Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

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Irishness and Jewishness

Published by peter on 2013-02-21 in Anthropology, Culture and Music. 0 Comments

A friend’s thoughtful meditation on the different natures of Irishness and Jewishness:

First, to be absolutely clear about this, I’m not Irish. None of my parents, grandparents, or remote ancestors are from Ireland. I’ve only ever been to Ireland once, on a work trip which involved an ecumenical service to dedicate a new halal abattoir, but that’s another story.

Four years ago I decided to learn to play music, and hit on the tin whistle as my instrument of choice. It was cheap, portable, and hard to break or ruin. One thing led to another, and I found myself at traditional Irish music classes run by an organisation called Meitheal Cheoil at the Camden Irish Centre — the only place I could find where it was possible to actually have tin whistle lessons.

Within a few weeks I was beginning to pick out some traditional songs on my whistle. We learned by ear, not by reading music. This suited my musical abilities, but presented another problem; the rest of the group all knew the songs, and I didn’t.

I hadn’t really thought about this previously. I just wanted to learn an instrument, and was really taking a free ride on the Irish part. But for Methail Cheoil, the passing on and preservation of a part of Irish culture, as a live tradition rather than as a museum piece, was an essential part of the activity.

So I bought CDs, and listened to them as often as I could. There was no point in buying innovative cross-over reworking of the traditional tunes; I needed the raw stuff, so that I could get the songs into my head. To get the simplest renditions, I had to immerse myself in Hiberno-schlock, a twilight world of albums with names like ‘Twenty Irish Songs to Warm Your Heart’ and ‘Irish Party Singalong Tunes’. You’d probably recognise the Jewish equivalent if you saw it, and probably run a mile.

Of course, I did ironically, so that was OK. And there was something rather liberating about taking a dunk in someone else’s culture, and not having to worry about whether it was really politically acceptable to enjoy maudlin nationalist sentimentality. Some of the Irish members of the class worried about it rather more.

In any case, it must have worked, because by Christmas I was playing in the beginner’s band at the Irish Centre Ceilidh. And that’s where I had my revelation; anyone could be Irish if they wanted to.

Even in the whistle class, no one had seemed to find it particularly strange that I as a non-Irish person was participating in their thing. But there it wasn’t terribly clear who was and wasn’t Irish. Some of the students were first-generation immigrants — some old people reconnecting with the traditional music they’d grown up with, and some Irish yuppies for whom it was a class that they might have taken back home — but most were second or even third generation ‘assimilated’ Irish, on a roots thing. They didn’t sound or look that different from me, a third-generation descendant of Jewish immigrants.

But the Ceilidh, which included people from the other music classes and from the broader Irish community, was a whole new experience. Irishness, at least in its North London manifestation, was clearly a much more inclusive category than I had been prepared for.  There were quite a few Black Irish people, and one or two Chinese ones.  There were a couple of others with what looked to me like Jewish faces, though they might equally have been Greek.

I don’t know how everyone in the room felt about this; but I do know that there was no outward sign that anybody had any feelings about it at all. Then and subsequently, I have never come across any handwringing about who the traditional music activities ought to be for, let alone ‘who is an Irish person?’ The activity was Irish in content, and that was enough.  Other, non-Irish people’s participation did not detract from its Irishness or threaten its existence or value.

In our community, interest by others in our culture is rarely taken at face value.  Although discussions about Jewish culture are often shot through with barely-veiled assumptions about cultural superiority, we are usually suspicious about anyone else wanting to partake.  Perhaps it’s because we are afraid that it won’t stand up to much scrutiny from anyone without a sentimental attachment to it; or maybe we are worried that they are only showing an interest so that they can insinuate themselves into our superior institutions. Why else would non-Jews be trying to sneak into our schools?

Either way, there is an all-pervasive obsession with maintaining and policing a boundary, with determining who is and isn’t entitled to come in.  Look at the selection processes associated with admission to Jewish schools, or the application forms for joining a synagogue.  No-one at Meitheal Cheoil ever asked me for my parents’ marriage certificate.

I don’t want to imply that Irish culture is inherently inclusive and anti-racist.  I’m sure that someone else could find plenty of counter-examples, together with joyous examples of Jewish inclusiveness and syncretism.  But I don’t think that the Jewish obsession with boundaries and separation, which make up an enormous proportion of our law and our lore, are merely accidental add-ons to our culture either. In biblical and talmudic Judaism, the principle of distinction and separation, and the importance of keeping things from mixing, is always imbued with a moral and theological dimension.

We are forbidden to mix meat and milk; fish and meat on the same plate; wool and linen in the same garment; and forbidden to yoke two kinds of animals to the same plough.  God does not like it when we mix things, stuff, or ourselves.  It’s worth remembering this next time you get into one of those discussions about the essential ethical core of Judaism.

Time, gentlemen, please

Published by peter on 2013-01-16 in Culture, Forecasting, Language, Prophecy and Religion. 0 Comments

Much discussion again over at Language Log over a claim of the form “Language L has no word for concept C”.  This time, it was the claim by Wade Davis (whose strange use of past tense indicates he has forgotten or is unaware that many Australian Aboriginal languages are still in use) that:

In not one of the hundreds of Aboriginal dialects and languages was there a word for time.”

The rebuttal of this claim by Mark Liberman was incisive and decisive.   Davis was using this claim to support a more general argument:  that traditional Australian Aboriginal cultures had different notions of and metaphors for time to those we mostly have in the modern Western world.
We in the contemporary educated West typically use a spatial metaphor for time, where the past is in one abstract place, the present in another non-overlapping abstract place, and the future in yet a third non-overlapping abstract place.    In this construal of time, causal influence travels in one direction only:  from the past to the present, and from the present to the future.   Nothing in either the present  or the future may influence the past, which is fixed and unchangeable.   Events in the future may perhaps be considered to influence the present, depending on how much fluidity we allow the present to have.  However, most of us would argue that it is not events in the future that influence events in the present, but our present perceptions of possible future events that influence events and actions in the present.
Modern Western Europeans typically think of the place that represents the past as being behind them, and the future ahead.   People raised in Asian cultures often think of the abstract place that is the past as being below them (or above them), and the future above (or below).   But all consider these abstract places to be non-overlapping, and even non-contiguous.
Traditional Australian Aboriginal cultures, as Davis argues, construe time very differently, and influences may flow in all directions.   A better spatial metaphor for Aboriginal notions of time would be to consider a modern city, where there are many different types of transport and communications, each viewable as a network:  rivers, canals, roads, bus-only road corridors, railways, underground rail tunnels, underground sewage or water drains, cycleways, footpaths, air-transport corridors, electricity networks, fixed-link telecommunications networks, wireless telecommunications networks, etc.    A map of each of these networks could be created (and usually are) for specific audiences.  A map of the city itself could then be formed from combining these separate maps, overlaid upon one another as layers in a stack.   Each layer describes a separate aspect of reality, but the reality of the actual entire city is complex and more than merely the sum of these parts.  Events or perceptions in one layer may influence events or perceptions in other layers, without any limitations on the directions of causality between layers.
Traditional Aboriginal notions of time are similar, with pasts, the present and futures all being construed as separate layers stacked over the same geographic space – in this case actual geographic country, not an abstract spatial representation of time.  Each generation of people who have lived, or who will live, in the specific region (“country” in modern Aboriginal English) will have created a layer in the stack.   Influence travels between the different layers in any and all directions, so events in the distant past or the distant future may influence events in the present, and events in the present may influence events in the past and the future.
Many religions – for example, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, and African cosmologies – allow for such multi-directional causal influences via a non-material realm of saints or spirits, usually the souls of the dead, who may have power to guide the actions of the living in the light of the spirits’ better knowledge of the future.   Causal influence can thus travel, via such spirit influences, from future to present.  Similarly, the view of Quantum Mechanics of space-time as a single 4-dimensional manifold allows for influences across the dimension of time as well as those of space.
I am reminded of an experience I once witnessed where the only sensible explanation of a colleague’s passionate enthusiasm for a particular future course of action was his foreknowledge of the specific details of the outcome of that course of action.  But these details he did not know and could not have known at the time of his enthusiasm,  prior to the course of action being executed.  In other words, only a causal influence from future to present provided a sensible explanation for this enthusiasm, and this explanation only became evident as the future turned into the present, and the details of the outcome emerged.  Until that point, he could not justify or explain his passionate enthusiasm, which seemed to be a form of madness, even to him.    Contemporary Western cosmology does not provide such time-reversing explanations, but many other cultures do; and current theories of quantum entanglement also seem to.
Contemporary westerners, particularly those trained in western science, have a hard time understanding such alternative cosmologies, in my experience.  I have posted before about the difficulties most westerners have, for instance,  in understanding Taoist/Zen notions of synchronicity of events, which westerners typically mis-construe as random chance.

Public appearances

Published by peter on 2013-01-15 in Culture and Politics. 0 Comments

I have argued before that it is an abuse of power for major newspapers to run obituaries of obscure back-office staff, simply because they can.   This is an abuse since a newspaper is a public organization, playing a very public role in public life,  not some private family newsletter shared, like samizdat, between close relatives over kitchen coffee.
The Guardian now runs, as the cover story in its Saturday Review section, extracts from the piano-learning diary of its Editor, Alan Rusbridger.    Perhaps there is nothing actually unethical about a major newspaper running long cover stories about its Editor’s private hobbies, and promoting his new book.  But one has to ask:   Is The Guardian now the private family newsletter of its Editor?

Coates on Bam

Published by peter on 2012-09-01 in Culture, Heroes, Obama speeches and Politics. 0 Comments

Ta-Nehisi Coates has written a superb and insightful essay on black and white perceptions of Barack Obama as President and as a black American in a country that experienced 175 years of white affirmative action.  The common phrase describing what black Americans need to be for success in white society is:  twice as good and half as black.
 

The value of an education

Published by peter on 2012-07-07 in Culture and Human intelligence. 0 Comments

In a letter to Rupert Hart-Davies on 29 November 1956 George Lyttelton included this statement from William Johnson Cory (1823-1892, Master of Eton 1845-1872) on education:

At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge, you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions.  But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.”

Reference:
Rupert Hart-Davis (Editor) [1978-79]: The Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters:  Correspondence of George Lyttelton and Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955-1962. London: John Murray.

Teaching children not to think

Published by peter on 2012-04-06 in Culture and Politics. 0 Comments

Suzanne Moore rightly criticizes the back-to-rote-learning-the-times-table fever that has so gripped this British Government and the chaterati generally.

We could ask writers about reading, but why listen to the likes of Michael Rosen when we can bang on about phonics, which naturally enough children must be immediately tested on as soon as they get the gist? According to the Daily Mail, a government initiative to test school literacy levels will see more than 500,000 six-year-olds asked to read made-up words such as “jound”, “terg”, “fape” and “snemp”. What a perfect way to symbolise our obsession with testing. We test nonsense when we could “gyre and gimble in the wabe”. We could get kids to do what they already do – imagine words. Sorry to bring this up, this awkward issue of imagination, but having observed 22 years of state education, I see its slow strangulation.
Of course, many are reassured by this return to tradition, an education in conformity, with its refusal to teach students how to code, source, verify and interpret data, and its division between arts and sciences when it is at this crossover that some of the best thinking is being produced. All this explains the continual cracks made at media studies, which is about learning to negotiate a mediated world through something other than 19th-century novels – mad, huh? But it is an exercise in sentimentality, not a design for living for now.
The current doublespeak means that free schools are not free at all. Intelligence, the ability to connect and create ideas, the so-called thinking outside the box – these things are hardly likely when the box itself is idolised. Far be it for me to advocate a return to actual free schools where my friends’ kids learned to make a dope table, but to purchase wholesale the idea that this return to “traditional methods” works for all is stupid. Evidence tells us otherwise. As a policy, it is more about what works for politicians than what works for children.
Our political class is indeed the pinnacle of smug regurgitation. Many are the products of the very best education, and what do they desire? Only to replicate what they know, not to transform the world. As our access to information widens, our education system could open up. Instead, it narrows itself to certainties that anyone with half a brain would have questioned a long time ago. Go to school, get a good job, don’t ask what it’s for. Freedom does not come from thinking by rote. Whatever they tell you.”

 

The mechanical judiciary

Published by peter on 2012-02-19 in Computer technology, Culture, Law and Politics. 0 Comments

In the tradition of Montaigne and Orwell, Rory Stewart MP has an extremely important blog post about the need for judicial decisions to be be made case-by-case, using humane wisdom, intuition, and discretion, and not by deterministic or mechanical algorithms. The same applies to most important decisions in our lives and our society. Sadly, his view runs counter to the thrust of modern western culture these last four centuries, as Stephen Toulmin observed.   Our obssessive desire for consistency in decision-making sweeps all before it, from oral examinations in mathematics to eurozone economic policy.

Stewart’s post is worth quoting at length:

What is the point of a parliamentary debate? It isn’t about changing MPs’ minds or their votes. It wasn’t, even in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1860s Trollope describes how MPs almost always voted on party lines. But they and he still felt that parliamentary debate mattered, because it set the terms of the public discussion, and clarified the great national questions. The press and public galleries were often filled. Churchill, even as a young backbencher, could expect an entire speech, lasting almost an hour, to be reprinted verbatim in the Morning Post. MPs put enormous effort into their speeches. But in the five-hour debate today on the judicial sentencing council, the press gallery was empty, and for most of the time there was only one single person on the Labour benches – a shadow Minister who had no choice. And on our side, a few former judges, and barristers. For whom, and about what, were we speaking?
Continue reading ‘The mechanical judiciary’

My heart remains in Orchard Street

Published by peter on 2011-10-22 in Culture, History and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

Just recalled this sad break-up letter from John Vorwald to the Lower East Side, published two years ago.

Dear Lower East Side,

I don’t know how to say this.

It’s over.

For years I defended you.  I stood by you — faithful to a fault. When people said you were dirty or unkempt, I called it character. When they said you were running with a shady crowd and staying out too late, I said it was a phase. And when they shook their heads and said you’d sold out, I’d say you’d come back around.

But I was wrong.

Recently, on the corner of Rivington and Ludlow (the once-proud site of the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” album cover), a photo shoot was taking place. Two rugged men — shaved heads, chiseled jaws, cultivated stubble — were decked out in full prep-school regalia. Tweed plaid pants, sweater vest, looming crest. Pose, flash, pose. A bearded photographer angled for an incongruous blend of uptown couture and downtown street grit. Princeton ghettoway. Slytherin in the City. Call it what you like.

At that moment, I knew two things were true: Somewhere, someplace, Lou Reed was crying. And you and I were finished.

Sure, we’ve had our good times; you’ve been there for me. When I was coming off a breakup with a sleepier borough, you gave me your stripped-wire energy. I loved your pulse — the crackle and hum that only downtown Manhattan could provide (shut up, Fort Greene). Who needed pretty brownstones and an inferiority complex? I had your tenement castles. Forget backyard gardens; I had your grid of fire escapes, my own urban picket fence.

I’ll always remember our early days. I wasn’t exactly promiscuous, but I’d been around — Greenpoint, SoHo, East Village, Boerum Hill. You reminded me of a gracefully aging rocker, grizzled and sage. I admit it, I liked the cougar in you.

By the early 2000s your renaissance was well under way, but it was your past lives that spoke to guys like me. A simple walk along Orchard Street conjured nickel-and-dime vaudeville, turn-of-the-century Jewish grandparents, ’70s punk, bargain leather and the odor of garbage and sour beer. Richard Price once described you as a modern-day Byzantium. You were more like my very own Alexandria, richer for your rag-and-bone ruins. So, I nestled into a fourth-floor perch over Ludlow and listened to the street pop like a 45 track, like so many broken bottles.

It was perfect. For a while.

True, I’m no Reagan-era squatter. My forebears did not immigrate to your streets. But I know a thing or three about you now. Only a few years ago, you’d reserve your special mayhem for the weekends. Amateur nights in your arms — a beautiful mess. All trussed up like a ’50s-era pinup model, you were the Queen Bee welcoming one and all with a knowing wink. We were still O.K. then, you and I. I knew that the workweek was our time, when I could still catch glimpses of the real you: the Chinese ladies returning from the Essex Street Market, the local kids playing ball at Roosevelt Park, the tattooed cartoonist stationed in the window across the courtyard. Even the din of bands rehearsing in errant basements along Ludlow.

Then they came — your new friends.

You gussied yourself up with shiny new hardware: Thor, Fat Baby, Spitzer’s. Hordes of banker boys in J. Press checked shirt/chino uniforms and manicured necklines swarmed to you faster than to the promise of a government bailout. They enjoyed sausage-party dinners at Schiller’s (“It’s like Pastis, but edgy!”), used winter as a verb and eyed sun-speckled Germans and Australians “on holiday.”

Toothsome Upper East Side girl packs (never fewer than four) tarted up in too-new Lilly Pulitzer dresses and slurped down sugar-free Red Bull and Grey Gooses at the Stanton Social. Hipster millennials, rocking extra-skinny jeans, oversize Elton John glasses and cocked-back fedoras, turned Pianos and Welcome to the Johnsons into their own private Thompson Twins video. Hold me now. Hold my heart.

At first you shrugged, as if to say, “Can I help it if I’m so popular?” The truth is, you liked the attention. And who could blame you? Wasn’t it better than the heady days of strung-out junkies on every corner? So, I tried looking in the other direction. I took whole weekends away. I’d leave you to your affairs — the girls and the boys.

I told myself that you’d get it out of your system, that you’d grow out of it. I visited neighbors — precious NoLIta, wizened East Vil — but I kept coming back to you, forgiving your indiscretions. Then, one day, I realized we had both changed. Truth is, you like the new you, this Guitar Hero version of yourself: the mallternative bands, the squeaky-clean beer halls, the rooftop parties at glass hotels. And me? Well, I could say that the ironic T-shirts have lost some of their charm (they have), or that I am not like them (I’m not). But, really, isn’t the awful truth that yours is a love only for the very young and carefree? And I am decidedly neither.

So, as the new year dawns, I must vow to leave you, dear L.E.S.

Not sure yet where I’ll end up. I should let you know that I’ve been seeing someone, someone a little less flashy, someone who isn’t trying nearly so hard, and — it must be said — someone who actually enjoys the company of an older man. No, it doesn’t matter who. What matters is that we’ve come to the end, my lovely Loisaida. I know I’ll miss you, and the spell you once cast over me. But as an old flame of yours named Lou Reed once said, “There’s a bit of magic in everything, and then some loss to even things out.”

Regretfully,

John Vorwald