Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

            Recently an academic luminary from an elite university suggested that the American classic Huckleberry Finn be changed to eliminate offensive language, specifically a well known and hateful word, (changing it to “slave” as in “Slave Jim”). This peculiar sensitivity makes me wonder if the professor reads anything other than the unreadable, politically correct writing that now masquerades as scholarship in the English departments of most American universities.

I recently read Thomas Wolfe’s great American novel Look Homeward Angel, which contains offensive words like those in Huckleberry Finn.  Has the politically correct professor read Look Homeward, Angel? If he has, does he think the offensive language should be changed?

            Ernest Hemingway writes that Huckleberry Finn is the first authentic American novel because Mark Twain writes in the American vernacular, which often contains offensive words. Before Mark Twain American writers followed the belletristic style (after belle lettres) favored by anglophile critics. Great writer that he was Mark Twain broke new ground with Huckleberry Finn, the best anti slavery novel in American literature, but which is now distorted by half educated, politically correct English professors.

            I also wonder, has the professor read any American literature written by distinguished black writers? Richard Wright’s Native Son, for example, has as its main character the tragic Bigger Thomas. Any guesses as to why Wright chose the name “Bigger”? Will the professor bowdlerize Native Son to make it more acceptable to the sensitivity crowd? How about Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy?

            But cultural abuse of great literature goes beyond the elimination of so called offensive language in American classics and extends beyond the university. These days one can find Shakespeare’s plays written in contemporary English because, according to the dumber downers, Shakespeare’s syntax, word selection, and blank verse are hard for youngsters to understand. Funny, during my school days teachers and students read the plays together, and my teachers did a good job teaching students how to read and understand Elizabethan English. Furthermore, we memorized famous passages like Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, countrymen…”) and Macbeth’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day…” etc.). 

            Then we have the egregious abuses of English as represented in dumbed down English translations of the Bible. Of all the English translations of the Bible, none approaches the Authorized Version (The King James Version) for the beauty of its poetry and its timeless ability to remain in one’s consciousness. When I was a child learning the Bible in my Methodist Sunday school and church liturgy, the King James Bible was the Bible I heard and I still remember its marvelous verses: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” now dumbed down to “Let the children come to me” or “How can this be since I know not a man” now rendered as the incredibly clumsy “How can this be since I have not had relations with a man?” or “Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder,” which is now the wretchedly inclusive “Whom God has joined together human beings cannot separate.”

            The worst English Biblical translations occur in my Catholic Church in the tone deaf New American Bible, which, among other atrocities, renders St. Paul’s “I have fought to good fight” to the embarrassingly inaccurate “I have competed well.” Hearing that at Mass is like hearing long fingernails scrape across a chalkboard. And speaking of the Mass, the dumber downers have worked overtime there. Before Vatican II Catholics all over the world heard the beautiful Latin Tridentine or Pius V Mass at worship. Now they celebrate in the vernacular with hootenanny hymns and mistranslations of Pope Paul VI’s Novus Ordo Mass.

            Dumber downer translators and their advocates defend the new translations because the older ones are hard to understand. In other words people are too stupid or too unteachable to learn. Isn’t it interesting that illiterate slaves, who were forbidden by law to learn to read, listened to the King James Bible and not only understood but also created spirituals that demonstrated that understanding, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example?

            Fortunately for Catholics Pope Benedict XVI has made it possible for all priests to now say the Pius V Mass in Latin and the Church has also corrected the mistranslations of the Novus Ordo Mass. Can we hope that someday an educational reformer and cultural restorationist like Benedict will emerge for the whole society to restore beauty and taste to language, literature, architecture, and manners, and where bowdlerizers will be too embarrassed to advocate on behalf of their culturally illiterate and nihilistic ideas? That’s a most needed educational reform and one for which we must most devoutly pray.