Responsibilities

We have an inclination to excuse authors of the past for opinions that to us appear as unsavoury on account of the unenlightened times that they lived in. So John Milton’s treatment of Eve does not lead us to condemn Paradise Lost as the work of a chauvinistic woman-hater and the racism underlining Aphra Behn’s Oronooko; or, The Royal Slave, A True History is easily set aside by the remarkabe fact of it being a piece of travel fiction published by a woman in 1688. Perhaps the case of Nazism provides a limit case: the revelations that Günter Grass was a member of the Waffen-SS are harder to swallow than, say, Ezra Pound’s support of the Italian fascist regime, whose fervour can, in any case, be assimilated to his radical destruction of the ‘metronome.’ Anyone who was not a direct opponent of the Nazis is still ideologically suspect. And for good reason perhaps, but what of our own complicities? Living in an era that responds to the by now undeniable fact of man-made climate change and the destruction of our planet that it threatens not with a transformation of our energy consumption practices, but with a war on terror that has no clear enemy and hence no projectible end, an era that has redefined human improvement as economic progress, which in its turn seems to increasingly rely upon, rather than counter, the exploitation of those worse off, an era in which refugees stimulate the building of fences and technology is geared towards generating every-better ways of monitoring our private lives for financial gain – in short, what will posterity make of us and our words? If the future manages to improve on its past, will future generations of readers look back on literature written in 2016 and celebrate its aesthetic achievements  despite the barbaric times it was written in? Will they excuse us by providing contextual details and arguments about how we primitives could not have known better? Or will they condemn us for not realising the implications of that which is so blatantly in front of our eyes? A purely academic question, of course, given the energy we pour into destroying nothing as efficiently as our own posterity.