CSotD: We’re only human
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Joel Pett on the mote in Africa's eye and the beam in our own.
It's a challenging cartoon that brings up all sorts of arguments over history, over foreign policy, over shared humanity, over perspective.
The other day, I touched on naming conventions and how various people tend to refer to themselves as "people" and then find other names for other … um … people. And it's charmingly naive in "Little Big Man" when the Cheyenne refer to themselves as "the Human Beings."
But the charm and the naivete rely on the isolation of these hunter/gatherer societies and their relative inability to affect outsiders.
In the movie, the Human Beings don't like the Pawnee, and there's little doubt that the Pawnee also call themselves "human beings" and don't like the Cheyenne.
This racism, however, is tempered by the fact that neither set of "human beings" has the technology to simply eradicate the other, and the point of the movie is the dismaying contrast provided by the newcomers who indeed possess that capacity.
When we hear Old Lion Skins talk about the world, we hear an ironic reflection of our own similarly insular attitude, and are then confronted by how toxic it becomes when "human beings" are technologically powerful and neither self-contained nor modest in their aspirations.
I have read, and even referenced here, Robert Burns' poem about a high-falutin' woman in church with a louse wandering around on the back of her bonnet, and how nice it would be if we could see ourselves as others see us.
I've also referenced, multiple times, the issue of triumphalism James Loewen criticizes in "Lies My Teacher Told Me," and have said, each time, that while he is right, he also overcorrects. This isn't a reason to avoid his book, which is important.
It is a common fault that reformist history does not simply contrast with the Accepted Version but feels the need to be entirely contrary to it. Maybe more temperate thinkers don't bother to write books.
And this isn't confined to historic study.
It's part of a black-or-white binary vision of the universe that leads to all sorts of mischief.
It can be personal: The person you loved when your marriage was working becomes a psychotic demon upon divorce.
It can be theological: Ex-Catholics seem particularly prone to not simply slamming the door when they leave, but, like a temperamental six-year-old, repeatedly slamming it to make sure they were heard. In their newly-liberated world, every priest is a pederast and each pope a Borgia.
Which is not to say that there aren't some genuinely psychotic ex-spouses out there, or some pervert priests and self-indulgent popes.
But those are not universal attributes and, to the extent that they are real, both Epictetus and the zen masters agree that you make more personal progress by not fixating upon them.
In matters patriotic, there is a middle ground between wrapping yourself in the flag and burning it, but you won't find it a very loud area: I am convinced there are a lot of people on that middle ground, but they don't make a lot of noise, and, for that reason, don't figure much in the national conversation.
Obama's remarks in Africa pleased me, because I've long wished that, over the past century or so, we had put less money into sending soldiers around the world and more resources into sending out well-diggers and teachers and nurses, and I've never felt it was not compatible with our economic self-interest.
Imagine if we simply swapped the missions of the military and the Peace Corps, and made a national priority out of sending young Americans to Third World countries to provide them with clean water, good schools and decent medical care, while maintaining a small but efficient self-defense capacity at home?
We'd be like Canada on steroids. People would love us, which would not only solve some defense issues but would also give us a strong corner on trade, albeit within a more mutually respectful model.
But what we lost in imperialist exploitation, we'd make for up in volume.
And then those kids would come home and we'd have to find them jobs using the skills they'd learned and that would pretty much take care of the second part of Pett's cartoon.
I mean, since it would be central to our national identity, it would be unpatriotic of us not to give those returning veterans of outreach the opportunity to teach and nurse and repair infrastructure here.
We'd make movies about it, reinforcing our priorities and declaring our heroes.
You can't handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has wells.
And
those wells have to be dug by men with drills. Who's gonna do it? You? I have a capacity to drill down several fathoms! And, deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties,
you want me in that well. You need me in that well.
Don't waste too much time daydreaming about that, because it isn't gonna happen. Speaking of digging deeply, we're pretty well dug in to a pattern that began, when? Under McKinley?
Just as Jack Crabb's Cheyenne believed they were "the human beings," so, too, the expansionists and imperialists were inspired not simply by greed — that's too easy an explanation — but by the sincere belief that their values were the cosmic default, and that other people were simply waiting to be shown how things ought to be.
Just as the Cheyenne were human beings and the Pawnee were simply Pawnee, so, too, we, the "human beings," had defeated the Spanish. And now it was up to us to teach the people previously exploited by the Spanish how to be human beings like us.
We weren't just making a profit. We were doing them a favor.
Which sounds pretty arrogant if you think about it a little. So don't think about it a little. Think about it a lot.
In a cartoon world of heroes and villains, you can just swap the black hats with the white hats and pretend you've corrected the errors. That's thinking about it a little.
In the real world of real people, in which everybody is a "human being," it's more complex, and it requires you to think about it a lot.
Certainly, however, we can speak of the needs of others and we can also listen when they remind us of our own.
And maybe even act on both, you think?
Because, if we take the simple-minded black-and-white position that only the perfect can help, we're not going to see a lot of improvement anywhere.
Start by defining "human being" by what someone has, not by what they lack.
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