The British empire had a long run, though certainly not as long as the Romans', whose "world" lasted for 1400 years and included "invading" or "colonizing" a good part of Britain.
At one point in her reign, Queen Victoria knelt on a little wooden stool, covered with sky-blue velvet, and was named "Empress of India" without, of course, anyone asking the peoples of India (which, then, included Pakistan) what they thought of the arrangement. It has been called by various names, including a noun springing from a word used by Rudyard Kipling, "Jingoism:" forcing one's culture upon another. The Greeks called it "Hellenism" while the Romans, modeling the Greeks, saw it more euphemistically as the pax Romana -- the peace of Rome. That is, although you have been invaded and are under Roman rule, you could continue practicing your own culture unless your culture (and politics) contradict Roman ideals (laws); it was a way of appeasing unrest, but coming under the rule of another usually doesn't grant much peace to the oppressed.
Henry VIII tried this on with the via media, the middle way after separating England's church from Rome's (because the Pope wouldn't grant Henry a divorce). Since the pope would not play the game, Henry said, "OK: I'll take my ball(s) and go home, start my own church -- the Church of England -- and I will be the head of it." Using some of the ideas from those protesting on the Continent (Luther...Calvin), he proceeded to build his Anglican (Anglish/English) church on a balance between Catholicism and Protestantism to appease both sides: that middle way.
And the next generations of Tudors? His daughter, Bloody Mary, burned her father's (Henry's) church leaders in the streets of Oxford for going against the Catholicism she held to. And what about Elizabeth I (Mary's half-sister, who eventually took the throne after Mary's reign)? This Elizabeth changed it all back to Protestantism, and chased down as treasonous those who supported the Catholic cause. This included her cousin, Mary Stewart, who was queen in Scotland and who tried to help the Catholic, Spanish king invade England and turn it Catholic again. Elizabeth delayed executing Mary despite the continuing danger of her machinations...but eventually had no choice: "off with her head." So it was.
At root, "jingoism," "colonizing," empire building, and the requisite "ideological prescription" administered under duress come to mean any arrangement where one person with power forced their views, their ideology, their game on (or is it "into"?) others who would rather claim their own sovereignty but are put in a place where it is nearly impossible to resist -- without being killed. The tendency to "force" exists in the human personality at an individual level. And in its most violent extremes it is rape (literal and metaphorical). In its more peaceful cloaking, it is political expediency and smiling coercion "for your own good" and "you'll learn to appreciate it."
I think we do well to appraise institutional forces and movements at individual levels because the aim to dominate is firmly seated within human nature. Henry wanted a divorce: England adopts a new faith. And Hitler? And McCarthy...? It has always been about personal ideologies if not merely greed. Whether openly and violently forcing another, or surreptitiously cloaking one's true aims of domination with "flowing robes of sanctimony" (to use Clarence Thomas's words -- with some small irony) -- neither is correct. Rather, the humanitarian offers the view, guides the approach, informs the vacancy within an individual's human paradigm...that is all, and it seems to be everything in humane human relations: recognizing an individual's sovereignty over his or her own soul.
It's ironic that forcing one's beliefs on another is something we claim to loathe. Embodied in a regime (tortuous and deadly often as not), we stand against it. Embodied in the individual, the personification is, to me, most loathsome. If I can go back to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway: they are people in the habit of "forcing your soul," which Woolf says "makes life intolerable -- [they] make life intolerable." They say 'must.'"
Bloomsbury, a section of greater London just to the north, stands as an ideal to me because of what is and has been here: the British Museum (the big "BM" with a slight grin at the Bowel Movement implication). The BM is where Marx (was that Groucho or Karl?) and Hegel wrote their communist documents (another ideology asserting itself in painful measures hither and thither in the world), and the BM is where George Bernard Shaw wrote works like Pygmalion, which implicates males and intellectuals as imposing their views upon women -- and doing so merely for their own amusement. More: this part of London more largely is where T. S. Eliot, Lyton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, her husband Leonard, and Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell among others of the "Bloomsbury Group," or "Bloomsberries," spent their days writing, thinking, and painting in large part about and against a society and a people who "force your soul" by imposing their will upon that of others. I do not follow the thinking of the Bloomsberries everywhere, but the ideal to me is this:
Isn't it a gift? Being able to wander London -- mentally wander through books and the minds of those who have been here -- all on our own without undue measures forced upon us to do so, and in whatever direction we seek? Isn't it a gift to inform our own paradigms, experience as we would do, not as someone dictates we should or "must"? This is personal sovereignty and is when life is richest, when it is a gift and a light.
When I was a student in England -- on this very street, Bedford Place -- I was allowed to wander London as I liked, laissez faire. And it allowed me to drink in England -- its ideas and ideals -- and largely opened my eyes a great deal wider. I am different because of those days, days when I was glad to be left alone to wander and learn as the city and its lights came to me.
I could not be happier today than if I should give my students the same opportunities without impediment.
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Neologism of the day: Flogger n. one who follows a blog, expecting daily entries. ;)
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