Progressive Racism and Progressing Stupidity | Clarissa's Blog
Well if your heart isn’t in what you are doing and you have to do that job day in and day out, that is degrading to the mind and body. Certainly it is not “slavery” in the sense of being owned by a particular person and being required not to leave the premises. But it can be very degrading.
I do think people need to start using words with greater care, so that they do not make their own emotional concerns seem to be at the centre of the universe, though. Supposing I communicate to others, as the author may be trying to do, my sense of degradation at work, but I can’t take into account greater extremes of oppression, or variations of it, because I have already used the available words with too great a rhetorical effect in service of myself — well then I have exhausted communication even before I have begun engaging with others.
That is perhaps the problem with most forms of political correctness today. They immediately exhaust the possibilities of communication though the extreme use of language as a rhetorical device. One either agrees with the speaker or walks away shaking one’s head.
But outside the world of narrow, perspectival manipulation, reality opens up. At least, it has the potential to do so. Really, I think the problem with much of contemporary academia, in the humanities, is that it is stuck in this mode of limited, perspectival management. And this tendency toward socially engineering what kinds of meanings are permitted to be expressed is deeply entrenched in much of general society as a whole. That is why I have not been able to express very simple and even banal things about my past, but had to write a book to get thse things out of my system. People would stop me and imply I’m not permitted to speak of them. And then they would go to work on me, trying to manipulate my perspective so that I would take in reality in a much more narrow and socially contrived filter.
And in fact, that was quite traumatising, not because of the views I was expected to embrace as such, but because I was not permitted even to say the very plain and trivial things I wanted to relate about my past experiences in Africa. If you can’t relate even matter of fact things, you cannot make a cultural transition from one state of mind to another.
So, in fact that was why I chose not to pursue an academic career, because I can’t walk around in that kind of a straitjacket. It’s not only uncomfortable, but is is unhealthy. One would have first be mad enough to accept it. Some people are, and they comply to a limited degree.
But most people in the humanities are taught to use language to keep out what they sense to be “evil”. Under the label of “evil”, put the unknown, the wild that is just beyond the borders of suburban consciousness, the capacity for free thinking, experiences that happen to have grown up in locations where the gardeners of the contemporary, modern soul have not cultivated anything. Also place most of reality itself. It’s too tough and too wild and too wicked for the contemporary mind to try to come to terms with.
It’s not so much that the contemporary, educated person cannot come to terms with the historical existence of slavery, but they actively resist acknowledging even the slightest thing that is not already part of their purview. They view it as evil and undigestable. They may even downvote any attempts to communicate to them about it, on YouTube.
Well if your heart isn’t in what you are doing and you have to do that job day in and day out, that is degrading to the mind and body. Certainly it is not “slavery” in the sense of being owned by a particular person and being required not to leave the premises. But it can be very degrading.
I do think people need to start using words with greater care, so that they do not make their own emotional concerns seem to be at the centre of the universe, though. Supposing I communicate to others, as the author may be trying to do, my sense of degradation at work, but I can’t take into account greater extremes of oppression, or variations of it, because I have already used the available words with too great a rhetorical effect in service of myself — well then I have exhausted communication even before I have begun engaging with others.
That is perhaps the problem with most forms of political correctness today. They immediately exhaust the possibilities of communication though the extreme use of language as a rhetorical device. One either agrees with the speaker or walks away shaking one’s head.
But outside the world of narrow, perspectival manipulation, reality opens up. At least, it has the potential to do so. Really, I think the problem with much of contemporary academia, in the humanities, is that it is stuck in this mode of limited, perspectival management. And this tendency toward socially engineering what kinds of meanings are permitted to be expressed is deeply entrenched in much of general society as a whole. That is why I have not been able to express very simple and even banal things about my past, but had to write a book to get thse things out of my system. People would stop me and imply I’m not permitted to speak of them. And then they would go to work on me, trying to manipulate my perspective so that I would take in reality in a much more narrow and socially contrived filter.
And in fact, that was quite traumatising, not because of the views I was expected to embrace as such, but because I was not permitted even to say the very plain and trivial things I wanted to relate about my past experiences in Africa. If you can’t relate even matter of fact things, you cannot make a cultural transition from one state of mind to another.
So, in fact that was why I chose not to pursue an academic career, because I can’t walk around in that kind of a straitjacket. It’s not only uncomfortable, but is is unhealthy. One would have first be mad enough to accept it. Some people are, and they comply to a limited degree.
But most people in the humanities are taught to use language to keep out what they sense to be “evil”. Under the label of “evil”, put the unknown, the wild that is just beyond the borders of suburban consciousness, the capacity for free thinking, experiences that happen to have grown up in locations where the gardeners of the contemporary, modern soul have not cultivated anything. Also place most of reality itself. It’s too tough and too wild and too wicked for the contemporary mind to try to come to terms with.
It’s not so much that the contemporary, educated person cannot come to terms with the historical existence of slavery, but they actively resist acknowledging even the slightest thing that is not already part of their purview. They view it as evil and undigestable. They may even downvote any attempts to communicate to them about it, on YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment