Plural Identities

Bernard says bog off Gordon

"Prof Sir Bernard Crick is a former government adviser on citizenship" and likely to remain 'former' once Gordon Brown accedes to the throne, judging by his article in the Financial Times today.

"Mr Brown's disappointing mixture of rhetoric, bad history and perhaps political opportunism"

says Sir Bernard of Gordon Brown's 2005 statement that a definition of Britishness is important in defining a shared purpose across of all our society. 

"This idea of national purpose is what Goethe called 'a blue rose'. The search for it can prove damaging."

He also accuses Gordon Brown of being too English in his definition of Britishness:

"The examples he gives of our long British tradition of civic values are all English. The myth of Magna Carta’s importance is once again disinterred and nary a word on the Declaration of Arbroath. He invokes Milton, Wordsworth, Burke and Orwell as British rather than, it seems to me, typically English voices. Walter Scott and Robert Burns are ignored, though both were Unionists, powerful voices for a dual not a single identity."

Sir Bernard concludes that:

"Perhaps rather than a world role under a pretend world leader, we would be left with ourselves and our partners in Europe.  Is that too bad?  I think not."

At which point one can safely assume Gordon choked on his porridge (with salt of course).

Foreigners or immigrants?

I visited Sao Paulo's Japanese community about 20 years ago.  It's the biggest Japanese origin community outside of Japan, apart from San Francisco.  It started with shiploads of Japanese coming to Brazil under a government arrangement in the first decade or so of the 20th century, to work on sugar and coffee plantations.  The community tended to intermarry, and there is a Japantown, which reminded me of rural Japan when I was first there in the 1970s.

Now many of the third or fourth generation Japanese Brazilians have gone back to Japan, mainly to work in the automotive industry.  This article from the Japan Times is one of many I have read about them, but I am blogging it this time, because the thing that most struck me last time I went to Japan, in November 2006, was how much more 'normal' it had become in Japan to have foreigners living and working there.  One of the Japanese films (Kencho no Hoshi) I saw on Virgin Atlantic on the way home, featured an African guy, someone called Bengal and a Chinese woman working in the lunchbox packing part of a supermarket, and none of the characters made much of a big deal about it.

However, as the article points out, Japanese authorities are pretty clueless and unprepared for what to do now that the immigrant population has reached 15% in some Japanese towns.  Japan has no recent history of integrating immigrant populations apart from that arising from slave labour groups being brought to Japan in WWII from Korea and China, which is hardly the model to be followed now.

Ow!

Handholder

You go out of your way to build bridges with people of different views and beliefs and have quite a few religious friends. You believe in the essential goodness of people , which means you’re always looking for common ground even if that entails compromises. You would defend Salman Rushdie’s right to criticise Islam but you’re sorry he attacked it so viciously, just as you feel uncomfortable with some of the more outspoken and unkind views of religion in the pages of this magazine.

You prefer the inclusive approach of writers like Zadie Smith or the radical Christian values of Edward Said. Don’t fall into the same trap as super–naïve Lib Dem MP Jenny Tonge who declared it was okay for clerics like Yusuf al–Qaradawi to justify their monstrous prejudices as a legitimate interpretation of the Koran: a perfect example of how the will to understand can mean the sacrifice of fundamental principles. Sometimes, you just have to hold out for what you know is right even if it hurts someone’s feelings. What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Multi-faith schools

Sir Cyril Taylor, education adviser to the British government and chairman of the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust proposes in an interview in the Financial Times today that:

Schools dominated by Muslim children should be closed down and replaced with a new breed of "multi-faith" academies in order to forcibly integrate pupils in some of the UK's most troubled towns.

The BBC reports on this and adds, in the interests of balance of course, twice, just in case we did not get the message, that the Department of Education and Skills:

'has rejected such a controversial proposal.

"Any suggestions of closing schools are wide of the mark. However, all schools can and should play a leading role in creating greater community cohesion."'

Lord Adonis said that in such a school pupils would not be selected on the basis of their faith.  We need to hear more detail but I wonder how easy it is going to be to get parents to send their pupils to such a school - assuming that we are not talking about compulsory social engineering here.

 

   

Shining examples

I mentioned in a previous post that there are shining examples of people who were in some way an outsider or 'excluded' at critical points in their lives, but instead of then joining groups trying to destroy society, have achieved great success.  Two profiles from Saturday 13th January's Financial Times caught my eye:

Andrew Adonis, now Lord Adonis, schools minister:

The son of a Greek Cypriot former waiter and postman, he was put into voluntary care by his father after his mother walked out. He lived in a council children's home until he was 11. His lucky break came when the local authority paid for him to go to an Oxfordshire boarding school. It was this experience that sparked his "obsession with education as a life transformer". He subsequently earned a place at Keble College, Oxford, where he read history. After completing a PhD on the British aristocracy of the late 19th century, he spent three years as an Oxford don before joining the Financial Times as a reporter.

Stuart Rose, Marks & Spencer Chief Executive

By his own admission, he was a drifter in his youth. He grew up in Tanzania, where his father worked for the Colonial Office. His mother wanted him to become a doctor but he was not naturally academic. He worked at the BBC for a bit and then landed a place on the M&S trainee programme when he was 23. He says it was his mother Margaret's suicide just a year later that helped focus his mind. "My mother was fiercely ambitious for me and she taught me, if nothing else, one thing: she taught me to value myself and my philosophy."

But his rise to the top was not as linear as Sir Terry's, whose card was marked at a very early age. Mr Rose, who quit M&S just before he hit 40, having decided that he was not going to get into the senior ranks, followed a more haphazard route. He did stints in the Burton Group, Arcadia, Argos and Booker before his homecoming.

"I was never a favoured son of the business," says Mr Rose, looking back on his days under Lord Sieff, chairman from 1972 to 1984. "I was never one of those people. I sat on the edge of the plate. People couldn't decide if I was half-genius or half-mad."

One general point I see links these two - both Adonis and Rose seemed to have gained strength rather than resentment from early experiences of being an outsider which has helped them in later years to weather general disapprobation or rejection or charges of eccentricity or betrayal.  Maybe one could even say that they gained the strength or bloody mindedness to do the things which caused them to attract disapprobation or rejection.

The more specific point I take from the Adonis background, which is one that I have made many times when discussing with people about whether Oxbridge is still deliberately biased towards private school candidates is that often potential state school candidates don't even apply to Oxbridge, because they cannot imagine themselves going there, but often all it takes is one tenuous moment of contact - a visit to an Oxford or Cambridge college and meeting people there, a solitary teacher at the school who went to Oxbridge and believes in you, or, as it would seem in Adonis' case, actually living near Oxford.

Evil

I don't disagree with Norm Geras - nurture cannot be the whole story for some human beings being evil.  I still think it's important to find out what the triggers are that encourage some people to give full rein to their evil impulses.  The Stanley Milgram experiments, where his students were encouraged to give increasingly intense electric shocks to unseen victims, are well known.  I was very struck a few years ago by a summary I read of research that had been done into how ordinary Greek men were turned into military police torturers under the Regime of the Colonels. The researcher Mika Haritos Fatouros also wrote this article about his findings, from which I have taken the following extracts:

"Sensitivity to torture was blunted in several steps. First, the men had to endure it themselves, as if torture were a normal act. The beatings and other torments inflicted on them continued and became worse. Next, the servicemen chosen for the Persecution Section, the unit that tortured political prisoners, were brought into contact with the prisoners by carrying food to their cells. The new men watched veteran soldiers torture prisoners, while they stood guard. Occasionally, the veterans would order them to give the prisoners "some blows.'

At the next step, the men were required to participate in group beatings. Later, they were told to use a variety of torture methods on the prisoners. The final step, the appointment to prison warder or chief torturer, was announced suddenly by the commander-in-chief, leaving the men no time to reflect on their new duties."

I'm pretty sure that in the original summary I read there was also a reference to taking the trainee torturers away from their families, so they could not refer back to them when troubled by what they were asked to do.

I am sometimes asked in my training seminars whether Japanese people are somehow inherently cruel or weird, based on the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in WWII.  My answer is that all it proves, much as the Germans and the Holocaust, is that human beings are all (maybe there are some exceptions) capable of horrible cruelty, given certain circumstances.   The circumstances might include being exposed to warped values or a lack of positive values in one's formative years (see Saddam Hussein's early years), or being excluded from an in-group in some way in later childhood or young adulthood, which is then often followed by being wooed into another, deviant, group. This does not excuse giving into cruel impulses.  There are plenty of people in the latter category who have come through such experiences to be shining examples of good citizenship or success in their chosen careers. We would all (nearly all) want to believe we would be the brave person who would refuse to join in what we believed to be wrong.  We would be in the Resistance. 

A lot of these posts are my attempts to see what practical measures could be taken to minimise the manifestation of the evil sides to human nature, particularly in situations where 'plural identities' are at stake.

Home grown

A difference between the July 7th London bombers and those currently undergoing trial for the bombings on July 21st 2005 is that the former were born in the UK (or moved to the UK as a baby) and the latter were born in Ethiopia, Ghana and Somalia and did not move to the UK (or Italy) until just at the end of their 'formative years', aged 11 or 13 or so, or later.

The July 7 bombers' backgrounds had therefore led to much questioning about how effective integration of second generation immigrants has been.  The backgrounds of the July 21 bombing suspects are less surprising - formative years (meaning the years in which cultural values are absorbed) outside the UK, in particular, in unstable countries such as Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and moving to a new society at a very unsettling point in their lives (after about 11 or 12 years' old, children adapt a lot less quickly to new environments) and, in one case, a period in foster care.

Muktar Said-Ibrahim
Born 1977/8 in Ethiopia/Eritrea and moved to Britain in 1990 aged 13, son of an asylum seeker.

Ramzi Mohammad
Born 1981/2 in Somalia, came to Britain in the mid-1990s.

Yasin Hassan Omar
Born in Somalia in 1980, came to Britain aged 12 in 1992, child of asylum seekers; was in foster care until 18. 

Hussain Osman
Born in 1978, posed as a Somali when he arrived in Britain in 1996 aged 18 but is Ethiopian; Osman is not his real name. Went to Italy first in 1989 aged 11.

Manfo Kwaku Asiedu
born 1973/74, may be Ghanaian. His real name is thought to be Bukhari. Came to UK 2003 aged 30 or so.

Adel Yahya
Born 1979? in Ethiopia.  Studied at London Metropolitan University; Lived in Yemen before came to UK

It may be a slum but at least it's our slum

So David Aaronovitch sees Libby Purves' "splendid polemic", largely inspired by public transport misery, as being part of the Great National Whinge, and feels that on balance his quality of life has improved.  I certainly think, compared to say, 20 or 30 years' ago, many factors that affect quality of life in the UK have improved.  However, the seminar I facilitated yesterday, for a group of Japanese expatriates and a couple of Japanese 'immigrants' (married to Brits and settled in the UK), reinforced how some fundamental attitudes in the UK are as bad if not worse than before.

When I asked them to come up with "what they had found positive so far in working and living in the UK", many participants could not think of one nice thing to say.  When I asked for the challenges, half an hour of passionate discussion followed, and the resulting list was: "dirty, especially people dropping litter, and common areas being particularly filthy, bad food, appalling customer service in the sense that any problems are viewed as the customer's fault and that if the customer complains, it will only get worse, and that the only way to complain effectively is to be adversarial, the class system is still so strong, everything seems to be broken, selfish driving, people won't accept responsibility, they pass the buck, tradition seems to be more important than change in order to improve convenience, British might be creative and innovative but they are not good at implementing or maintaining innovations."   One participant started to say "I thought I was coming to one of the most advanced nations in the world but after a year or so here I almost look at the UK as a Third World country, although I suppose I should not say that..."

Well it was a rainy, dark day in the middle of January on an industrial estate in the outskirts of Birmingham, so I tried to cheer them up with thoughts of how lovely England is in the spring, and how they should travel to Cornwall, the Lake District etc and try the food in Brighton (third best city to eat out in the country!), and how 20-30 years ago the food was even worse and we had strikes all the time, and high unemployment, and runaway inflation  but I knew exactly what they meant. 

The root of it in my view is a widespread unwillingness to take collective responsibility, and this is not limited, as Libby Purves suggests it is, to the services and authorities that we pay for with our taxes.  If it is not directly that individual's fault', a British person will refuse to say sorry - like the instance where not one person from the baggage handling supervisor to the 'customer service' agent said sorry for my missing suitcase, presumably because nobody in the service supply chain, apart from the actual person that failed to transfer my suitcase from one plane to another, was seen as  'responsible', particularly as they all worked for different companies, and even then, I was told that it was somehow my fault, because my incoming plane had been late, so there was not enough time to transfer the  suitcase.

As for dropping litter, this is also part of the same attitude - no sense of responsibility for the greater good, and (I was actually told this when I once tried to stop someone from littering) "it's someone's job to clear it up".  Well I suppose I am sounding like any middle aged, middle class disgusted person now, with a touch of Blairite "rights without responsibilities"- because that is also the strange thing that my Japanese participants forced me to point out, which is that many people in Britain feel similar disgust, but we don't try to do anything about it.  Because complaining will only make things worse and nothing ever gets better whatever you do?  Because it is all tied into our class system, and the middle class feel embarrassed and guilty about complaining and the working class have lost their pride in a job well done, or had that pride taken away from them?

It sounded from listening to this lunchtime's interview on Radio 4 with Treasury Minister Ed Balls, with his emphasis on cultural initiatives for combatting extremism, as if he had read the New Yorker article I blogged about yesterday.  The implication being that one can expect more of this kind of approach if Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister.

Learning by doing

A classic cross-cultural clash story which fellow intercultural communications trainers will be mentally filing for use in future seminars:  Half Spanish, half British, rather posh Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, history professor at Tufts University, Massachussetts, USA, jay walked in Atlanta, Georgia in order to get from one part of a conference to another and ended up being wrestled to the ground by a cop and arrested.

First up we have the Universalist versus Particularist cultural difference.  Universalist cultures (there is a rule and it applies to everyone, everywhere, every time, regardless) are the USA, Germany, Switzerland (you'll see in the comments at the end of the BBC story linked to above that reactions to jay walking in Germany and Switzerland are discussed).  This incident shows clearly that the UK is more particularist (there may be a rule, and whether it is obeyed depends on the situation and the people involved).  The most extreme particularist culture I have ever come across in terms of crossing the road is Indonesia, specifically Jakarta, where if you want to cross the road, you just start walking, and hope the cars stop.

The story even connects into the phenomenon of universalist, dictatorial regimes trying to impose on normally particularist cultures - for example China (including Hong Kong) and Spain under Franco. Prof Fernandez-Armesto is old enough to remember life under Franco, and indeed referred to how nobody dared cross the road except at the designated crossing under Franco in his interview on the BBC Radio 4 this morning.  I wonder whether this doesn't intensify his desire to disobey the rules when he deems it appropriate.  Having lived under oppression, you wish to express your freedom of choice whenever you can.  Certainly people in South Korea and former communist Eastern European countries are usually particularist, with a strong mistrust of authority such as courts and policemen, and would lie on behalf of family and friends if necessary.  This is in flux now in Eastern Europe - a mix of fear of breaking the law as a hangover from communism, a wish to show individual freedom and now an increasing respect for authority under a more democratic administration (although the latter of course depends on which country we're talking about).  Again, there are some interesting stories in the comments on the BBC link above on this.

Then there is the class issue.  Prof Fernandez-Armesto mentioned in his interview on the radio this morning that he did not take any notice of the cop telling him not to cross the road, because he was wearing a bomber jacket over his uniform which looked 'raffish', with 'arrogance' and 'menace'.  So when the policeman asked him to identify himself, Fernandez-Armesto asked him to identify himself first.  At which point the policeman kicked his legs out from under him.  Further lessons in class difference followed when Fernandez-Armesto spent 8 hours in a cell, befriending Atlanta's underclass.

He freely admits he learnt a lot about cultural differences from this incident.  Perhaps undergoing a pre or post expatriation training course from my professional colleagues would have been a less painful way of achieving the same end.