倒 (invert) 行 (do) 逆 (oppose) 施 (bestow)The world spends way too much time and energy, post-9/11, arguing over arbitrary borders, demarcations, partitions, barriers, fences, walls.
Will the day ever come when a presidential candidate could proclaim, "there is not a liberal Earth and a conservative Earth -- there is the United States of Earth. There is not a Black Earth and a White Earth and Latino Earth and Asian Earth -- there's the United States of Earth."
倒行逆施 is normally used in the negative sense - for chastising the reversal of the natural or "proper" flow of things.
With pigheaded idealism and forgetfulness of history, I ask, so, what do you mean by natural and proper?
In the topsy-turvy world of Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's black is good and true, and white is evil and false.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Or vice versa. If there are such things as good and evil.
The "tide of history" is by definition, I suppose, human history. Human history tends to be written around large-scale instances of human beings trying to kill each other. Or at least, to persuade each other with extreme prejudice. This was the history I learned, anyway; perhaps because learned in a country which once built the largest empire the world has seen out of its genius for mingling persuasive ingratiation with ruthless aggression, and for seeing superiority and inferiority in Us and Them, White (pinkish) and Black (brownish), United Kingdom and United States (to pick a random erstwhile opponent for the sake of euphony).
ReplyDelete(What do today's imperialists teach?)
So, I see nothing pigheaded (lipsticked or not) about questioning assertions of the "natural and proper"; they are highly questionable: tailored to suit as tools of power, manipulative, mutable, self-fulfilling. Furthermore, they are imprisoned within the tiny scope of human experience - and King Knut is supposed to have demonstrated the danger of overestimating human tides against more intractable ones.
The King's fellow semi-mythical wave-watcher Stephen Dedalus later pondered losing himself in the "ineluctable modality" of what he was gazing into. A bunch of clever people with their Large Hadron Collider are currently also contemplating, in a sense, the ineluctability (and I suppose the modality) of little things which go in waves (or pulses? it's hard to say) in their circular 27km tunnel beneath an Alpine pasture, and in doing so are stretching their minds back 13.7 billion years. The tide of human history seems, by comparison, a little circumscribed.
The religious would say the "natural and proper", "good and evil" were determined well outside the scope of humanity; but then God is a human invention which humans seem as continually eager to force onto each other as their particular notions of the good and proper. And it's probably sanest not to ponder what God was up to 13.8 billion years ago.