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Sad headshake
Jun. 8th, 2018 10:31 amPicking up Arthur C Clarke's Profiles Of The Future (1962) and opening the Introduction, I come upon this little gem:
"I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men."
There speaks privilege. There speaks a citizen of a rich and powerful country, whose primacy had never to that point been seriously challenged, living a comfortable life and free to turn his mind whithersoever he listed. There--in fact--speaks shocking ignorance and illogic.
Surely it must have occurred to him that, in being concerned with power and wealth, politics and economics must also be concerned with powerlessness and poverty, which even then were indeed the primary and even the exclusive concern of large numbers of people--of both sexes--in the country in which, at that point, he still lived? (Correction: he was already in Ceylon, as it then was. Which makes it all the odder.) Apparently not. One could never accuse him of "I got mine, fuck you," but this paragraph clearly shows the far more common, and more British, "I've got mine, thank you, and I have better things to do with my time than think about it, and I really don't see why people are making such a fuss." Clarke's actual economic circumstances at the time are unknown to me, but they don't bear on the question; a Briton living in a one-room flat on baked beans in 1962 was still better off than vast numbers of "full-grown men" all over the world. The inability of the comfortable (on whatever terms) to understand the discomfort of others is sad and shocking.
I don't know if the writer ever, over his remaining years, saw cause to repent the complacency of that paragraph. Mine is a 1964 paperback of the book, and I've not seen later editions. But when people talk about ivory towers, this is what they mean.
"I also believe - and hope - that politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past; the time will come when most of our present controversies on these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies. Politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth, neither of which should be the primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men."
There speaks privilege. There speaks a citizen of a rich and powerful country, whose primacy had never to that point been seriously challenged, living a comfortable life and free to turn his mind whithersoever he listed. There--in fact--speaks shocking ignorance and illogic.
Surely it must have occurred to him that, in being concerned with power and wealth, politics and economics must also be concerned with powerlessness and poverty, which even then were indeed the primary and even the exclusive concern of large numbers of people--of both sexes--in the country in which, at that point, he still lived? (Correction: he was already in Ceylon, as it then was. Which makes it all the odder.) Apparently not. One could never accuse him of "I got mine, fuck you," but this paragraph clearly shows the far more common, and more British, "I've got mine, thank you, and I have better things to do with my time than think about it, and I really don't see why people are making such a fuss." Clarke's actual economic circumstances at the time are unknown to me, but they don't bear on the question; a Briton living in a one-room flat on baked beans in 1962 was still better off than vast numbers of "full-grown men" all over the world. The inability of the comfortable (on whatever terms) to understand the discomfort of others is sad and shocking.
I don't know if the writer ever, over his remaining years, saw cause to repent the complacency of that paragraph. Mine is a 1964 paperback of the book, and I've not seen later editions. But when people talk about ivory towers, this is what they mean.