“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” This remark, made by the mischievous sprite Puck in William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, was directed at the absurdity of man’s love affairs. And while such folly is timeless, the comment is also relevant to a rather odd love affair perhaps unique to our time.
That is, the West’s affair with an ideology dictating its own culture’s destruction.
Perhaps the latest example of this toxic relationship comes from, ironically, the land that once perhaps did more than any other to spread Western culture: the United Kingdom. And its current effort at grinding itself down is an attack on its greatest writer, Shakespeare himself.
That’s right, it’s not enough that Britain now reportedly has a lower GDP than our poorest state, Mississippi. The country also apparently wants its cultural fortunes to mirror its economic ones.
What’s more, this anti-Shakespeare effort is driven by what animates so much degradation today: an assault on objective reality. More on that later.
Shaking a Spear at Shakespeare
The organization leading the anti-Shakespeare charge is none other than the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, England’s premier Shakespeare organization. The problem? Shakespeare is just too … well, English. The Telegraph reported the story Sunday (as presented at American Thinker):
William Shakespeare’s birthplace is being “decolonised” following concerns about the playwright being used to promote “white supremacy”….
It is now “decolonising” its vast collection to “create a more inclusive museum experience”.
This process includes exploring “the continued impact of Empire” on the collection, the “impact of colonialism” on world history, and how “Shakespeare’s work has played a part in this”….
The process of “decolonising”, which typically means moving away from Western perspectives, comes after concerns were raised that Shakespeare’s genius was used to advance ideas about “white supremacy”.
The claims were made in a 2022 collaborative research project between the trust and Dr Helen Hopkins, an academic at the University of Birmingham.
This is a shame because, as commentator Andrea Widburg writes, adding perspective:
Shakespeare has long been considered one of England’s great men because of his extraordinary output of timeless plays and sonnets. They … shaped the English language as well as exporting [sic] ideas about British culture … not because the Brits foisted his works on others, but because others recognized their beauty and universality.
But “universality” is for black-and-white thinkers, not for those obsessed with black and white and all things racial. Of course, the knee-jerk analysis here is that this anti-Western movement is motivated by “white guilt.” That is part of it, too; only, all it does it create weak, defenseless prey. As for the predators, the movement is driven by people who hate Western culture and seek its demise.
Perspective on Perspectives
Widburg addresses the justifications for this guilt and loathing. She points out that, yes, Britain engaged in colonization and slavery, among its numerous misdeeds. But so did other civilizations. As I put it in “A World Without the West”:
The West’s crimes, every one, are the crimes of all humanity; its glories, however, are in many cases uniquely its own.
Widburg then outlines these glories:
When Britain was good … she was very, very good. It was Britain’s Great Awakening, a religious crisis of conscience, that led to the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor, and the general improvement of working conditions.
And while Britain was a colonialist, Niall Ferguson has pointed out something fascinating: Former British colonies, wherever they are in the world, have thrived, exceeding nations in their regions that others had colonized (and everyone was colonizing everyone, whether Western, Asian, or Muslim). In other words, while we moderns can rant against the evils of colonization, everyone was doing it, and the lucky nations got England as their rulers.
Actually, however, it goes beyond that. The reality is, colonization was often a vehicle through which technology and prosperity-breeding habits — in a word, civilization — were spread. Economics professor Thomas Sowell summed up the colonizer/incidental-benefactor phenomenon well in his 1998 book Conquests and Cultures: An International History:
[Where] a technologically or organizationally more advanced people have conquered a people lagging behind in these respects [as with Western colonization], then conquest — like migration — has been a way of spreading the existing human capital of mankind and promoting the development of more human capital among more peoples.
When the colonizer/conqueror was less intellectually and economically developed, however, (e.g., the Mongols), human capital was destroyed. In other words, Western colonization was a relative blessing.
Thank you, Britannia!
Wallowing in Moral Confusion
Speaking of the “relative” brings us to a point. Widburg touted Shakespeare’s “universality” while the cultural devolutionaries complained about it (i.e., his being called a “‘universal’ genius.”). The latter speak instead about how that’s merely a matter of “Western perspectives.” It’s no surprise they would, either.
Divorced from Truth and awash in moral relativism, and its correlative cultural relativism, “perspectives” are all they have.
As to this, they complain that Shakespeare shouldn’t be presented as the “greatest.” Rather, relates The Telegraph, he should be viewed as “part of a community of equal and different writers and artists from around the world”. And this is where they lose the argument.
For what yardstick are they using to judge superiority, inferiority, or equality? It’s not Truth (objective by definition) because they don’t believe in it. That means their judgment merely reflects their own perspective. Yet if everything is relative, then what they’re saying is relative, too — and therefore meaningless.
The Eternal Yardstick
Actual meaning only comes from recognition of Truth, and this eternal yardstick would not deem all writers as “equal.” This brings us to how works are supposed to be judged. Ask: To what extent do they reflect man’s struggles with that universal flaw, sin? Even more importantly, to what extent do they transmit the universal remedy, Truth — and its derivative moral elements, the virtues?
Detached from the yardstick of Truth, though, moderns (relativists) have only one guide left: emotion — what feels right. And what feels right currently is impugning the West and giving every non-Western/victim group what the cultural devolutionaries feel will make it “feel” right (women’s studies, Afrocentrism, “LGBTQ+” curricula, etc.) It’s like being an intellectual drug dealer.
And as with any drug dealing, it hurts the young, preventing them from reaching their full potential. For instead of becoming beings of the ageless, they’re damned to being animals of the age.
