To follow up on yesterday's banana bread recipe, adding a smashed-up bar of rich dark chocolate worked as well as it sounds like it would have worked. It pleased a birthday table of 6 different nationalities so I'm going to recommend it.
Anyways, I've found the strangest little book in a bargain basementy used bookstore shop here, from a series I'd never heard of before, Teach Yourself, which I suppose is the British answer to Whatever for Dummies, except the little thing I found was published during the second world war, so it's vice versa. I boldly splurged 50 centimes on Teach Yourself Geology not because of an overwhelming interest in geology - I just wanted to see what a self-ed book published in the middle of one of the most brutal conflicts in human history is like. The answer is fucking brilliant.
It's so excited about what it's about and, since it was only 1943 and I suppose no one had told them that the world is a fucking terrible place where men are no better than vicious, murderous tomcats with opposable thumbs and revolting imaginations, that kill babies in factories by the thousandweight, it's so excited about progress. About evolution and the aging of the planet as a progress towards - what? - something bigger and better - as well as about the expansion of human knowledge.
That caught me off guard a little bit. Does anybody still believe in this idea of progress? Of natural evolution, or of the evolution of human knowledge, as a process that's going somewhere, from a modest place to some sort of abstract but obviously much better - what? Conclusion? Surely not. Just to something obviously much better, I suppose. What beautiful optimism. I don't think it exists anymore. Was it just so obviously wrong, in the face of the Nazi, Soviet and Maoist hecatombs? In the face of war photography? Or have decades and decades of advertising campaigns for everything from cars to breakfast cereal simply inured us to it, until the idea that tomorrow will be better than today just rings in our head like a fatuous jingle?
The Teach Yourself series was and is published by these people - religious types back in the day - and apparently each Teach Yourself book they published back in the day had the title of this post, Proverbs 9.9, printed in the frontispiece. It reminds me that old optimism, that blind, enthusiastic faith in progress - in the idea that natural evolution and the evolution of human knowledge was an ever upwards and onwards type thing - was the natural reaction of a Christian society to the theory of evolution. The Christian society could accept that things hadn't happened like in Genesis when faced with the evidence, but it still needed to believe there was something profoundly God-y about existence - maybe even believe there is no God, but still clinging to the belief that somehow everything makes sense, and everything is getting better. Things 'evolve'. Things 'progress'. Things, in general, are couched in the language of a people who earnestly believe, without necessarily making it explicit and without thinking that it must mean they have some sort of abstract mystical faith, that there is a direction for existence.
4 commenti:
That's quite a find. Optimism may remain although a direction for existence would be much harder to pin down.
Maybe. A new kind of optimism.
If you believe in progress, then the most progressed people have the natural right, or even duty, to wisely govern over the less progressed people.
That's an interesting point, because that's a notion of progress that is still very, very present in our society and political thought - progressed people and not-progressed people requiring government.
Even if the evidence points to 'progressed' people almost constantly protecting their personal and class interests from their positions of responsibility, and even if 'not progressed' people have perpetually been preyed on and encouraged to remain 'not progressed' by the 'progressed', and even if we don't have that old-fashioned Victorian Godly idea that everything is getting better and better, I think most people living in industrialized countries still very much believe in this idea of levels of social progress and the strange paternalism, the excused dominance it leads to.
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