countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and focus on the procedure of “thought policing” whose ultimate expression was the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books), a list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and which Catholics were therefore forbidden to read without permission. This list was operative (and regularly renovated) from early modernity until 1966, and everyone who counted in European culture was, at some point, included—in philosophy from Descartes and Kant, to Sartre and de Beauvoir. As my friend Mladen Dolar noted some years ago, if you imagine European culture without all of the books and authors that were at some point on the list, what remains is a wasteland. The reason I mention this is that I think the recent urge to cleanse our culture and education of all traces of racism and sexism courts the danger of falling into the same trap as the Catholic Church’s index: what remains if we discard all authors in whom we find some traces of racism and anti-feminism? Quite literally all the great philosophers and writers disappear.
Let’s take Descartes, who was at one point on the Catholic index but is also widely regarded as the philosophical originator of Western hegemony, which is immanently racist and sexist. We should not forget that the grounding experience of Descartes’s position of universal doubt is precisely a “multicultural” experience of how one’s own tradition is no better than what appears to us as the “eccentric” traditions of others: as he wrote in his Discourse on Method, he recognized in the course of his travels that traditions and customs that “are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.” This is why, for a Cartesian philosopher, ethnic roots and national identity are simply not a category of truth. This is also why Descartes was immediately popular among women: as one of his early readers put it, cogito—the subject of pure thinking—has no sex. Today’s claims about sexual identities as socially constructed and not biologically determined are only possible against the background of the Cartesian tradition—there is no modern feminism and anti-racism without Descartes’s thought. So, in spite of his occasional lapses into racism and sexism, Descartes deserves to be celebrated, and we should apply the same criterion to all great names from our philosophical past: from Plato and Epicurus to Kant and Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard. Modern feminism and anti-racism emerged out of this long emancipatory tradition, and it would be sheer madness to leave this noble tradition to obscene populists and conservatives.
The same argument applies to many disputed political figures. Yes, Thomas Jefferson had slaves and opposed the Haitian Revolution, but he laid the politico-ideological foundations for later Black liberation. And in a more general view, yes, in invading the Americas, Western Europe did cause maybe the greatest genocide in world history—but European thought laid the politico-ideological foundation for us today to see the full scope of this horror. And it’s not just about Europe: yes, while the young Gandhi fought in South Africa for the equal rights of Indians, he ignored the predicament of Blacks—but he nonetheless brought to a successful conclusion the biggest ever anti-colonial movement. So, while we should be ruthlessly critical about our past (and especially the past that persists in our present), we should not succumb to self-contempt—respect for others based on self-contempt is always and by definition false. The paradox is that in our societies, the whites who participate in anti-racist protests are mostly upper-middle class whites who hypocritically enjoy their guilt. Maybe, these protesters should learn the lesson of Frantz Fanon who certainly cannot be accused of not being radical enough:
Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. […] My black skin is not a repository for specific values. […] I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden. […] Am I going to ask today’s white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? […] I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.6
If we reject the notion of the generalized guilt of white men, we should of course also show no tolerance for their continued Politically Correct racism, whose exemplary case is the infamous Amy Cooper video7 that was filmed in Central Park. As Russell Sbriglia commented,
the strangest, most jarring part of the video is that she specifically says—both to the black man himself before she calls 911 and to the police dispatcher once she’s on the phone with them—that “an African American man” is threatening her life. It’s almost as if, having mastered the proper, politically correct jargon (“African American,” not “black”), what she’s doing couldn’t possibly be racist.8
Instead of perversely enjoying our guilt (and thereby patronizing the true victims), we need active solidarity: guilt and victimhood immobilize us. Only when we all act together, treating ourselves and each other as responsible adults, can we beat racism and sexism.
4 4. http://www.cdep.ro/pls/proiecte/upl_pck2015.proiect?idp=18210
6 6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008), pp. 201–206.
7 7. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/26/us/central-park-video-dog-video-african-american-trnd/
8 8. Private message from Russell Sbriglia.
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