Maybe you’re a normal well-meaning person just trying to reconcile the revelation that your favorite movie was made by a creep. Maybe you’re a manic Woody Allen fan, blathering on like a schizophrenic street preacher that Hollywood is leading a “witch hunt.” Either way, there’s no denying that separating the art from the artist these days definitely seems to be a quandary.

Tough as it clearly is, we should probably keep in mind that it’s nothing new. Before #MeToo outed dozens of well-liked entertainers as abusers of power, before a bit from Hannibal Buress’ stand-up forced us to realize that Bill Cosby is a serial rapist, before Roman Polanski fled the country to avoid sentencing for statutory rape charges, before even the oldest tales of Hollywood sexual assault finally came to light, we were already grappling with more than a metric shit ton of uncomfortable truths about our most beloved creators. We had Roald Dahl’s anti-Semitic remarks and Picasso’s open mistreatment of women. We had Charles Dickens’ intense shittiness as a father and Jack London’s bloodcurdling racism.

This moral impasse has never even been strictly limited to art. Anybody who appreciates Thomas Edison’s contributions to our electrically powered lives is stuck between the rock of enjoying light bulbs and the hard place of abhorring animal abuse. In the same way that Henry Ford helped shape the middle class as we know it, while taking the time to self-publish his deepest anti-Semitic thoughts. Or in the way Thomas Jefferson co-founded the United States on the “all men are created equal” tip, despite being fundamentally racist. Keep on digging through history; you won’t find a tier of historical figures, no matter how revered, that’s free of indefensible words or actions.

Overcorrecting society’s past mistakes by accepting a new set of tyrannically rigid dogmas doesn’t help any of us.

Where does that leave us? With no choice but to burn an effigy of every venerated figure in Western culture or throw our hands up and accept that the whole of human history is pockmarked with assholes? I’m gonna give both a soft ‘no’. As with so many issues, this one isn’t well-served with black-and-white thinking. On the contrary, our only hope in this situation is the judicious application of nuance.

There are some obvious reasons why. Overcorrecting society’s past mistakes by accepting a new set of tyrannically rigid dogmas doesn’t help any of us. Case in point: An angry meme showed up in my Instagram feed a while back implying that the most notable thing physicist Stephen Hawking should be known for is leaving his wife for a younger woman. Oof! The misguidedness of this still makes me cringe. Look, I understand the general attitude that spawned this meme. Women’s second-class ticket in society has led to countless ladies being snatched up and cast aside like man’s mere possessions since time immemorial. But this doesn’t mean that every divorce and remarriage in history can be attributed to this phenomenon alone. By all accounts (most importantly, that of Jane Hawking herself in her book Traveling to Infinity), the Hawkings’ marriage deteriorated in the mutual way that many do.

But even if Jane Hawking had offered a less than flattering portrait of Hawking as a husband, how specific of a view into his personal life would we need in order to come away with a firm belief that he was indeed an abuser, a narcissist, or some other flavor of awful that’s unforgivable enough to negate his accomplishments, rather than just your basic run-of-the-mill partner in an overall toxic relationship? It’s just the first in a long list of increasingly impossible questions that accompany many problematic figures whose awfulness is more than apparent, but less than criminal. For instance, how much weight would we need to afford to historical context and the mores of his time and place? And if enough specifics about his behavior could be established, how would we then proceed? We’d probably need to stop making sweetly inspirational movies about him, but would that be enough? Would we need to make it standard practice to mention his bad behavior whenever his scientific discoveries come up in conversation? Or should we all agree to just roll our eyes whenever his name is mentioned?

This is difficult enough to parse with a purely hypothetical example. Replace Hawking with Ford or Dahl or some other important historical figure whose actual misdeeds aren’t a matter of fiction or even hearsay but of their own public statements, and the conversation becomes even more fraught. To drag an even more hot-button example into the fray, John Lennon admitted to having been physically abusive to women, but he did so with remorse and regret. Does his contriteness make a difference in how we view this aspect of his character? Or how much we enjoy the White Album? Does it matter if an actual survivor of physical abuse feels differently?

I’m not suggesting that I think there is, or should be, a single right answer to any of these questions. This is one of those cliche but all too real situations where it’s not about deciding which answer is right, it’s about asking the questions in the first place. It’s about having a conversation about it, one where it’s okay if we each feel a little differently as long as we’re helping foster a culture in which we talk about these things. Having the discussion at all helps hold these problematic historical figures accountable for their shitty behavior. But what’s far more vital is that it places importance on the victims of that shitty behavior; people our culture has previously been able to effortlessly dismiss, like girls and women, members of minority races and religious groups, and family members of prominent narcissists (just to use a few examples from this essay).

It’s easy to get it twisted, to think we all have to decide which babies need to be thrown out with their bathwater right this minute. But this thinking doesn’t just leave us open to looking like jackasses if it turns out our case against a potentially problematic figure wasn’t airtight (like with the Stephen Hawking meme), it takes a backward approach to our overall goal of steering Western culture in the right direction. It places the primary (and often only) importance on condemning problematic people, instead of on elevating the voices and experiences of victims —which should come first. Not to mention that, as the many questions listed above would seem to imply, condemnation isn’t a simple process that we should all expect to agree on. But acting on our empathy for victims is. To use the erroneous Stephen Hawking meme as an example, we wouldn’t all have to concur on whether Stephen Hawking was a monster or just a party to a troubled situation in order to agree that Jane Hawking’s experience, whether it would appear differently to a third party observer or not, was still painful and worthy of our compassion. That’s a pretty solid start.

Recognizing your privilege in this situation isn’t a mandate to kill all your darlings.

So where is all of this going? It’s easy to forget. All this hooplah is pointed squarely at the idea that, moving forward, we should mandate that the smart, talented, forward-thinking people in our culture who don’t say and do terrible, hurtful things should be the ones who get our research grants and studio greenlights and unbridled adulation. That’s the thing: Bettering our relationship with the past is great, but it’s really just a means to help us better our relationship with the right now. The more value we place on each other’s experiences, the less room society makes for douchebags and meanies who ruin other people’s experiences. A meme can definitely punctuate the dark comedy of this process, but sound bite culture doesn’t favor nuance. And nuance is definitely what we need.

Not that I don’t enjoy memes—I do. But I also enjoy the Beatles and looking at cubist paintings and reading Call of the Wild. Sure, these things all still give me heavier pause than they used to. But clearly not enough pause to stop me from maintaining a comfortable mental distance between the art in each of these cases and the artists. Which is why it’s important for me (and you) to grapple with the fact that this small feat of mental gymnastics might prompt an actual victim of physical abuse or emotional abuse or hateful racist rhetoric to comment, “Gee, must be nice.” Whichever artist I’m able to partly eclipse from my mind when I enjoy their work, I have to remember that just because I can do it, doesn’t mean I should expect everybody to do it—not if I want to be a good, compassionate person (or live in a harmonious society). As a white person, I may indeed believe that the racism Jack London left to be printed on the historical record means that some large part of his character was comprised of straight garbage, but I’m still never going to see in him the familiar silhouette of racists from my own lifetime who have hurt, dehumanized, and humiliated me. There’s just no getting around it: In a lot of cases, the ability to separate the art from the artist is mostly a question of—wait for it—privilege.

But don’t freak out. Recognizing your privilege in this situation isn’t a mandate to kill all your darlings. All you have to do to stay good in this kooky new world of trying to be a good person is acknowledge it. First and most importantly, to yourself, and then to other people, if your problematic artist happens to come up. Nobody is expecting all the white Jack London fans of the world to necessarily react to this author with the same visceral distaste that a person of color might more readily experience in light of his track record. But the hope is that they’d take a minute to empathize with that feeling. It’s not a Draconian tenant of the new, PC World Order. On the contrary, I believe this principle has been historically known as the Golden Rule.

Maybe I can explain this best in first person: Something I can’t enjoy anymore is The Cosby Show. And while some of that might come down to the terrifying juxtaposition of Cosby’s esteemed TV persona with his horrific real life crimes, I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that this is a case where the figure’s misdeeds actually do reflect my own fears and experiences. Unlike with London, Cosby’s crimes feel personal, his monstrosity faintly resembling the image of monsters I have personally feared and known.

But what if I met somebody who was able to enjoy those vintage episodes of Cosby Show in the same emotional vacuum I’m able to conjure for Call of the Wild? I sure as shit couldn’t reasonably find complete fault with them out of hand. I can’t deny that the show itself, however improbable, is a gold-standard sitcom that doesn’t seem to bear even the tiniest hint of its namesake’s predatory nature. I’d just hope that this imaginary viewer and I would be able to talk about it for a second, so that Cosby’s shittiness was openly acknowledged, proof that these days, the stink of being a terrible person does indeed follow you around for the rest of your public life—thus helping to prevent any future comedian with a serial-rapist streak from spearheading a sitcom empire with the same impunity.

After all, I also enjoy the world’s slow but steady slog toward fairness and equality, but even my heroes from the genre of humanitarian activism are marred with fallibility. Even Ghandi was, in many ways, a hypocrite and a misogynist. Babies and bathwater. It’s definitely a quandary.