Whig history is bullshit, except sometimes not, but mostly it is
I am reading George Orwell's Burmese Days for class. It is an excellent book about uniformly terrible people - even the person you'd be expected to sympathize with in a non-Orwell novel, Dr. Veraswami, is the worse kind of internalized self-hatred, toadying colonial stereotype. The uniform terribleness of the people in the novel is not alleviated by their occasional attacks of humanity, usually swiftly repressed by liquor and the notion that one musn't let the side down.
The point here is that reading Burmese Days does not give me a feeling of superiority. It gives me the uncomfortable certainty that if the people in the book - the people reading the book - could be so fundamentally unable to perceive certain things that slap us upside the head from page one, then we, in our own day, are missing things that are equally big. I suspect I know what some of those are - I get a lot of it just from my reading list - and I am not reassured about the state of anything.
Sometimes I think the only thing we as a species have done right is put paid to the notion of slavery. And that too was more of a revolution, a turn, in consciousness than anything else, not a linear move up a line of progress. If there was any "progress" in the last century, along the axes of civil rights or the end of empire or the status of women, those were revolutions too, turns that turned. But that's as far as I'm willing to go. Grant civil rights? Okay, we'll just institute mass incarceration to put people in their place. I could go on.
I don't know where this is going. The latest news out of Wisconsin (repealing equal pay provisions) makes me see red, as does the fact that racism is still killing people. I guess what I'm saying is, let's not be lulled by the notion of "progress." Every single fucking thing that's ever gone right in history, people had to fight for, and we forget that at our peril.
The point here is that reading Burmese Days does not give me a feeling of superiority. It gives me the uncomfortable certainty that if the people in the book - the people reading the book - could be so fundamentally unable to perceive certain things that slap us upside the head from page one, then we, in our own day, are missing things that are equally big. I suspect I know what some of those are - I get a lot of it just from my reading list - and I am not reassured about the state of anything.
Sometimes I think the only thing we as a species have done right is put paid to the notion of slavery. And that too was more of a revolution, a turn, in consciousness than anything else, not a linear move up a line of progress. If there was any "progress" in the last century, along the axes of civil rights or the end of empire or the status of women, those were revolutions too, turns that turned. But that's as far as I'm willing to go. Grant civil rights? Okay, we'll just institute mass incarceration to put people in their place. I could go on.
I don't know where this is going. The latest news out of Wisconsin (repealing equal pay provisions) makes me see red, as does the fact that racism is still killing people. I guess what I'm saying is, let's not be lulled by the notion of "progress." Every single fucking thing that's ever gone right in history, people had to fight for, and we forget that at our peril.