A quote from Bazarov, the Nihilist character in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons -- “... should you say that education is useful, you will be uttering a platitude: but should you say that education is harmful, you will be uttering an inverse platitude. The one is identical with the other, except that they differ a little in elegance of expression.”
Rather than “identical” we might say “isomorphic?”
Inverse platitudes are something I think we all have to watch out for. Someone who hates snobbery, for example, may well become an inverse snob – thus continuing to judge people by precisely the same criteria used by snobs. It's better to come up with new criteria altogether.
Same problem if you abandon Eurocentrism merely to adopt Europeripheralism. Once I heard a KALX DJ say on the air that she celebrated Patrick's Day because she was part-Irish and “that's the only culture my white ass is ever going to have.”
Her logic is clear. In the nineteenth century, cultured places were more or less defined as metropolises situated at the heart of empires. To distance herself from this world view, our Irish-American DJ insists on perceiving culture only in those regions that have the most history of political oppression from without. This attitude's weakness is that it perfectly preserves the structure of the original prejudice.
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