Progress in an Egg
February 26, 2005
Reading Walter Bagehot’s Physics and Politics (1872), I came across the most remarkable dispatch circa 1870 from a British officer serving in India answering queries from the British government as to whether the Indians approved of the British presence and activities. This officer’s perception is worth hearing in full, for it remains pertinent to our own overseas advertures:
No doubt you are giving the Indians many great benefits: you give them continued peace, free trade, the right to live as they like, subject to the laws; in these points and others they are far better off that they ever were; but still they cannot make you out. What puzzles them is your constant disposition to change, or as you call it, improvement. Their own life in every detail being regulated by ancient usage, they cannot comprehend a policy which is always bringing something new–they do not a bit believe that the desire to make them comfortable and happy is the root of it; they believe, on the contrary, that you are aiming at something which they do not understand, that you mean to take away their religion; in a word, that the end and object of all these continual changes is to make Indians not what they are and what they like to be, but something new and different from what they are, and what they would not like to be.I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’s retort (put in the mouth of one of his fictional characters) to an indignant bureaucrat who spluttered, “But have you never heard of progress?”: “Yes, I’ve seen it in an egg. I call it ‘going bad.’”
This is Progress in an Egg in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: On The Simpsons and Simpletons | Next: Allow Me to Retort | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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