What do we do with the dinosaurs?

As someone who tries to be progressive, and has predominantly left-wing ideas and standpoints, I sometimes struggle with one side of my personal preferences: I really like dinosaurs. No, I’m not speaking of the reptiles that went extinct 65 million years ago, I’m speaking of the white men that had political ideologies, a view on women and a view of white superiority that I completely disagree with; the Heideggers, the Kants, the Humes of our history. In a time were progressive minds would like to see these dinosaurs to go extinct, and are debating what to do with their remains, I would like to contribute to that discussion by focussing on one of those dinosaurs specifically: H.P. Lovecraft.

A "contemplation of mankind's place in the vast, comfortless universe revealed by modern science" in which the horror springs from "the discovery of appalling truth"

Let’s not beat around the bush: H.P. Lovecraft was a racist. Even if you would want to argue that you’d have to view him “in his own time”, something which I wouldn’t like to do myself, you’d have to admit that his racism was very, very bad. What’s very wry, is that the general concepts that ooze out of his literary work, in my view, juxtapose racism. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, H.P. Lovecraft was the founding father of the science-fiction genre cosmic horror. The Greenwood encyclopedia of science fiction and fantasy: themes, works, and wonders defines cosmic horror as a "contemplation of mankind's place in the vast, comfortless universe revealed by modern science" in which the horror springs from "the discovery of appalling truth". To me, this kind of science fiction gives us a hopeful kind of pessimism: we are all doomed to be equally insignificant.

We are all doomed to be equally insignificant.

Lovecraft’s stories show us our insignificance, which is even more tragic in the perspective of our hybris. To me, it is incomprehensible to understand how one can write this view so eloquently, and still be a racist. However, I also don’t want to simply push that fact away, or ignore it, but I do still want to use his stories for my philosophy. Can we salvage the useful remains from this dinosaurs? Is it possible to talk about the positive nihilism as sketched from Lovecraft’s work whilst acknowledging his racism? Even more so, can we write progressive texts, denouncing the divides between our fellow human beings whilst referring to Lovecraft?

Perhaps we should appropriate the positive elements from the dinosaurs, and leave the rest for the museum – put away, but not forgotten.