Derek looks back at three important historical figures with unsavory pasts to ask the question: who gets to decide who gets canceled, and why?Show NotesGreat Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India How would Gandhi’s celibacy tests with naked women be seen today?John Muir Is Canceled. Who’s Next?Don’t Cancel John MuirI’m an MLK scholar – and I’ll never be able to view King in the same lightA judge gave a drug dealer a second chance. Sixteen years later, he swore him in as a lawyer.Sponsored Content: Last Week Tonight with John OliverThe Unbearable Feelings of the Anti-Masker
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
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I want to tell you a story about a man who became so obsessed with self-purification that he demanded a number of women sleep in his bed wearing as few garments as possible, preferably naked, while he embraced them throughout the night in order to prove he could not be aroused.
Years before, at the age of 36, this same man decided to stop having sex.
He claims his wife accepted his decision to live in a sexless marriage, though reports are conflicted.
Either way, the goal was his enlightenment, and so his celibacy began.
As well as his wife's.
Well, sort of.
I want to tell you a story about a man who slept naked alongside naked women to test his dedication to celibacy after his wife died.
The closest such female turned out to be his grandniece, who, at age 17, was summoned to not only be his walking stick wherever he went, but also began undressing and lying with the 74-year-old man.
And this was not her only duty.
In her extensive journals, she chronicles the daily massaging of his body and bathing, and this ritual could take an hour and a half each morning, as well as the cutting of his vegetables.
If the man were alive today, we would recognize his eating disorder as orthorexia, the constant elimination of foods until you only eat one or a few approved vegetables for weeks or months at a time.
His quest for sexual purity extended to nourishment as well.
There was another grandniece, and a female doctor, all of whom slept naked besides this man, who was a half-century or more older than each of them, and all of whom bathed and cooked for and cleaned him.
In fact, there were many women, though no accurate documentation exists of exactly how many.
Some appear to have been willing, but others were not.
And since he was a charismatic and beloved man, a national hero, who would say no?
Some of these women were not allowed to sleep with their own husbands, though they were required to lie naked with him.
Not only that, young boys and girls under his care were to bathe together, naked, and not become aroused.
His personal experiment extended well beyond the boundaries of himself, for this man knew the way and was going to show everyone else regardless of the harm being caused to them.
Harvey Weinstein?
Bill Cosby?
Kevin Spacey?
All fit one bill or another.
A powerful man in a powerful position that sought to only appease themselves.
But no.
I want to tell you the story of Mahatma Gandhi.
Last year, the National Park Service in America turned 100.
In honor of this momentous event, the nation's most well-known environmental organization, the Sierra Club, celebrated by renouncing its own founder, John Muir.
In 1892, the Scottish-American naturalists that became one of the most famed environmentalists in American history founded the organization.
Serving as its inaugural president for 20 years.
We certainly would not have had a conservationist movement to the degree that we do without Muir's influence.
But it was the 19th century, into the early 20th, and at some point Muir made derogatory remarks about Blacks and Indigenous Americans.
So in 2020, the current executive director of the Sierra Club, Michael Bruhn, said it was time to tear down more monuments.
As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir's words and actions carry an especially heavy weight.
They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club.
A few years prior, the Sierra Club noted that Muir was progressive for his era, an important distinction to make during a time in which all of history tends to get lumped together in a bucket called, Not Now, So They Should Have Known.
A few years is a lifetime in social media terms, and so Broon kept rethinking their stance.
Yet even in his lifetime, Muir renounced his former feelings about Native Americans after living with a number of tribes.
His biographer, Donald Worster, explains.
He saw the effects of white immigration and the diseases that came along, wiping out whole populations.
The presence of alcohol and its effect?
Trade relations that were not good for the Indians?
He wrote a diatribe against the white invasion.
He said this is something the government should be up here doing.
Taking care of and protecting these people from being exploited, from being hurt and dying from all this.
It wasn't just the Indians who got him saying unflattering things.
The white population, the people who were invading the frontier types, the miners, he thought they were uncouth, savage, brutal, dirty, given over to alcohol.
His writings are full of those descriptions.
Nobody gets upset about that.
Muir would come around even as he kept friendships with influential men that would go on to promote eugenics, for example.
While Muir didn't participate in the worldview, he also didn't speak out against it either.
There's the rub.
Another monument falls.
Muir isn't the only questionable character in this story.
Closer to our era, a young closeted black boy asked Martin Luther King Jr.
for advice on dealing with his sexual proclivity.
Here's King's reply.
Your problem is not at all an uncommon one.
However, it does require careful attention.
The type of feeling that you have toward boys is probably not an innate tendency, but something that has been culturally acquired.
Your reasons for adopting this habit have now been consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed.
Therefore, it is necessary to deal with this problem by getting back to some of the experiences and circumstances that led to the habit.
In order to do this, I would suggest that you see a good psychiatrist who can assist you in bringing to the forefront of conscience all of those experiences and circumstances that led to the habit.
You are already on the right road toward a solution, since you honestly recognize the problem and have a desire to solve it.
Like Gandhi, King memes are rampant in the circles I associate with.
And, of course, Gandhi's influence on King is well known.
King was also known for his sexuality, albeit in a different way than Gandhi.
He wasn't trying to prove himself by not having sex.
I haven't seen any calls for cancelling King or Gandhi, nor is that why I'm recording this episode today.
As for Muir, his star, as influential as it was on the environmental movement, isn't as bright as the others.
Beyond the confines of activists and ecological warriors, citizens barely know his impact.
But I'm not concerned with cancelling any of these men.
