Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Decolonilation I 33
Non-Western, Oriental, or so-called primitive cultures,
including the Celtic, were portrayed as the polar opposite
of the modern, occupying the space of the spiritual, the
not-yet-disenchanted, the unilluminated-whether that
was seen as a sign of danger and backwardness (as for the
Utilitarian reformers, who tried to make India over with
railroads and Shakespeare in the 1820s-30s) or salvation
for the world (as for the theosophists, who took dictation
from Buddhist "hidden masters" and added their force to
the Indian nationalist movement in the 19005-191 Os).
Whether the Enlightenment logic was evaluated as good
or bad, or a little of each, depended on how you felt about
mechanization, rationalization, and so forth, or whether you
lived in England, Ireland, India, or the Ottoman Empire.
It bears mentioning that the words progressive and reactionary-in
their most literal sense-entail relative direction,
not necessarily political content or ideological value.
One means to go forward in the direction of change, and
the other means to generate friction, stoppage, or reversal.
But what is the particular change we're talking about, and
what was the status quo? It seems more pertinent to ask
what a specific vision of utopia looks like-what its content
is-than which direction we need to move in to reach it
from where we are now-whether we envision it as having
existed in a prelapsarian past or as the destination of future
redemption. The legacy of utopian thought contains both
kinds of narrative.
Neither an across-the-board improvement nor unmitigated
ruin, modernization was rather a radically destabilizing
rearrangement in the status quo, which benefited