I commented today that just as Zhou Enlai was not wrong to say in the 1970’s that it was too soon to judge the French Revolution, it is also too soon to judge the effects of British Imperialism. My friend was wishing the Zulus had been better armed against the British, and I pointed out that the Zulu were hardly innocents.
And without denying countless crimes were committed by the British, which all began with their forced presence in nations which did not want them, what they also brought was a mindset, that of IN PRINCIPLE–certainly not in practice– but in principle the equality of all human beings, both in theory and before the law.
This principle, among other things, caused the British to be the first culture in recorded history to renounce the historically universal, or nearly universal, practice of human slavery. And when slavery was banned, it was banned everywhere in their considerable Empire.
No one who condemns racism can but do so from this perspective, which did not exist in most African, Asian, or American cultures. The idea that prejudice, bigotry, racism and oppression are wrong has never acquired such prevalence in any culture before that of 18th or 19th century European culture.
White people did not invent wars of conquest. We did not invent slavery. We did not invent human rights abuses. We merely made them HYPOCRITICAL. And should we renounce all principles, merely because crimes can be committed in the name of them? Should we renounce all principles because they can be used for their contrary?
For all intents and purposes, the answer of the modern Academy is YES. Emphatically YES.
But the idea of ideals has done immeasurable good in the world. When people speak of human rights, that is a European invention. It has no analogue anywhere else I know of in human history, even if countless enlightened leaders have observed them out of simple compassion, dignity and decency.
And broadly speaking, the IDEAS of white Europeans have conquered the world, permanently and irrevocably. There is no going back. You can choose Marxism, as for example in PRINCIPLE (but not in practice) the Cuban and Chinese Communists have done. They claim to want to “free” people while using slave labor and torturing dissidents. There is nothing benign in that. If you want to find something truly good in those nations, your sole recourse is reading their words and ignoring their actions.
And all nations pursue science in their own ways. Science–of the sort which invented penicillin and the atomic bomb–is now universal. It will not be put back in the bottle without a global catastrophe, of the sort many seemingly wish for.
What is at stake at the moment is which sort of European ideal will win out. I would assert that broadly speaking Communism is a European social system rooted in the ideal of systematic hypocrisy–you can call an elite living in abundance at the expense of an ocean of oppressed serfs, in the NAME of the serfs, nothing else–and its opposite is honest Liberalism.
And please note that when I use the word Liberal I not speaking of rich hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi. I am speaking of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and our Founding Fathers.
I would go so far as to say that the system in China today is not really different in principle or practice from that of the medieval Church, in which a small oligarchy imposed on the Many ideas which brooked no opposition, and which worked to the enrichment of that oligarchy at the expense of the many. Chairman Xi is the Pope, and his Party the wealthy and omnipotent Church.
The dominant Bad Idea animating this farce is that a SOCIETY can be improved without working for the betterment of any individuals within it. Within the notion of SOCIETY as an actually existing organism, innumerable crimes can and in the event HAVE been committed and hidden. That process continues today. A Falun Gong practitioner may be having his liver cut out at this very moment to provide to a Party member who has spent his or her life drinking too much. Hundreds of thousands of Uighurs are enduring the conditions in work camps on a scale never contemplated by the British at the height of their arrogant hubris.
The Opium Wars are dwarfed in scale by the atrocities committed by the Chinese Communists. Not even close. Not within several orders of magnitude. The British were merely greedy. The Communists want people’s bodies AND souls, and will tolerate nothing less. That is the domain of a Church. Mere greed and garden variety rapacity never asked so much, even if they always asked much too much.
Communism represents a return to the old. Liberalism, in contrast, sees in humankind the possibility of moral improvement, of enlightenment, of growth, of sustained and generalized felicity.
Human individuals are and must be the core concern of any person trying to improve the world. And to improve people you must have ideas on how to do so. This obviously is my own concern. It is why I wrote what I will call my essay on Goodness.
[I would modify that piece in some ways now, but have not taken the time. The most important change is that I decided Curiosity, as a value, stands in well for, and is less challenging intellectually than, Perceptual Movement.]
In order for some human dignity and freedom to survive, in the long run, we MUST have an articulated and actionable moral code that is generalized and willingly accepted by most people. My whole intent with that essay was to formulate principles which did not lead to zealotry, to dogmatism, and to rigidity in all forms, but which in aggregate and over time still worked to improve people, to make them happier, healthier, and more naturally communal and beneficent.
As Milan Kundera commented in his bitter “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, what he really wanted in Communism was laughing people dancing in circles. And if you look at the cover of the book carefully, you may see the hidden image below. They are floating in the air. But what is real is seen on the ground. It’s a great pictorial metaphor.
We have seen that mass murder can be justified under the name of Love. What crime is not possible in a rigid people? None. All have been committed. Many are being committed at this very moment.
And I do think that the notion of God is very relevant, for this reason: with God all individuals, in the end, have their own accounting to make. With Society–which is the God of Communists and their countless brethren who use differing names–the accounting, in the end, is with an omnipotent State. Politically, this was true even in the Medieval Church. Given that only horrible people would WANT to have that power, or participate in such a system, only human degradation, impoverishment spiritually (and usually materially), and ruin and loss can be the outcomes.
And as I continue to insist, the existence of something most reasonably called God IS AN EMPIRICAL QUESTION. We have the power to bring science to bear on this question. We KNOW that within the paradigm of Quantum Physics none of the shared assertions of most traditional religions are impossible. By all means renounce the notion that you have to be washed in the blood of the lamb to avoid eternal damnation, but do not reject the notion of a benevolent Creator, the reality that our souls transcend our bodies, or that we are all connected spiritually with one another and all Life in ways we are only beginning to guess at.
Read the books of Dean Radin, and Rupert Sheldrake. A good commentary on Quantum Physics is Nick Herbert’s Quantum Reality, although there are many. If and when any honest skeptic–and this is virtually an oxymoron (although one could make the case that the word oxymoron isn’t one)–starts reading in this vein, there are thousands of good titles. The evidence is everywhere, and cumulatively vastly, vastly better than the evidence for matter. Matter does not exist. Anywhere. Not in an absolute sense of a bottom to Reality. The only place matter exists is in the mind of ignorant people.