Western Canons

In this episode of The Makers Rage Podcast, Darren tackles the concept of the Western Canon—a collection of literature, music, philosophy, and art considered essential to Western culture. What makes a work canonical? Who decides? From its origins in religious texts like the Bible to Harold Bloom’s defense of aesthetic greatness, Darren explores how consensus, selection bias, and cultural politics shape our understanding of greatness.

This episode examines debates about inclusivity, the evolution of multiculturalism, and the impact of colonization on canon formation. Through engaging analysis of figures like Shakespeare, Dante, and Chopin, Darren explores how canons have been shaped by both tradition and challenge. Canons, Darren argues, are not fixed monuments but evolving dialogues enriched by diverse voices and perspectives.

Tune in for a thoughtful exploration of what it means to preserve, challenge, and expand our cultural treasures.

#WesternCanon #CulturalHeritage #Literature #ArtHistory #Philosophy #MusicHistory #Inclusivity #Multiculturalism #GreatBooks #Podcast

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Transcript

Western Canons

What’s A Canon?

Hello, my name is Darren and welcome to The Makers Rage Podcast. ‘Western Canons’. So, what's a Canon? If you open the dictionary, you'll see several definitions. “An authoritative list of books accepted as Holy Scripture.” “A body of principles, rules, standards, or norms.” “The writings or other works that are generally agreed to be good, important, and worth studying.” The word Canon comes from the Greek word meaning ‘rule’. If you're Catholic, you've probably heard of Canon Law – the first modern Western legal system. And indeed, the oldest continuously functioning legal system in the West. And the Apostolic canons is a collection of ancient ecclesiastical decrees concerning the government and discipline of the early Christian Church. You get the impression that what is canonical can't be argued against: like the word of God. And yet I've titled the podcast Western Canons in the Plural because I won't be talking about the word of God but the works of men and women who have contributed to a body of high culture, of literature, music, philosophy, and works of art so valued that generations have been taught to treasure them. For they are part of our heritage, works we’re taught in school, at university, works that the wider culture deems classic because the most educated among us have decreed this to be the case. 

Perhaps it's unfair to say Western Canons have been established by decree, it’s more a loose consensus. In the case of the Western Canon of literature, there is no agreed upon list. There are some works whose inclusion is less contentious than others. And it does help if you are white, male, and dead along time, because like it or not, the most educated people in the early modern period in the West were white men. And remember, multiculturalism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the West. So, while the works of dead white males will necessarily feature strongly in any Western Canon, since the influence of these works has been longstanding and pervasive through the whole history of Western culture, these canons aren't fixed by papal decree. Every generation will have people who champion works that have traditionally been included and others who champion works traditionally excluded. The reason there is no list of 100 authors, philosophers, musicians, artists that everyone agrees upon is that no two people will ever agree upon such a list. Although there have been valiant, perhaps foolhardy, attempts by the modern library, say, or Harold Bloom. Why should there be a quota at all? Or why should it end with zero? If Western Canons are our cultural treasure trove, surely, we want this to continually grow and not have to swap out older works to accommodate the new. There should be no limit to this bounty. The only criterion for inclusion should be greatness.

Consensus

That there's a loaded word. I mentioned no two people will agree on a hundred works of music or literature, say, that are great, but if you have 100 or 1000 people? Or thousands of people across generations and centuries who have been familiar with these works, a kind of consensus tends to be reached. And this, I suppose, is how these canons tend to be formed. In the history of Western music, what are the names that usually feature? Bach. Mozart. Beethoven. Chopin. Yes, dead white males. But who’d argue for their exclusion? If we get rid of all the dead white males, there wouldn't be a Canon of classical music. And how do we judge their greatness? There are aesthetic criteria, for sure. The Irish composer John Field invented the Nocturne, but why are all of Chopin’s remembered and adored and none of his? I'm sure you'll find someone out there who will champion the nocturnes of Field, but again, I come to the word ‘consensus’. There's something about Chopin’s nocturnes that has led more people in succeeding generations long since his death to agree that these should be treasured, should be taught, performed in concert by cavalcades of virtuosos and child prodigies, whose names we may not even know, but we’ll recognize, a Nocturne of Chopin’s. It's not enough to say that they are beautiful. That's a matter of opinion. And although enough people over time have agreed with this opinion, in justifying Chopin's inclusion in any Canon of Western music, each individual listener is still entitled to disagree. 

The Best that has Been Thought and Said

Regarding the Western literary Canon, the 19th century poet and social commentator Matthew Arnold railed against the anarchy of materialism, industrialism, and individualistic self-interest of his age while proposing in his most famous work, Culture and Anarchy, in 1869, that everyone should strive to read and assimilate “the best that has been taught and said in the world”. Arnold believed great literature was a palliative against the forces of materialism in the Industrial age, and as a substitute for scripture in an increasingly skeptical age: the age of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, among others, during which Arnold himself noted in his poem ‘Dover Beach’: “The sea of faith, its melancholy, long withdrawing roar, retreating to the breath of the night wind down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world.” The best that has been taught and said is what you take with you when the Barbarians are at the gates and the buildings are on fire – our poetry, our songs, our origin stories. Before there was writing, the people carried these with them everywhere they went, retained in their memory, transmitted orally. After all, it's hard to run with books and manuscripts under each arm whenever the barbarians show up. And that is why the foundational texts of many cultures were retained in the collective memory for centuries before being written down. Writing it down means there’s less need to remember it. And what if the libraries go up in flames and there's no one who has memorized the stories? Of course, many libraries have gone up in flames. Many great works lost forever: The Great Library of Alexandria; The House of Wisdom in Baghdad; The Maya codices of the Yucatan; The Imperial Library of Luoyang, among so many others. And countless great works have gone up in flames and lost to us forever. Among them, doubtless works which, had they survived, Matthew Arnold would have counted among the best that has been taught and said in the world. 

Selection Bias

It wasn't always illiterate Barbarians who were responsible. I mentioned the Maya codices, many of which were ordered destroyed by the Franciscan Bishop Diego de Landa. In 1562 de Landa wrote “We found a large number of books in these characters, and as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.” The them being the Maya people, of course. For these were their poetry, their songs, their origin stories, their sacred texts. And who knows what other great works of Astronomy or mathematics, all dismissed as lies of the devil by a benighted idiot priest? An extreme example of selection bias where the Catholic Church decides which texts will be translated and transmitted, and which ones added to the Index of Forbidden Books, or worse, thrown upon a bonfire of the vanities. Thankfully, the Arabs who translated Aristotle and Plato and a bunch of other ancient works weren't as hidebound by orthodoxy when deciding whether a text was worthy of being saved. Nonetheless, what survives of the ancient world has gone through a long and rigorous process of selection that wasn’t purely on intrinsic merit or ‘greatness’. If the Church decided there was heresy in these texts, or superstition and lies of the devil, the chance of them surviving to the 21st century to be considered for inclusion in any canon was remote indeed. So, you see from the start, politics has played a role in canon making, especially the literary canons. For more blood has been shed over what has been written or said than what was painted or sculpted. And often included with Shakespeare and Dickens and Dante and Homer is the Bible itself, for many throughout history, the Alpha and Omega of the Western Canon.

And yet, if you look at the Bible (a word that just means ‘books’ in Greek), if you're Catholic, a collection of 73 books approved by a succession of ecumenical councils from the Synod of Hippo in 390 CE to the Council of Trent, 1563. If you're Protestant, your Canon is 66 books, with fourteen others regarded as apocrypha. The word ‘apocryphal’ just means of doubtful authenticity, so basically ‘uncanonical’. Long before this, the Hebrew Bible went through its own long editorial process before the final authoritative version was approved by rabbinic scholars in the 10th century CE. This is to illustrate that canons don't come about organically. There was always a committee, some selection bias driven by political or religious orthodoxy that impinges upon their formation. 

Harold Bloom

The literary critic Harold Bloom, that great defender of the Western Canon, wrote in his book by that very title quote, “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength which is constituted primarily of an amalgam mastery of figurative language, originality, cognitive power, knowledge, exuberance of diction.” And he rails against its politicization by ‘resentful’ scholars who would shoehorn mediocre writers in because they're ‘underrepresented’ for their ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. “New Historicists”, he says, “with their odd blend of Foucault and Marx, who would banish Shakespeare, reduce him to his contexts”, and suggest social and economic forces, wrote Hamlet and Macbeth, not the individual man of genius, William Shakespeare. At the back of his book, Bloom gives us his own Western Canon, at whose foundation during what he termed the Theocratic Age, appear works like Gilgamesh from the ancient Near East, the Authorized King James Bible (in other words, the most Shakespearean of Bibles), the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, the Bhagavat Gita and the Ramayana. I suppose we shouldn't object if Indian scholars decide to include Shakespeare in their Canon. Then Bloom gives us the usual procession of Greeks – Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Euripides, and the rest, and the Romans. Interestingly, the Koran is there, acknowledging, rightfully, that the Western Canon had its sunrise in the east. But after this, during his so-called Aristocratic Age (spanning from Dante to Goethe), he lists the usual dead white aristocratic bunch. Even during what he calls the Democratic Age after the 19th century, ironically enough, his selection is far from democratic. Although women were beginning to feature a lot more. 

Multiculturalism

It is from the 20th Century onwards that he denotes the Chaotic Age, the age of multiculturalism. But in his list, he takes pains to ignore everything multicultural about it. Despite acknowledging earlier that the Western canon’s origins to be non-western, it is the politics of identity that characterizes the Chaotic age that he felt most degraded it in the 20th century onwards. For his politics motivates selection not for aesthetic power, and champion works not for their ability to enlarge our consciousness, but because they speak for the underrepresented. 

Anecdotally, as someone of mixed Irish and Caribbean descent, my first consideration when deciding which work of literature to read isn't the ethnicity or sexual orientation of the writer. But I do have my biases, conscious and unconscious, like everyone else. Ireland took to multiculturalism quite suddenly during economic boom of the 90s and early 00s – the Celtic Tiger as it was called. Now there are people of Indian and African and Chinese descent walking around with Irish accents. This wasn’t common, 20 years ago, even. And I can imagine being someone today with Chinese parents, say, going to school and being told this and that writer is great who isn’t Chinese. Even though you consider yourself Irish and develop a love of Irish literature, you may wonder if there ever could be a great Irish writer with Chinese or Indian or African parents. 

In America, of course, this has been playing out almost since the country's founding. And the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, all being men of European descent, in their determination and supreme confidence, must have been disquieted in declaring independent a territory their ancestors seized from the people who were indigenous to that land. And since many of them owned slaves, did they wince a little when reciting the “all men are created equal” part? We know they must have because Jefferson's initial draft of the Declaration of Independence included a passage scolding King George III for his role in propagating slavery in America – for taking quote “A distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” The signatories who benefited from slavery had this section removed from the final draft. 

So, imagine being someone of Lakota descent who wants to know the best that has been taught and said and sees among the works listed nothing by someone who looks like them. They moreover read in some of the works by descendants of these colonizers’ bigotry and paternalism towards the people who were already living in America long before it was ‘discovered’ for Europeans. But does this mean that every book the colonizer brings afflicts like Smallpox and the sword? The conquistadors weren't exactly men of letters. But as the Greeks exemplified on being conquered by the Romans, the best way to strike back is to captivate your conqueror in turn with your arts and letters. And indeed, all Roman literature would take inspiration from captive Greece. And as mentioned already. The Western Canon has its roots in literature far more ancient than Greece, far removed geographically from Europe, and since so many millions now living in the West have their roots far removed geographically from Europe or America, having seen the lamp aloft the golden door inviting the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse from foreign shores, what a bonus it must have been to discover they brought their treasures too – their poetry, their stories, and our songs. New Yorkers today, who come from all ethnicities and backgrounds, can see the text of that famous poem by Emma Lazarus cast on a bronze plaque mounted inside the statue's pedestal: a welcome message to all. Not unlike one written not long before by another New Yorker, Walt Whitman: “That you are here. That life exists and identity. That the powerful play goes on. And you may contribute a verse.”

Unfortunately, there are people who instead of contributing a verse, want to rip existing ones up. who instead of adding a page to the great book of Western literary culture, want to tear pages out by artists who've committed the cardinal sins of being dead, white, and male. As if ripping out Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, for example, to accommodate lesser writers of an underrepresented ethnicity will improve the canon. In other words, compromising on the best that has been written and said for the sake of the three cardinal virtues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. There are today Italians of African descent and Asian descent, but in 13th century Florence they were scarce the nonexistent. So, while African and Chinese Italians are free to contribute to the Canon of Italian literature today, in the Middle Ages, when the Tuscan dialect was being established, it's understandable that the people contributing most to establishing what would become the modern Italian language are present in their nation’s canon: Lentini, who invented the sonnet and Petrarch, who made it world famous; Bocaccio, who arguably invented the short story; and Dante, who with his Commedia or Comedy, which Bocaccio later called the Divine Comedy, gave us one of the greatest works in world literature. To tear out a page of any of these writers from the Western Canon is to tear out the very history of the Italian language. 

Empires Striking Back

Things become more contentious though, in a country whose Canon is comprised mostly of people writing in a language not native to it. In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Irish writer James Joyce gives us an exchange between Steven Dedalus – a barely disguised Joyce – and an English Dean, who is surprised by the Hiberno-English word Tundish, which is a type of funnel used to regulate the flow of liquid (originally in brewing). It's that called a “Tundish in Ireland?” asked the Dean. “I never heard the word in my life.” “It is called a Tundish and Lower Drumcondra”, said Steven, laughing. “Where they speak the best English.” “A tundish”, said the Dean, reflectively. “That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my ward I must.” And after giving the Dean this quick lesson in his own language, Stephen reflects, “The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words Home, Christ, Ale, Master on his lips and on mine? I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.” This is the insecurity every Irish writer who writes in English must feel when considering who to include in any Irish Canon. Many writers traditionally included in the English Literary Canon are Irish after all. And yet it was this very insecurity that motivated writers like Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, and Yeats in the 20th Century, when Irish Independence was finally achieved, to make this language its own. The English language may have belonged to the English first, but Anglophone countries like Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia, produced their own versions of this language and their own literature to boot. And this was the empire striking back. 

Similarly, the greatest literature written in Spanish in the 20th century was mostly not written in Spain: Julio Cortazar of Argentina, Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia – all writing in Spanish, the language of the conquistadors. But you can argue The Latin American Boom had a greater influence on Spanish language literature than anything written in the Iberian Peninsula the past 100 years. 

Race

I suppose America, of all Western countries, has the most trouble with its Canon. A country founded on Western European principles by people of European descent, but significantly unlike in Europe, not indigenous to it. A further complication, The United States, which prides itself on its Constitution and in its Declaration of Independence: of the equality of all men and women of whatever ethnicity, was the last major Western country to abolish slavery, and even after the abolition, down to the present, has had to live with the consequences of slavery. the United States may be a nation of immigrants who have come from all over the globe, but Native Americans didn't send out any invitations, and African Americans didn't accept any. So, it’s no wonder the indigenous would rankle at the suggestion their land was discovered in 1492 by a European pirate, or the descendants of slaves take umbrage upon discovering that the founding fathers agreed to redact a passage condemning King George III for “captivating and carrying their ancestors into slavery” – “we hold these truths to be self-evident.” Well, when Jefferson wrote those words, there was little evidence that all men are created equal. And this is the truth America has had to come to terms with through Jim Crowe, the civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter. 

But I suppose there is a worthwhile concern that these politics have encroached too far upon literature and the arts, and that in confusing the struggle to achieve equality of opportunity for all with that of equal historical representation, there's a risk of overcorrecting by excluding works, not for the lack of esthetic power, but because their authors’ skin color is overrepresented. The goal shouldn’t be rip up existing verses, but like Langston Hughes did, to contribute new ones: 

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.

Nobody’ll dare

Say to me,

“Eat in the kitchen,”

Then.

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

As is the dead white Herman Melville. And I'm sure his contemporary Frederick Douglass, that black Demosthenes of the Civil War era, would have warned against abstracting whiteness from the man or woman, as he himself urged post-abolition white men and women not to do with people of his complexion. And no doubt as his eloquence flowed, it diluted this prejudice, which beforehand struck “more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.” – as the whiteness of Melville's whale. 

Intellectual Declaration of Independence

Despite Emerson, 25 years before the Civil War, declaring America's intellectual Declaration of Independence when he wrote in the American Scholar. Quote “Our Day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. Events, actions, rise that must be sung, that will sing themselves.” Twenty years later, Whitman began his ‘Song of Myself’ with the famous line “I celebrate myself and I sing myself”. It will take another 70 years for the son of slaves, Langston Hughes, to say, “I, too sing America.” 

Today, it's hard to imagine an American Canon without Langston Hughes or James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and others besides. Ralph Waldo Ellison: named after Emerson, who wrote America's Intellectual Declaration of Independence. And unlike Jefferson, Emerson owned no slaves. And not a drop of blood was shed after this declaration. Intellectual independence isn’t won by force of arms but after a long apprenticeship. And though Emerson would urge the American scholar not to feed on foreign harvests, he was still steeped in the European classics. Writing essays on Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe, Plato, and Swedenborg in his Representative Men. Likewise, Ellison wrote that T.S. Elliott’s ‘The Wasteland’ was a major awakening moment. And no doubt he read Emerson as he did Dostoyevsky and Thomas Hardy who were also big influences. And this is how a writer becomes canonical, by first becoming familiar with it. Then writing within and around the Canon; responding to it, even subverting it. And Subversion is a kind of response. And only in the arts can heretics be canonized. 

Inclusivity

Of course, the more inclusive the Canon becomes – the richer and more capacious – the more there is for teachers to choose from. But it also means that teachers must be more selective when teaching it. There are only so many works one can fit in any curriculum, and this is where the controversy really starts. Some of argued that in English Language literature, including Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton, especially in any American literary Canon is to fill a limited space with great, immovable colossi against whose pedestals all subsequent writing must be stacked, and only these can be swapped out and replaced. Of course, the idea that Shakespeare is an immovable colossus would’ve amused his contemporaries and himself. That said, one of his contemporaries, one of his rivals, Ben Johnson, said that he was not of an age but for all time, so they must have seen the potential. And while banishing Shakespeare from the Canon isn't to “banish all the world”, to quote Falstaff, bit it would be to excise the most considerable single influence on English literature other than the Bible. And while Emerson wanted to end the long apprenticeship to foreign shores, the language that is spoken by most Americans is itself an immigrant that brought with it its history, its poetry and its songs. 

That said, this doesn't solve the challenge of forming a curriculum of great literature. It’s easier with Western composers, since no one is writing great symphonies these days, great piano concertos. If there are Chopins and Beethovens out there, they're in hiding. By contrast, more literature and poetry is written today than at any time in history. How can we possibly identify what works will be canonical in 200 years? I suppose that's a job for future generations, but what teachers choose to teach today has a greater chance of being taught tomorrow. Yet, no two teachers, no two lovers of literature will ever agree upon the same list of great books. Which is where an informed consensus is needed. 

Giving the students some agency here is important. It allows them to enter into a dialogue with the Canon. The purpose of teaching literature isn't simply telling students what's good and what's bad writing, it is to teach them to think critically about all writing; to discern for themselves what is good and what is bad; what they like and dislike; and to develop the ability to articulate their defense persuasively, not dogmatically. And I don't mean to turn them into literary critics, especially those belonging to what Harold Bloom termed the postmodernist ‘School of Resentment.’ 

Theory & Criticism

Though I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the many ways there are of interpreting a text. A feminist reading of a poem or a Marxist one; Psychoanalytic, post-structuralist; a queer reading. It makes the work richer, more interesting, like an opalescent stone that changes colors as you turn it. As soon as we stop examining a work, arguing over it, it loses its appeal. And the fact Shakespeare has been translated into at least 100 languages, and his works performed in Japanese, Arabic and Swahili, perhaps points to him being more than just a big marble colossus taking up space. That said, Harold Bloom certainly went too far in his bardolatry in claiming Shakespeare invented human character. Sweeping claims like that make Shakespeare seem inescapable, which is why there are great writers who resented him, like Tolstoy and Mark Twain, who both taught him overrated. It was their way of denying his divinity, resisting his apotheosis, for once a writer’s works become holy writ, there is no escaping them. One must be free to say a work is shit, overrated, without fearing the inquisition. 

Death of the Author

After Nietzsche declared God was dead, some like Matthew Arnold sought solace in literature. Then along came the literary critics, who looked at the word “author” and thought it smacked too much of divine authority. In 1967 – of course, that decade when everything radical was chic – the French literary theorist Roland Barthes published the essay ‘The Death of the Author’, which stated that whatever the author intended in his or her work is less important than the reader's interpretation. The death of the author seemed to imply the birth of the critic, and since author implied authority, Barthes suggested we change the word to ‘Scriptor’. Thankfully, this hasn't caught on. But what did catch on was a trend of bringing increasingly baffling theory to the humanities and all the bafflegab that comes with it. And post-World War 2, most of it seemed to come out of France. The British biologist Peter Medawar even sighed at the quote “Euphoric prose-poetry, which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.” But if the French language doesn't lend itself naturally to the opaque and the ponderous, perhaps inspired by questionable translations, many Anglophone literary theorists would imitate the style in English. 

I don't want to cherry pick examples out of a body of work that itself has become a kind of Canon. But I’ll quote Alexander Pope’s admonition in his ‘Essay on Criticism’, 

Be sure your self and your own reach to know,

How far your genius, taste, and learning go;

Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,

And mark that point where sense and dulness meet.

Physics Envy

One accusation that's most often levied against literary critics today is that they failed to mark that point. Some have called this tendency to the abstruse ‘physics envy’. Perhaps in some, but I think for most in the humanities, it's been an attempt to grapple with a world, a reality that seemed a lot less simple at the dawn of the 20th century than in centuries before, when old certainties seemed unassailable, when God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

The fact the intellectual leadership of the 20th century rested largely with scientists (Time magazine’s ‘Man of the 20th century’ is Einstein, after all) And if you remember the famous 1927 Solvay Congress photo mentioned in the episode on ‘Thought Experiments’, you have represented in that photo Canonical figures in 20th century physics. And although they are mostly European and male, one cannot dispute their achievements, and therefore their inclusion in any Canon of 20th century science. And since Theoretical Physicists are celebrated for ideas the general public scarcely understood, perhaps some in the humanities who call themselves theorists saw difficulty as a virtue, and being clear and comprehensible, as something to be avoided, like public nudity. 

Of course, you see the same trend in 20th century philosophy. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is not an easy read. Neither is Heidegger’s Being and Time, works known as much for their inaccessibility as for their influence on 20th century thought. And if you look at the Western philosophical Canon, which some believe consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, if Plato is to that Canon what say Homer is to the Western literary Canon, his dialogues are certainly far more readable and entertaining than what you see in philosophical journals today. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant is considered the greatest philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, and yet his great work, The Critique of Pure Reason is again famous for being impenetrable. 

Of course, this may simply be down to the fact that not all great philosophers are great writers. Plato was a great writer. Aristotle was not. Schopenhauer was a great writer, Hegel was not. Nietzsche was perhaps the greatest philosophical writer, and this has definitely helped his popularity, let alone his canonicity. And yet, ironically enough, it’s from Nietzsche that 20th century theorists developed their skepticism towards grand narratives like Democracy, The Enlightenment, and the idea of a Western Canon. Plato, whose dialogues read like plays that could be performed on a stage, nonetheless wanted to banish the poets from his Republic. Were he alive today, I'd say he'd revise his opinion on this and instead banish the cabals of obscurantists who claim to be his successors. 

Open Borders

But of course, we should be skeptical of so-called Western Canons because they aren’t strictly western. Works like Homer and the New Testament had very nonwestern precursors like Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible. And such cross pollination has continued to be a trend in the development of Western culture, Schopenhauer, so strongly influenced by Buddhism and Vedanta Hinduism had a profound influence not only of philosophers like Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra also had his provenance in the East, but on ardent nationalists like Wagner, who would have liked to think that his music dramas were wholly Germanic. Despite his Tristan and Isolde especially being written in response to Schopenhauer’s Buddhist inspired The World as Will and Representation. 

In 20th century poetry, ‘the Wasteland’ has been cited as canonical. And yet you can't talk about it without mentioning the Bhagavat Gita. In Western art, Toulouse Lautrec was inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, Picasso by African sculpture, particularly the traditional masques; and The Beatles, who used a piccolo horn as Bach would have done, also incorporated the sound of the Indian sitar in their songs. Ravi Shankar, who taught George Harrison to play the sitar, engages with Western music by writing compositions for sitar and a Western Orchestra. So, the East-West dialogue that began in antiquity has continued to the present. And though we may squabble over who gets to cross a geographical boundary, the borders that enable the exchange of ideas should be open and unguarded.