musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

Will this look of thine hurl my soul from heaven?


‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’, wrote Yeats in his magnificent poem The Second Coming. That’s how I feel sometimes, when I think about the things I was taught and came to accept. Came to expect, because what we see is so often laden with expectations. We accept what our culture paints, so we are uncomfortable with the vertiginous view from the cliffs of any paradigm shift: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’

And yet, the centre does indeed hold, and after we become accustomed to the view, the world once again slips into its convenient slot. One of the many mysteries of Age, I think, is that things do change without falling apart, and if we don’t adapt, we are only left with yellowing leaves.

My childhood and early schooling was largely in post-war Winnipeg, a city in the Canadian prairies, and situated close to the geographic center of the continent. I’m not sure that matters, except perhaps that its relative isolation prompted a primary school teacher at the time, to tell us how lucky we were that we were the only place in the world that had no accent when we spoke. Why that made us so fortunate I was never sure, but looking back over the wrinkled pages of my life, it seemed to encapsulate how naïve that era was. I’d hate to call it ‘innocent’ -more like credulous: willing to accept that what society had decided, was normative. That what we were taught was normative; it seemed to make sense. What on earth would goad us into mistrusting the lens which we had, for so many centuries, applied to history? The idea that there is -and has always been- an us and them just seemed to make sense.

Of course, bubbling up under the surface, there is a mistrust of tradition I think. The young especially, are less bonded to the past than their parents, and eager to see and do things differently. But, some features still seem too sacrosanct to question -too embedded in ‘common sense’ even to think of changing. World-views can be like that.

Although I have never been a particularly original thinker, over the years I have begun to question many of the things I considered untouchable in my youth: the barely disguised racial prejudice against our aboriginal population here in Canada, the lip service equality of women contrasted with their unequal treatment in our culture; the changing views about sexual freedom -not to mention sexual (and gender) choice. I began to realize there were a host of things which were swept under our collective rug so we wouldn’t see them.

But some things still escape closer scrutiny for some reason. Perhaps we feared that too much of our culture was likely to change. Or, perhaps we chose merely to look through the glass darkly. Our current conception of race seems to be a glaring example -whatever ‘race’ means. Is it, for example, something based on skin colour, or language? Maybe country of origin? How about physiognomy -or even, simply, other? Them. We can become so entrenched in our own values, that any deviation becomes suspect, and our own view remains the default -the obviously correct and proper one.

Even our understanding of history is tainted with our own current expectations. I can remember being intrigued by my previously unchallenged assumptions about what I had absorbed in university and these prompted me to write an essay a couple of years ago about the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems of Homer.[i] Why did I merely presume Achilles was pale-skinned? It was an unconscious assumption I’m afraid; I am, as well as most of the people I know, entangled in the cobwebs my culture has strung across the years. We tend to accept what we expect, and question whatever we find uncomfortable.

But the more we probe, the more we discover; surprises are inevitable. Not only were some of the ancient Greeks different from what we had imagined, so too were the ancient Romans.[ii] Of course, given the size and extent of their empire, many differences could be anticipated in skin colour, I suppose, and yet given the biases of our times, I would not have expected there to have been the same variations in their leaders. I had to wonder whether I was contaminated by modern day prejudices, or whether their historians had simply not seen fit to record skin tones, and neither defined, nor cared about what we moderns would call ‘race’. Were historical writers guilty of expurgating records, or did we decide to read them as if they were conforming to contemporary expectations?

Surely, though, some evidence must have escaped even the most thorough purging (if that was indeed what occurred): some discrepancy in descriptive translations, some forgotten likeness painted on a wall, or damaged in a disaster and buried along with the rubble.

Perhaps in response to the recent Black Lives Matter movement, evidence is slowly emerging of discrepant views of history.[iii] Still, I’m sure the evidence has been there all along and there is only now a perceived market for its publication as different segments of the population seek fair and long denied recognition. It can be a problem of democracy that, really, only the majority rules, not the entire population -the demos- which has many concerns, all of which cannot be addressed.

There’s more than just the majority skin colour to which we accustom nowadays and expect to see mirrored in our histories. We anticipate -and seem to need- historical accreditation of our present day cultural practices, our contemporary values, and our beliefs about the world. It is often unsettling to discover that other worldviews privilege counterintuitive perspectives; that there existed countervailing viewpoints which were held to be equally valid, and as equally applicable as our own. Of course if they are too much at odds with what we cherish, they are deemed primitive; if they clash too loudly, they are simply repressed. Canada is certainly no exception.

Only very recently has indigenous knowledge here in Canada been, well, tolerated, but seldom in historical interpretations. The ancient Romans, however, seemed almost happy to incorporate different ideas into their pantheon; they seemed to appreciate, and even value those who held them, as long as they helped with the running of their empire.

We have not yet reached that point in our acceptance of what we in Canada call our First Nations, I fear.

[i] https://musingsonwomenshealth.com/2020/04/29/an-achilles-heel/?

[ii] https://theconversation.com/challenging-the-whiteness-of-classics-remembering-the-black-romans-175180?

[iii] Ibid.

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gozzter

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