July 11, 2010

Consider this excerpt from an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt (quoted by Sasha Abramsky in his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2010 – Look Ahead in Anger: Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to swamp our politics).

It came across my reading pane as I am wrestling with the issues of funding cutbacks to the not-for-profit arts sector in B.C. and finding alternative and more productive responses……

It brings to mind a quote from William Hazlitt’s 1826 essay “On the Pleasure of Hating“: “The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.” Cultures that self-identify as victims and come to see their defining historical references as a series of grievances have a tendency to mutate in ways that range from unpleasant to catastrophic^*…

*my emphasis – and I love that William Hazlitt was clearly also a visual artist as well as an essayist.