Grozny

The most surprising moment in Oblivion comes when Cruise’s hero, a repairman on a post-apocalyptic Earth, rappels into the dusty hulk of the New York Public Library and grabs a book. It turns out to be the least fashionable volume imaginable: Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1842 collection of patriotic ballads that inspired a generation of Victorians. (The young Winston Churchill’s only success at Harrow was winning a prize for memorizing 1,200 of Macaulay’s lines.)

In Oblivion, Cruise opens the volume to the Republican Roman legend of Horatius at the bridge. He volunteers to defend his home city against invaders with the conservative words:

And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

Yet in Baron Macaulay‘s own lifetime (1800-1859), this poet, statesman, and historian was not considered a conservative. Instead, he was recognized as a prodigy of progressive Victorian virtues, the epitome of British self-confidence in the triumph of their advancement.

But Macaulay’s renown has faded as he came to symbolize the Dead White European Male, attacked both from the right for his “Whig Interpretation of History” and from the left for his role as the most brilliant administrator of the Raj in India.

Conservative historians have denounced Macaulay’s amazingly readable History of England as contrived to portray all of history as merely leading up to the Whigs’ Reform Act of 1832. Still, a list of the great Whigs of the English-speaking world”€”in which Macaulay finds himself in company with John Locke, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, George Washington, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin”€”should give even the truest Tory pause.

To contemporary liberals, however, Macaulay’s impatience with cultural relativism puts him beyond the pale. Convinced of the superiority of English culture”€”“all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England”“€”Macaulay successfully argued that all education in India be carried out in English.

By making English the national language of the Indian elite, Macaulay thereby laid the basis for what prosperity India now enjoys in software and call centers. But the Indians who express appreciation for him today are mainly the Untouchables, who admire his disdain for the Hindu culture that oppresses them. Dalit intellectual Chandra Bhan Prasad remarked in 2006: “Imagine, if we had only followed indigenous study, we would be like Afghanistan or Nepal today.”

Strikingly, Macaulay was not English. He was of Scottish Highlander descent, and his vivid description of his Gaelic-speaking marauder ancestors’ barbarism would sound familiar to the Russian greats writing about the Chechens. Macaulay wrote that before 1745 a visitor among the “Wild Scotch”

…would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats.

Eight years later, Tolstoy similarly wrote of the Chechen-influenced Cossacks:

The Cossack spends most of his time in the cordon, in action, or in hunting and fishing. He hardly ever works at home….A married woman has to work for her husband from youth to very old age….

Yet Macaulay considered anyone who argued for the overall superiority of the Highland Gaelic customs over the Lowland Saxon civilization a Romantic fool.

Similarly, in his notorious Minute on Indian Education, Macaulay noted in passing:

Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia….And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices….

Somehow, I doubt that Macaulay’s pragmatic attitude toward ethnicity”€”that national progress is not encouraged by flattery”€”was ever conveyed to the Tsarnaev Brothers in Cambridge’s culturally delicate taxpayer-supported schools.