AliceFraser
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Saturday Night Thoughts: My Two Cents For Free
🕑 Added 2020-07-18 12:52:38 +0000 UTC(Picture of Alice Fraser Merch by Sam Streeter)
Here’s a thing I’ve been thinking about, and it’s tricky to articulate, but I’ll give it a shot if you’ll give me the benefit of the doubt. If you’ve been listening to Tea With Alice or watching recent instagrams-live (what’s the plural?), you’ll have heard some of these thoughts creeping in at the edges. I’ll try to lay them out sensically
It’s tricky because the thinking touches on the current discussions about equality and history, and those are subjects so spring loaded at the moment that critical analysis is often damned by association with bad faith criticism, ‘sealioning’, dogwhistling, undermining, etc. So caveats away - I like that people are trying to make a better world, and I think that more equity will lead to more equality. People should be treated as though they’re at least as human as you are.
THAT SAID
My colleague Dave Rose has just done a podcast for the ABC in Australia about his great grandfather - a jewish comedian who played a caricature Jew character on stage. And I’m talking extreme caricature; a sort of “jew-face” that would now (rightly) be seen as abhorrent, anti Semitic and bordering on hate speech.
Dave asked me to comment on what I thought of the character, and it made me solidify some of my uneasiness about the ways people are discussing texts (and artefacts, and historical ‘greats’) from the past.
The thing I said was that in its context, it’s entirely possible that the character Great Grandad Rose played was not regressive or retrograde. At a time when Australian mainstream culture didn’t include jewish representation, playing a buffoon-jew was a way to introduce a non-threatening, clowning, safe, silly, version of Jewishness into the discourse. A step forward, morally speaking. The ‘grotesque’ as a form plays an important function in art, and part of that function is to sort of... solidify a threat into a joke and minimise through ridicule, a perceived threat.
It’s entirely possible that this kind of (now self evidently unacceptable) role is a necessary part of the progress toward its own unacceptability, if you see what I mean?
It’s hard to think of morality as something that shifts, particularly at the moment, where a lot of the talk rests on an idea that our progressive morality should be obvious - that it’s a natural end point of humans, to treat other humans as equals.
(This belief is appealing and prevails despite the counter-evidence of basically every society in the vast span of human history, which has had hierarchies and in-group/ out-group violence and xenophobia).
But in the same way as you wouldn’t blame a pre-germ-theory doctor for performing surgery without washing their hands (though in retrospect it’s so obviously and viscerally WRONG, ugh, gross, ick), we have to figure out a way to engage with the morality of the past as part of the progress towards our current values.
Surely it must be possible to understand the wrong morality of the past in a way that also gives credit for where it helped progress.
It might diminish the legacy of George Washington to note that he had slave teeth in his dentures, because we can see how revolting and awful that is. But is it possible to give him credit for building an idea of America and refusing to be king of it as well. The underlying assumption I’m making here is that the understanding of the good and the bad don’t need to try to cancel each other out. You don’t need a final score on Washington. The dentures and fighting off the British are both history, and knowing them both is a good way to understand the world as it was and how that plays into where we are now. Surely that’s the point of history.
It might also diminish the legacy of Marie Curie to note that she exposed herself, her husband and her child to lethal doses of radiation. On one hand, killing your child is unforgivable. That’s kind of a moral absolute. On the other, it’s an important part of the story. We don’t need historical figures to be painted as heroes to acknowledge the impact they had. Do we?
Of course, this is a bad analogy because Curie probably couldn’t know what the results of having heaps of radiation would be, and making accessories out of other people feels like it ought always to have been self evidently Not A Good Thing. But I’m too tired to think of a better analogy, and I really probably shouldn’t be talking about something this delicate when I’m too tired to think of a good moral analogy for radium exposure.
Anyway - this is not a manifesto or a conclusion; I’m mainly trying to figure out my thoughts by pinning some of them down in words. I guess I’m trying to put my finger on what’s qualitatively different about moral progress that makes us willing to condemn the bad attitudes of the past by our own standards when we don’t say “Isaac Newton was a fuckwit because he legit tried to turn lead into gold at the same time he was figuring out lenses by poking his own eyeball with a stick. Idiot.”
Comments
Jay Watkins
I would say that the issue lies not with the people now, but with the way we view characters from history. We seek to lionize these characters. As you say, Washingtons slave teeth (and all other things regarding slavery) do diminish his legacy as the perfect american, but only if we are seeking him to be the perfect american. If we look at him holistically, and instead of saying he ‘was’ a great man, and rather say he was a man, ‘with’ some great ideas it become easier to see them as a human, worthy of both respect and also a problematic member of his time. My ancestry is a mix of germanic frontier settlers, escaped slave, and displaced native american, so my relationship with American history is complicated to say the least. My father grew up not being allowed to share the same restroom as white men, but I can’t hate the rest of my family for participating in that system, at the same time I don’t have to absolve them of all guilt. I think history is still largely influenced by the ‘great man’ theory, whether its explicit or not we expect these ‘great men’ to be movie characters, near flawless and either an object of almost pure good, or pure evil. As for things like portrayal of stereotyped characters. I could never blame an actor for being in a film that had problems. Often they are trying to find any work, and if they love in a time where bad roles are the only roles they can get, it is better to be some kind of human representation of people like them. I can though, personally, still lay the blame at the feet of the writers and directors who decided to include that character as their only representation, that I feel is where the guilt lies.
Deniz Bevan
"figure out a way to engage with the morality of the past as part of the progress towards our current values. "Surely it must be possible to understand the wrong morality of the past in a way that also gives credit for where it helped progress." I agree! I had this kind of thought just recently, when reading this article https://www.pressreader.com/canada/montreal-gazette/20200711/282316797333566 (inspiration from beyond, by Kathy Stevenson, a review of a book of travel from 1905). I sent a message to my sister: "I wish she’d spent more time describing the book and less time commenting on how racist some of it was. Obviously they referred to the “natives” of whatever country they were in, that’s how most people wrote back then. We don’t need to be hit over the head with that observation!"
As an American, I would just add that part of the issue is that multiple generations of people have grown up hearing about how, George Washington, for example, was the father of our country, and a famous story about his being unable to tell a lie, etc. After a couple hundred years of setting him up as this great man, it comes as a real shock to the system for a lot of people (mostly white people, but there are a lot of them) to find out that he had some particularly heinous qualities. So part of the struggle is not that there's only a desire to condemn him, but there's a worshipfulness which is confronted by a condemnation, which the worshipful can only read as being a complete and total condemnation without nuance, because it removes him from the status of godhood. Cancellation, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. (Not now— they will say it in the future.) So we have to work out how much telling the truth about someone and wanting to act accordingly is being written off as cancellation or over-reaction or choose-the-phrase-of-the moment- "political correctness" begets "call-out culture" begets "cancel culture", etc.
Judging the past using the standards of the present is fraught with problems. Offence itself is subjective. Shouldn't the absence of malice be at least a mitigator but not necessarily an excuse. We are almost teaching people to be offended by things without necessarily knowing why. Confused? You will be.. in this episode of Alice
Mr. Martini
I have some conservative relatives (as in American conservative) and they truly don’t understand why their beliefs are so hurtful to oppressed people in the US. But their lack of understanding is rooted in a lack of familiarity and practice, it is not due to innate immorality (they are incredibly kind , forgiving and generous to people that they know personally). While I am frustrated and disappointed by them, My frustration feels equivalent to the frustration of playing a sport with a teammate who sucks. That teammate needs a lot more practice (and may not have the natural ability to get very good at the sport) but it feels obviously wring to hate someone for being bad at a sport, especially when I know that they are trying to get better.
Ben Ward
No worries.
I so appreciate you talking this through with us. It's easier perhaps to think of individuals (Nixon bad for Watergate but good for creating the EPA) than broader morals of a particular time. I'm not sure how we do that, but do feel a lot of caution when a person or piece of art gets the cancel culture treatment. It feels like we're closing off parts of ourselves rather than addressing them.
Meagan
Very good thoughts, and I appreciate and understand and sympathize with how hard it is to retro-justify certain actions and behavior. (I’d say it’s an impossible task!) I think all we can do now is learn from history and try to appreciate the context they lived in. Germ theory is a really great example. 150 years ago only the COOL KIDS went into surgery with blood-stained hands, instruments and doctor coats. There was no good way of approaching those “cool kids” and telling them how gross they were and that times would change and leave them in the dust. In the US, the confederate flag was a big thing 150+ years ago. And yes, there was a reason why. But... maybe it should have stopped being a thing after a certain point. Justifying it today as a “huge great wonderful” thing means some of us forgot why it existed in the first place. Call it the blood-stained doctor’s coat of the US. Those who don’t understand why it’s... to quote Alice Fraser... “ugh, gross, ick” have missed out on the times that be a-changing. Ideas evolve, society evolves, norms evolve. We can’t lose sight of why they evolved. Another possibly long-winded agreement. This is a difficult subject, causes hard conversations. And we’ll change from this as well, it would seem, for the better.
Very well said. Triteness aside, "everything is relative". Imagine 100 years from now how all of us will be condemned for doing/not doing whatever thing will be so self-evidently wrong/hurtful to other people by that time. One somewhat-related idea is the relative offensiveness/acceptableness of various words and how their status changes over time thanks to both shifting moralities, overuse, underuse, reappropriation, etc. Perhaps Helen Zaltzman could shed some light on this whilst drinking tea ... :)
Damn it! Brain knows what it wants to say but the words turn into rambling... This is interesting, you are struggling with something which seems plainly obvious to me. We can't view the past based on our lives today. Sure, we can look at things and condemn them if they were happening today but "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." I love Monty Python's Bruces' sketch and Philosophers' Song, watching it recently on Netflix I almost jumped out of my seat when one of the chaps comes in at the end in blackface as an Aboriginal, and that is quite apart from all the Pooftas and such in the sketch. I find myself increasingly sensitive to the racial stuff in old shows, quite sensitive (when I notice it) to implied sexual violence (as happens rather too often in many old songs) and less to the sexual terms like pooftas, or like Bill and Ted embracing then pulling back and going 'Fag!'. But I have no sense of implied malice from the Pythons, they are actually referencing violence against the indigenous people in the sketch so there is awareness being raised - if people noticed it. Over the course of the Flying Circus I think I noticed variations on blackface 5ish times and it was shocking each time to 48 yr old me in 2019/20. Plenty of examples of blatant racism, sexism and such in the past to rage against but I have no energy for it when it was quite normal and done without actual malice back then. I'm well aware of my white hetero male privilege. Perhaps it's greatest bonus for me is that I'm simply not personally sensitive to much. The last ancestors I had who felt endangered by their identity was probably Great (great?) grandparents who fled to England from Russia when the communists took over, Jewish merchants who thought they had too many connections with the old regime for their own safety.
