Here! Zadie Smith ^ says in an interview in The Guardian (8/26) something I’m always trying to say—that as a key to understanding attitudes of the past we can look at our own attitudes (biases). How we’ve adjusted to Covid (if we could), for instance, and carry on as normal.
Our “all is normal” bias is a human strength. It can also be a problem. People condemn past generations for tolerating bad things, but don’t we do a similar thing?
Smith on her forthcoming novel The Fraud says she wanted to show how people in Victorian England tolerated or ignored slavery—how they “‘lived on top of a monstrosity.’
She said, “There are urgent contemporary parallels. ‘We live on top of a monstrosity now,’ she exclaims. The environmental crisis is ‘the perfect analogy’ to 19th-century attitudes to slavery. ‘When we say, “How could they ever?”, how can we ever?’ She asks. “Are you going to get on a plane this summer? We do it all the time. How can we ever?’”
I love this question—not to condemn but possibly to liberate ourselves—if we can see our blinders, we can take them off, or at least loosen them to look around more.
