Europeans, Africans, Tones, Power

The “strangers” in the European enlightenment, the Persians, Chinese and African kings – they are not only there to be strangers. They are there to show how strange the Europeans – or the European elites - really are. Voltaire expanded the stranger base to aliens from other planets. Rousseau took up the Hurons of Baron Lahontan's dialogues.

The estrangement effect of the stranger helps the philosophe to understand the power arrangements embedded in everyday life.

I found a wonderful quotation from an African king in William Hazlitt's great essay, Reason and Imagination, that I think takes that awareness a great step beyond.

Since we have witnessed the unexpected rise of an old nineteenth century utilitarianism in our day, Hazlitt's struggle with utilitarianism has assumed an unexpected pertinence. Reason and Imagination is one of a number of Hazlitt's pieces - including the portrait of Bentham in Spirit of the Age - that seeks to undermine the hold of Benthamite utilitarianism on the English radical imagination. Hazlitt, as his commentators like to point out, took up Adam Smith’s sympathy based morality as the basis for his own theory of moral sense. But he also took up another eighteenth century theme – one that actually starts with Voltaire – which is the theme of unexpected consequences. He wields this theme as his weapon to attack utilitarianism as a tone, as a sort of common sense ideology – always so appealing to the British.

Hazlitt was well aware that a tone is a power position. Our sounds are territorial. As Hazlitt noted in another essay, On Egotism, the man who comes into a room and announces that he ‘hates’ poetry puts the person who doesn’t at a momentary disadvantage. The statement of dislike seems to be a considered and superior judgment. Hazlitt makes a very clever analysis of this, one that is taken up (although not, I should say, under the direct influence of Hazlitt) by many writers during the 19th and early 20th century, from Herzen to Proust. They felt, in these common conversational habits, the presence of a greater beast – a specter that haunted Europe:

“A man comes into a room, and on his first entering, declares without preface or ceremony his contempt for poetry. Are we therefore to conclude him a greater genius than Homer? No: but by this cavalier opinion he assumes a certain natural ascendancy over those who admire poetry. To look down ujpon anything seemingly implies a greater elevation and enlargement of view than to look up to it. The present Lord Chancellor took upon him to declare in open court that he would not go across the street to hear Madame Catalini sing. What did this prove? His want of an ear for music, not his capacity for anything higher. So far as it went, it only showed him to be inferior to thousands of persons who go with eager expectation to hear her, and come away with astonishment and rapture. A man migh as well tell you he is deaf, and expect you to look at him with more respect. The want of any external sense or organ is an acknowledged defect and infirmity: the want of an internal sense or faculty is equally so, though our self-love contrives to give a different turn to it. We mortify others by throwing cold water on that in which they have an advantage over us, or stagger their opinion of an excellence which is not of self-evident or absolute utility…”
While the utilitarians can manipulate social attitudes, they can’t account for them under their theory. Attitudes atomize into millions of hedonic calculations. Which – to get back to Hazlitt’s Reason and Imagination essay – has a macro effect beyond the individual calculus to the mimetic heart of human social relations. Hazlitt uses an example from the slave trade – which is certainly not just an example. Hazlitt mentions the throwing overboard of African slaves like so much lumber that was reported on a ship in 1775, and writes that it is an instance where the instance flashes a light on the whole: “A state of things, where a single instance of the kind can possibly happen withwithout exciting general consternation, ought not to exist for half an hour. The parent, hydra-headed injustice ought to be crushed at once with all its viper brood.” And he joins this story to an account from an African explorer:
“The name of a person having been mentioned in the presence of Maimbanna (a young African chiefain), who was understood by him to have publicaly asserted something very degrading to the general character of Africans, he borke out into violent and vindictive language. He was immediately reminded of the Christian duty of forgiving his enemies; upon which he answerednearly in the following words: - ‘ If a man should rob me of my money, I can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me, or try to stab me, I can forgive him; if a man should sell me and all my family to a slave-ship, so that we should pass all the rst of our days in slavery in the West Indies, I can forgive him; but’ (added he, rising from his seat with much emotion) ‘if a man takes away the character of the people of my country, I never can forgive him.’ Being asked why he would not extend his forgiveness to those who took away the character of the people of his country, he answered: “If a man should try to kill me, or should sell me or my family for slaves, he would do an injury to as many as he might kill or sell; but if anyone takes away the character of Black people, that man injures Black people all over the world; and when he has once taken away their character, there is nothing which he may not do to Black people ever afgter. That man, for instance, will beat Black men, and say, Oh, it is only a Black man, why should not I beat him? That man will make slaves of Black people; forwhen he has taken away their character, he will say, Oh, they are only Black people, why should not I make them slaves? That man will take away all the peole of Africa if he can catch them; and if you ask him, But why do you take away all these people? he will say, Oh, they are only Black people – they are not like White people – why should I not take them? That is the reason why I cannot forgive the man who takes away the character of the people of my country.”
We are still living with this anecdote, the long slander of racism, and the long reply of Maimbanna. In a world built on the bones of slaves, we – me, you - would do well to listen to this history.