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XVI. Moral Swindlers.
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One hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person,
"It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "what a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." The poor part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude."
No, one hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person,
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One hadn't thought of George Eliot being a colonial racist, ignorant person, much less siding with a butcher like Macaulay, who she mentions with casual respect.
Interesting, though, that she begins an essay on moral swindlers by invoking name of Macaulay, even if it's in a twisted way. But who could fit the title better!
"Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls."
Wasn't England's own history replete with males, including kings, of dubious morals in this regard, or why was mention of India necessary in this reference? Wasn't Henry the VIIth bad enough?
As for Macaulay, he set up the policy to destroy India by lying about everything good about India, badmouthing India fraudulently, until her spirit and her spine was broken, so as to enslave people of India and loot wealth of India without any obstruction.
Was George Eliot in accord with all this policy of butchering, looting, enslaving???
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"The informal definitions of popular language are the only medium through which theory really affects the mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whose business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in an unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every calculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for the use of high ethical and theological disputation."
Doesn't that describe Brit ish in India, looting and enslaving Indians causing famines by stealing harvests and ignoring deaths of millions that resulted thereby, massacring unarmed civilians by using tanks and machine guns, and calling themselves civilised?
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" ... To rob words of half their meaning, while they retain their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have lost half their faculties the same high and perilous command which they won in their time of vigour; or like selling food and seeds after fraudulently abstracting their best virtues: in each case what ought to be beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than morality to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let us refuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by using large machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet of unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let us rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithful of husbands, and contend that his own experience of home happiness makes his reckless infliction of suffering on others all the more atrocious. ... "
Agreed - and considering how British looted, chiefly India, and then created a terrorist factory (because they wanted a free use of military bases for west for use against USSR), causing deaths of thousands- in India, in U.S. chiefly in 2001, and everywhere since - what does that say about England, about British, about anyone of British ancestry?
Thieves, killers, thugs, frauds, ...??? All of that, and worse?
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" ... meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams."
" ... And though we were to find among that class of journalists who live by recklessly reporting injurious rumours, insinuating the blackest motives in opponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility on dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feeling between nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real conviction as the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effects did not make it appear diabolical—though we were to find among these a man who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of private differences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce him nevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the commonwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of social and political disease."
And guess who fit right in? BBC, NYT, ... all those lying against India, against Hindus, against Hinduism, ... All those who refused to admit, much less mention, that pakis were supporting terrorists, despite being advertised as 'partners in war on terror', which they emphatically never were, never had been, never have intentions of being; all those who knew that pakis defrauded U.S. of hundreds of billions that were supposedly aid, but poor of pal remained poor, forced to send their sons to terrorist factory schools, just to feed them (and then provide their daughters to terrorists as and when demanded!); And, too, all those who knew that Daniel Pearl wasn't killed without knowledge of authorities, and the trucks filled with U.S. ammunition were changed into potatoes because the ammunition was handed over to terrorists who used it to kill U.S. forces and other personnel. Was it worth lying against India, destroying India, raising this demon that turned and bit? Hid terrorists and denied it, and denied it even now, despite marines having killed him in Abbottabad, equivalent of paki West Point?
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" ... meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams."
Open market nothing! As long as markets were even slightly fair, England used India muslin, better than any; when English factory manufactured cheap cloth coukdnt be forced on India, British chopped off Indian weavers' hands, to force a shutdown of Indian cloth industry.
""I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality and Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional fashions in speech and writing—certain old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether they have a human face or not is of little consequence. ... "
Yes, definitely racist, apart from ignorant and lying, blind and more. Venetian drapery? Best fabric was Indian! "
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" ... One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard; but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of his excellent morals."
" ... One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard; but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of his excellent morals."
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September 20, 2021 - September 20, 2021.
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