Smith Ignores How East, West Converge

To the editors:

I read Luke Smith’s op-ed piece (“Bring Back the Dead White Men,” Nov. 6) with one curry bowl-full of shock and two of amusement. Smith apparently wants to impose a whitewashed curricular canon on all Harvard students, no doubt in order to protect those values of “tolerance for many different ethnic and gendered perspectives” that makes “Western society better than its alternatives.”

Putting aside the inherent contradiction and irony of those words, even if one accepts Smith’s premise (and I do not) that learning about Western cultures is more important than learning about those in the East, he should realize that in this age of Coca Cola stalls in Bangladesh and martial arts films dominating Hollywood box offices, the cultures of the two hemispheres are inseparable. Furthermore, to suggest that the teachings of Mohandas K. Gandhi were not the primary inspiration for the political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. would be to call King himself a liar. Confucius wrote of the perils of a foolish consistency more than 2,000 years before Emerson set foot on the Earth and wrote the same in “Self-Reliance,” which, like the writings of King, is taught in the government department’s introductory course on political theory. The freedom from compulsion in religion was written into the Quran some 1,100 years before our founding fathers thought to do the same in the Bill of Rights.

If anything, Smith’s words underscore the importance of allowing all Harvard students an equal opportunity to sample the political and literary works of non-Western cultures in order to the prevent the sort of blind-eyed ignorance that his article attempts to propagate.

Nitin Shah ’04

Nov. 6, 2003