How Benedict Anderson imagined community (his philosophy)
- He is briefly mentioned when he is talking
What’s wrong with an essay which is titled “On the historical unity of Russia and Ukraine?”
- The statement itself is contradictory because when you he’s saying unity but also recognizing Ukraine’s sovereignty
- The title plays a trick. When you say on, the trick is that when you say on, that thing might exist
- If I write a book which says “On quick chess strategies to defeat Garry Kasparov” then it’s like, that thing must exist, right, even though it doesn’t exist, right?
- The kind of implicit assertion of existence is a non historical language, it’s the language of the legend, the language of the myth
- It perpetuates forever, something eternal
What is history about?
- War and Peace
- People
- It’s people who can write stuff down. And that’s actually where you draw the line between history, archeology or anthropology ⇒
- Change in continuity
⇒ In the history of Eastern Europe or Europe in general is that with baptism and Christianity comes written language and with written language comes the ability to make different kinds of interpretations where historians are comfortable.
Historical unity is a non-historical concept.
- Historical in this concept means forever, forever unity. However normally it means a change in the continuum, something was going on and it became historical, it changed
..but someone might think history is about old dusty books. But here’s the thing, even if you read all the old dusty books that you wanted about the year 1439 and you became the world’s leading expert on 1439, you still would not know what happened in 1440, right? That’s the level you wouldn’t have, and that’s the level of unpredictability of history, and it comes up to the present. You can read all, I mean you could know everything you could possibly humanly know about 2021, but you wouldn’t know what’s gonna happen in 2022. You just wouldn’t. It’s only afterwards that it all seems like it had to happen, right? “Of course Russia’s not gonna invade Ukraine.” After February 24th. “Oh, of course Russia was gonna invade Ukraine.” That’s how our minds work and history is there to remind us that actually we’re wrong pretty much all the time, that things are not actually predictable, right? That what people expect to happen is generally what doesn’t happen, and that novelty is an authentic thing, that there are new things which come about all the time.
History is not a repetition
- If history literally repeated itself, then there would be no human agency. It’s akin to saying things never change
If I talk about Golden Age, I am getting rid of all diversity, stripping of its interesting stuff
- Most of them are structually same, they’re good and something evil comes. No matter the situation they’re always the good guy
When you’re trying the pretend things are static, you’re excluding all the diversity, all of the innovation and all the things that come outside. In this class that’s what we’re aiming to do. GoddamnRealization
34:05 George Orwell quote
The hardest thing to notice is what’s right infront of your nose
- The things which are most intensely obvious are very often the things that are hardest to take on
Heart Of Darkness
- The race for Africa