AliceFraser

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.”