Help remembering an old quote about China

November 6, 2010 10:26 PM

While reading about how people tend to care less about deaths that do not directly impact them, I came across a quote that I'm hoping someone here would recognize. I can only remember the basic idea of the quote. It is presented to a European audience, I think sometimes in the last century or two, but not in our recent era, as follows: If all of China were swallowed up whole, Europeans would go on with life without much change. This is all I can remember.
posted by mulligan to Religion & Philosophy (6 answers total)

Although it's certainly not what you're thinking of, Milan Kundera addresses a similar theme in the beginnings of The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

"Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing. We need take no more note of it than a war between two African kingdoms in the fourteenth century, a war that altered nothing in the destiny off the world, even if a hundred thousand blacks perished in excruciating torment."

I've always been deeply affected my this passage, and I hope it's useful to you.
posted by charmcityblues at 11:34 PM on November 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also on the same subject, Annie Dillard's astonishing essay "The Wreck of Time", may be of interest. It's available online, as a Word document, here.
posted by hydatius at 1:41 AM on November 7, 2010 [1 favorite]

Far less highbrow, and very recent, but you should also google monkeysphere.
posted by Iteki at 3:37 AM on November 7, 2010

Response by poster: Thank!

http://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2008/12/adam-smith-on-earthquakes-and-man-of.html


And here is the quote with context and helpful commentary
posted by mulligan at 5:30 AM on November 7, 2010

Further reading: Judith Butler - Precarious Life

In part of it, Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives.
posted by knapah at 5:31 AM on November 7, 2010

I was also coming in here to mention the Monkeysphere!
posted by peagood at 6:09 AM on November 7, 2010