Chauvinism is a hell of a drug. Once a person has swallowed the Kool-aid that their own place and time are the best that have ever been, and that all future societies will be based upon current beliefs and notions, and that all past and foreign societies are to be judged against the chauvinist’s culture, deeply stupid ideas are bound to be the result. One way in which chauvinists paper over the cognitive dissonance which is bound to result from such silly prejudices is to envision everyone who isn’t lucky enough to live in the Magical and Blessed Here and Now™ as being interchangeable, because obviously individuality was only invented in the 1960s and therefore everyone born before Kennedy was assassinated (OK, maybe before the First World War, but definitely no earlier than that) thought and believed and felt exactly the same way as everyone else, except for a few Great People™ whose names are in the history books because everyone else was wrong and they were right. You think I’m kidding? Exaggerating, sure, but not kidding. Take a look at this article:
Historians from Oxford University have been taken aback to discover that Matthew Tomlinson’s diary from 1810 contains…open-minded views about same-sex attraction being a “natural” human tendency. The diary challenges preconceptions about what “ordinary people” thought about homosexuality…Tomlinson [was] prompted by…a…scandal…in which a well-respected naval surgeon had been found to be engaging in homosexual acts. A court martial had ordered him to be hanged – but Tomlinson…argued…”It must seem strange indeed that God Almighty should make a being with such a…defect in nature; and at the same time make a decree that if that being whom he had formed, should at any time follow the dictates of that Nature, with which he was formed, he should be punished with death,” he wrote on January 14 1810. If there was an “inclination and propensity” for someone to be homosexual from an early age, he wrote, “it must then be considered as natural…and if [so]…it seems cruel to punish that defect with death”…An acceptance of homosexuality might have been expressed privately in aristocratic or philosophically radical circles – but this was being discussed by a rural worker. “It shows opinions of people in the past were not as monolithic as we might think,” says [Oxford researcher Eamonn] O’Keeffe…
You might think those unschooled old-time hicks had “monolithic” opinions, Mr. O’Keeffe, but I certainly don’t. Human opinions were never and are never monolithic across a society and era, no matter what authoritarians want you to believe. Individuals have always thought and felt across a wide spectrum of opinion (and yes, that includes “rural workers”); the difference is that in the past, there were fewer places where freedom of speech was protected, so we don’t get to hear about widely-differing opinions because people were afraid of their ideas being declared as “sinful” or “seditious” or “hateful” or “misinformed” and therefore cause for censure or even punishment. Sound familiar? This is what both “wings” now want for America and Europe: control of thought and speech by government and its corporate cronies to enforce “righteous” norms. Oh, the excuses differ between places & rulers, but the intended outcome is always the same: Thought control.
The world has improved not because we are “better” or “smarter” or “more educated” than our ancestors; it has improved because slowly, over millennia, humans have become less accepting of “rulers” using threats of violence to control what we can think, say, and do. Oh, there have been eras of backsliding; we’re in one right now, where every would-be dictator supports censorship of ideas they don’t like and state violence against people who dare to have sex, ingest substances, or cross imaginary lines in the dirt in the “wrong” way and/or without the permission of their Dear Leaders. In times and places where the individual’s right to be individual is respected, society becomes better and freer for everyone; in those where individuals are only viewed as faceless members of cliques, parties, mobs, or other collectives, society becomes worse and less free for everyone except the rulers. Sentient beings are not born to be part of a monolith, and the only way to make them so is to violently break them and cram the remains into a huge structure designed and built by the power elite for nobody’s benefit but their own.
I always enjoy Maggie’s pieces, and I almost always agree with her. But this short essay is a masterpiece, thank you, Maggie. I have very similar thoughts when I read tendentious opinions of this or that expert generalizing about what people think now or thought in the past about various things. Not only are people not uniform or predictable about their thinking, but they might not even tell others what they really think because of the dangers their revealed thoughts might cause them.
My only addition to Maggie’s essay is that the improvement (if any) over humanity’s enslavement to ruling dogmas is not due only to us becoming “less accepting” of our rulers. It is also thanks to improved technology that enable us to escape rulers, and dogmas, and people ordering us around with their good intentions. I can read Maggie easily because of the Internet, people can escape drudgery and abusive situations by getting machines to do their drudgery for them, and by getting out of town (or country) on easily obtainable transportation.
Well, obvious facts were obvious facts for all of history. And, as far as we know, there never were many people that can see what is instead of what they are told to see and what their own prejudices tell them is the truth. Independent thinkers are somewhere around 10…15% of the population, and if they are often invisible in history, then that is simply because these people are smart and can usually see what will happen if they voice their insights about how things actually work. Hence most of them keep silent and all we have is the occasional rare recording and some documentation of cases where it all went horribly wrong. But see, for example, Cassandra for an early tale about this form of general ignorance of most people.
There is absolutely no sane reason to believe that people in earlier time had less than the ever-present small part of independent thinkers either. Of course, independent thinkers were never welcome by most people because they threaten comfortable misconceptions, and that was also true for all of history.
Well said. (It’s for both you and Maggie.)
Thank you!
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The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but it is with these same good intentions that we blindly place our trust in those with power. The architects of out future and all too often the manipulators of our ultimate fate.
“The majority of men… are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and… are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Still as insightful as ever, and despite the spelling mistake, I am not surprised that you were never contacted to work on a PragerU video. (If Dennis Prager somehow had you make a video, just watch as the likes of Lauren Chen, Candice “Doxxing Queen” Owens, etc. lose their shit.)
That wasn’t a spelling mistake; it was a dropped letter. Ever since I got this newer Chromebook, it has been happening with infuriating frequency, about once every sentence or two. The keyboard seems “hard”, like it needs more pressure to depress keys than I’m used to; that means a lot of keys don’t seem to know I’ve pressed them and the letters don’t appear. Sometimes I notice it quickly, but often I don’t until later. Sometimes MONTHS later.
(When typing this, it dropped the final “t” in “that” on the penultimate line).
Bad keyboards are an atrocity. I am using an external sort-of gaming keyboard (Cherry Blue Switches) just to get good, _accurate_ feedback.