Self-Hating Narcissism
The Internet is forever.
Not always, not when you flash back to some thing vaguely pleasant from long ago, only to discover that you Google Fu skills are no match for the search engine's maddening ability to give you everything except that gossamer wisp you're trying to recapture.
Certainly, however, when and if you commit some bit of insta-inanity to it. If something can make you look like a fool, technology will pretty much guarantee it'll be a Page 1 search result forever after.
The only remedy is not to play the game, but if the game is your livelihood, the risk is unavoidable.
This crossed my feed the other day.
Tyson, at some point, decided to leverage his education and reputation in science for political purposes and self-promotion. And, since he opted to do so via Twitter, a tone of smug condescension became inevitable.
It's the message beyond the tone that stirred my opinion engine to life. For it takes a certain form of solipsistic arrogance to ignore the entirety of human history in order to lay especial blame upon one small slice of it. Humans have been fighting and conquering each other ever since the species came into existence. One source notes that "[t]he history of one of the earliest civilizations in the world, that of Mesopotamia, is a chronicle of nearly constant strife." Ditto for ancient Egypt, China, Persia, Greece, Rome, and, on this side of the globe, the Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, and countless other "First Peoples." Genghis Khan conquered so much of the world that 1 in 200 men alive today are related to him.
Human conquest knows no skin color. Nor has it ever required disparities in such. Ditto for slavery and other forms of subjugation. It's what humans have always done. Doesn't make it right or moral by modern values, but remains a fact. Skin color was a 'motivator,' but so was religion, or ethnicity, or the meat others ate, or the land others controlled, or the success and wealth others had. The list of reasons is long, but at their core they are just excuses. We have certain evolutionary proclivities, and distrust/dislike of 'other' is among them.
So, why single out European Colonial history?
Because it's en vogue in certain circles. Because some like to scold history's victors when it matches their agendas and bents.
Make that some of history's victors. You won't hear that crowd talk down the Romans, or the Persians, or Genghis, or Alexander, or Cyrus, or Tamerlane, or Attila, or any of the Pharaohs. You won't hear much talk about the Barbary slave trade, or the pre-Columbian wars in the Americas, or the conquests by the Incas or Aztecs. You won't hear a peep about eastern or southern Asia.
No, the plagues of the world are uniquely the fault of "European Colonialism," which spanned fewer than four hundred of the six thousand-plus years of known human civilization.
The aforementioned "modern values" that condemn expansion and conquest were, ironically, born in that same Europe. The Enlightenment, the "Age of Reason," emerged during that era of colonialism, and it is therefrom that our modern morals, centered around the primacy of the individual, find cause to condemn colonialism and its attendant behaviors. For it is obvious to any student of history that, prior to this paradigm shift in human thought, individuals did not matter to anywhere near the degree they do today. Slavery of many forms existed everywhere, even under the Magna Carta (see: feudalism and serfs). Neither the Bible nor the Koran debarred slavery, and instead codified it with recognition that it was common and ubiquitous. kings, emperors, and other despots would routinely use their (conscripted) citizens to engage in war against others. Even apart from slavery, conquest of others' lands and property was how the world operated, and nations and empires would form in order to repel outsiders' covetousness.
Looking back across history with modern eyes abhors most of us. The "inhumanity" with which everybody's ancestors treated each other is alien to our present-day morals, but when we curate our special condemnation only to some, when others were as bad or worse, we should check our motives for doing so.
At its core, this singling out is just another iteration of distrust/dislike of 'other.' The 'motivator' today is often political tribalism rather than the more traditional discriminators, but the root is the same biological wiring our ancestors had: the desire to lift one's self and one's own above the others.
The new wrinkle in this is the self-hatred. While Tyson is not overtly of "European Colonial" heritage (black and Puerto Rican parents, per the Intertubes), his opinions and tone mirror that of many who are and have chosen to focus anger on that heritage. As if doing so makes them "better."
History is what it is. We can certainly assert, and do so accurately, that what happened in the past clashes with modern morals and values, but when some only view it through modern filters, they lose touch with reality. In doing so, they make it all about themselves, not about the world, and in doing so they reveal a particular form of narcissism.
Narcissism is rarely a positive attribute, but when it's born of a collectivized self-loathing, it becomes extra destructive. History is there for us to learn from, not to lord over with smug superiority. We have evolved, societally and morally, from the values of the past, both recent and ancient, and we can take pleasure and satisfaction from having done so, but cherry-picking to score points over our fellows does not contribute to further evolution. In fact, it does the opposite - sowing unnecessary seeds of discord and introducing fabricated tribal conflicts that feed the lizard-brain dislike/distrust of other that our rational minds (and the Enlightenment) should override.
Tyson’s self-absorbed mistake? Substituting “European Colonial” for “human.” Human history has indeed been “Is that yours? It’s mine now,” interspersed with an occasional defeat, rebellion, or revolution. That’s the truth, and picking on one segment, geographical and time-wise, suggests that the rest of it wasn’t. It was, and no revisionism or retconning will change that.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.
Inducing self-loathing among the successful (and that can be anybody) is a Marxist trope - a "Jedi mind trick" intended to divide us while disqualifying your success and nothing more. Aside from actual human traffickers, which are a real thing today, none of us are guilty of slavery and oppression.
Well said. This is in essence the thesis of Douglas Murray’s War In The West. It’s disingenuous to insist that only Western European powers engaged in this, c. Middle Ages to present.