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narcasseThe problem, such as it is, is that I’ve been working from the wrong assumption. I’ve been presuming that Western prejudice ought to work along the same lines as Eastern prejudice for the most part. Eastern prejudice after all has a rather harsh honesty to it, in the way that your relatives will tell you outright if you’ve put on weight, ought to study medicine or anything else besides. There’s a brutal honesty to Eastern prejudice where it’s acknowledged that you hold said prejudice, whatever it might be, because you dislike someone. You don’t tend to go much further than stating that that someone belongs to a group that is not like your own either. You don’t need to. That probably also explains why classism comes so easily to us: it’s just another entirely unjustified form of prejudice that need only be explained by a dislike for those who are different. Western prejudice on the other hand seems to require convoluted justification for the most part, or at least in the mainstream. It’s no good to openly admit to disliking that which is different, you have to find a way to justify your prejudiced behaviour as being for the benefit of those you dislike. You have to advocate ‘correcting’ their difference so that their being forced to conform to your norms is marketed as kindness rather than the deliberate obliteration of the values they prize.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time wondering why people are such liars and now I’ve discovered that plenty of them may not be lying at all. They’ve absorbed the standard rhetoric of Western prejudice so thoroughly that it never occurs to them to examine what they’re acting out. Western culture is steeped in it after all, just like Eastern culture is crammed to the brim with its own flavour of vindictiveness. All that realised, what I really need to do, to even begin to get a grasp on matters is go back to my textbooks. I need to find my copy of the Merriman book, all two inch thick and orange, that I somehow appear to have lost, and pick up where I left off with the dissolution of absolute monarchies. I might, curiously enough, even have to read up on the American colonies too if I want to complete a rough overview of the necessary knowledge.
Quite some years ago a lecturer once told me that there were several broad stereotypes about the way that different scholars went about learning. The Russian method involved learning everything possible leading up to and possibly having any relevance to a topic. This was why the Russian scholars had such a formidable reputation, even if what they sometimes knew ranged from highly relevant to completely irrelevant trivia on a matter. The Anglo-Saxon scholars on the other hand had a habit of reaching for a point, learning that tightly compacted specific area of knowledge and then leaving off everything else, so that you could end up with disconnected peaks of knowledge with complete wastelands in between. I somewhat forget what he said about German scholars, though I do believe it was to the tune of German learning involving a steady level of knowledge without the mountain of information of the Russians or the sudden, sharp peaks of the Anglo-Saxon. Regardless: I have very obviously gone down the Anglo-Saxon route of acquiring knowledge and that has been to my detriment. Therefore it’s time to redress that. It’s embarrassing enough to have voted Whig for the last three elections without realising, let alone figuring out that the majority of my knowledge about the Regency comes from Blackadder.
I’ve spent an awful lot of time wondering why people are such liars and now I’ve discovered that plenty of them may not be lying at all. They’ve absorbed the standard rhetoric of Western prejudice so thoroughly that it never occurs to them to examine what they’re acting out. Western culture is steeped in it after all, just like Eastern culture is crammed to the brim with its own flavour of vindictiveness. All that realised, what I really need to do, to even begin to get a grasp on matters is go back to my textbooks. I need to find my copy of the Merriman book, all two inch thick and orange, that I somehow appear to have lost, and pick up where I left off with the dissolution of absolute monarchies. I might, curiously enough, even have to read up on the American colonies too if I want to complete a rough overview of the necessary knowledge.
Quite some years ago a lecturer once told me that there were several broad stereotypes about the way that different scholars went about learning. The Russian method involved learning everything possible leading up to and possibly having any relevance to a topic. This was why the Russian scholars had such a formidable reputation, even if what they sometimes knew ranged from highly relevant to completely irrelevant trivia on a matter. The Anglo-Saxon scholars on the other hand had a habit of reaching for a point, learning that tightly compacted specific area of knowledge and then leaving off everything else, so that you could end up with disconnected peaks of knowledge with complete wastelands in between. I somewhat forget what he said about German scholars, though I do believe it was to the tune of German learning involving a steady level of knowledge without the mountain of information of the Russians or the sudden, sharp peaks of the Anglo-Saxon. Regardless: I have very obviously gone down the Anglo-Saxon route of acquiring knowledge and that has been to my detriment. Therefore it’s time to redress that. It’s embarrassing enough to have voted Whig for the last three elections without realising, let alone figuring out that the majority of my knowledge about the Regency comes from Blackadder.
