One of the great lines from Goethe’s Faust states: “What you inherit from your forbears, must be earned before it is owned.” Today’s anti-woke culture warriors would do well to heed this lesson. They treat Western civilization as a heritage that one comes into by being born with European ancestry in Western Europe and its settler offshoots in North America and Australasia.
“The anti-woke right is not worthy of this heritage.”
But the anti-woke right is not worthy of this heritage; its militants haven’t earned the right to claim ownership over Thucydides, Cervantes, Shakespeare, or Goethe, let alone defend them. And so long as they exploit the monuments of Western culture as mere trappings for their own brand of identity politics, they never will.
To be sure, the impulse to take on the mantle of Western civilization—to promise to defend and preserve it—is understandable. Over the past decade or so, an energetic legion of activists and academics has been agitating for a range of institutions and disciplines to be “decolonized.” Everything from the curriculum to the museum, Shakespeare, classical music, mathematics, and even the idea of love has been in the decolonizers’ crosshairs.