25 – Balancing Accounts

I was recently given a Kindle. It was a generous gift, but I wasn’t sure I would enjoy using it. I’m old enough to still prefer the feel of books, especially hard-covered ones. But as I explored the options I had for downloading material, I discovered that I could purchase, for only $1.99, fifteen novels by Sax Rohmer which would then be transferred wirelessly to the Kindle. The fact that it could be done in a matter of seconds still amazes me.

I had been considered a slow reader in grade school. At the end of fourth grade, a note was sent home to my parents warning them that I was falling behind my peers. My mother was worried by this, and, when she noticed that I was watching the Boris Karloff movie, “The Mask of Fu Manchu,” on television one day, she told me she had another book by the man who had written the novel the film was based upon. It was Rohmer’s “The Yellow Claw,” and it was the first extended piece of writing I ever attempted. After that, I became absorbed in Rohmer’s novels, and even in my early years at university, I would search used book stores for titles I did not have.

However, reading “The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu” on my Kindle, I was struck—and I should have expected to be—by the incredible racism and even the sexism of the novel. I felt that discomfort I sometime feel when seeing a favorite old Monty Python sketch which by current standards is no longer “politically correct.” Community standards change. My standards had changed.

On the one hand, I want to maintain that individuals in the past should not be judged by contemporary standards; they were, after all, the products of certain cultural assumptions, the standards of their era, their class, their background. On the other hand, I can’t ignore the fact that those standards are simply no longer viable.

There are people who become defensive when former Culture Heroes are judged by contemporary standards of behavior. Christopher Columbus is just one such figure. Their defenders argue that it is inappropriate to apply contemporary standards to our assessment of the events of the past. But it isn’t that simple.

While it is true that we cannot expect persons in the past to have been free of the prevailing cultural milieu in which they lived, we also cannot ignore the inequities and injustices which were inherent in most cultures (and still are). To fail to recognize this would leave no opportunity for improvements in cultural institutions.

History, as the common saying goes, is written by the victors. Those victors naturally view events from a particular perspective. But even in their own time, that perspective wasn’t universal. There have always been competing perspectives. If the Taino people had been able to write the story of the encounter with Columbus and his fleet, there is no doubt that the story would be very different from the one my classmates and I were given in grade school.

In looking at history, our goal is not to debunk but to balance accounts. We do that by recognizing that while there were prevailing social norms, those norms were never universal. There is always another side to every tale told.