{"id":3283,"date":"2010-07-30T21:44:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-31T04:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=3283"},"modified":"2010-07-30T21:44:05","modified_gmt":"2010-07-31T04:44:05","slug":"not-so-novel-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2010\/07\/30\/not-so-novel-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"Not so novel thought"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Page <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Smiley%27s_People\">316<\/a>, &#8220;Alexandra&#8221; (Tatiana) tells Smiley:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>She [Tatiana&#8217;s mother] was not obedient to history. That is to say, she believed that history had taken a wrong course. She was mistaken. The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And that, in a nutshell, is a description of ideology (and ideologues) everywhere: the too-often insane belief that there&#8217;s a system (&#8220;history&#8221; &#8211; or religion &#8230;or whatever) that changes people, when it might actually be the other way around.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Smiley%27s_People\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" style=\"border: 6px solid white\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/4\/4b\/JohnLeCarre_SmileysPeople.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"65\" height=\"102\" \/><\/a>Now, interesting corollary: there&#8217;s an ideology that claims that people are unchanging &#8211; the old saw about &#8220;human nature&#8221; etc.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;You know, as in: &#8220;It&#8217;s in human nature to (a)&#8230; or (b)&#8230; or (c)&#8230;,&#8221; meaning, &#8220;we can&#8217;t really change this\/ do anything about it,&#8221; &#8230;which ends up as an excuse for putting up with crap.<\/p>\n<p>Somewhere in between those two pieces of junk is a dialectic perhaps &#8211; I hope.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Page 316, &#8220;Alexandra&#8221; (Tatiana) tells Smiley: She [Tatiana&#8217;s mother] was not obedient to history. That is to say, she believed that history had taken a wrong course. She was mistaken. The people should not attempt to change history. It is the task of history to change the people. And that, in a nutshell, is a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1242],"tags":[20121],"class_list":["post-3283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-just_so","tag-ideology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3283"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3289,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions\/3289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}