Comment by PaulDavisThe1st
5 days ago
1. No, this is not the point at all. The actual view that you're referring to is that sometimes people are in fact harmed by verbal behavior and cultural phenomena, that we should recognize that, and when possible and appropriate seek to mitigate it. That doesn't mean punishment or book-banning (ideas which come from those most often associated with being anti-woke) but rather a willingness to examine reality through the eyes of people other than ourselves and above all to be kind.
2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.
3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".
There also seems to be a willful ignorance of the horrors created by the Aztec, Qing, and Songhai powers (among others) before Europeans arrived in force. I won't attempt to defend or excuse the crimes against humanity committed by European colonial powers, but focusing on them seems particularly myopic. We can educate people about the history of that period but to what end? Assigning blame for the current state of affairs to dead people doesn't actually solve any problems today. The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.
Sure, but do you see one of the primary reasons why there is such ignorance? Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)
You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".
>Because to acknowledge that there were (or are) great, powerful, complex, sophisticated, organized cultures in parts of the world before European colonization happened undercuts one of the central myths that European colonization has wanted to tell about itself - that it, and it alone, was responsible for bring all those attributes to the parts of the world it touched.
What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.
This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.
That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.
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> The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us. I think a distinction should be made between revisiting history (in a bid to understand how we got where we are now), and assigning blame.
I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".
I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.
Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.
Realizing that the sex classifications (male, female, intersex etc) are only tangentially related to gender roles seems to me to be about the most basic concession to reality that one could make in these times.
What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.
Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.
> Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures
Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijra_(South_Asia)
That's orthogonal to my statement. They still recognize that male hijra are not women. Nobody in history has said "I would like a wife to start a family, I will go find a nice hijra", and if they did, they were quickly disabused of the viability of that plan.
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