https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qBmZDF2Ww8Q
The thing is that there is, this is an image that I’ve been bringing up more and more, the nakedness of Noah, trying to kind of talk about that. And there is a sin in colonialism, like there is a sin which was hidden, and it was, we’re invading your land, and we’re going to pretend like we’re doing it to help you. And they’re not the only ones who did it. The Romans did something similar even before Christianity. It was always like a benevolent, we’re going to be benevolent dictators. And so that mask is, kind of came off with colonialism, decolonization, and kind of decolonialist approach and post-colonialism and all that stuff. The post-colonial attitude, although it has its serious problems because of what it leads to, the basic idea of saying, you know, stop pretending like this was just for our good, it wasn’t. There are nefarious things hidden in your agenda. And so as those are exposed, then we do have, we have this like removing of the, exposing the nakedness of Noah, let’s say. Exposing the nakedness of the modern project, how it’s related to colonialism, how it’s related even to the modern slavery in the US was related to weird enlightenment kind of superiority complex thing. And so it’s, the revelation of that is a real one. Now the problem is, how do we deal with it? How do we now heal that exposure without destroying everything? And I’m not, I don’t see the discussion being had. I brought up storytelling before where, when you read the Iliad, for example, there are several ways to read the Iliad. There are ways to read the Iliad in which the Greeks are the heroes or the main characters. And there are ways to read the Iliad in which the Trojans are the heroes and the main characters. And you see the Romans took up the position of the Trojans in the Iliad and saw themselves as the descendants of the Trojans. And so in epic storytelling, there is a manner in which you can have complexity. You can have the notion that the characters are doing evil, they’re doing good, and the other side is also doing evil and doing good. And so there’s a way to tell that story where we can inhabit the different characters. That’s like real, real storytelling. Now the difficulty that we’re dealing with now is right. We see the evil of our fathers. We see the evil of the European fathers. And now we want to destroy everything. But the thing is that those who are doing the destroying also have their own evils that they’re hiding. They also have their own nakedness, which they are hiding as they’re attacking the other. And so it’s always just a question of time before that comes out. I wish there was a way, like one thing I mentioned recently is there could be a way to reinterpret, for example, far west mythology, like the US far west mythology in a way that would have an epic version of that, which would have the capacity to show the evils done by the colonizer and then the evils done by the other side as well to show that the two sides is having heroes and villains. I mean, there could be ways to do that to kind of try to heal these rifts, but I’m not sure that it’s possible anymore. Well, we’re also in the case that every African-American is the descendant of slave owner and slave. Almost every Native American is the descendant, the physical descendant of colonizer and colonized. I mean, we’re very quickly a mixed multitude. Yet the identity element that gets salient is obviously instrumental in the way a particular narrative is promoted and then the demands made by that narrative upon the public. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there are places, you know, the thing is that there are places where the real healing can happen. And I’m seeing them happen. It’s just that they’re not happening. They’re happening in the private sphere. They’re happening in people’s lives. They’re happening as people do the work to kind of integrate those two things. I have a one of a very like one of my best friends when I was a young man and when I was 14, 15, I met him at a camp and we had this amazing connection together. And he’s half black, half white, and he’s the descendants of massive slaveholders, like horrible, horrible slaveholders. And he’s also a descendant of slave at the same time. And I’m watching him like we’re having a lot of discussion. We’re talking, we’re exchanging and I’m watching him try to do the work in himself to reconcile the evils of his own past, like identifying with the slaveholder in him and at the same time, understanding the difficulty of being identified as a black man in America because he looks black in terms of the cultural markers, the kind of simple cultural markers we have. Like if you saw him, you could see that he’s not he’s not a white guy. And so he’s working. I can see him. He’s struggling and he’s working on that in himself. And it’s powerful to watch happen. But it’s it’s something which is happening in the heart of a person. And I mean, I think kind of thing where you say the waves of that will will will unfurl. Like they will there will be waves of that amazing work being done. But I don’t know how fast like I don’t know how fast that needs to happen. You know.