Kipling and Racism

Time [...] pardoned Kipling and his views. -- W H Auden

Forgiveness is one thing, but let's try not to completely forget.

Last night, I listened to an episode of Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time" radio series, the episode which deals with Rudyard Kipling. Early in this episode, Professor Daniel Karlin describes Kipling's earliest memories as having been of an "astonishing multicultural" nature. Citing Kipling's posthumously-published memoir Something of Myself, Karlin mentioned that the book begins with an invocation to Allah, then affectionately mentions a Catholic and a Hindu servant who raised him and says that his first language was not English, but Hindi. Karlin seemed convinced that this was enough to prove that the notion that Kipling had had something to do with English nationalism, was quite absurd. By this point, 4 minutes into the broadcast, I was already half-convinced that Karlin was absurd, and the rest of the episode took care of the other half. Kipling's nationalism is as plain to see as Karlin's blindness to Kipling's nationalism.

I was surprised by this description of Kipling's earliest memories. I was reminded once again of the fact that the well-known Eurocentric bigot Richard Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya. But I was reminded in part because a video relating in some way to Dawkins was linked to the right of where "In Our Time" was playing on YouTube on my computer screen. I paused the episode of "In Our Time," informed YouTube that I did not wish to see the link to the Dawkins video, and returned to the radio show.

And although I learned all sorts of amazing things about Kipling, from his friendship with Henry James to his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, I heard what seemed to me to be very, very little about Kipiling's racism. Bragg mentioned Gandhi's comment that what Kipling called the "White Man's Burden" was actually a yoke which whites put around the necks of non-whites. And someone called Kipling's views on race "horrible, horrible, horrible," but if I remember correctly, they did so in the subordinate clause of a sentence.

And for a while I was puzzled, thinking about Kipling's undeniable artistic achievements and his experiences in India and his racism, and Dawkins' undeniable scientific achievements and his birthplace in Kenya and his racism.

And then suddenly I remembered all of the Confederate officers who had been raised by black mammies, and all of the Southern men before and since the Civil War likewise raised by black slaves or servants whom they naturally loved liked mothers, as late as the 1960's because in the 1980's I knew some of them when I was a student in Knoxville, Tennessee, and for all I know they might still have mammies in some publicity-shy corners of the South.

So, of course, there would be nothing at all unusual for a Protestant English boy in Kipling's time to be raised by Catholics and Hindus in India, or for a boy in Dawkins' time to grow up in Nairobi, and still somehow not be enlightened by it. I recalled the Confederate slave-owners who believed that they were good to their slaves and that their slaves loved them, and regarded runaway slaves as anomalies, and who were absolutely astonished when, during the Civil War, all of their slaves ran away and never came back. I recalled that I already knew all of this. And that I knew that most of the Englishmen in India in Kipling's time and in Kenya in Dawkins' time were just as surrounded by non-whites as Kipling and Dawkins, without it having automatically enlightened them as to the racist nature of the British Empire.

And then I thought about how often the British monarchy were discussed on "In Our Time," without the tone of discussion coming anywhere near John Lydon's "God save the Queen/The fascist regime/They've made you a moron/A potential H-bomb." They've also made Melvyn Bragg the life peer Baron Bragg, of Wigton in the County of Cumbria.

We see what we want to, and very often blind ourselves to the rest. It's a notable achievement when someone can stand up against a political system which benefits them -- a pre-Civil-War Southern planter, or a pre-Civil-War New York cotton merchant, against slavery; an Empire-era English gentlemen in India against British rule; an Alaskan receiving an annual Permanent Fund Dividend check against global warming; a professor of literature against the messy aspects of a great writer's biography, etc.

A notable achievement, and one which we must repeat unceasingly. You too, Melvyn.

Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Have 7 of My Previous 8 Posts Been About Him?

(8 out of 9 if you count this one.) I'm so glad you asked!

Jordan Peterson

is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.

But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.

And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:

This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.

As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.

That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)

Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.

And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?

Ethnic Diversity and Racism in Ancient Rome

A brouhaha has erupted in Britain about ethnic diversity and racism in ancient Rome: Alt-right commentator gets 'schooled' by historian over diversity in Roman Britain, and now people are arguing about who got schooled by whom and who is or isn't alt-right.

I don't know who is or isn't alt-right or who got schooled by whom, and I also don't know how racist or ethnically-diverse ancient Rome was.

I do know that here, as seemingly always and everywhere, a lot of people are making up a version of history which suits them, rather than actually studying history.

It seems that people are so anxious to be sure that racism was unknown in ancient Rome that they've even taken to translating "white" and "black" out of Catullus' notorious 93rd poem: "Nil nimium studeo, Caesar, tibi velle placere/ nec scire utrum sis albus an ater homo." ("I don't care much about pleasing you, Caesar, or knowing whether you are white or black." This short poem was Catullus' response to an invitation to dinner by Caesar.) As Caesar said, "Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." ("Men gladly believe what they wish to be true.") And Caesar's bonmot applies equally to those who underestimate the prevalence of racism in ancient Rome and those who overestimate it, rather than examining the evidence with an open mind. And it applies as well to those who are convinced that Jesus was "black" and also to those who are convinced he was "white" (I contend that his historical existence is uncertain and his appearance completely unknown), and to everyone else who claims to be studying history when what they are actually doing is making uninformed pronouncements on historical subjects with closed minds and little information.

If I had translated Caesar as "People gladly believe[...]" instead of "Men gladly believe[...]," I would've been editing out his sexism, which he shared with almost all ancient Roman men of whom we know, a sexism which is much more obvious and plain than the degree to which ancient Romans were or were not racist.

Have people already begun to present a non-sexist version of ancient Rome?

I feel very lonely at times when I consider how very few people care at all about getting an accurate view of historical subjects.

Race In The US

So, we're starting to have a public discussion about race in the US, finally. There may have been a lot of discussion of such things in places like academia, but I think we're seeing the first real public discussion of it all now, at this late date.

I'm white, and I was raised (born 1961) by liberals to believe that race doesn't make anybody better or worse than anybody else, but that didn't mean that I was immune to all of the nonsense all around me. For one thing, despite the liberal attitudes of my parents, I met very few non-white people before I was full-grown, and there's only so much you can understand about race in an environment as segregated as that.

In the mid-1980's I was hanging around with a friend of mine who happened to be black, and I said something, I don't remember exactly what I said, but I said some ignorant thing about some people getting some advantage because they weren't white, and my friend, who had never said a cross word to me before then, went off, and made some very angry and direct and edifying comments which I've never forgotten, about how every single day he envied people who had white skin like me, and how he was constantly made aware of being judged by his race, and often harassed by the police for no other reason. I'm actually not sure whether he and I were good friends after that or if he ceased to consider me to be a friend because of what I'd said, and I have no idea if he ever had any idea of how deep an impression he'd made on me by what he said. He had beautiful glowing bronze-colored skin, and I had a pink face full of pockmarks, and he envied me for my skin. From then on I listened and looked a lot more carefully when it came to race.

In 1992 I saw the riots in LA after the police who beat Rodney King were all acquitted of all charges. I couldn't believe that people could look at that video and not see that something very, very wrong was happening, but of course since then we've all seen video after video after video of police doing very wrong things and then seen them be acquitted. If we're not blind, we've come to understand just how stubbornly blind many people are.

In November 1994 I moved to NYC, and was not yet used to being around lots and lots of non-white people all at once, and once I accidentally took a wrong subway train, and I ended up on a platform with a sign that said Flatbush, a crowded platform, and it seemed like everyone else there was black. And I was scared. I lived through that experience, and looking back on it I feel that I was a bit silly for being afraid.

I had moved to NYC with hopes of a career in acting. One of the shows I very much wanted to be in was "NYPD Blue." I'll never forget meeting a very wonderful actress, how she told me she'd been a trill in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and I responded, "I bet you were!" and I'll never forget the moment when she informed me that almost all of the filming of "NYPD Blue" was done in LA. This was still a good decade before I was diagnosed with autism. Autism no doubt had a lot to do with how I flubbed things like my attempt at an acting career, and like a shot at a relationship with that actress, who seemed to really like me, amazingly. (It amazed a few other people too, not just me.)

But anyway, in NYC, for the first time, I spent a lot of time in places where I might be the only white person around, and gradually it dawned on me that I didn't have to be afraid. And like I said, I was raised by people who were very liberal on race issues. So that makes me think about how screwed up the mentality of people who were raised by racists might be.

And then gradually it dawned on me that non-whites in the US have a lot more reason to be afraid of white people than the other way around. Around the time I moved to NYC, the episode of "NYPD Blue" aired where Lt Fancy (black) took Det Sipowicz (white) to a soul food restaurant in a black neighborhood, at the end of a shift in which Sipowicz has behaved with some racial insensitivity toward a black man suspected of a crime, who turned out to be innocent. "NYPD Blue" was on the air for over a decade, and one of the threads of the show was how Sipowicz, with the patient help of a lot of people including Fancy, gradually became less racist. Anyway, in the soul food restaurant, Sipowicz is the only white person in the place, and Fancy says, You don't know how these people feel about you. Maybe some of them dislike you, just because of how you look, and you didn't do anything to them. Now imagine if people like this surrounded you all day every day and they all had badges and guns.

A moment from a fictional TV drama. It's not a brilliant original insight on my part. But maybe it's food for thought.

Anti-Racists Formulate Concepts Of The Superman, Racists Come Along And Misunderstand Them

The comic book character Superman was created in 1933 by two Jewish guys who presumably were not Nazis.

The term superman is -- or was, for a while -- generally translated into German as Uebermensch. The Nazis often referred to themselves as Uebermenschen. The German term Uebermensch was coined by Nietzsche, who hated anti-Semites and racists in general.

In English, before the creation of the comic book character, the most prominent user of the term superman was George Bernard Shaw, also an anti-racist. Some people think that Shaw's support of eugenics was racist, but, on the contrary, he favored breeding across ethnic and class lines -- the exact opposite of racist goals of "racial purity." In direct opposition to racist pseudo-science, Shaw's assertions that benefits would come from broadening the gene pool are scientifically sound.

Nietzsche first mentions the Uebermensch in Also sprach Zarathustra, published in 1883. Shaw first mentioned the superman in his play Man and Superman, written in 1903, first performed in 1905. It has often been erroneously asserted that Shaw got many of his ideas directly from from Nietzsche. Shaw himself attempted to clear this up, saying that, although he liked Nietzsche's works very much, he first began to read them after he had read assertions that he had gotten various ideas from Nietzsche -- but the error persists. When Shaw read Nietzsche, he found that they had much in common -- such as being frequently misunderstood by people who very annoyingly claimed to be championing their causes without first having gone to the trouble of reading their works.

An annoying tendency which still hasn't died out.