The Fifth Great Blow

Ohio woman convicted
of killing month old baby
in her microwave oven.

A fifth blow to Man’s ego? At least to the ego of Western-European white men (no one in the west has ever been much concerned with the egos of anyone else). Anyway, some years back, when the notion of cultural relativity was first gaining some recognition (and running into a lot of resistance) someone (I believe it was Ruth Benedict but it may have been someone else) suggested there had been four great blows to Man’s ego. The first great blow was, of course, the Copernican revolution, when Copernicus demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe and, in fact, was merely a planet revolving around the sun. The second blow was the Darwinian discovery of the theory of evolution in which mankind was removed from his elevated position and shown to be part of the animal kingdom. Then there was the Freudian blow that suggested that far from being the rational, sensible creature they thought they were, people were actually driven by unconscious desires and motives of which they were not necessarily even aware. The fourth blow was the discovery (or argument) that values, far from being fixed and unchanging, were actually relative to the various cultures in which they were found.

Might I have the temerity to suggest that if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States this will constitute a fifth great blow to the egos of white Europeans. This is so because it will not only shatter the long-standing belief in white superiority, but will also involve a change in the basic paradigm that has guided European thought for the past few centuries. That is, the notion of the Great Chain of Being, in which all creatures were located on an evolutionary and even moral continuum, from the lowest to the highest, with white Europeans at the very top of the chain. This was related to the false notion that cultures evolved in the same way physical evolution did, with some cultures (European ones) being at the apex and all others being placed on a somewhat lower level (that went roughly from “savages” to “barbarians” to we “civilized” and presumably morally superior creatures”). This paradigm allowed Europeans to blissfully and savagely take over and colonize most of the world. The conquest was unbelievably brutal and took place all over – in Asia, Africa, South America, the Philippines and even Siberia. Christianity was interpreted in such a way as to support this imperialism, as was the theory of cultural evolution, and the discovery of racial differences during the age of exploration. Non-Europeans were believed to be less than human and therefore dispensable in the name of progress (which was also part of the European belief system). Barack Obama has already made an important challenge to this basic paradigm, and if he succeeds in becoming President it will have far-reaching consequences that might not be completely apparent at first but will over time result in a new paradigm. When Obama speaks of change I do not believe this is what he has in mind, but this is what will result and it will be far more important that merely bringing out troops home from Iraq and changing the tax code and etc. There will be a monumental paradigm shift every bit as important as any of the other Great Blows to our egos. It will have been a long time in coming, and will not, of course, undo the terrible damage that resulted from these false paradigmatic beliefs, but it may become a tremendous boon to our human existence on this small and inconsequential planet.

LKBIQ:
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
Albert Einstein