The white man’s burden
The standard piece of contemporary anti-imperialist rhetoric would not be complete without a glancing reference to the White Man’s Burden, with it’s non-specific allusion to 19th Century-style racist colonialism. This inevitably irritates Kipling fans, who point out that he was _himself_ something of an anti-imperialist, aware of the brutal and brutalising nature of British colonial rule.
> Take up the White Man’s burden–
> The savage wars of peace–
> Fill full the mouth of Famine
> And bid the sickness cease;
> And when your goal is nearest
> The end for others sought,
> Watch sloth and heathen Folly
> Bring all your hopes to nought.
However, it seems to me that, contrary to both simple-minded anti-imperialism and conventional Kipling scholarship, it is precisely in Kipling’s anti-imperialism that he is _closest_ to contemporary imperialism. The curious thing about Kipling’s criticisms of imperialism is that he never draws from them a practical anti-imperialist conclusion. Likewise, isn’t Tony Blair himself an anti-imperialist, in his heart? In all his speeches about Iraq, we see how much guilt and pain he feels for the terrible acts he has to authorise. Yet, this doesn’t lead to him to reject imperialist policies. Indeed, it’s quite the opposite — Blair’s pain is increasingly presented as being a justification _in itself_ for his policies. The form of the argument is, “I feel bad about these short-term consequences; but it will work out for the best in the end.” As the argument is deployed repeatedly, the content of the ‘in the end’ shrinks and shrinks, while the ‘feeling bad’ takes on more and more argumentative weight. This is why, incidentally, it may be a mistake to put too much stress on arguments about Western self-interest in Iraq, because it invites in response demonstrations of the motives and feelings (selfish or selfless) of Western policy-makers, and thereby relieves them of the burden of addressing the _consequences_ of their policy.
This structure reaches its apotheosis in Kipling, where the surpressed premise ‘this will all be good in the end’ whithers away almost to nothing, while the middle term, the criticism of current imperial practice, swells to enormous proportions. But this argument can never lead to an anti-imperialist conclusion. Instead, Kipling argues that colonialism is terrible, unwanted, and almost entirely fruitless: and concludes, _if even something so evil will lead to good in the end_, think how incredibly justified it must be. With such an ideological structure in place, the harshest criticism of imperialism becomes, precisely, it’s justification.
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excellent. i wrote almost the same thing about tocqueville last year, and concluded that it’s intrinsic to liberalism to wring one’s hands about something while failing to do a goddamn thing to resolve it. more interestingly, the paper took shape as more of a critique of poststructuralists (and i debated my advisor repeatedly about this), as the latter demands that we recognize tensions and contradictions, and moreover recognize that they can’t be resolved (i.e. aporia). the problem is that there are indeed ways to resolve a good deal of problems, and i think the practical impact of a theory that embraces contradiction may be more pernicious than the ill it seeks to cure.
Comment by geo @ 12/28/2004 4:16 am