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Eloi, with a liberal twist
I have often compared modern, liberal people, in their embrace and approval of the unassimilable Other, to the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, who allow themselves to be killed and eaten by the beastly Morlocks. But there is a crucial difference. Well’s Eloi are simply passive creatures, lacking the intelligence, will, and strength to defend themselves; they are basically sheep in human form. But our contemporary Eloi—the operating majority of the Western world—do not, like Wells’s Eloi, merely allow themselves mindlessly to be killed. In order to accommodate themselves to the process of their own destruction, they must add a dollop of liberal rationalization to it. So, when they are attacked and killed by the Morlocks, they say things like, “We must understand the Morlocks,” or, “We must fix the root causes of what makes Morlocks behave this way,” or, “We have oppressed the Morlocks in the past and have no right to judge them,” or, “The overwhelming majority of Morlocks are moderate and peaceful,” or, “To exclude the Morlocks as a group would be racist,” or, “We must try harder—much harder, using all the resources of our society, to assimilate the Morlocks.”
Between Wells’s sheeplike Eloi and our own, liberal brand, who are more despicable? Email entry |