“The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”, Bertrand Russell
[This essay was published by Bertrand Russell in 1937 in The Nation, 144. It was republished in Russell’s Unpopular Essays (1950). An online transcript of it is also here.]
A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which the admirer does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations, the poor, women, and children. The eighteenth century, while conquering America from the Indians, reducing the peasantry to the condition of pauper laborers, and introducing the cruelties of early industrialism, loved to sentimentalize about the “noble savage” and the “simple annals of the poor.” Virtue, it was said, was not to be found in courts: but court ladies could almost secure it by masquerading as shepherdesses. And as for the male sex:
Happy the man whose wish and care
A lew paternal acres bound.
Nevertheless, for himself Pope preferred London and his villa at Twickenham.
Interesting. The curse of unaddressed philosophical roots. The division between rich and poor and the sentimentality of both toward each other, top to bottom as charity, bottom to top as deference, as well as the City versus the Rural is a manifestation of Judeao Christianity as expressed through the political restructuring of the Protestant Reformation. No matter how we pretend at achieving that elusive Enlightenment, as long as we continue to drag the decaying shroud of such outworn philosphical ideation with us, the scapegoating disguised as social Progress will continue to haunt us.
“The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”, Bertrand Russell
[This essay was published by Bertrand Russell in 1937 in The Nation, 144. It was republished in Russell’s Unpopular Essays (1950). An online transcript of it is also here.]
https://criticathink.wordpress.com/2018/04/11/the-superior-virtue-of-the-oppressed-bertrand-russell/
A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which the admirer does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations, the poor, women, and children. The eighteenth century, while conquering America from the Indians, reducing the peasantry to the condition of pauper laborers, and introducing the cruelties of early industrialism, loved to sentimentalize about the “noble savage” and the “simple annals of the poor.” Virtue, it was said, was not to be found in courts: but court ladies could almost secure it by masquerading as shepherdesses. And as for the male sex:
Happy the man whose wish and care
A lew paternal acres bound.
Nevertheless, for himself Pope preferred London and his villa at Twickenham.
Interesting. The curse of unaddressed philosophical roots. The division between rich and poor and the sentimentality of both toward each other, top to bottom as charity, bottom to top as deference, as well as the City versus the Rural is a manifestation of Judeao Christianity as expressed through the political restructuring of the Protestant Reformation. No matter how we pretend at achieving that elusive Enlightenment, as long as we continue to drag the decaying shroud of such outworn philosphical ideation with us, the scapegoating disguised as social Progress will continue to haunt us.