Just dealing with Kipling, rather than the interpersonal stuff...
Salmoneus wrote:It's worth noting that what it's fashionable to call "racism" in Kipling is exactly the same as what is called "liberalism" and "progressivism" in foreign policy today. Western do-gooders still preach the White Man's Burden
It's fine to put a problematic writer into historical context— but you have to actually do it. Kipling was not liberal and progressive for his time; he was a conservative, s gung-ho nationalist and imperialist, and progressives of his day despised him.
George Orwell's 1942 essay on Kipling recognizes both his virtues and his faults:
Orwell wrote:Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like.
I actually agree that Kipling was not a racist, in the sense of despising people for their inherent nature— this is clear from
Kim where he is explicitly scornful of Westerners who disdain Indians or Indian civilization.
But he was an imperialist, and it's not very useful to confuse imperialism with attempts to end injustice worldwide. He believed in
British rule over as much of the globe as possible. This too comes up in
Kim, most explicitly in the section where the revolution of 1857 is described as "madness", more subtly in the careful construction of the plot and situation such that Indians simply
never come into conflict with British rule, and cheerfully work to support it.
Read some of his comments about Ireland quoted in
his Wikipedia article to get a taste of his anti-Irish, anti-Catholic sentiments.
Of course, to live with himself, Kipling had to believe that imperial rule was benign and that self-rule (whether by Irish or Indians) would be savage and backward. This doesn't mean he was a secret liberal; it means that imperialists deluded themselves about the moral nature of their practices.
(And about their practical efficiency. As Orwell points out, the British colonialists were very good about building railways. Somehow they convinced themselves that Indians were not able to build railways themselves... though the Japanese managed it just fine. Of course, the apologists didn't talk much about the fact that the locomotives weren't even built in India, but imported from the UK...)
