Conversationalism + Identity

The thesis of this blog, as it were, is that culture is a conversation, and every mode of public expression helps shape that culture. One of the ways in which public expression shapes culture is through public understanding. When a journalist writes an important news story, or an internet meme travels through the public consciousness, or a theater piece reaches the height of its success, it's partly because it causes a new understanding of the current shared state of the members of its culture (or causes a new awareness of understanding).

So, a cultural dialogue is a mode of cultural self-expression, but also a cultural dialogue is a mode of cultural self-examination. America is constantly probing the question, "What is America?" and "Who are Americans?" When you hear this refrain of "Small town values," for instance, what you're hearing is one interpretation of what America "really" is; and such an interpretation is deliberately constructed so as to remove those who disagree with it from America. In other words, by defining America as conservative America, "liberal" America becomes un-American, and thus America has no responsibility to "liberal" America. That, I think, is the power of the common refrain in the Obama campaign: "That's not who we are as a people. That's not who we are as Americans."

By extension, I think, part of joining the cultural dialogue is also examining your own internal dialogue, and coming to understand yourself better. The wisest people in public life, for instance, have often had the most healthy internal understanding. Think of Abraham Lincoln's brooding self-examination, or George Washington's humility in the face of success. Their self-awareness is what made them more aware of how to serve their country.

Our blind-spots in ourselves are our blind-spots looking at culture, and those things we see constantly in ourselves are what we see in culture. This, perhaps, explains the fascination that biographical interpretations of art/history have for us. After all, if we understand what Kafka thought of fathers, we should be able to understand what Kafka wrote about fathers.

This also is where we get into the trouble spots in culture. Because too often, we use culture and cultural identity as a protection from self-examination. That not only shows an unhealthy attitude toward the self, but an unhealthy attitude towards culture.

Conversationalism + Identity + 2008: Sarah Palin + Katie Couric

Required Viewing

I felt a deep pathos for Sarah Palin during that interview. Many of her positions are abhorrent to me, and I am shocked that anyone would have believed that she would be good on the ticket. But she struck an emotional chord within me, a chord of fear, while watching specifically these sorts of moments in her interview, and having thought about it, I'm starting to realize what it is.

Sarah Palin is trying to learn a foreign language.

When I was growing up, I was taught Hebrew, because I was Israeli-born and American raised. My family all spoke Hebrew, and indeed from my parents' generation upward Hebrew was the dominant (if not the only) mode of communication there was. When I was young, the frustration of learning a language drove me wild--I hated it, and I consequently dropped Hebrew lessons.

Part of me regrets that to this day, but my abortive attempts to learn language since then have made me feel that I was correct in my choice. A year of Spanish I in middle school, four years of French in High School (culminating in a 2 on the AP French exam), and, just this year, studying introductory Czech--and each time, I have not done well.

But there is something more fundamentally frustrating or disturbing than not doing well in language classes, which I only realized today. It's a frustration I feel when I try to speak to a Czech person in Czech, and they respond in English (recognizing instantly my inability to communicate). It's equally the frustration I feel when I have to dumb down my language to get across to someone who thinks they know English, but don't.

Before action, comes the word, and part of my self-awareness is my self-awareness about how I communicate. Part of the urge that creates a writer, after all, is the love of words--and furthermore, an identification with words and communication. Before I am anything else, I am a creator--and the first step in the act of creation is writing and planning; placing ideas in definite grammatical structures. George Carlin talks about how you start with an airy, indefinite thought, and then you attach a word to it, and BAM-- you're stuck with that word for that thought.

But what happens when it becomes impossible to communicate? I can imagine myself happier unable to walk than unable to speak. I have a definite fear of loss of speech, which is in fact tied into my fear of death. I identify myself with my thoughts, my ideas, and my opinions; death extinguishes them. So the solution to death is to spread my thoughts, my ideas, my opinions. Shakespeare's body may have died, but his thoughts/ideas/opinions live on because they have gained traction. I not only fear dying, but I fear dying and taking everything I think and feel with me.

That's why I write: if no one will listen to my ideas and thoughts and opinions, I must write them down, so that if the time comes that someone is interested in them, they will be waiting for them. I have a fantasy in my head that, after I die, people will come through my computer, looking for my ideas and thoughts and opinions. And they'll discover that I laid it all out--my computer is laid out with a highly organized filing system, so that people will know what I thought, what I was here for.

Imagine if I lost all of that. Imagine if I lost the opportunity to make myself known. Imagine if I dealt with someone who is trapped in seeing me as "The Other" because I cannot make myself clear to them. Imagine that. It is the same tragedy as a paralyzed athlete: he who identifies himself with physical action will mourn the loss of that action, and he who identifies himself with communication (not just thought; communication) will mourn that in a deep way.

I have trouble watching Sarah Palin in these interviews. It was alright for me when she was just speaking, saying foolish things like "Thanks but no thanks" or "The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull...". She knows how to speak like a politician. But watching her try to speak like a statesman, is like watching my comrades in Czech 1 trying to form a sentence about their family when they've forgotten all the vocabulary involved.

You can see her clutch to phrases she knows. Take, for instance:

"So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americas."

Let me diagram this sentence for you:

[Positive initiative 1] + [positive initiative 2] + [positive initiative 3] + [positive initiative 4] + [positive initiative 5]

Furthermore, if you notice, Positive Initiative 2, 4, and 5 are all the same initiative: raising taxes. They're just different phrases for the same thing.

She memorized the vocab, and she's struggling to deploy it. It deeply unsettles me, emotionally, because I can't imagine the horror of being tested on language I don't know. The inability to communicate, in its sharpest form.

If Sarah Palin's nomination only accomplishes one thing, let it be that it gave me a little more insight into the darker side of myself.

Identity/Ethnicity in Europe

Another issue which being in the Czech Republic has given me some ideas about is about race/ethnicity, and what's going on historically right now in terms of race.

Firstly, I suppose, it's interesting to note the incredibly intolerant history of race and ethnicity in Europe. It is probably equally prevalent in every other continent, but previously I had sort of been of the notion that Europe was, at the least, given more to ideological/religious feuds, and due to the ethnically homogenous nature of Europe hadn't really distinguished racially between Europeans.

Well, it seems that the question of the "ethnically homogenous nature of Europe" is what I had missed. In the era passing forward from the Middle Ages, people lived in small villages, tribes, small city states and Duchys. Many spoke their own regional dialects and languages. But all had "Christianity," as it was united by the Church under the Roman Empire. The exception was the tribes of Jews that were throughout the land.

During this period, it seems to me (from an admittedly not very highly studied vantage point--my knowledge of history crystalizes much more clearly after 1900) that there weren't very many huge ethnic feuds. Now, partly this has to do with the fact that it is impossible at that point in history to actually destroy an entire ethnicity. The tools of mass murder were yet to come. But overall, people mostly kept to their small, local communities. The "other" was out of sight, and out of mind.

This changed after the Schism. Although this didn't create "ethnic" divisions, it did create another major identity division: Catholic or Protestant. And what, I suppose, is key is that the people who were divided were previously people who were in close proximity. And this is during the period where Europe is getting slowly smaller: the Kingdoms have mostly gotten large and intertwined through trade (during the trade revival of the 1600s), so suddenly these people were in close divisions. If you want to imagine what such a world looked like, imagine if all of Europe was Northern Ireland in the 1950s - 1980s.

I'm ignoring, of course, examples of "top down" persecution. It's one thing when King Ferdinand signs the order to persecute Jews, I'm focusing on mass movements of intolerance.

So at the end of the Schism, a peace is signed, which tells each King/Prince that where they rule, they decide the religion. And what that does is enforce homogeny in each community. There is a brief and catastrophic period of exoduses as Catholics flee to Catholic countries and Protestants flee to Protestant countries.

Nationalism, during this, has been on the rise. During the 1800s, it really peaks. The 1800s is the peak of nationalism. And this nationalism is not based on kings or kingdoms; the intellectuals of the time are trying to base it on something "historical" or "scientific." Hence you have the great frauds (neanderthals spoke German! ancient texts referring to the Czechs!), attempting to define the countries as more than just a temporary boundary created by history: countries are collections of a certain kind of people.

And they decide to use language as the identifier, and that identifier becomes race. Now, at the time of the 1800s, there were many Germans outside of Germany; some in Czechoslovakian regions, or in Austrio-Hungary, or in Prussia; and all of those people were mixed as well. As well as the French, or the Italians. Switzerland still represents that sort of mixture: after all, thanks to its long reign of peace, its ethnic makeup hasn't changed much since the 1400s, when the peace was first crystalized.

Eugenics enters the scene, and tells people that race is absolute. Meanwhile, there is a great rush of people to the big cities: cities which are much more ethnically complex than their home villages. They see The Other every day. And when they hear about Germany's actions, for good or for worse, they're constantly seeing Germans. Nationalist propaganda at the time (until pretty much World War II, sometimes even later) was based on vilifying the people who lived in those countries. It's not just that Kaiser Wilhelm is evil: the Krauts are evil. So how do you treat those nasty krauts who are in your workplace? What if one of those Krauts is your boss in the factory?

These people are, for many other reasons (see previous post) very unsatisfied. And a racial politics suits the up-and-coming Hitler. And during World War II, Germany, and various lands Germany held, became very very ethnically homogenous. Jews, gypsies, and other misplaced minorities were liquidated. Then, at the end of World War II, the counter swing: Germans were evicted from all the lands outside of Germany. Germany responded by evicting whatever non-Germans existed. Jews were still persecuted in areas of Poland. Poles were resettled thanks to the moving of the borders of Poland; Hungarians and Romanians settled within their own borders too.

The result of World War II is that all of the nationalist boundaries of the 1800s became ethnic boundaries. And since at the point of World War II, your community is your nation, that was enough to bring a sort of ethnic peace in Europe.

The exception is Yugoslavia, under Josef Tito, which did not go into that repopulating mode. But as soon as Tito's rule fell, Yugoslavia quickly tried to match the rest of Europe (not deliberately, I don't think) in creating nations based on language-ethnic homogeny. And of course, because of the very interspersed nature of these communities, it meant a lot of repopulation and depopulation.

None of this, to be clear is a good thing. All of the events which lead to the ethnic homogeny of Europe today (even the former Yugoslavia is homogenous to a degree which it never was to the past) were catastrophic, traumatic events for Europe.

But something reverse is happening now. But before I get into that, a word about colonies.

The biggest exceptions (there are a few) to the homogenization of the 20th Century is a side-effect of the collapse of the British and French Empires, where many of the peoples of the colonies came to their mother country to settle permanently. This is seen in "Londonstan," the part of England which is more culturally diverse than all the rest of the island combined. The suburbs of France have the same effect with many of its African colonials. And the racial tensions these have created are huge. The only ethnic hot-spots in Europe today are precisely those places that have races in contact.

Going back to the process of reversal that is going on now:

Previously, these conflicts have occurred every time the "horizon" of what your community was expands. The reason that World War II set off Europe's repopulation is that Germany, not content to sit in its own borders, intersected with all of the other nations. And where it went, it tried to ethnically homogenize. This created a lot of ethnic tension in Europe. Which, by the way, led to people distrusting Germany for half a century, not based on any one leadership, but based on the concept of Germany as a whole. "Germany" is dangerous if united.

Globalization is expanding the horizon of one's community again. The Schengen Free-Movement Zone makes it as easy for a Bulgarian to live in London as it is to live in Bulgaria. There is a huge movements of people to wherever it is that they can make the best living. This has, of course, created a lot of anxieties in areas where, previously, "the other" was elsewhere rather than here. Europeans have come to live with the idea of "the other, elsewhere" but as yet has not learned to deal with "the other, here." This is like the aftermath of the Schism's peace: other religions will be tolerated in other countries, but not in our own. Out of sight, out of mind.

This is a very complicated question, one which nobody has really solved anywhere. But it is the problem of Europe in the 21st Century. You'll notice that this question sort of bubbles near to the surface whenever the entrance of Turkey into the E.U. is discussed. After all, Bulgarians and Poles may be ethnically "other" from Brits and the French, but they're not considered religiously other; and especially today, there is a much more sour history between the West and Islam. This is an "other" which Europe is clearly not prepared to engage with ("here", at least: they're good friends with Turkey when Turkey is "there"). They will stall Turkey's membership into the E.U. until they're ready to have "the other, here."

And we need to figure out "the other, here" very soon.

Identity Politics

Today, in my Culture of Dissent class (taught by the inimitable Jan Urban, a Czech dissident from the Velvet Revolution and an excellent journalist in Bosnia, and Kosovo), we discussed the rather difficult question of why Communism proved to be popular.

The answer, from my point of view, is one having to do with the nature of identity in the 20th Century. There are many people who don't believe themselves to be very philosophical in their everyday life (philosophy being a very 'elite' passtime), but in point of fact, everyone has philosophical ideas and worldviews. And one of the big philosophical questions is, "Who am I? What is my identity?"

People base a surprising amount of their political convictions and idealisms based on who they think they are. For instance, one of the reasons that Americans have consistently voted for tax cuts for the wealthy is an array of polls which show that Americans consistently think that they are wealthier than they actually are (which corresponds to the way that they think they're thinner than they actually are).

We talked about the appeal of communism in the Industrial Revolution era. In order to understand it, you need to take a village-eye view of the change. The poor serfs, living in small rural communities, lived in an era with very little mobility. They were engaged in occupations passed down to them from generations, among a small community of people they knew. As the industrial revolution came to pass, serfdom was abolished: they were not necessary anymore. A vacuum formed, which sucked these serfs into the city. Suddenly they were in a huge community, much larger than themselves. Whatever they had previously been known for, through their family, was no longer a mark of identity. They passed by nameless and faceless masses everyday; they worked alongside nameless and faceless masses that did exactly what they did. There was no honor in their new work: they were (proverbially) just another cog in the machine; just another brick in the wall. They had been robbed of their identity, their purpose, and their security.

It was rather like going to a large college after being in a small high school.

At any rate, they needed a new identity. Communism provided that. It gave them a name for themselves: proletariat. It gave them a cause for their misery: bourgoisie. It told them that not only were the proletariat powerful, they were the single most powerful force of history: and that it was historically determined that they must succeed.

So, to turn to contemporary politics: during the Cold War, these identity politics broke apart into large dualisms: Communists and Capitalists on the world stage, and Democrats and Republicans on the American stage (note that third parties were still a noticeable force until World War Two). Ideology became, for one of the few times in American history, a primary source of identification: Democrats, Reds, Anti-Communists, Republicans, Socialists, Peaceniks, Hippies. All of these tags were ideological in nature. They gave people a sense of identity.

Today, these two grand coalitions seem more fractured. At least, the Republican camp seems to have split decisively into moderates, libertarians, neoconservatives, and social conservatives. A messy primary season filled with candidates who did not fully appeal to any of these groups (with the exception of Mike Huckabee for social conservatives and the Ron Paul movement for Libertarians) left people on the right with a lack of a sense of direction. Many of these people identified themselves as Republican strongly, without being on board with many of the actions or beliefs of other Republicans.

A big tip-off to me that this identity politics is coming apart? Obama has a large following of so-called Obamicans (Republicans for Obama). Notice, of course, that they are still calling themselves Republicans despite voting for Obama. I'm not necessarily saying that they aren't actually Republicans, but I'm noticing that their insistence is on defining themselves by a party affiliation which, in this election, may not be entirely accurate.

One of my favorite sayings to hear is "I've been a life-long Republican, but I'm considering voting Democrat." Notice the phrase "life-long." This is put forward as a positive, even though being a life-long Republican might imply that you've supported characters like George W. Bush, Nixon, or Reagan (in the same way that a life-long Democrat must have supported Carter, Dukakis, McGovern).

But this is the way people have previously identified themselves.

But with a hyper-specification of polls, there is a new level of identification going on. We hear it today on the news all the time. Demographics. Very small clusters of identity. How are middle-aged women going to vote? What about older men? Young black men in rural towns? These statistics can all be coallated. And apparently, they matter. And although women's groups have been condemning Palin since she was first put on the ticket, the latest poll shows that McCain has indeed spiked among women.

The question, I suppose, is whether we can move past identity politics. Barack Obama (in my opinion) has a way of addressing that. He appeals to people to vote not as Democrats, or Republicans, or as black and whites, but as Americans. This isn't just a trite slogan of identification: he's asking us to identify ourselves as America, and vote in such a way that doesn't just benefit my group or your group or any group, but benefits all of America.

And the question is: will it work.