It took me some time to recognise the wheel discussion as a subset of colonial racism: we define 'civilisation' as 'what we do' and no-one else lives up to it, so they must be inferior. See also writing and agriculture. (I think my moment of fury came when, after being brought up on a diet of 'these stupid primitives, trading valuable pelts for <snigger> glass beads' I saw what intricate beautiful art people made with 'worthless glass beads' and grokked that if you can go out and hunt another pelt any day, it's not valuable, and that a novel means to make art is priceless in comparison. But that's not how we transmit the knowledge, and *that*, rather than going a different technological path, is the real problem here.)
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Date: 2021-08-05 08:37 am (UTC)Heh.
It took me some time to recognise the wheel discussion as a subset of colonial racism: we define 'civilisation' as 'what we do' and no-one else lives up to it, so they must be inferior. See also writing and agriculture.
(I think my moment of fury came when, after being brought up on a diet of 'these stupid primitives, trading valuable pelts for <snigger> glass beads' I saw what intricate beautiful art people made with 'worthless glass beads' and grokked that if you can go out and hunt another pelt any day, it's not valuable, and that a novel means to make art is priceless in comparison. But that's not how we transmit the knowledge, and *that*, rather than going a different technological path, is the real problem here.)