Memes

I want to clarify my point. I'm definitely not dismissing the importance of these figures or the value of reading them.

What I'm saying is that I think people put too much emphasis on what their opinions were rather than just learning from their ideas and synthesizing them with the ideas of their contemporaries and intellectual progenitors.

To go back to my example, there's a meme among creationists that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution on his deathbed. It's baseless, but more importantly it's irrelevant. The value of his ideas are not dependent on what he believed. He's notable because he contributed to a framework on which we hang a larger understanding.

Similarly, I think Marx et. al. contributed ideas that are still very useful to our collective discourse. But their opinions are not prophesy, and I think people should focus more on the collective wisdom of the fields that they birthed rather than the specific opinions they personally held.