Plural Identities

Veiled response

I don't think anyone would disagree with the Archbishop of Canterbury that there should be no problem with people visibly displaying their religious affiliation in public (presumably, in case any Satanists get the wrong idea, only to the extent that the clothing is not an incitement to violence or religious hatred, or grossly indecent), but that was not what Jack Straw said anyway.  He was making what I consider to be a reasonable point that he would prefer it if people removed their veil when they came to see him in his surgeries.  So,as a British citizen seeking a favour of an elected politician, one should dress in a way that shows respect to the politician and enables one to communicate (and allows the other person to focus) properly on what one wants to say.  The identity one should put foremost is that of a British citizen, not some other identity whether it is religious or professional or anything else.  I'm not saying one has to remove all signs of other identities, but if they dominate, then you have to accept that your message may be impeded and the other person may not react as positively as you would like.

In terms of practicality, there cannot be any doubt that a veil impedes communication.  There were various comments on the radio about how the veiled Ms Azmi and others seemed to communicate perfectly well with a radio audience or with the interviewer, but I heard one instance of such a comment, made to Melanie Phillips, who was in a different studio to the interviewer, on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, and in fact she did misunderstand the interviewer, because some vital body language and the joky glib tone were lost down the wires.

I am going to quote Prof Mehrabian's famous finding that 7% of a message is contained in the actual meaning of the words, 38% in the way the words are said and 55% in other non-verbal signals, but with a caveat.  On double checking this last week during a training session where I used this statistic (the joys of a wireless laptop connection) I found Prof Mehrabian's website where he points out, rather wearily, that his finding only applies in instances where a like or dislike is being communicated.  So if you are simply communicating to someone how to work a microwave oven, you could probably stick a bag over your head and still get your message across. 

Ultimately, if you are in a situation where you are interacting with someone, and you want them to respond to you, and respond to you positively, then surely you will want to do all you can to maximise the way your message is expressed and make your likes and dislikes clear.  Radio and TV communicators are not asking the listener to respond to their message by doing something for them, teachers and people visiting MP's surgeries are.

Roots and wings

'Transcultural manager' is a better term than 'global manager, says Karl Moore, professor* at McGill University, Montreal, in an article for World Business (subscription required).  He argues, and I agree, that a 'global manager' who operates sucessfully across different cultures and has a 'global management style' does not and cannot really exist.  A transcultural manager, however, who is at home in two or more cultures, does exist but is a "living paradox" who has roots and wings; roots in their own home culture but wings that have taken them elsewhere and allowed them to develop a real comfort in one or more different cultures, in effect having multiple selves.

Moore says this idea of multiple selves is not new, and refers to William James**'s1890 Principles of Psychology, in which James suggested that rather than a unified self concept, people have multiple selves that they demonstrate in various situations.  Apparently this view has been expanded by post modern psychologists.

This comes as a relief to me, as I have had feelings of resistance towards all the personality and team building tests that I have taken in my career, including Myers Briggs, TMI, Insight etc.  This started with the graduate trainee test at Unilever ("are you warm hearted or cool headed?") and more recently one which tried to deduce whether I preferred working alone, logically and analytically or was more convivial and spontaneous.  This was impossible to answer, because as a person running a training and consulting business from my own home, there are times when I enjoy working alone, logically and analytically doing the accounts and growling at anyone who interrupts, and when I am at a client's running a training session, I am Ms Conviviality (I hope).  I even had a Myers Briggs tester tell me I must have been lying or mis answering questions to have switched from Extrovert to Introvert over the years, when to me it seemed quite understandable that as a rare high profile non-Japanese woman in a Japanese company I was more extroverted, and then when I ended up running a software development team in a British company full of pushy, aggressive people (the company, not the team), I was more introverted.

*Moore is professor of strategy and leadership at McGill, and yet in today's Financial Times, Henry Mintzberg, professor of strategy at McGill, denounces the teaching of 'leadership'.  Must make for some interesting faculty dinner table discussions.

**Another coincidence - William James is a brother of Henry James, who has been the focus of much of my mother's research into the meaning of clothes in fiction - clothes being one of the ways we express our multiple selves, I would say.

Exclusive schools

A few weeks ago I thought I came up with a radical new policy, that any school which selected its pupils on whatever basis (religion, income, intelligence, gender) should have to prove that they had a substantial programme in place to integrate with whichever group they were excluding (ie not just a once a year boys' school/girls' school disco) or else their state funding or charitable status would be withdrawn. Many private schools already do something along these lines, such as twinning with a struggling state school, because of threats made to their charitable status if they do not do something 'charitable' for the community. Now St Paul's, one of the top London private boys' schools is saying they will admit pupils exclusively on merit, regardless of income. By the way, I find it very British of the head to say that he is looking for a sense of irony in pupils - I can't imagine schools in other countries placing much value on irony.

And last week Alan Johnson announced that the Education and Inspection Bill will be changed to specify that any new faith schools must offer up to a quarter of their places to non-faith children. I wish old faith schools could be targeted somehow too.  I don't understand why the Catholic education service is reacting angrily - surely this is a great opportunity to convert non-Catholics, unless they think going to a Catholic school is more likely to put them off Catholicism.  I went to a Catholic school in Japan at the ages of 7 and 8, and hardly any of the pupils were Catholic, nor was the school particularly academically attractive, but the nuns running the place made it very clear that the school had a Catholic ethos, and we were all taught to pray.  (Check out the archaic sailor uniforms we all had to wear!)

Although the experience did not make me a Catholic, the Japanese rather than Catholic values of the school had a profound influence on me.   The school did not not exclude non-believers or regard non-Catholics as inferior, but I worry that British schools who do exclude non-believers and which preach that one faith is more worthy than another, or that those with no faith are worthless, will affect the values of children in their formative years, brainwashing them into a religious mono-identity and not allow reasoned, rational choice of identities, a fear which Amartya Sen (see quote heading this blog) also has.

Update:  See also David Aaronovitch - also asking why only new faith schools are targetted by the proposals.

Secular Liberal Offence level rises*

The news that Aishah Azmi lost her discrimination case after she refused to remove her veil in the classroom is further evidence that we have reached a tipping point in the way that  British society deals with religious identities.  It will be interesting to see how the case regarding crucifix wearing Nadia Eweida and British Airways is resolved.

I felt the tide was turning a few weeks back following the reaction to the Pope's lecture quoting  from a book recounting a conversation between 14th century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and an educated Persian on the truths of Christianity and Islam.  Many British secular liberals, no big fans of the Pope's pronouncements on other issues such as abortion or homosexuality, were indignant at the apparent inability of many to react in a rational and reasoned way to his comments and rightly derided the "anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant enourages violence" line of argument emanating from people such as Tasnim Aslam, Pakistan's foreign ministry spokeswoman.

The current issue of Prospect has an article arguing that Christianity is strengthening in Europe, partly in response to its increasing Muslim population. My view is that Christian faith is probably not on the rise, but a recognition, conscious or otherwise, that many of our societies' values arise from our Judaeo-Christian traditions and that these, even post Enlightenment, are worth defending.  At the same time, after centuries of massacring each other, most Europeans have come to the view that religion is a private matter and not to be shoved up other people's noses. Most of all, and this is the point of this blog, Europeans no longer see religion as being the foremost definer of a person's identity.

Rather than being a sign of strength, I regard the refusal of Ms Azmi and Ms Eweida to conform to their employers' dress code as a sign of a weakness of personality.  Confident, strong personalities in modern societies are those that can adopt various identities depending on the group that they interacting with or the message that they wish to send out.

When being a teacher, there is a professional duty to dress in a way that enables effective teaching but also sends out a message that teachers are worthy of respect.  Wearing a veil over the mouth hinders teaching of English as a second language, and wearing a veil whenever there is a male teacher in the classroom sends out a message that male teachers cannot be trusted to behave if they see a woman who is showing any flesh or hair.

Similarly,  if you have chosen to work as a customer facing check-in supervisor, working for a company with strong corporate branding like BA, it is surely a given that you should adopt a professional identity that puts the corporate brand foremost, because you are the face of the company.  Putting your identity as a Christian above this gives the customer the message that their needs for a seamless, consistent, recognisable service  is not as important as your needs to express overtly and unfailingly your religious beliefs.

BA allows Sikh turbans and hijab headscarfs, and says this is because it is not practical to put these underneath the uniform.  In other words, the corporate look and message of the BA uniform is not compromised by a turban or a headscarf. 

Freely picking between your various identities is not a sign that you are being bullied into conforming, being denied your human rights or not being true to yourself, it shows that you are mature enough to understand that the expression of each of your identities through clothing and other signals inescapably sends messages to other people, and temporarily subsuming an identity to another one does not negate that identity  but in fact makes you a functioning member of society.

*Hat tip to the late lamented Religious Policeman and his tongue-in-cheek Muslim Offence Level

Plastic identity

Not being a John Lennon or video art fan, I almost wandered off to the kitchen in search of more wine during a piece on last Saturday's The Culture Show on the BBC about South African artist Candice Breitz's video installation at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, but then my attention was caught by something the artist said about being interested in how the language of fandom is an international currency.  As can be seen by this interview with one of the many fans she filmed singing Lennon songs, this definitely counts as a moment when a national cultural identity is subsumed by a common identity as a fan.