Monday, April 19, 2004 |
18:21 - The descendants of slaves
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Further to my Fear of God post from last week, reader Thom T. sent me the following, which I believe crystallizes a very important historical perspective:
Just read the "Fear of God" post. While I normally simply appreciate your blogging very much, for the past few days, it seems like either I'm channelling you, or vice versa. Scary, I know. :)
Anyway, I'd been thinking about precisely this issue lately, about exactly what it is these cretins don't get, and it crystallized in my mind when I read the passage in which you wrote your solution.
What they don't get is that for the majority of the world, existence on Earth is a pretty crappy experience from cradle to grave, and for a good number of those people, existence on Earth is a horriffic, shitty, really, really, REALLY unconscionable version of Hell on Earth.
This is not exactly a stunning revelation, obviously. The vast majority of humanity lived somewhere in between these two states until 1850 at the earliest (and that's being generous, time-frame-wise), and we know this. Why this is important in regard to the cretins is that they have their history all mixed up: I have heard, first-hand, several people, most of whom are friends of mine and who are not extremists, posit the view that there were so many other, greater, NON-WHITE civilizations from the past that accomplished so many great and beautiful things, and that our civilization is but a crude, cruel, inhuman, conformist joke on humanity, where the rich prosper, the poor are crushed, and the rest of us are drones.
What they don't get is that while Michelangelo was a great sculptor and painter, THAT WASN'T THE MAJORITY OF ITALY AT THE TIME. That while the Egyptians built some of the most breathtaking structures, which are rightly named wonders of the world, THEY WERE BUILT BY SLAVES. That while the Greeks may have been more ahead of their time intellectually than any other civilization before or since, THAT WAS ONLY A FEW VERY FORTUNATE GUYS. The vast majority of people who lived during those ages, and during the great ages of China, Babylon, Persia, Phoenicia, the Almohads, etc., were either slaves, or one or two steps above, and that life for them was pretty damn piss-poor.
They see only the greatness, and, combined with their ideas of multi-culturalism, project the past onto the present, and see America as this crude infant stumbling blindly across the world and wrecking all that is good, and replacing it with Wal-Marts and McDonalds. Among these people are those who went to Iraq (remember, this was once Mesopotamia!!) to become human shields, and were stunned to learn that the majority of Iraqis really, really wanted freedom more than anything else.
What they don't get is that the Industrial Revolution was vastly more important than the Rennaisance. What they don't get is that Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" is the most important work in the history of humankind (outside of the Bible, for me), and not Joyce's "Ulysses". What they don't get is that the Cotton Gin was a far more important discovery than oil paints.
What they really don't get is that personal and economic freedom are the same thing, and the it was recognition of such that truly freed the decrepit, and that, if that didn't happen, they, and we, would be the decrepit of today. They see themselves as being the spiritual descendants of the Michelangelos, the Plutarchs, the Aristotles. Wrong. We're the descendants of their slaves.
And, finally, it's much simpler than all this, really. It's freedom OF, or freedom TO, not freedom from.
And if they really want to free people from hunger, poverty, and oppression, they should stop reading Maya Angelou, and start reading Adam Smith. The world outside the West largely sucks. The pagodas should not be destroyed, but building a few Wal-Marts along side them would be far more helpful than corrupt Oil-for-Food programs.
That's the trouble with Communism: it claims to be the ideology of the huddled masses, the wretched refuse yearning to breathe free. But history shows us that when those huddled masses stop huddling and start revving up their hands and brains, the tools of capitalism are far more readily at their service than the tools of communism, and rewards them far better. It allows the best of them to rise to power and stardom, but any of them to freely and realistically aspire to it. The alternative is a world where the best possible future for a peasant is to remain a peasant.
Which is well and good, if we can convince ourselves that the life of the peasant is a good, honorable thing, or that being taken care of by a maternal State is the "right" way to live. But Americans have never quite taken to asceticism, nor to allowing anyone to dictate how we live our lives. Which is why we do the things we do.
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