn the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it.”
And so the wheel turns and the cycle begins again.
Authors took the trouble to write these stories so that we may learn from them and progress. It’s ironic that these self-named “Progressives” seek to suppress that progress.
Great article! I grew up on the classics & love literature. A lot of entertainment today is just fluff and I hope classic books will survive our current “cancel culture”. Thank you for the well reasoned article!
Thank you! Glad to hear from a fellow literature lover!
“Be like Odysseus…”
Oh, the irony. One must have read “Odyssey” to understand the allusion to it.