Dethroning the Dead: Colorless Canons, Darkening Doubts

It is curious how often the most resounding social philosophies ignore facts that are obvious but inconvenient to theory. A current example of this will be found in the debate over the debased cosmopolitanism that has come to be called by the name "cultural diversity." For, while it has become fashionable to affirm the idea that all ethnicities can stake a claim upon the curriculum of the contemporary American university, it is easy to show that the European culture holds a sovereign position in the hierarchy of the intellect. Indeed, its status is universally loftier than any contenders, even where no one studies Homer or Shakespeare, in the original or in translations; in point of fact, it is at least as high in the Far East as in America. For, even when it is admitted that literary canons, aesthetic principles, and moral prescripts have a more or less arbitrary claim upon the devotion of a people, the same cannot be said of the calculus, thermodynamics, particle physics, or molecular biology. Science, which is multicultural in its sources, is practiced still today by Arabs, Asians, and Africans whose forebears were creators of its inchoation. But the version known to any contemporary researcher results from centuries of European refinements. Not every kind of knowledge is of the same importance to the culture, nor every culture of the same significance to the world. To insist otherwise is to place oneself in an impasse from which there can be no escape. That being said, it should be admitted straight out that the kind of expertise the author of this essay and the readers of the Journal of Aesthetic Education hold in dearest regard-that is, knowledge of the arts and humanitiesis enough to damn them for being disciples of Dead White Men in the eyes of a legion of skeptics whose most original spokesman was the daguerreotypist Holgrave in Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1850) who proclaimed: