Meaningful inauthenticity

It would be easy to be cynical about what is happening here. Picturesque remains of a bygone age combined with the sentimental illusions evoked by a white wedding. "Who do they think they're kidding?" would be one reaction. "Mostly themselves" would be the automatic reponse.

Maybe. Maybe not. Obviously, none of us can have the slightest idea about the reality of this choice from the point of view of those involved. Without figures to hand, I cannot say how many people go for the picturesque setting to celebrate their wedding. There's a Unitarian chapel in Styal that in Spring and Summer needs a conveyor belt to manage the wedding parties passing through it. The villagers tend to sneer at them but I have some sympathy with folk who really don't have much consumer choice here.

What most of us think we're doing when we get married is very traditional: we're choosing a partner for life, someone that we're going to live with until we live no more. On the scale of the choices we make, not much comes close to that one in its consequences. We reach out for reinforcements, for the warmth of companionship to reassure us that we are not alone. Lots of people help, especially the ones that have known us and will continue to populate our little world. Others' eyes witness what we do and, in some way, guarantee it.

With our friends and family taking the secondary roles in our story, we acknowledge that there wouldn't be a story without them. But there are other narrative threads that must occupy the foreground at times. One of these is generational: the previous generation giving way to the current one just as the current one must one day give way to the next. This is one of those fundamentals that are so easy to forget if we persist in the delusion that 3.5 billion years of evolution are all about us. A wedding taken seriously will make you feel the star of the show, but will also remind you of you place in the scheme of things. And the scheme of things goes way back.

That's one story, but there are others, ones you could identify with culture or tribe and family. A ritual, an agreed and long-lasting set of actions, words and images, perform this function. All of these things are part of the bedrock of the structure you start to build with the wedding; they are a hedge against the uncertainty of the future you are making a claim on.

In the deracinated lives that most of us live, within the most revolutionary culture that has ever existed, we don't have much choice when it comes to long-lived, charged-with-meaning rituals. Intellectually, it is all too easy to undermine them, deconstruct them - you don't even have to understand much about them to do so. What we're less good at is building the bigger story that we can call on and all can make use of. What is left then but to rope in the unthreatening, but reassuring remains of a past that was more proficient in this field?

I took this photo at Fountains Abbey in July. I have no idea who the people are. In the unlikely event that they can be recognised, I hope that they take no offense at my use of them for idle reflections.

Higher standards

There is a related proposition to the one dismissed below by Tony Blair and it regards language. It dismisses the idea of a Standard English (or French, or Chinese) on the grounds that these so-called superior versions are nothing more than the dialects of the powerful, dialects with an army and a navy, as someone put it. Its proponents point out that what we call Standard English was merely the demotic of a small social group in London and environs, which, because of the concentration of political and economic power in the capital and of cultural power in its two universities, became regarded as the language of prestige. But it is absurd to think of it as superior in any other way. The language of a Glasgow steel-worker is the equal to that of Tony Blair because it is born and grown in the same human cognitive juice and enlived by the same human symaptic fire.

You might think that all this was just another silly academic tantrum against the grown-up world, but it matters. Evidently, until last June, the following was on the website of the school district of Seattle:

"cultural racism'' includes "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology,'' "having a future time orientation'' (planning ahead) and "defining one form of English as standard.'' The site also asserted that only whites can be racists, and disparaged assimilation as the "giving up'' of one's culture.

There has been a lot of fuss in American schools over the advisability of 'forcing' especially black or hispanic pupils to learn Standard English. This should be resisted, say some teachers and academics, for reasons of ethnic identity and resistence to racial oppression. Never mind that the practical result was the condemnation of these victims of PC education to the economic and cultural ghetto. The point about the equality of all dialects is the same as that I have made about the putative equality of all cultures: the world demonstrates that it just ain't so.

The argument I am about to make is a circular one. In a nutshell it is that one dialect is superior to another if enough of the right people for long enough consider it so. The qualities of the language spoken by the emerging burghers of London in the fifteenth century would have been more or less those of several other dialects in the country, not least some in the Midlands that had already produced considerable poetry. But with its power base established and consolidated in national institutions, within a short period, laws, thought and literature would come to be expressed in that dialect. And the dialect would therefore have to develop and grow at a much greater rate than its fellows just because of the pressure put on it by so many demands. It would need to be able to manage abstraction, sophisticated narrative and conceptual precision, qualities not at a premium in the other dialects, which would remain mostly spoken. The longer this continued, the greater the difference.

The important distinction between the dialects really rests on that between spoken and written language. In a culture that relies on the written word for all official and cultural transmission, the language of the printed word is ipso facto the language of power and will influence greatly the spoken word so that it too can take on those qualities of abstraction and precision at need. This is a huge change. You may not remember the struggle of learning to write well and yet it is one of the most difficult skills we have to master (if ever we do). It does not come naturally. It has to be learnt by the sweat of the brow usually before we have anything worth reading to write. Once learnt, however, it changes and enlarges forever our capacity to express ourselves and much else both orally and in writing. Aside from social prestige, that is the great benefit of acquiring the Standard dialect. With it, you may take part in the discourse of the best that people do and have done. Without it, you are confined to the ghetto. The Standard Language is superior because we have made it so.

I wrote the above because of this article by Theodore Dalrymple, which, though making the same point, takes a different tack.

Finally

Tony Blair has boldly said what has needed to be boldly said for quite some time now (and what John Howard has, in fact, been boldly saying for some time now). That, in this country, all cultures are not equal, that there is a hierarchy of values in which some abrogate others.

When it comes to our essential values - belief in democracy, the rule of law, tolerance, equal treatment for all, respect for this country and its shared heritage - then that is where we come together, it is what we hold in common.

It is what gives us the right to call ourselves British. At that point no distinctive culture or religion supercedes our duty to be part of an integrated United Kingdom.

Being British carries rights. It also carries duties. And those duties take clear precedence over any cultural or religious practice.

We must demand allegiance to the rule of law. Nobody can legitimately ask to stand outside the law of the nation. There is thus no question of the UK allowing the introduction of religious law in the UK. Parliament sets the law, interpreted by the courts. All criminal matters should be dealt with through the criminal justice system.

Iran (be)heading for leadership battle

According to Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media, things are on the move in Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah ali Khamenei is evidently very close to meeting some of the heroic martyrs he has helped towards dusty death and the blood-letting to decide his successor is well under way. Students are demonstrating on the campus of Tehran University, calling for a “death to despotism,” and “death to the dictator.” Speaking of which,

A week ago, the Majlis (the national assembly) passed a law effectively reducing the presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad by a full year. This was universally seen as an attack in favor of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadi-Nezhad’s most visible political rival, and a candidate to succeed Khamenei.

Regime Change Iran has more on the protests here and here, including a photo of a poster reading, “AS IF WE WANT ANYTHING OTHER THAN FREEDOM”.

(via Dinocrat)

Diplomatic shorthand

A Russian trouble-maker is murdered by the most exotic means available in the middle of London. Pierre Gemayel is gunned down on a street in Beirut. Take comfort. This is just diplomacy without the duplicity. It is proof evident that some things never change.

Those who complain that there is a lack of communication between the Bush administration and the Assad regime are not paying attention. By local rules, a well-timed murder such as the gunning down of Pierre Gemayel in Beirut last week is more effective in sending a message than a diplomatic demarche.

This translation of Syrian actions quickly made its way through the Middle East: "You want help in Iraq? It will cost you Lebanon. For starters." That is realpolitik and real communication, Assad-style.

If we sold Lebanon for the sake of a Syrian hand in Iraq (as if there weren't enough Syrian hands in Iraq), then the worst that al-Queda could say about us would be richly deserved.

The Marriage Gap

It is almost impossible to argue for a tradition. Usually, the reason a certain practice is a tradition instead of a theory is that the evidence for its value is so dispersed that it is extremely difficult to put it together. So religion imposes and carries on what might otherwise be lost. It builds altars to exalt it and refines anathema to defend it.

Now we've got statistics and the slowly dawning realisation that, just because something isn't always true doesn't mean that it isn't usually true. A case in point is marriage.

Three paragraphs from an article by Kay S. Hymowitz, which summarises her new book Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. First, two of many significant statistics.

Virtually all—92 percent—of children whose families make over $75,000 are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is reversed: only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents.

Implications

[T]he Marriage Gap—and the inequality to which it is tied—is self-perpetuating. A low-income single mother, unprepared to carry out The Mission, is more likely to raise children who will become low-income single parents, who will pass that legacy on to their children, and so on down the line. Married parents are more likely to be visiting their married children and their grandchildren in their comfortable suburban homes, and those married children will in turn be sending their offspring off to good colleges, superior jobs, and wedding parties.

The mentality that works

For one thing, women who grow up in a marriage-before-children culture organize their lives around a meaningful and beneficial life script. Traditional marriage gives young people a map of life that takes them step by step from childhood to adolescence to college or other work training—which might well include postgraduate education—to the workplace, to marriage, and only then to childbearing. A marriage orientation also requires a young woman to consider the question of what man will become her husband and the father of her children as a major, if not the major, decision of her life. In other words, a marriage orientation demands that a woman keep her eye on the future, that she go through life with deliberation, and that she use self-discipline—especially when it comes to sex: bourgeois women still consider premature pregnancy a disaster. In short, a marriage orientation—not just marriage itself—is part and parcel of her bourgeois ambition.

Read it all. It's long but worth it and there's some quite surprising stuff.

Benedict's misquotes?

In his Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict quoted the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus as translated by Professor Theodore Khoury:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

You know what happened next. However, it seems that Khoury's translation may have been a bit strong.

Sandro Magister at Settimo Cielo reproduces a letter to the Pope written by don Silvio Barbaglia of the diocese of Novara in which he seeks to correct the translation of the infamous phrase.

According to don Silvio, the context was one of comparison: the ancient Law of Moses and the newer Law of Mohammad, the fact that it was more recent being, according to the Persian in dispute with the emperor, what made it superior.

The emperor replies that whatever Mohammad brought that is new is ... Well, Khoury's version has 'mauvais', which is rendered into English as 'evil', and into Italian as 'cose cattive' (bad things). The original Greek, says don Silvio, uses a comparative, not an absolute adjective, which would best be translated as 'worse' or 'of less import'.

The second adjective, as well, should be understood as comparative, or rather, as a superlative and with its meaning as something like 'dehumanising'. This because he is approaching the main point of his argument: the use of violence in the diffusion of the faith.

So don Silvio would translate it like this:

Show me whatever Mohammad brought that was new, and you will find only worse things and the most dehumanising of all, the command to spread with the sword the faith that he preached.

SFW, I hear you mutter. Not a huge change, I'd agree, but a significant one. In Khoury's version, Mohammad's own additions to the Law of Moses are 'evil and inhuman', and that's it. In don Silvio's version, his contribution is only of less value than the original, not necessarily bad in itself. And the adjective 'dehumanising' applies only to the command about violence.

Mind you, the connection with violence is still made, if anything it is more explicit. So it's good to know that our enthusiastic friends were not shouting for nothing.

Unfortunately, the article is in Italian and doesn't appear on Sandro Magister's English-language blog.

Chirac calls. No-one at home.

I thought this was funny. Why a French competitor for CNN and the BBC is essential.

"Take the conflict in Lebanon this summer. If Jacques Chirac's call for a ceasefire - which didn't even make BBC or CNN - had been reported earlier, it could have brought about an earlier resolution of the conflict. If Chirac's call had been reported more widely it maybe could have saved thousands of lives. That was a story calling out for a French angle, given the historic links to Lebanon."

An earlier resolution to the conflict! Thousands of lives saved! If only they'd listened to Jack!

Instinctive associations

The results of the latest Nation Brands Index has Britain at No. 1 and Israel at No. 36 in an international survey of people's attitudes to 36 countries and their tourism, exports, governance, investment, immigration, cultural heritage and people.

No-one would expect Israel to score well in most of these areas in comparison to most other Western countries, but to score as badly as Bhutan? Simon Anholt claims in this Jerusalem Post article that Bhutan is the only other 'guest' participant in the history of the survey to score so low. Bhutan with 93% of its workforce engaged in agriculture and per capita GDP at $1,400. How is this possible?

Anholt said that his study differed from that of other surveys, in that this was not a politically-based public opinion poll. It did not measure people's ideas about the conflict with the Palestinians or Hizbullah, but rather it examined people's instinctive associations with the country that would impact their decisions outside the political arena, such as whether they would buy a product from Israel, visit the country, or hire an Israeli.

Could you have a clearer indication of the impact of the media's treatment of Israel than this? How else are these instinctive associations formed? I bet you Iran would score higher if it were included. This is how, as we have seen, others form more murderous instinctive associations.

Dante's Inferno

A well-designed Flash guide to the Inferno with a visualisation of the structure of Hell, notes on the main symbols and figures and some quotes. It's a support rather than another way of reading Dante's poem, but it allows you to orient yourself quickly.

(via Pajamas Media)