Bride Price

Because my feelies trump your politics, and your politics trump facts, I am always reticent to comment on what Mrs. Kiltz, one of my seventh-grade teachers, called 'current events'. But current events occur in what Yural Noah Harari has called 'the miracle', and we for the most part are blythely unaware or dismissive of living in a miracle, and far too careless about protecting it. Miracles tend to be fragile states that easily collapse into chaos.

The miracle emerged in modern European culture and has continued to nourish not only the lives of those countries but also those that have emerged from European colonialism. The miracle was made possible by scientific progress, but that alone did not guarantee it. (Marshall McLuhan would consider moveable type to be an almost-necessary-and-sufficient factor; oddly Harari mentiins neither Gutenberg nor McLuhan. Perhaps he's another fish who never notices the water in which he swims.) The miracle that is modern European culture invented concepts we take for granted but which are very rare in human history, which are revolutionary.

Take, for example, the extremely counter-intuitive notion for which there is no evidence, but that Jefferson claimed as self-evident: 'all men are . . .  equal.' Today we have knotted knickers and start screaming 'but not women, not black men', all the while losing sight of the fact that without Jefferson's radical water in which we fish swim, there would be no reason to grant equal rights to anyone. Hammurabi, Moses, Henry VIII, Mao Tse Tung, these were the guys with the rights. I'm just a poor boy from a poor family, kept alive to work at the Ruler's pleasure and to die in the Ruler's wars.

A friend posted an anectdote about having been molested when she was seventeen, and ,'somewhere she shouldn't have been', but she told no one because she was 'just a fucked up kid'. (She was a fucked up kid because she was a lesbian in a southern-fucking-baptist family trying to live in the 20th century money-making economy while following the moral code of a tenth-century b.c. desert tribe.) Some one commented that her saying she was 'somewhere she shouldn't have been' illustrated that we live in a rape culture. How did can we get? For the first 1000,000 years of human civilization we have lived, like all other plants and animals, in a rape culture. Bees don't ask flowers if they consent to the rape of their pollen. Be fruitful and multiply is a law nearly as easy to follow as gravity.

But in the miracle that is (has been?) modern European culture, we have a notion of individual freedom and sovereignty. It is because we have agreed to that notion, that shared fiction, that element of the story we tell ourselves, that we can object to violations of the story without people just looking at us like 'what planet do you come from? The world that disagrees with our story -- think Uganda or the Roman Catholic Church--have 100,000 years of human history on their side.

So, I worry when people look at lapses in the culture as representative of the culture. Call someone the enemy long enough and you make it so.

I run the risk of having written far too much to expect anyone to read. But if you are interested, I suggest Harari's Sapiens or McLuhan's The Global Village.

So, I want to end with suggesting that modern European culture with it's capitalism and whiteness and whatever else annoys you, is a bridge under construction. I t leads from the savagery of a real raid-and-rape culture that has prevailed for 100,000 years and the dream in which anyone may safely go anywhere. Below the bridge lies the rocks of another stone age. I hope we don't tear down the bridge because it hasn't reached the destination yet.