Post-Colonial Thought Crimes

 

Readers of these pages will be aware that, among many unpopular and downright obscure views, a certain hostility to post-colonial orthodoxy is often on display here. The author himself is a colonial and has traveled widely through the remnants of the British Empire in Asia. Alarmingly, he isn’t riddled with post-colonial guilt; rather he holds errant opinions on colonialism, imperialism and the entire edifice of the post-colonial world order. In view of recent social unrest, in this post we will document some of his thought crimes…

 

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While that broad intellectual construction known as ‘post-colonialism’ purports to see the hidden ‘power structures’ of the colonial period – it’s a construction of intellectual tools with no other purpose – its lack of self insight is frightening. The orthodoxy of the post-colonial intellectual posture is so pervasive, so comprehensively the zeitgeist, that almost nothing stands outside it. Like all unchallenged viewpoints, it quickly becomes totalitarian. All ages are blind to their own prejudices, but there are degrees of delusion. The edifice of ‘post-colonialism’ is dangerously self-enclosed. 

 

In fact, the post-colonial period has been disasterous. The Age of Empires gave way to an age of proxy-wars where empires pretended not to be empires and a world order was patched together from over one hundred and fifty miserable little nation states, most of them complete confections, two thirds of them failures, all of them necessarily propped up by rambling international institutions running a welfare system for incorrigibly corrupt regimes. In these new nations the fervour of ‘independence’ masks the reality: once the Empires left, corruption, if not chaos, set in and life became much, much tougher.

 

Conversely, in fact, the colonial period was one of unsurpassed economic, technological and cultural ferment, with the British Empire in particular an agent for this. The post-colonial Marxist narrative of pillage and rape is radically untrue. It is as untrue as supposing that the Roman Empire engrandized Rome at the expense of the rest of Europe. That would be a seriously one-sided and inaccurate account of the Pax Romana, and it is an equally one-sided and inaccurate account of colonial history from the seventeenth century to the mid twentieth.

 

Empires are the norm in history. They are, after all, essentially free trade zones. They facilitate free trade and the hybrid vigor of cross-civilizational exchange. They put an end to the local squabbles and petty tribalism that keeps men’s knuckles dragging in the dust.  Marxists seem to think that everyone conducted their Empires like the Mongols: murder and mayhem. Actually, empires created the space and conditions for every high-point in human civilization, every high culture, the greatest art and architecture, engineering, science. Cross-cultural and cross-civilizational interchange on a historical scale is a good thing. Both the appropriations and the impositions of empire can be good. It is good that Indians drink tea and it is good that Englishmen do yoga. The alternative to the intimacy of empire, as we have discovered, is an arid globalism.

 

Moreover, by any fair assessment of world history from the year dot to the present – casting an eye over all the empires that has come and gone – we must declare the British Empire the greatest and also the most benevolent of all. Yes, the Belgians were monsters in the Congo, and the Dutch were bastards generally, but the British Empire, all things considered, was a boon and a blessing. In broad historical terms the British found themselves charged with the task of bringing large swathes of the Earth to the inescapable reality of industrial modernity. The British took this responsibility seriously and in the end the Empire was more about that than about supplying the cotton mills in Manchester. This process ended abruptly following the World Wars, often with terrible consequences (such as the partition of India) which would have been much better avoided. Indeed, rather than the Empire lasting too long, it is tragic that it did not last a few more generations in some form. It takes generations to build solid and deeply-rooted institutions and to establish a whole new mode of outlook such as modernity demands. What we now witness across the post-colonial landscape, with few exceptions, is the spectacle of failed modernities, the worst of both worlds.

 

With few exceptions, neo-nation states are artificial abominations held together by anthems, flag-waving and the patriotism of scoundrels. It has not been a succesful unit of political organisation. On the other hand, the expanse of empire, in the best cases, allows the creation of de facto city-states that flourish under an umbrella of peace and free trade. It is certainly arguable, on the historical evidence, that this is a better way to do things than a gaggle of competing and half-baked nations fueled by a concocted nationalism and insular delusions of glory.

 

We are blind to the wider consequences of the fragmentation of the post-colonial world into petty nation states – corrupt and ill-prepared petty nation states hobbling into modernity. This, more than anything, has been responsible for modern environmental degradation on a global scale. Wherever you care to look, wholesale environmental degradation really began apace after imperial rule ended. It is poorly governed so-called Third World nations that have trashed the planet. This reality is plain to see. Everywhere, all vestiges of rational and corruption-free urban planning went out the window and once beautiful and orderly colonial cities descended into swarming, polluted cesspools, sometimes within the matter of a decade. This is an observable fact. In fact, it is utterly glaring! And fifty, sixty, seventy or more years later these nation states, founded on liberationist victimhood, are still blaming colonialism for all their woes.

 

Few things are as pernicious or as self-defeating as the post-colonial doctrine that proposes that the abject failure of so many petty nation states is due to the secret machinations of former colonial bad guys. This is the most pervasive conspiracy theory in the world today. It provides cover for the endless parade of tyrants and incompetents who have sauntered across the post-colonial stage. It spurns a toxic intellectual culture and a literature of resentment. It is a tragic fact that, throughout the post-colonial period, the best minds of many nations have wallowed in victimhood and conspiracy rather than advancing a noble culture.

 

Nothing is as ugly as post-colonial Western art, though. If the colonialized world is a mess, the post-colonial West is intellectually and spiritually gutted and has been left socially incoherent. Again, this is largely because the colonial project was interrupted abruptly and its processes of assimilation and exchange went unfinished. It became unsustainable – not just the ability to maintain administrations in distant lands, but more importantly an entire movement in the Western soul suddenly came to an end. We give too little attention to the deep trauma of this. The collapse of the orientalist project is conspicuous, for instance. 

 

The orientalist project was not a devious and systematic misrepresentation of eastern (especially Mohametan) societies in the service of imperial exploitation. It was, au contraire, the greatest intellectual outreach ever undertaken by any civilization in human history. The European orientalists – no doubt constrained by certain limitations inherent in their worldview – overcame a thousand years of prejudice and intractable religious hostility in an attempt to obtain a sympathetic understanding of a rival civilization. The orientalist’s extraordinary sympathy for their subject is on display in every orientalist travel memoir or painting. Edward Said’s distorted and highly dishonest account of the orientalist project has been, without question, one of the most noxious and destructive books of the post-war period. 

 

This should be enough to demonstrate to the reader just how thoroughly out of phase the author is. On a personal note – as some of these pages demonstrate – he set out more or less subscribing to a standard and genteel version of the above-mentioned post-colonial orthodoxy. His views changed over thirty years of study, extensive travel and periods living in former colonial cities.