When history isn’t: why are we rewriting our past incorrectly?

Noble savagism is creating dangerous holes in western academia and conversion

All people are capable of being violent, cruel, despotic, selfish, and unkind. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Saxon settler in 510, or a Zulu herdsman in 1870: there is no culture or community on earth that cannot be discussed in terms of contemporary sexism, ableism, racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia, or violence. Humans are abstract in their morality: very few things can be considered universally and homogeneously wrong or right. Their capacity to enact wrongdoing, or indeed, acts of great kindness, is almost entirely down to the size and technologies within that tribe or community. None of this is a surprise to you, I hope. So why are we becoming so bad with objective analysis?

When we talk about racism in the west, we are still mostly guilty of discussing it as a personality flaw. A trait of the bad person, the bad apple, the villain. That’s deeply problematic. Racism is institutional, cultural, structural and personal. It does not exist because one person is ignorant, or one person is cruel. To become racist, and to embody racist behaviours, you have to participate and involve yourself with racist philosophies, ideas, and world views. No one signed up to be an Auschwitz…