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.

Stephen Hawking Thinks The Robots Are Going To Kill Us All

And that is certainly alarming. But what exactly should we be alarmed about: artificial intelligence, or Hawking's state of mind?

I've already written about how Hawking has illustrated Bollinger's Axiom on another topic: a few years ago he declared that philosophy was dead. Now he's illustrating it again with his Terminator-Matrix-type fantasies.

Let's look at some other cases. Remember Linus Pauling? He's one of only 4 people ever two have won 2 Nobel Prizes, and the only 1 of those 4 who didn't share either prize with anyone else. He was, like Hawking, undeniably extraordinarily brilliant, and yet, his greatest effect in the short term, still in effect now 21 years after his death, may well be due to some nonsense which he energetically plugged: he urged people with no serious health problems to take massive amounts of vitamins. In real life, using real science, doing so, as Sheldon explained to Penny on "The Big Bang Theory," only produces "very expensive urine." Pauling, with no scientific justification and no corroboration from any serious physicians or biologists, said that taking dozens or hundreds of times the recommended daily dosage of Vitamin C prevented colds, and that massive doses of C and other vitamins also had other health benefits such as the prevention of cancer.

Rudyard Kipling was sort of smart in some ways, I suppose -- they gave him a Nobel -- but he insisted that

"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,"

while the meeting was well underway all around him.

Hawking, Pauling, Kipling -- 4 Nobel Prizes between them, many good ideas, some bad ones.

Hey, all of their surnames end with -ing. Maybe we just need to be wary of eccentric statements made by Nobel laureates whose last names end in -ing.

Eh? Huh? See what I did there? I'm very bright, and I just suggested a perfectly cuckoo idea. Of course I don't think that surnames ending in -ing are any cause for alarm, I only pretended to think so in order to illustrate what it would be like if I were to commit a blunder which illustrated Bollinger's Axiom.

And I'm sure I do make such blunders fairly frequently without realizing it, what with my being human and all, not to mention being autistic and dealing with a 99% neurologically-typical general population. Hopefully my particularly bad ideas aren't very influential right now, because I'm a nobody, and people will tend to judge my ideas more or less objectively, appreciating the good ones and rejecting the ridiculous ones. But if I win a Nobel or two, if Hawking, Pauling and Kipling are any indication, people might suddenly lose all of their critical faculties when it comes to my every utterance, despite my own warnings not to do so with me or anyone else, and simply assume that everything I say is pure gold. That would be a disaster in my case, it's a disaster in Hawking's case, it's always a disaster when critical judgment is suspended in response to any authority or for any other reason.

Anyway, all I came here to say is: fears of AI are ridiculous, even if Hawking suffers from them. AI doesn't even exist yet -- computers trouncing humans at chess isn't AI, it's just a combination of math and electronics. Cute little gadgets that vacuum the floor and self-driving cars don't qualify either -- and there's no rational reason to believe that, if and when AI ever is created, it'll go all Terminator-Matrix on us. One thing which IS dangerous is neo-Luddite mentality, and it's extremely ironic that this mentality is currently being fed by someone who is able to communicate with us and go about his daily life thanks to some pretty sophisticated technology.

Sir Stephen, some of the people who are heeding your call to be afraid, to be very afraid of the robots are themselves very intelligent, again illustrating Bollinger's Axiom. Some of the simpler folks heeding your call to panic think YOU're a robot.