bob effect
somnambulist
Eight pages to say history is written by the victors.
How England Sees Itself
- Thread starter zhao
- Start date
Eight pages to say history is written by the victors.
There was a nice bit of symmetry between my post and Droid's there, ha. I never understand why people whimper about "ad hominem attacks" -- it's a pretty common currency, and who cares anyway, unless the attacks are true, then I can understand why they would hurt. I get it all the time on this forum, doesn't do me any harm -- are you Welsh or what?
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Well, if that's buffoonish to you, so be it. What precisely is wrong with talking about class war? Pray tell. It's a far more useful terminology than accepting the genuine buffoonery about 'wars between nations', that are in fact wars between elites, which benefit, oh, elites, and disproportionately affect the most vulnerable. I don't see what's wrong with the term - of course it's not perfect, but it' nearer the truth than many terms that are bandied about with seeming impunity. Class war is being waged in this country at the moment by the Tory party, or hadn't you noticed? In general, the circumstances of your birth dictate the extent to which their policies will fuck you over, and social mobility is being eroded even further (student costs etc etc). You can coin a new terminology if you like, to take account of the fact that class connotes something a bit different to what it did 30 years ago, but it's not that different.
As to realpolitik: This is true up to a point, but I was simply making the point that national armies are largely aimed at defending economic/realpolitik-type interests, which benefit the few rather than the many (eg Iraq, mainly benefitting multinationals). But then I was making the false assumption that those ideological reasons would be moral in themselves, which is fair point.
PS A lot of 'international development' is clearly not benefitting the people it claims it is at all, so you're being too generous to the discipline there. eg the discrediting of microcredit. Hence my vacillating about whether to get into it. Anyway, whole other (very long) discussion.
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baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
Guilty of that, obv.
Er, because it obscures the argument and isn't really necessary in debates like this? Anyway, no harm done.
Well, if you want to wax about class conflict as a factor in society, that's one thing; the phrase "class war" has a whole other (or extra) set of connotations, and you know it. You were striking a radical pose, and it didn't suit you: it looked buffoonish, and I thought you ought to be picked up on it.
baboon2004
Darned cockwombles.
!
Um... I have (almost) no clue what you're talking about. I was talking about the army being (historically, and it seems, more recently, from that report a quick Google picked out) predatory upon people with few options, and that most people dying on the combat field are form the less well-off sections of society, doing the fighting for the benefit of the more well-off. Prisons are healthily stocked with veterans, and homelessness among ex-army people is disproportionate. It's hardly radical to think that's fucked up, given the rhetoric of national prestige around the army, whatever one might mean by that term 'radical'!
I used the phrase 'class war' rather than 'class conflict' to emphasise the sheer brutality of the economic squeeze put on less well-off people (also, we were talking about war in the first place, weren't we? it's hardly a word I've just introduced for 'radical' effect!), which I don't think 'conflict' brings out, and not to make any point about being 'radical', whatever that woolliest of terms means to each of us. What other connotations are we talking about? The fact that it's associated with particular anarchist groups? So what - other people can still use a useful phrase (useful for the reason outlined above)! Bizarre to be told what poses you can strike by a stranger, too, even though I wasn't!
Quite frankly, you came across as someone who has a personal investment in this topic that you won't declare (particularly in your assertion as to how the forces is a good career. I mean, wtf?). Maybe this is not the case, but if not your behaviour is a bit bizarre.
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A Scottish friend of Zhao's chiming in...
Britain’s imperial atrocities were not necessarily more horrific than those of other imperial powers; they were simply on a larger scale, due to the larger size of empire. However, in terms of facing up to post-imperial reality, a comparison with Germany is highly instructive.
Germany’s sudden defeat in 1945 forced a genuine national cultural reassessment; Britain’s (and France’s, and Belgium’s) slow post-imperial decline did not. While Germany used the postwar discussion of their crimes to try to forge a new society, Britain treated the drip-drip revelations of their own atrocities as one would treat the news that a favourite uncle is a serial rapist: something to be briefly acknowledged at most, then quickly swept under the carpet.
At its most constructive, the progressive British response has been to half-heartedly define post-imperial values as being about tolerance and inclusion. However, the problem with tolerance and inclusion is that they are secondary virtues which presuppose a dominant cultural identity doing the tolerating and including. Sadly, we don’t actually have much more of a collective cultural identity than “we defeated Hitler once; mmmmyeah the empire was kinda bad; have you seen my new kitchen?”
There’s a vacuum here, which will inevitably be filled by the likes of...
Niall (fucking) Ferguson: to be fair to him, something far more dangerous than this twat could have stepped into the gap. The sole justification for Ferguson’s repackaged imperialist apologetics, and its inevitable re-emergence, is the continuing absence of a constructive alternative. for me, the main problem with Ferguson is that his list of the West’s “killer apps” (ugh) fails to include gunboat imperialism itself as a key "app" which contributed heavily to the West's rise. This of course brings us full circle, and will inevitably lead to the conclusion that it’s complicated but actually my new kitchen really is very awesome indeed.
Since the bulk of our contemporary ersatz shopping-as-identity culture is borrowed wholesale from America, I assume what is required for a genuine post-1945 British identity to emerge is for America to go down the shitter first.
Britain’s imperial atrocities were not necessarily more horrific than those of other imperial powers; they were simply on a larger scale, due to the larger size of empire. However, in terms of facing up to post-imperial reality, a comparison with Germany is highly instructive.
Germany’s sudden defeat in 1945 forced a genuine national cultural reassessment; Britain’s (and France’s, and Belgium’s) slow post-imperial decline did not. While Germany used the postwar discussion of their crimes to try to forge a new society, Britain treated the drip-drip revelations of their own atrocities as one would treat the news that a favourite uncle is a serial rapist: something to be briefly acknowledged at most, then quickly swept under the carpet.
At its most constructive, the progressive British response has been to half-heartedly define post-imperial values as being about tolerance and inclusion. However, the problem with tolerance and inclusion is that they are secondary virtues which presuppose a dominant cultural identity doing the tolerating and including. Sadly, we don’t actually have much more of a collective cultural identity than “we defeated Hitler once; mmmmyeah the empire was kinda bad; have you seen my new kitchen?”
There’s a vacuum here, which will inevitably be filled by the likes of...
Niall (fucking) Ferguson: to be fair to him, something far more dangerous than this twat could have stepped into the gap. The sole justification for Ferguson’s repackaged imperialist apologetics, and its inevitable re-emergence, is the continuing absence of a constructive alternative. for me, the main problem with Ferguson is that his list of the West’s “killer apps” (ugh) fails to include gunboat imperialism itself as a key "app" which contributed heavily to the West's rise. This of course brings us full circle, and will inevitably lead to the conclusion that it’s complicated but actually my new kitchen really is very awesome indeed.
Since the bulk of our contemporary ersatz shopping-as-identity culture is borrowed wholesale from America, I assume what is required for a genuine post-1945 British identity to emerge is for America to go down the shitter first.
vimothy
yurp
But that's circular. Other civilizations conquered the world, and yet, other civilizations did not produce the industrial revolution.
I find this to be a very interesting line of thought, though.
On the one hand, these values are merely the expression of the dominant cultural/ideological mode of the day: progressive-idealism, or democratic-liberalism, or whatever you want to call it.
In the contemporary era, they're not uniquely British. They're shared by basically all members of the global middle class and ruling elite.
On the other hand, they were chief planks in the ideology of the uber-British Whigs and Nonconformists. This tradition has been transmitted via America to the whole world by virtue of the fact that America won all of its battles in the 20th Century--in particular, WWII and the Cold War--and the fact that these traditions define the politics and philosophy of the American elite. That is, in the 20th century, Quakerism conquered the world.
Now, there are some philosophical problems with modern liberalism. I think you correctly identify one of them in that, as secondary virtues, tolerance and inclusiveness are of course noble things, but when elevated to the status of absolutes, they produce this yawning chasm of meaninglessness and nihilism that is the modern world.
In the modern way of thinking, the satisfaction of individual desires is the highest possible good. The job of the state is to remove impediments to their satisfaction, that ever more people might satisfy ever more of their individual and equally valid desires ever more efficiently. Discovering social structures that permit or amplify this is the role of social science. The process of social change in the furtherance of the liberal vision is known as "progress".
But the liberal politics of hyper-rationalism spells death for the traditional societies and communities that host it. It is no accident that all modern cultures are converging into one undifferentiated mass of grey formless goo: nothing but shopping, fucking and computer games. Such an endstate is encoded onto the very DNA of liberalism: atomisation is our inheritance.
I find this to be a very interesting line of thought, though.
On the one hand, these values are merely the expression of the dominant cultural/ideological mode of the day: progressive-idealism, or democratic-liberalism, or whatever you want to call it.
In the contemporary era, they're not uniquely British. They're shared by basically all members of the global middle class and ruling elite.
On the other hand, they were chief planks in the ideology of the uber-British Whigs and Nonconformists. This tradition has been transmitted via America to the whole world by virtue of the fact that America won all of its battles in the 20th Century--in particular, WWII and the Cold War--and the fact that these traditions define the politics and philosophy of the American elite. That is, in the 20th century, Quakerism conquered the world.
Now, there are some philosophical problems with modern liberalism. I think you correctly identify one of them in that, as secondary virtues, tolerance and inclusiveness are of course noble things, but when elevated to the status of absolutes, they produce this yawning chasm of meaninglessness and nihilism that is the modern world.
In the modern way of thinking, the satisfaction of individual desires is the highest possible good. The job of the state is to remove impediments to their satisfaction, that ever more people might satisfy ever more of their individual and equally valid desires ever more efficiently. Discovering social structures that permit or amplify this is the role of social science. The process of social change in the furtherance of the liberal vision is known as "progress".
But the liberal politics of hyper-rationalism spells death for the traditional societies and communities that host it. It is no accident that all modern cultures are converging into one undifferentiated mass of grey formless goo: nothing but shopping, fucking and computer games. Such an endstate is encoded onto the very DNA of liberalism: atomisation is our inheritance.
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@vimothy, I largely agree with you, except for a few specific points:
True, but Ferguson seems to apply the term "civilisation" to all the Western powers who engaged in imperialism, not just Britain.
Not really. Outside the West, a lot of the world's elites are still organised along lines of tribe/caste/religion/etc, and consequently much of the emerging global middle classes tend to be drawn disproportionately from the same groups. It's not absolute, for sure, but the dividing lines are certainly visible, especially where resources are limited.
Hmm. I was always under the impression that the rise of progressive-idealism/democratic-liberalism in 20th Century America was more linked to the emergence of a Jewish-American intelligentsia, who were more aware than most of the consequences of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. The Quaker theory is plausible, but I find the influence of e.g. Freud's "Civilisation and its Discontents" on 20th century American thought to be more pertinent.
*
Otherwise, I agree with you. And we're all pretty much fucked.
True, but Ferguson seems to apply the term "civilisation" to all the Western powers who engaged in imperialism, not just Britain.
Not really. Outside the West, a lot of the world's elites are still organised along lines of tribe/caste/religion/etc, and consequently much of the emerging global middle classes tend to be drawn disproportionately from the same groups. It's not absolute, for sure, but the dividing lines are certainly visible, especially where resources are limited.
Hmm. I was always under the impression that the rise of progressive-idealism/democratic-liberalism in 20th Century America was more linked to the emergence of a Jewish-American intelligentsia, who were more aware than most of the consequences of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. The Quaker theory is plausible, but I find the influence of e.g. Freud's "Civilisation and its Discontents" on 20th century American thought to be more pertinent.
*
Otherwise, I agree with you. And we're all pretty much fucked.
vimothy
yurp
Well, it seems to me that American Jews (like other immigrant groups) mostly integrated to the dominant mode of the day, and as they ascended to positions of power, they acquired the ideology of the powerful, namely, progressive idealism.
There's a cute quote in a book by Auguste Laugel, a European traveller to the US. Describing the Civil War, an American explains, "it is the conquest of America, by Massachusetts."
As you go back into America's past, you see that the philosophy of Massachusetts is continuous. There are no break points. What Harvard believes in 2011 is directly descended from what Harvard believed in 1911, which is directly descended from what Harvard believed in 1811, and so on. Less of the God stuff, perhaps. But I don't see what the emergence of Jewish intelligentsia adds to this picture; the trajectory of thought amongst America's elite is unchanged.
There's a cute quote in a book by Auguste Laugel, a European traveller to the US. Describing the Civil War, an American explains, "it is the conquest of America, by Massachusetts."
As you go back into America's past, you see that the philosophy of Massachusetts is continuous. There are no break points. What Harvard believes in 2011 is directly descended from what Harvard believed in 1911, which is directly descended from what Harvard believed in 1811, and so on. Less of the God stuff, perhaps. But I don't see what the emergence of Jewish intelligentsia adds to this picture; the trajectory of thought amongst America's elite is unchanged.
what do you mean by this? as an example of something "good" which came out of empire? i find it a bit hard to believe that you would say something like this, but if so:
1. highly debatable if industrial revolution was "good" for mankind, if the jury has not yet returned with a conclusive, wholly negative ruling.
2. the technological advancements of and after the renaissance can not be only attributed to Europeans and their "killer apps" (barf) -- the contributions of Muslim mathematicians, which have been said to rival or even surpass those of Europeans like Newton, and others have been erased from history books.
3. and the exactly relationship of imperialism and the industrial revolution is not so simple is it? not just a case of one making the other possible, and a bit more complex, no?
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Great post, and I agree with most of it, but I think this sentence is maybe a little unfair. There's more to Britain's identity than being a former colonial power that was once very good at war, isn't there? Though I'll admit society does seem quite fractured, especially now, but is that necessarily an unalloyed evil?
To put it another way, consider countries that have a very strong "collective cultural identity". In these cases, I should think such an identity is often imposed from on high by a totalitarian government (China, for example) or, when it arises more spontaneously, tends to have rather a suspect nationalist (be it linguistic, racial, religious...) element to it.
I suppose it's a lot different for a country that's emerged as a independent polity in the relatively recent past than it is for a country like Britain that was the occupier/coloniser.
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vimothy
yurp
I simply meant that, if you want to explain how it is that the West came the dominate the scene and conquered the whole world, then "by conquering the whole world" is not something that takes you too far in the right direction.
As to whether the industrial revolution was a good thing, I did not mean to suggest that it wasn't. There are some upsides, right? Personally, I prefer being alive to being dead, and suspect that the industrial revolution goes some way towards making this happen. That said, there is obviously a strong link between the industrial revolution and the cultural mode of the day, ultra-liberal progressive-idealism or "super-protestantism" [*], which draws authority and validity from its seeming consistency with science and technological progress.
Finally, re the contribution of non-Western cultures to science and progress, this strikes me as a case of having ones cake and eating it. On the one hand, no good has come from technological progress. On the other hand, Islamic civilisation should get some of the credit for it. On the one hand, no good can come from empire. On the other hand, Islamic empires have made great contributions to civilisation.
* EDIT: Free link: http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,801396,00.html
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@vimothy,
I’ll give you that. But, like the typical Scot, I’d argue that the birth of America was primarily a byproduct of the Scottish Enlightenment, as encapsulated by Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” (said concept being widely known at the time as “the Scottish Philosophy”).
I’m genuinely interested in finding out more about the Quaker element - any tips for a book on this? I’ve always wondered how America still kept coming up with original ideas in the interregnum between Scots-American philosophy and Jewish-American philosophy, this could be the answer [/sorta troll/]. Srsly tho, book tips plzthx?
I agree, but I’d go further, with the following broad sweeping statement: genuine collective national identity is a couple of hundred years old at best, and has very little credible long-term history anywhere. In Britain’s dissolution of it, we are kinda leading the world again, I guess. But to where, I dunno.
I’ll give you that. But, like the typical Scot, I’d argue that the birth of America was primarily a byproduct of the Scottish Enlightenment, as encapsulated by Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” (said concept being widely known at the time as “the Scottish Philosophy”).
I’m genuinely interested in finding out more about the Quaker element - any tips for a book on this? I’ve always wondered how America still kept coming up with original ideas in the interregnum between Scots-American philosophy and Jewish-American philosophy, this could be the answer [/sorta troll/]. Srsly tho, book tips plzthx?
I agree, but I’d go further, with the following broad sweeping statement: genuine collective national identity is a couple of hundred years old at best, and has very little credible long-term history anywhere. In Britain’s dissolution of it, we are kinda leading the world again, I guess. But to where, I dunno.
vimothy
yurp
When I wrote "Quaker", it was just a glib synonym for the whole spectrum of liberal British religious thought, inclusive of Welsh and English Nonconformists and of course your Scottish Presbyterians. There are lots of books that cover this--one that springs immediately to mind is "The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism" by George McKenna. If I get chance later today, I'll dig a load more up.
Slothrop
Tight but Polite
It's worth pointing out that the Puritan commitment to religious freedom basically extended to their freedom from the CofE, though - it didn't take long for them to start executing people for being Quakers in Massachussets Bay, something from which they had to be prevented by Charles II...
Thanks, that's exactly what I need to read.
I’m aware I hold a somewhat simplified and biased view of American history, which places immigrant groups with previous experience of holding dual conceptions of nationhood (primarily Scots and Jews) as the grownups with most of the good ideas, while stereotyping most other historically significant white immigrant groups as being hollering fundamentalist Christian yahoos. On reflection, that's probably kinda racist.
I’m buying that book.