Focus and Openness

[Guest guest]

Dear George Thompson,

 

The beauty of is that each thread has a life of its own, just like

different rooms in a convention hall. You should simply ignore that

particular thread that is irrelevant to you, but it clearly evokes interest

from many others. You should start threads of your interest, as one does not

preclude the others. Your email system can also be programmed to

automatically filter messages based on a certain identifier in the 'Subject'

line. David Salmon made some suggestions along these lines. Live and let

live.

 

Just to clarify: Eurocentrism is an attitude that many non-Europeans have,

and that many Europeans do not have. To view the world as seen from Europe

is a method of viewing and such a view can also be, and often is,

constructed by people from other origins. As a concrete example: Amitav

Ghosh's latest and highly acclaimed book, 'The Glass Palace', is about how

Eurocentric Indians (a.k.a. Macaulay's Children) did most of the dirty work

under the British to oppress the Burmese.

 

After a couple of logical and perfectly reasonable paragraphs in your email,

I am shocked to suddenly read you say: "It seems to me that you have already

decided that I am a cultural racist, to use the terms of this fellow Blaut

of recent discussion." Since I never made any statement about you, I fail to

see how you reach this conclusion - I don't even know who you are!

 

Perhaps, there are several erroneous conflations going on in your mind:

 

1. Blaut's book that I refer to is a well-acclaimed work on deconstructing

European portrayal of world history, and he is one of dozens in this field

from various disciplines. The paper by Blaut mentioned on the web is not on

the same field of inquiry, and I presume it happens to have been found by

someone doing a name search so they posted it. Therefore 'Blaut = one paper

on race' is a gross error.

2. Your reading into Blaut's (unrelated) paper is also fallacious: he is not

calling you a racist. Perhaps, you self-identify yourself with the

attributes he describes, but then it is your own superimposition and not

his.

3. On top of all these conflations, you then conclude that I call you a

racist. How did you arrive at that?

 

RM