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Angels and Ages
Dec. 6th, 2013 08:51 amI’ve been reading Adam Gopnik’s Angels and Ages, which is a sort of extended musing about Lincoln, Darwin, and how they’ve shaped modernity. It’s a thought-provoking book in general, but this quote in particular stuck out to me: “The attempt to make Lincoln into just one more racist is part of the now common attempt to introduce a noxious equilibrium between minds and parties: liberals who struggle with their own prejudices are somehow equal in prejudice to those who never took the trouble to make the struggle.”
This sums up something that often bothered me in academic history (or simply academic discussions), a sort of “more enlightened than thou” mindset: the kind of mentality that looks at the radicals of the past, people who signed Emancipation Proclamations or suffered death threats or had their printing presses destroyed by mobs with axes, and says, “So what about their accomplishments? Those people never reached my pinnacle of twenty-first century enlightenment, and therefore I can look down upon them from my lofty moral heights.”
This is particularly pernicious in academia, which tends to encourage the idea that smart people, by sheer virtue of their intelligence, are in some absolute sense better than everyone else - as if intelligence were the ultimate measure of human worth.
But intelligence is an accident, like beauty or athletic talent or rich parents or being born in the twentieth century. It’s not a reflection of virtue because it’s not something that we chose or earned; it’s something we were given, by luck or God or genetics, and therefore it’s foolish to look scornfully at people who lack any of those advantages, because “there but for the grace of God go I.”
I think that if one’s philosophy - any philosophy, feminism or Christianity or postcolonial theory, anything - becomes largely an excuse to look down in touchy judgment on 99.9% of humanity, past and present, then it’s not worth much. People so often seem to latch onto the judgmental parts of a worldview before they get to the parts that expand their kindness and compassion.
If we see farther than Abraham Lincoln did, it’s not because we’re fundamentally better human beings. It’s because we have the good luck to stand on the shoulders of giants.
This sums up something that often bothered me in academic history (or simply academic discussions), a sort of “more enlightened than thou” mindset: the kind of mentality that looks at the radicals of the past, people who signed Emancipation Proclamations or suffered death threats or had their printing presses destroyed by mobs with axes, and says, “So what about their accomplishments? Those people never reached my pinnacle of twenty-first century enlightenment, and therefore I can look down upon them from my lofty moral heights.”
This is particularly pernicious in academia, which tends to encourage the idea that smart people, by sheer virtue of their intelligence, are in some absolute sense better than everyone else - as if intelligence were the ultimate measure of human worth.
But intelligence is an accident, like beauty or athletic talent or rich parents or being born in the twentieth century. It’s not a reflection of virtue because it’s not something that we chose or earned; it’s something we were given, by luck or God or genetics, and therefore it’s foolish to look scornfully at people who lack any of those advantages, because “there but for the grace of God go I.”
I think that if one’s philosophy - any philosophy, feminism or Christianity or postcolonial theory, anything - becomes largely an excuse to look down in touchy judgment on 99.9% of humanity, past and present, then it’s not worth much. People so often seem to latch onto the judgmental parts of a worldview before they get to the parts that expand their kindness and compassion.
If we see farther than Abraham Lincoln did, it’s not because we’re fundamentally better human beings. It’s because we have the good luck to stand on the shoulders of giants.
