Thoughts arising from, well, being British...

[avevale_intelligencer]

Okay, just so everyone knows we're all on the same page: Imperialism is bad. Colonialism is bad. Paternalism is bad, patriarchalism is bad, anything else beginning with pat and ending in ism is probably bad. Arrogance is definitely bad, in fact it may be the eighth deadly sin. I'm aware of all this, and I'm aware that in future centuries, when Reagan and both Bushes are footnotes in history, the British Empire will still be vilified for its brutal subjugation and exploitation of other countries, who should have been left alone to subjugate and exploit each other as they did before and are doing now. I know all that. There is no need to repeat any of it, or to go into detail. I know.

Okay?

So why does it still get me on the raw when someone takes another whack at us for the evil things that a bunch of dead strangers did a century ago?

Perhaps because I know that it was also during that period of imperial arrogance that we did just about every good thing that we have to be proud of. British achievements in science and engineering changed the shape of the world. British explorers, expanding the nasty Empire, mapped bits of it that had never been mapped before. This twenty-first century of ours, like it or not, is still to a very great extent built on the good that we did when we were being the bad guys for the future. We've never been great since, and probably never will be again. Perhaps you can't have the good without the bad.

Perhaps because I've never known what it's like to live in a nation that's truly proud to be what it is. All my life has been spent in a country ashamed. We tried to be happy about being us briefly in the seventies, but we couldn't sustain it, and the demons of punk rose up to hound us back into the shadows. When we stopped being evil imperialists, we lost our nerve, and our patriotism (oh look, there's another one) has rung hollow and hysterical ever since. And yet there still seems to be just as much evil imperialism in the world as there ever used to be. It's just that other nations are unrepentantly reaping the benefits of it, while we're still saying sorry every time someone looks at us.

Perhaps because I look back on the designs of that time, the clothes, the buildings, the machinery, the art, the typography, the very language, and I see something else that seems to have been thrown out with the imperial bathwater, an idea that things could be, should be, interesting and beautiful, colourful and daring, as well as functional. I guess we don't feel we deserve that any more.

And perhaps because I look to the future and I see far worse empires to come, many and many of them. Till the human race is perfected, nation will try to dominate and conquer and exploit nation, often with the best of intentions, and some of them will succeed. Those who do not learn from history are compelled to repeat it, and the lesson to be drawn from British imperialism and arrogance, and from its guilt-stricken aftermath, is "there but for the grace of gods go you."

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Well said, sir! I agree totally.

[soren-nyrond.livejournal.com]

Good job it's Friday -- I get the weekend to gloom over this.

Empires is (or were/will-be): sh*t happens.

Hypothesis: most beauty happens in Dire Times, because when things are Dire, the creative mind wants to leave something behind, and so writes things down, or carves them in stone.
I don't think chainsawing sheep in half fits that theory, though.

I'm going to go to sleep now (I *am* at work, after all)

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Still another four thousand years till the Sagittarian Age. Which I guess means lots of beauty still to come. :)

[howeird]

Perhaps because I've never known what it's like to live in a nation that's truly proud to be what it is.
Are there any? I can't think of any nation which deserves to be truly proud of itself.

OTOH, most nations have something to be proud of. GB has many somethings.

The USA get whacked all the time for things done by dead people, and I get angry about that because while those dead people were treating African people like property, dead people in Russia were treating my dead relatives like the Olympic javelin-catching team.

Twilight Zone thought of the day: "One world" is a powerful theme in sci-fi, yet every time someone has tried to achieve this goal, they have been defeated and all the countries they joined together were randomly split up again.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Hey, look, something we agree about!

I must admit that, long, long ago, Tom Shippey was giving a talk at an Eastercon and made the statement that "all of us in Europe feel guilt for the Holocaust" or words to that effect.

I stood up and said that I didn't - and I'm half German, my parents fought on opposite sides in WW2 and at least one family member (dead since 1945) was a Nazi party member and an SS soldier.

I am horrified that it happened, and despise the thinking that led to it, and do a lot of crying when I see the films and photos and read the accounts of what happened, but I am not responsible for it. If it happened again, here in England, then I would have to take my share of the blame for letting it happen and, oh boy, I would indeed feel guilty. I do feel guilt for not protesting as much as I could about prejudice and injustice, for instance. However, I am not guilty of the slave trade, either, thank you very much.

[placeofhonour.livejournal.com]

Personally, I think it's high time the British stopped wincing and apologising for themselves every time the Empire gets mentioned, and started saying "So?"

The thing is that the people who believed in the ideals of the British Empire are, exactly as you say, dead. The people who ran it have been dead for a good long while now, in fact. The only people still alive who even remember the Empire were children - young children - at the time of the first World War, when the whole shebang really started to wobble a bit. Hell, we declared our territories equal in status with the UK in 1931 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Westminster_1931). Oh and incidentally, have I mentioned that this soggy, diminutive little island played a pretty big part in winning both the two World Wars?

The nation of Britain as it is now is a nation that has had the time and opportunity to learn from its history. And actually, what we've learnt is that while there's plenty we can get from the imperial episode, firstly, not all of that is entirely negative, and secondly, there are nearly two thousand years of recorded British history outside of it. Not to mention a few more millennia when things didn't get written down. There comes a point where other nations' attempts to guilt-trip us just don't really cut it any more.

[shannachie.livejournal.com]

And there I was always thinking being British would be so much less complicated than being German. I always envied you because YOUR history seemed to be the basis for festivals, colourful parades, proud displays and inspired clothing. Whereas our history seems to exist entirely out of 12 years within 1200 years, 1188 of which nobody remembers.

[lutos.livejournal.com]

Well said!

[howeird]

Nah, lots of people remember November of 1989.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Was this inspired by something on your friends list?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Only in passing (http://harmonyheifer.livejournal.com/96074.html). It's my immediate emotional reaction to it that has prompted this, not the post itself.

[lutos.livejournal.com]

I'm astonished that British feel this way; it never occured to me that they could feel ashamed, too.
I think you'll understand how it feels to be German, then? Never ever feeling proud for being it, and excusing oneself all the time. Not to mention being pointed at in diverse countries who seem to have forgotten their dirty parts of past and recent history: In Holland f. e., were they drew the swastika in front of my home or in Czechia (when I was fifteen), were I was held responsible for what happened 30 years before I was born in Prague.
Shame and vicarious guilt is one reason I left my country at an early age...only in recent years have I dared to see things differently.

But as with all things, the world doesn't want to see things other than black and white, and so 'the German' in media and mass-belief has become a caricature of the bad Nazi, a technocratic, sadistic fascho guy who lacks every kind of sensitiveness. The same applies to the khaki wearing, odd and snobby Brit still living in the 19th century or the baguette/snail eating, womanizing Frenchman.

Greek people seem to have a natural (and sometimes unjustified ;) ) pride of their country that is not disturbed by whatever they are doing.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Arrogance is definitely bad, in fact it may be the eighth deadly sin.

Actually I think it might be the seventh, under the pseudonym "pride."

Perhaps because I've never known what it's like to live in a nation that's truly proud to be what it is.

I grew up in a nation that is quite full of itself. There are people in this country that not only insist that the USA is the greatest nation the world has ever seen, but that if you have the gall to point out ways in which it isn't, or ways that it could be improved, they will call you a traitor.

And it's not a coincidence that our tragically mistaken war in Vietnam shared the news with our steps toward landing on the moon.

A nation's power to be collossally stupid on a global scale grows from the collective genius of its people.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I believe that the British were some of the best-intended people on the planet. They did some horrible things out of good intentions, but that does not make those intentions disappear, nor does it make their achievements somehow cease to exist. History, like most things, is more complicated than people choose to pretend in general; few things are entirely black or entirely white.

[madfilkentist]

What we need is more historical understanding and less reflexive guilt.

Few Americans, in my experience, have any solid understanding of the way that British colonialism set up the conflicts in the Middle East which are affecting us all today. I say this not to dump guilt on the present-day people of Britain, but because knowing what happened helps to understand what bad moves in the past led to the fanaticism of today, and might help to avoid repeating the same mistakes (though probably little would help the current administration).

There's a tendency among people to equate historical understanding with either dumping guilt or granting absolution. But we should be able to look at what happened without a predisposition to do either. Good people can make mistakes, and evil people can exploit legitimate grievances.

[patriciamc.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I would view what were bad times for many as a kind of "golden era", if that's what you're doing - and maybe that's not what you're doing, my point there being that many an ordinary Brit's life contained the same levels of human suffering found in the colonies under the yoke of "Empire". Contrarily I have always believed that Britain has a lot to be proud of, a mind-boggling history, and isolated from the continent it produced a unique and dynamic culture that has given the world much in terms of social reform and scientific and technological innovation.

Empires always have had their uses to seed other cultures with novelty, helping to spawn a range of societies that are, though diverse, also tied in with "parent" cultures to produce a sort of homegeneity among people. The birth pangs of this method of culturally unifying world peoples, though, are better off behind us than in front of us. My having said that, you might be right that empires to come will be worse than anything Great Britain might have shown the world, although is there satisfaction to be derived from the thought? I'm not sure, but living in Oz and, to get here, my having travelled through countries, once a part of the British domain - the stigma of being born a "pom" has many times been rubbed in my face. And when it comes to guilt by association, given some minority group pressures, I "commit" the further "grave error" of being a European living in Australia, an attitude that sticks in my craw, which wrinkle however will probably iron out in a few generations .. and thus the wheel turns (blah blah ..).

And neither is the "Star Trek" version of events any better, really, despite that these imagined future humans have become a more refined kind their living, one imagines, as a single harmonious collective, yet there are still the sneaky, conniving, evil, bastard aliens to watch out for. Which puts the Trekkers in exactly the same boat that we are in today of having to find ways to universally get along with each other, our sometimes failing miserably at this.

When I come down to it, I do wonder if perfection is capable of being put on the "mortal creature agenda". And it's a nice projection that our species will attain perfection one day, whatever is meant by perfection in terms of human nature, although, mortal as we are, and vulnerable and often crazy as we are made by knowing that, there will surely always be some networks of people with big brains and small minds, willing to gamble away the futures of other people.

[danceswithlife]

Hm. Good post, Zander (and hi to you and the Countess!) One ponders questions like this when one is doing grad studies in psychology, philosophy and spirituality (and of course, other times as well :-) It seem possible to me that anyone who regards their personal history or collective history with guilt and shame is not only tying themselves to the past, but to the present as well. "Guilt" and "shame" imply that the people feeling those are aware that what was done was bad or wrong, and they have (hopefully) taken realistic and reasonable steps to help ensure it doesn't happen again. Those who believe what was done was *good* don't feel guilt and shame. But once the steps to change or fix the past are taken, then continuing to feel guilt and shame rather than regret make it very difficult for us to move on into the future, to apply the lessons we have learned, and to look for new and creative ways to improving our lot as fallible humans.

To say that by our present standards harm (sometimes massive harm) was done in the past seems to me a good thing. Apologizing that our ancestors weren't wiser or that they were blind about the welfare of others is a noble gesture. But we have a difficult time parsing out our present cultures, and figuring out what the "rightest" actions are now. We didn't live (most of us) in those past cultures, so I'm doubtful that guilt and shame on their behalf is helpful in the present. Monday morning quarterbacking so we try very hard not to repeat some variant of it--that's possibly helpful.

[min0taur.livejournal.com]

I rather think that an imperial outlook on the world is a writ-large image of an indelible and complex element in human beings, which becomes a powerful -- perhaps irresistible -- temptation when magnified by the ambitious social structures we build. When nations, vast churches, and even commercial enterprises (whether Dutch East India Company or Microsoft) encounter something outside their familiar order, the old dance begins, something dies, and something emerges. I doubt that any one culture (I see "nation" as more ephemeral) has that sad market cornered.

The process can't help but be deeply ambivalent in its reality, and apparently can't really be stopped for good, anywhere, though people of conscience keep trying. Certainly I've found "revisionist" views of history useful for deflating all sorts of self-important versions of history pumped up by what Orwell called the "smelly little orthodoxies." If a humane vision of the human enterprise is to be anything more than a perfunctory hand-wringing over a dead past, it means (among other things) accepting that any progress worthy of the name is a whole lot harder than it looks.