Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1324024
11 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 3 JANUARY 2021 OPINION (at least, for as long as those works remain available to actu- ally read) that they, too, must have regarded themselves as the 'pinnacle of human civilisation' in their own age… just as we do today. So to remove Homer from the school curriculum – and pre- sumably all other relics of the Classical World: replete as they all are with 'violence, sexism, racism', etc. – is also to perma- nently close a window which offers us an invaluable glimpse onto our collective past. And you don't even need dys- topian novels like 'Brave New World', to figure out what fate will inevitably befall a culture that refuses to ever learn the les- sons of its own history… And besides: why stop at Hom- er, anyway? The #DisruptTexts movement certainly does not limit itself only to ancient ep- ics. One of its proponents – a certain Padma Venkatraman, described as a 'young-adult nov- elist' – would take the chopper to Shakespeare, too. In her own words: "Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden senti- ments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that ac- ademic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric…" Leaving aside the obvious flaw in that argument – i.e., that what appears 'hateful' to us today, appeared less hateful in Shake- speare's time: and if we are to truly understand who we are, and where we're coming from… that fact, in itself, should give us more reason to study his works, not less – the real problem is that those words actually apply to every single work of litera- ture, from all ages, ever written before the last few years of the 20th century. There are, in fact, no literary works of any kind at all – written at any point before around 1990 – which 'portray the norms that we hold today in terms of gender roles, violence and racial equali- ty'. And there can't be, either: for the simple reason that many of those 'norms' did not even exist, anywhere at all, in the cultural mindset of people born before the 1950s (still less the 1500s… or, for that matter, 5,000BC). For this reason alone, I suspect that – lurking somewhere be- neath this ideological, extremist, Khmer-Rouge style 'pogrom' of world literature – there is also a deep-seated, primal fear of ev- er confronting the fundamental lesson bequeathed to us by all those past literary classics. It can be discerned in Homer's 'The Odyssey'… and Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex'… and Shake- speare's 'King Lear'… and Jo- seph Conrad's 'Heart of Dark- ness'… (all certainly destined for censorship, if these fanatics get their way)… all of which point towards the inescapable fact that our entire civilisation (including the so-called 'modern norms of human behaviour') are ultimate- ly built upon the foundations of violence… sexism… racism… and all the other 'isms' that ulti- mately hark back to humanity's earliest (and most primitively savage) origins. The difference was that those authors – and many more beside – had the courage to confront that ghastly realisation head-on; and the result of their bravery was timeless literature, that can still be appreciated today. Those who would suppress their works, on the other hand… and, worse still, deny the possibility of that discovery to others… are ignorant, benighted, and fearful. And it is a 'Cowardly New World' that they intend to create… One of the things that made 2020 such an awful year to live through (apart from COVID-19, and all the rest of it) was the realisation that humanity has, in fact, taken its first somnambulant steps into a dystopian future this year