Progress and Prejudice, Sort Of
Progress and Prejudice - GeorgeScialabba.Net
Nietzsche taught us that our loftiest pronouncements on the most abstract, universal subjects are just as idiosyncratic, just as much the product of our individual temperament, metabolism, and earliest influences, as our most peculiar predilections, our most eccentric crotchets. So let me declare a prejudice.
Of my great-grandfather I know only that he was recruited from rural Sicily to work on constructing the Panama Canal, and died there of yellow fever. My grandfather was illiterate and worked as a laborer in a factory of the Hood Rubber Company. A few months before he was eligible to retire with a pension, he was fired for no reason; speaking no English, he had no recourse. My father had a high-school education, but because his childhood was shadowed by the Great Depression, he held on to a safe, undemanding civil service job for fifty years and saved every penny, much of it under his mattress. He lived on the same street throughout his adult life and never travelled outside New England. My mother’s background, opportunities, and outlook were equally restricted, in some ways more so.
In Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot wrote: “The primary channel of culture is the family; no man wholly escapes from the kind, or surpasses the degree, of culture which he has acquired from his early environment.” As far as I know, neither of my parents ever read a novel, saw a play, or heard a concert. Nevertheless, their son has two Ivy League degrees, has written books, and has seen the world, in person and at the movies. I spend hundreds of blissful hours each year listening, on splendid but inexpensive equipment, to splendid but inexpensive recordings of the complete works of Bach and Mozart. Durable, inexpensive paperbacks furnish my rooms and my life. Even across one generation, this seems like progress. When I imagine my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather, sunk in the immemorial poverty, ignorance, and humiliation of the Sicilian peasantry, the conclusion feels irresistible: I, at least, am the lucky beneficiary of two or three centuries of progress. And since the carbon footprint of classical music, great novels, independent film, and most of my other chief pleasures is fairly low, it seems like sustainable, universalizable progress.
Do I embody moral progress as well? That’s a harder case to make, but not impossible. Some astute and astringent judgments have been passed on the traditional morality of southern Italians. In The Golden Bowl, Prince Amerigo implores Fanny Assingham, who has brought him together with his rich but inexperienced fiancée Maggie Verver, to “keep him straight.” She replies…