Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Manifest Destiny: Post-Class Response
I agree with Tim today’s class was a very useful approach to this book, but I don’t know how it would work with other novels. I did like that we were able to list all our points on the projector screen and that way we were able to tie them together and refer to them again better. Post class my feelings towards the book and its ideas are the same, but they are now more organized and the class let me organize them better. There is still something about the concept that every empire creates a sense of uniqueness and a special role in the world for itself, usually for some reason at the expense of others; and justifies this by giving itself a special high role and placement in the hierarchy of the world. Humanity does seem to be of parasitical nature and either needs to live at the expense of others or its environment.
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3 comments:
I completely agree. Everyone talks like this and probably thinks it too. But can we think differently? Part of the thing in the 90s, at least back home, was that America was a better place to live in than anywhere else based on all of our freedoms. Yet, all of my friends seemed to want to leave and go to Europe. Then all of sudden, we get 2001 and America's popular again. Why? Just because of a tragedy? A little weird, yes? But it happened and we're on a new patriotic/jingoistic swing. Yes, every empire says they're the best, but isn't part of saying so a defense mechanism? Wouldn't they have problems if they didn't say they were the best? Just a thought...
Could there even be an empire that didn't make such a claim?
I would argue that the Dutch "Empire" comes close to fitting that bill. Due to the fact that it was in fact one country with a series of colonies (ie trading posts), it has all the familiar symptoms of being an empire. Due to that same fact that they were trading posts and not colonies per se (at least at first), led to the Dutch expanding for purely trade-related reasons, rather than the idea that their empire was liberating the savages (as was so common for the Americans and other European Great Powers). This later changed, due to a surge of nationalism in the Dutch was against Spain, but for the first century or so their level of "we're clearly the best" was far lower than other imperialist nations. Their corporate gains overpowered their sense of purpose/rightness for some time, but that eventually changed to match the other nations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_empire
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