tag:theconversation.com,2011:/africa/topics/modernity-13175/articles
Modernity – The Conversation
2023-09-26T21:31:39Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/209775
2023-09-26T21:31:39Z
2023-09-26T21:31:39Z
Reclaiming Dada women’s art history shouldn’t mean amplifying orientalism and sexism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549129/original/file-20230919-23-on9z6n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C59%2C4256%2C2740&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">1920s Dada artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was known as 'the Living Dada.' </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_von_Freytag-Loringhoven#/media/File:Baroness_Von_Freytag_-_Loringhoven_LCCN2014714092.jpg">(Library of Congress)</a></span></figcaption></figure><iframe style="width: 100%; height: 100px; border: none; position: relative; z-index: 1;" allowtransparency="" allow="clipboard-read; clipboard-write" src="https://narrations.ad-auris.com/widget/the-conversation-canada/reclaiming-dada-womens-art-history-shouldnt-mean-amplifying-orientalism-and-sexism" width="100%" height="400"></iframe>
<p>Digital archives have become powerful platforms for <a href="https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.27">women artists who were excluded from official art history</a>, allowing them to claim their rightful place posthumously. </p>
<p>This is evident in dedicated digital projects for early-to-mid 20th century avant-gardists <a href="https://mina-loy.com">like artist, writer and entrepreneur Mina Loy</a>, antiwar activist and cabaret artist <a href="https://www.perfectduluthday.com/2022/06/11/avant-garde-women-emmy-hennings-shining-star-of-the-voltaire">Emmy Hennings</a> or Dada <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/655737/body-sweats-by-elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven-edited-by-irene-gammel-and-suzanne-zelazo/9780262529754">artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven</a>. The latter was better known as the Baroness or Baroness Elsa following her 1913 New York City Hall marriage to an impoverished German baron who was then residing in the United States. The Baroness has been the subject of my research. </p>
<p>However, amid the legitimate excitement of bringing overlooked female artists into the foreground through archival work, there are problems <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1357009">when digital copies of archives proliferate</a> and aren’t critically contextualized. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1697326620573335572"}"></div></p>
<h2>‘The Living Dada’</h2>
<p>Dada, an anti-bourgeois art movement <a href="https://magazine.artland.com/what-is-dadaism/">that emerged during the First World War</a>, challenged western institutions of art through its rabble-rousing manifestos, collages and performances. </p>
<p>Among Dada’s controversial, albeit less well-known practitioners, was Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927), a German emigree poet and performer. She was known as the “living Dada” in New York. </p>
<p>My research has documented Baroness Elsa’s value as <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262572156/baroness-elsa">an early feminist performance artist</a> who made bold statements through her attire. She drew on the irrational to express the trauma of the era, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262600668/irrational-modernism">as art historian Amelia Jones chronicles</a>. Writer Caroline Knighton has <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/modernist-wastes-9781350129047">examined how Baroness Elsa used waste products in art</a> to subversively link art to <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-subversive-artists-made-thrift-shopping-cool-82362">thrift culture</a>. </p>
<p>The University of Maryland’s online accessibility to <a href="https://archives.lib.umd.edu/repositories/2/resources/22">Freytag-Loringhoven’s manuscripts and papers</a> has played a pivotal role in restoring the artist’s rightful place in history. </p>
<p>Using <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/304923596?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true">digital methods, literature scholar Tanya Clement</a> has explored Freytag-Loringhoven’s experimental poetry through the lens of “textual performance.” </p>
<h2>Unverified images</h2>
<p>As the Baronness’s profile has been raised through research, so have less authoritative depictions of her work. A photograph lacking proper attribution and sourcing is presented on various websites as Freytag-Loringhoven. A reverse image search reveals the photo to be <a href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-f43d-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99">from a Russian theatre performance of the play <em>The Blue Bird</em></a> (1884-1940). Other research confirms the photo actually shows Russian actress Maria Germanova. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1613971114744745984"}"></div></p>
<p>This image also points to a deeper interplay between the Baroness and the West’s <em>fin-de-siecle</em> fascination <a href="https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-H014-1">with orientalism</a>, a harmful cultural practice originating in the west in a context of imperial domination that conceptualizes the East in alluringly exotic and sensualist terms. </p>
<p>Seeing this image asks us to question how the Baroness was conceptualized and stereotyped within orientalist terms during her era, her relationship to this lens and how these issues manifest in current depictions of her. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"535076785818304512"}"></div></p>
<h2>Orientalist, sexist 1915 descriptors</h2>
<p>In 1915, the <em>New York Times’</em> Dec. 5 issue introduced the Baroness’s artmaking in orientalist terms. Her Polish descent, the article asserts, “accounts for a certain Oriental strain in her appearance and temperament.” The Baroness is described as being “lithe in figure, and as graceful as a leopard.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=809&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549175/original/file-20230919-23-4fk5c3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1016&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Costume for a 19th century performance of ‘Semiramide.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiramide#/media/File:Rossini_-_Semiramide_-_Paris_1825_-_Hippolyte_Lecomte_-_Semiramis_1er_Costume_(Mdme_Fodor)_(cropped).jpg">Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Bibliothèque-musée de l'opéra, D216-19 (fol. 58).</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The story said she was modelling for a painting depicting “Semiramide, the turbulent queen of the East of Yore.” This refers to <a href="https://www.metopera.org/user-information/synopses-archive/semiramide">Gioachino Rossini’s eponymous opera</a> which the Metropolitan Opera in New York performed in 1892, 1894, and 1895, popularizing orientalism. I have not been able to locate this painting.</p>
<p>In the story, the Baroness explains she has worked until 3 a.m. that night to finish a new dress to wear to pose for a drawing class. She relays she has applied to the German consulate for support because her husband is a prisoner of war. The story is headlined: “Refugee baroness poses as a model.” </p>
<p>In amplifying an orientalist framing and sexually objectifying the Baroness, the news story suggests an eroticized narrative of her social downfall instead of amplifying her artistic vision and competence to earn a living as an artist. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/no-woman-could-paint-the-story-of-art-without-men-corrects-nearly-600-years-of-male-focused-art-criticism-184458">'No woman could paint': The Story of Art Without Men corrects nearly 600 years of male-focused art criticism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The story also grapples with understanding her avant-gardism, saying “Perhaps some might call her bizarre in attire.” Her garments are seen in several December 1915 photographs. One depicts a see-through silk cape. Another shows her posing with a <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nyc-fireboat-rebranded-vibrant-dazzle-camouflage-commemorate-wwi-180969683">geometric pattern evocative of the “dazzle” camouflage on war ships</a>. </p>
<p>Both images present her boundary-breaking avant-garde poses and design aesthetics. Her bold stare at the camera is unconventional for a woman of that era, though this is mainstream today. Avant-garde aesthetics have been routinely appropriated into the mainstream. </p>
<p>According to art historian Francis M. Naumann’s book <em><a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/New_York_Dada_1915_23.html?id=SF5QAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">New York Dada</a></em>, the year 1915 marked the beginning of the Dada movement in New York. </p>
<p>As Amy Malek warns in her 2021 study “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877920957348">Clickbait Orientalism and Vintage Iranian Snapshots</a>,” “latent orientalist ideologies continue to circulate,” even as their manifest forms change over time. Images that trade on “gendered orientalist tropes” attract attention and revenue. </p>
<h2>Complicated relationship to orientalism</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A photograph of a woman in profile view with hand lettering underneath." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1066&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538133/original/file-20230718-17584-jq63gx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1340&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baroness Elsa seen in a photograph decorated by her with stylized lettering, which appeared in ‘The Little Review,’ vol. 7, no. 3, September-December 1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_von_Freytag-Loringhoven#/media/File:Baroness_Elsa_von_Freytag-Loringhoven.png">(Modernist Journals Project)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Baroness had a complicated relationship to orientalism. She was part of contemporary art movements that mobilized and were affected by this cultural lens, and she included references to the sphinx and Buddha in her poetry published in <em>The Little Review</em> which represent orientalist tropes. </p>
<p>Simultaneously, in her <a href="https://archives.lib.umd.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/11123">autobiographical writings</a>, she ridiculed these same male artists for stereotyping women as hetaeras, ancient Greek prostitutes who were also intellectual companions. She was quick to point out appropriations as artistic fetishes. </p>
<p>In her poem “<a href="https://digital.lib.umd.edu/resultsnew/id/umd:59516">Arabesque</a>,” a Dadaist stream of words breaks their conventional meanings, as in the lines “upon honeysuckle fists/ arabesque grotesque/ basks […]/ beetle.” Arabesque refers to <a href="https://theconversation.com/contemporary-muslim-artists-continue-to-adapt-islamic-patterns-to-challenge-ideas-about-fixed-culture-176656">floral or biomorphic decoration appropriated from Islamic ornamentation in western arts</a>. </p>
<p>This rendering may be interpreted as disrupting or mocking <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/orie/hd_orie.htm">popular orientalist fads</a> in the west, in lieu of uncritically reproducing them. </p>
<h2>Images shape identity, perception</h2>
<p>Images have the power to shape our identity and perception. A diligent effort should be made to accurately source and responsibly contextualize images. It is also crucial to refrain from framing digital objects in manners that reinforce the allure of orientalism. </p>
<p>Custodians of archival websites must take responsibility in engaging in critical inquiry about the societal and ethical impact of images they post. </p>
<p>By doing so, we can ensure the ethics of digitization related to documenting feminist histories are robust. And, by critically challenging orientalist images and ideologies, we help ensure a renewed appreciation and understanding of the true significance of the Baroness.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209775/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Irene Gammel receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
Digital archives can have an important part in creating more inclusive art histories, but paying attention to ethical research practices when sharing and circulating resources is critical.
Irene Gammel, Professor & Director, Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre and Gallery, Toronto Metropolitan University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/194383
2023-01-04T11:59:35Z
2023-01-04T11:59:35Z
Noise pollution: how the sounds of the city were redefined as ‘urban music’ in 1920s Japan
<p>Cash machines, elevators and escalators that talk. Jingles in department stores, train stations, supermarkets and shopping arcades. Loud speaker warnings about the dangers of riding on the bus or train, overlayed by sirens, car horns, traffic and pedestrians. “For a culture that places a high value on quiet,” US journalist Daniel Krieger <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/10/10/lifestyle/making-noise-keeping-decibels/">once wrote</a>, “Japan can get pretty noisy sometimes.” </p>
<p>Japanese anti-noise campaigner Yoshimichi Nakajima talks about people being <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2014/10/10/lifestyle/making-noise-keeping-decibels/">“pickled in noise”</a>. He argues that at the core of his nation’s relationship with noise pollution lies passivity and ignorance. People in Japan pay no mind to the noise, he says – they barely notice it. </p>
<p>If <a href="https://theconversation.com/our-centuries-long-quest-for-a-quiet-place-94614">noise pollution</a> is a contemporary problem, however, quite how to measure, control and even define it has long been a subject of debate in Japan. My <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003143772-8/hell-modern-sound-martyn-david-smith">research shows</a> that this was particularly evident in debates over the language used to discuss the urban soundscape in the 1920s and 1930s.</p>
<h2>A changing soundscape</h2>
<p>From the 1860s, as the Japanese government imported technologies from the west to create a modern nation-state, life in Japanese cities was rapidly mechanised, shaped by transportation and industry. This process transformed the <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9223413/">soundscape</a> – or aural environment – too. </p>
<p>In September 1902, one “Mr A Victim” wrote to the Japan Times to complain about the excessive amount of steamboat whistling and factory bells on and around the Sumida river in Tokyo. Noise caused by civil engineering projects increasingly impinged on everyday life, as city planners rethought the major cities, laying concrete foundations, building subways and dreaming up modern cityscapes.</p>
<p>On city streets, rickshaws, wagons drawn by horses and oxen, pull carts and pedestrians were increasingly competing with bicycles, trams, trains, cars and motorbikes. In Osaka – which, by the 1920s was the sixth largest metropolis in the world – the number of cars, trucks and motorbikes exploded from 39 in 1915 to 6,886 in 1935. </p>
<p>Media commentators were quick to denounce the resulting racket. The February 2 1929 edition of the Osaka Asahi newspaper described it as “a hell of modern sound” that had given birth to “the scream of civilisation sickness”. And the October 9 1931 edition of the Osaka Mainichi labelled the city’s noise “the barbarism of civilisation”.</p>
<p>Scholars took a more nuanced view. In journals such as Urban Problems, engineers, architects and acousticians discussed the pressing need for an agreed definition of urban noise if the problem was to be solved. </p>
<h2>Defining urban noise</h2>
<p>The Japanese writing system uses phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) and Chinese characters (kanji). While different Chinese characters can often have the same pronunciation, their implication can differ significantly. For example, the kanji used for “sound waves” is 音響, pronounced <em>onkyou</em>; it is a compound made up of 音 (<em>on</em>, “sound”) and 響 (<em>kyou</em>, “echo or reverberation”). </p>
<p>In early 20th-century discussion of the noise problem in the mainstream media, the compounds 騒音 and 噪音, both pronounced <em>souon</em>, were used interchangeably to imply “noise”. </p>
<p>For scholars, however, the problem in coming to an agreed definition of urban noise was that those two compounds inferred slightly different things. For physicists, 噪音 designates complicated sound waves that rarely repeat and can change in volume and timing. It is thus used to distinguish unappealing, unwanted sound and aural interference from melodious sound waves that are relatively constant in volume and timing – from music, in other words, or in Japanese, 音楽, pronounced <em>ongaku</em>. </p>
<p>But as physicist Kohata Shigekazu pointed out in Urban Problems in September 1930, this usage effectively cast as undesirable “noise” many common auditory aspects of daily urban life and the natural world. By virtue of their diverse, constantly changing frequencies, all manner of organic, random sounds could be termed 噪音: those of the wind and the water, footsteps, or the sounds of people milling about. </p>
<p>In an attempt to solve this dilemma, architect Satou Takeo proposed in the same journal that the first <em>souon</em> kanji – 騒音 – be used to refer to any noise that had an unpleasant effect on daily life. His reasoning was that the first character of this compound – 騒, <em>sou</em> – implies “boisterous or turbulent”: taken as a whole, the compound literally means “turbulent sound”. Today 騒音 does indeed refer to noise which obstructs peace and quiet, interferes with the transmission of organised sound such as music or conversation, or damages hearing or health.</p>
<p>These scholarly debates continued, drawing in more and more experts. In 1933, architect Kinichi Hirose hoped to settle the matter by proposing <em>kensouon</em> (喧噪音), which added the symbol for “boisterous, noisy, brawling” (喧, <em>yakamashii</em>) to that first compound. Hirose’s point was that the problem of sound pollution was the sonic environment birthed by modern machinery: the discordant sounds of transport, civil engineering and construction techniques. This was “city noise” (都市喧噪音, <em>toshi kensouon</em>). </p>
<p>By contrast, those sounds that Hirose saw as integral to the aesthetic appeal of city life – footsteps, singing, radios blaring and tradespeople shouting in the street – should be understood as “city music” (都市音楽, <em>toshi ongaku</em>). </p>
<h2>A global debate</h2>
<p>Similar debates were underway across the newly industrialised world. Historian James G Mansell <a href="https://academic.oup.com/illinois-scholarship-online/book/23567">has shown</a> how in the UK, people in the early 20th century deemed theirs to be the “age of noise”. In this context, class-based prejudices came to inform the definition of urban noise. Itinerant buskers and pedlars were targeted. </p>
<p>In the US, as historian Raymond Smilor <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40641255?searchText=Raymond+Smilor&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DRaymond%2BSmilor&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A30ab7046e8032ef3b5e80ef58a47e820&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">recounts</a> in a 1977 article entitled Cacophony at 34th and 6th, people from across all social classes banded together in anti-noise campaigning because, as he put it, “noise was a problem that affected everyone intimately”. </p>
<p>People weren’t just advocating for quiet, Smilor wrote. They were grappling with the complexities and uncertainties of what he termed an entirely “new and bewildering society”. </p>
<p>This, in turn, led to <a href="http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/%7Emma/teaching/MS115/readings/thompson.pdf">a new economy</a>. As acousticians developed soundproofing, the modern science of acoustics was posited as being able to provide solutions to the noise problem. </p>
<p>Even if this proved ultimately futile – cities only got louder – a similar rush to eradicate noise by experts, scientists, conglomerates, merchants and the state itself can be traced in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s. For some, though, cities were not cacophonous. They gave birth to music of a new kind: an urban symphony.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194383/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martyn Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In the early decades of the 20th century, people grappled with the sounds modernity wrought. Some heard only noise. Others found great beauty.
Martyn Smith, Lecturer in Japanese Studies, University of Sheffield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/152946
2021-01-11T21:33:57Z
2021-01-11T21:33:57Z
Netflix’s ‘Bridgerton’: A romanticized portrayal of Britain at the dawn of modernity
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378050/original/file-20210111-15-1ru4syy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C26%2C2000%2C1089&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Bridgerton' tells the story of the courtship and marriage of Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">( Liam Daniel/Netflix)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Bridgerton</em>, Netflix’s new eight-part period drama miniseries, launched on Christmas day, has already achieved the <a href="https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/bridgerton-netflix-viewership-1234878404">No. 1 spot overall in more than 75 countries</a>.</p>
<p>The show is inspired by the romance novel series by American author <a href="https://juliaquinn.com/">Julia Quinn</a> set in early 19th-century England. In the hands of executive producer <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/dbloom/2021/01/05/netflix-has-another-hit-in-shonda-rhimes-smashing-bridgerton-debut/?sh=34a422ff5cc9">Shonda Rhimes</a>, the showrunner behind the blockbuster TV series <em>Grey’s Anatomy</em>, and <a href="https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/a34860495/bridgerton-showrunner-chris-van-dusen/">collaborator and creator Chris van Dusen</a>, <em>Bridgerton</em> pushes the envelope in <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/netflix-s-bridgerton-shonda-rhimes-reinvents-how-present-race-period-ncna1251989">depictions of race</a>, <a href="https://metro.co.uk/2020/12/23/bridgerton-netflix-cast-empowering-sex-scenes-13740922/">gender</a> and <a href="https://www.insider.com/bridgerton-rape-scene-criticism-julia-quinn-2020-12">questions of power and sexual consent</a>.</p>
<p>The series tells the story of the courtship and marriage of Daphne Bridgerton and Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings, and the impact of their relationship on the family, friends, gossipmongers and well-wishers that swirl around them. </p>
<p>Black actors appear in leading roles in Rhimes’s <em>Bridgerton</em>, including <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm2074546/">Regé-Jean Page</a> as the Duke of Hastings, and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0742929/">Golda Rosheuvel</a> as the Queen of England.</p>
<p>The show has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/12/27/bridgerton-queen-charlotte-black-royals">ignited discussion about British Royals’ possible African ancestry</a>, and at the same time, the plotlines ignore or obscure the evils of colonialism, poverty and racism. All of these were rife in this historical time period, and continue to blight our own era, as I chronicle in my book, <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Regency-Years/"><em>The Regency Years, During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern</em></a>.</p>
<p>The result is that <em>Bridgerton</em> is an escapist and deeply seductive fantasy (<a href="https://www.refinery29.com/en-ca/2020/12/10244470/bridgerton-review-blackness-representation">some Black commentators suggest one that particularly white people will love</a>) of a society that combines elegance and passion with racial equality. This is the case even while the show with its <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/inclusive-casting">inclusive approach to casting suggests new ways to challenge Eurocentric stories or who accesses the resources</a> and markets associated with them.</p>
<p>The series doesn’t tell us a great deal about what life was really like in England in 1813, the year the series is set, but is rather a fairy-tale that on some levels challenges perceptions of race, gender and sexuality. <em>Bridgerton</em> is part frothy romance, part call to action.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/sIsKen3y-mU?wmode=transparent&start=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Bridgerton’ trailer.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Intense historical period</h2>
<p><em>Bridgerton</em> is set in 1813, thus placing it in the historical epoch known as the Regency, which extends from February 1811 to January 1820. It is perhaps the most extraordinary decade in all of British history, and it marks the dawn of the modern world.</p>
<p>The term “Regency” often calls to mind a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/Regency-style">certain style of British furniture, art, architecture and fashion</a>. But Regency is originally a <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/regent">political term</a> used to describe when a person was appointed to administer the affairs of the country during the minority, absence or incapacity of the sovereign. There have been scores of regencies in monarchies globally. England has had more than a dozen. </p>
<p>Its most famous Regency, though, and the <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/bridgerton-recap-season-1-episode-4-an-affair-of-honor.html">backdrop for <em>Bridgerton</em>, began when madness had finally cast King George III</a> into darkness, clearing the way for the Regency of his dissolute eldest son, George, Prince of Wales, who ruled Britain as Prince Regent until George III died and the Regent became King George IV.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="A solidier." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378100/original/file-20210111-17-kbbtor.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Posthumous portrait of Maj. Gen. Sir Isaac Brock, by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster, c. 1883. Brock died defending Niagara at Queenston Heights on Oct. 13, 1812, in a key battle of the War of 1812 that defended British interests in current-day Canada.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Wikimedia Commons)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For England, this era witnessed major events such as the <a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/war-of-1812">War of 1812</a>, the <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/The-Luddites/">Luddite Riots</a> and the <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Peterloo-Massacre/">Peterloo Massacre</a>, during which 11 people were killed in a Manchester demonstration where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/16/the-peterloo-massacre-what-was-it-and-what-did-it-mean#:%7E:text=Why%20is%20Peterloo%20important%3F,of%20the%20north%20of%20England.">protesters demanded political reform and the right to vote</a>.</p>
<p>Most decisively, there was the British and allied victory over Napoleon at the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/battle-of-waterloo">Battle of Waterloo in June 1815</a>.</p>
<p>It was also a time of artistic and literary flourishing: Jane Austen published all six of her novels of courtship and romance in the Regency, including <a href="https://www.ool.co.uk/blog/29th-january-1813-publication-pride-prejudice/#:%7E:text=Jane%20Austen's%20most%20well%20known,on%20the%2029th%20January%201813"><em>Pride and Prejudice</em>, which appeared in 1813</a>.</p>
<p>In its dreams of freedom, its embrace of consumerism and <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/621777/summary">celebrity culture</a>, its <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/abs/petitioners-and-rebels-petitioning-for-parliamentary-reform-in-regency-england/ADA610BC6EA4CED1132AE8F0D5EA1647">mass protests in support of social justice</a> and its complex response to the burgeoning pace of <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/story-of-england/georgians/">scientific and technological advance</a>, the Regency signals both a decisive break from the past and the onset of the desiring, democratic, commercial, secular, opportunistic society that is for the first time recognizably our own.</p>
<h2>Fatal pastimes and conquests</h2>
<p>Much of the plot of <em>Bridgerton</em> is indebted to the preoccupations, pressures and privileges of Regency aristocratic society. </p>
<p>Duels were common and sometimes deadly. People from across the social classes flocked to the theatre. There was a fixation with <a href="https://lithub.com/tight-breeches-and-loose-gowns-going-deep-on-the-fashion-of-jane-austen/">dress and appearance</a>. <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/crockfords-club-how-a-fishmonger-built-a-gambling-hall-and-bankrupted-the-british-aristocracy-148268691/">Gambling was a mania</a>.
Sports played a leading role in the lives of many women and men. </p>
<p>In <em>Bridgerton</em>, the Duke of Hastings spars frequently with Will Mondrich, a Black boxer and confidante of the Duke’s, who is perhaps modelled on <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/molyneux-thomas-1784-1818/">Thomas Molyneaux</a>, a freed black slave from America, and a formidable Regency prizefighter.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Portait of a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=831&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/378055/original/file-20210111-15-kfht3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1044&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Wedderburn, author of ‘The Horrors of Slavery.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Wikimedia Commons)</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bigotry was deeply ingrained in the Regency, and fuelled the violence and colonial greed of Britain’s so-called “civilizing mission” across the globe. </p>
<p>In 1807, Britain declared the slave trade illegal, and during the Regency abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson worked tirelessly to ensure that every effort was made to enforce the new legislation, and that support grew for the abolition of slavery itself, which <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Abolition-Of-Slavery/">finally became law in 1833</a>.</p>
<p>The most important Black writer of the Regency was Jamaican-born <a href="https://100greatblackbritons.com/bios/robert_wedderman.html">Robert Wedderburn</a>, the <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146643591">illegitimate son of Rosanna, an African-born slave, and James Wedderburn</a>. </p>
<p>In the midst of government crackdowns on the impoverished and disenfranchised, Wedderburn declared in 1817 that “<a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=ZlgdBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA20&dq=%22making+no+difference+for+colour+or+character%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFy-32n5LuAhUJh-AKHV8NCVAQ6AEwAnoECAMQAg#v=onepage&q=%22making%20no%20difference%20for%20colour%20or%20character%22&f=false0">The earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character</a>.” </p>
<h2>Rakery, non-consensual sex</h2>
<p>Sexuality was frequently on display in the Regency. The period marked the brazen culmination of the <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/City_of_Laughter.html?id=KgaoPwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">18th-century tradition of libertinism</a>, and was the last great huzzah for <a href="https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/rake">rakes — men who had sexual relationships with a lot of women</a> — before the sobering and much stricter mores of the Victorian era. </p>
<p><em>Bridgerton</em> frames sexual conflict in ways that reflect the immense pressure on aristocratic women <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5959533.html">to remain chaste</a>, a burden brought clearly into view in the Regency era thanks in large part to authors like Austen and <a href="https://www.biography.com/writer/mary-shelley">Mary Shelley</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.oprahmag.com/entertainment/tv-movies/a35090027/bridgertons-controversial-sex-scene-episode-6/"><em>Bridgerton’s</em> most controversial scene</a> evokes highly contemporary questions. Daphne and her new husband, the Duke of Hastings, engage in non-consensual sex, with Daphne as the aggressor.</p>
<p>Before their marriage, the Duke has told Daphne he cannot have children. She soon learns that he can, but just will not. Determined to become pregnant, she retaliates. In the book, the Duke is drunk during sex, in the Netflix series he is not. </p>
<p>Neither the novel nor the film addresses the implications of Daphne’s actions directly. But the issue of consent is foregrounded in both instances.</p>
<p>Canadian writer Sharon Bala notes that “<a href="https://www.macleans.ca/culture/bridgertons-real-scandal">by rendering a more nuanced version of events than pop culture usually offers, <em>Bridgerton</em> forces an important conversation about the grey zone</a> in which so many real-life encounters exists.” </p>
<p>At a time when Meghan Markle has been driven to California after being bombarded in 2019 <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/harry-and-meghan-quit-social-media-w5qrlsck7">with 5,000 racist and abusive tweets in two months</a>, and the fallout from #MeToo disclosures and prosecutions still preoccupies our society, <em>Bridgerton</em> raises pointed questions about who we want to be now.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/152946/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. </span></em></p>
‘Bridgerton’ alludes to and obscures social, racial and political tensions in England’s Regency era, the extraordinary decade that marks the dawn of the modern world.
Robert Morrison, British Academy Global Professor, Queen's University, Ontario
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/128495
2019-12-18T23:03:38Z
2019-12-18T23:03:38Z
Holiday windows: The allure of showing and hiding makes us look
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307287/original/file-20191216-124009-cb9uwt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=140%2C152%2C3589%2C1955&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The seductive power of holiday windows resonates in the French term for window-shopping: 'lèche-vitrines,' which translated literally means to lick the windows. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The end of the year is often relished as a time for slowing down: for replaying memories, watching snowflakes dance in the glow of streetlights and lingering just a little longer around the dinner table. At the same time, it’s a period of rushing: deadlines, parties, travel and perhaps a foray to the shopping mall, a department store or a busy high street.</p>
<p>These polar experiences shine a unique light on the shop window.</p>
<p>During the holiday season, the commercial window displays that otherwise blend into the backdrop of the urban consumer landscape are foregrounded as indispensable features of the festive period. The holiday window is laden with nostalgia and associations of childhood traditions and a longing for drawn-out moments. </p>
<p>Yet the window is simultaneously a vehicle for consumerist and capitalist desires, grounded in 19th-century material innovations, and political, economic and consumer trends — designed to seduce and to sell. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=416&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307213/original/file-20191216-124009-qjiv1p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=523&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christmas shoppers, window shopping in New York.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Bain News Service, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Behind privacy screens</h2>
<p>Visual merchandising, or as it was previously called, window-dressing, is the task of designing and arranging displays of merchandise. </p>
<p>The world of fashion display captures seemingly incompatible experiences of time — anchored by the allure of showing and hiding.</p>
<p>What distinguishes “fashion” from the neutral “clothing” or “dress” is the extraordinary pace at which it evolves. Fashion is fleeting. <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/adorned-in-dreams-9781860649219">Fashion is change</a>. The <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/tigersprung">modern fashion system</a> is premised on the rapid rate at which new styles are outmoded and replaced, resulting in problematic and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/jun/23/five-ways-fashion-damages-the-planet">planet-damaging practices</a> of fashion production, transportation and marketing.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fast-fashion-lies-will-they-really-change-their-ways-in-a-climate-crisis-121033">Fast fashion lies: Will they really change their ways in a climate crisis?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Fashion’s ephemerality is supported by its presentation and display. Merchandising often happens overnight when stores are closed. The all-important shop window display is installed behind privacy screens. When the screens are removed and the completed scene appears suddenly, as if by magic. The mythology of consumerism is tethered to the invisibility of labour.</p>
<h2>Timeless permanence</h2>
<p>Window displays typically come and go as quickly and unceremoniously as fashion trends. Grand department stores, however, <a href="https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/4-10-november-2019/christmas-window-2019/">host special events around the “unveiling” of their holiday windows</a>. </p>
<p>For nearly 60 years, Ogilvy’s department store in Montréal was a rare exception to the tendency of ushering in new windows each holiday season. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/B6CcDRyJK9n","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Starting in 1947, Ogilvy displayed one of two holiday scenes annually. The “Enchanted Forest” and “Mill in the Forest,” both designed by a German toy company, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/ogilvy-moves-iconic-christmas-windows-to-mccord-museum-1.4587173">were donated by Holt Renfrew Ogilvy to the McCord Museum in 2018</a>. </p>
<p>For the past two years the <a href="https://www.musee-mccord.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/enchanted-worlds/">McCord Museum has exhibited one of the window displays</a> in a freestanding outdoor showcase. The other is on view inside the museum. That a public history museum acquired window displays suggests that commercial windows are more than temporary marketing tools. The museum archive symbolizes a timeless permanence not often associated with such commercial endeavours. </p>
<h2>Absence of price tags, labour</h2>
<p>Innovations in engineering in the second half of the nineteenth century produced two materials key to the retail window and other commercial systems of European modernity: cast iron and plate glass.</p>
<p>The Crystal Palace, the central pavilion of London’s Great Exhibition (1851), was built entirely of cast iron and plate glass. Inside, consumer commodities were displayed amongst a cornucopia of technological achievements, industrial marvels and colonial propaganda. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307283/original/file-20191216-124041-uhgb1b.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The front entrance of the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Wikimedia)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the vast light-flooded “palace,” the consumer goods of modernity were bestowed with new meaning. Removed from the dark and cramped confines of Victorian shops, they were no longer simple measures of economic or material value alone. The magnificent displays and the absence of price tags or signs of labour transformed the commercial objects into vehicles of symbolic value. </p>
<p>French social and literary theorist Roland Barthes remarked that sight is the most magical of the senses and touch the most demystifying — perhaps a productive way to consider the spectacle of commodities and goods championed in the Crystal Palace. Thomas Richards, formerly a literature professor at Harvard, suggests this analysis in <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=3018"><em>The Commodity Culture of Victorian England</em></a>. </p>
<p>Yet for others, the Crystal Palace’s iron-and-glass construction and emphasis on visual display shows <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520222991/weimar-surfaces">modernity’s preoccupation with surfaces</a>.</p>
<h2>Pleasure in ‘just looking’</h2>
<p>Consumerism grew rapidly in the decades following the Great Exhibition. The <a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691034942/the-bon-marche">department stores</a> that proliferated in metropolitan centres used plate glass to construct windows in unprecedented proportions. The project that started in the Crystal Palace flourished. </p>
<p>The window showcased the variety of goods on offer, and the dominant approach to window-dressing in this period was “the more the merrier.” Neither wholly public nor private, the spectacle of the window display was key to luring passersby into the store. Those who admired the goods outside practised a novel pastime: window-shopping. The visual rather than economic consumption of goods attests to the pleasure in “just looking.” </p>
<p>This suggests that shoppers <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520089242/window-shopping">aren’t simply “consumers,” but are also “spectators.”</a> The seductive power of modern window displays is clear in the French term for window-shopping: lèche-vitrines. Translated literally, it means to lick the windows. </p>
<h2>Lovechild of modernity</h2>
<p>Images of window-shoppers occupy our cultural imagination, from the solitary Audrey Hepburn in the opening scene of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JfS90u-1g8"><em>Breakfast at Tiffany’s</em></a> to the crowds descending on Simpsons’ “Christmas Tree” store in Toronto, both from 1961. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/B449Jzeg3A8","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Photographs of children with noses enthusiastically squished against the windowpane read as timeless signs of the season. The temporary installation of risers in front of holiday window displays is a reminder of these important “consumers.” </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307216/original/file-20191216-123987-58oe2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Small children gazing through Macy’s toy window, New York City, between 1908 and 1915.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Shop windows are the lovechild of modernity’s restlessness and capitalist obsession with the new. Yet, there is an irony in the fact that these windows might offer a moment of respite from the anxieties and hurry created by our commercially-driven world. </p>
<p>These retail windows mark a unique intersection in the landscape of consumer culture — one where the pace of modern life meets the desire to slow down.</p>
<p>[ <em><a href="https://theconversation.com/ca/newsletters?utm_source=TCCA&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=expertise">Expertise in your inbox. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter and get a digest of academic takes on today’s news, every day.</a></em> ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/128495/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paula Alaszkiewicz receives funding from SSHRC. </span></em></p>
The holiday window is laden with nostalgia and associations of childhood traditions and a longing for drawn-out moments.
Paula Alaszkiewicz, PhD Candidate and Lecturer in Art History, Concordia University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/127056
2019-11-19T13:39:10Z
2019-11-19T13:39:10Z
Stop medicalising loneliness – history reveals it’s society that needs mending
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302237/original/file-20191118-66925-1orge05.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sasha Freemind/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>What does loneliness sound like? I asked this question on Twitter recently. You might expect that people would say “silence”, but they didn’t. Their answers included:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The wind whistling in my chimney, because I only ever hear it when I’m alone.</p>
<p>The hubbub of a pub heard when the door opens to the street.</p>
<p>The sound of a clicking radiator as it comes on or off.</p>
<p>The terrible din of early morning birds in suburban trees.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I suspect everyone has a sound associated with loneliness and personal alienation. Mine is the honk of Canadian geese, which takes me back to life as a 20-year-old student, living in halls after a break-up.</p>
<p>These sounds highlight that the experience of loneliness varies from person to person – something that is not often recognised in our modern panic. We are in an “epidemic”; a mental health “crisis”. In 2018 the British government was so concerned that it created a “<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-launches-governments-first-loneliness-strategy">Minister for Loneliness</a>”. Countries like Germany and Switzerland may follow suit. This language imagines that loneliness is a single, universal state – it is not. Loneliness is an <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1754073918768876">emotion cluster</a> – it can be made up of a number of feelings, such as anger, shame, sadness, jealousy and grief. </p>
<p>The loneliness of a single mother on the breadline, for example, is very different to that of an elderly man <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/news/older-people/social-isolation-increases-death-risk-in-older-people/">whose peers have died</a> or a teenager who is <a href="https://www.psycom.net/mental-health-wellbeing/mental-health-wellbeing-mental-health-wellbeing-how-social-media-increases-loneliness/">connected online</a> but lacks offline friendships. And <a href="https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/blog/rural-loneliness/">rural loneliness</a> is different to urban loneliness.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302258/original/file-20191118-66941-1mo2rcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hotel Window, Edward Hopper, 1955.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hotel-window-edward-hopper-1955.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By talking about loneliness as a virus or an epidemic, we medicalise it and seek simple, even pharmacological treatments. This year researchers announced that a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/26/pill-for-loneliness-psychology-science-medicine">loneliness pill</a>” is in the works. This move is part of a broader treatment of emotions as mental health problems, with interventions focusing on symptoms not causes.</p>
<p>But loneliness is physical as well as psychological. Its language and experience also changes over time. </p>
<h2>Lonely as a cloud</h2>
<p>Before 1800, the word loneliness was not particularly emotional: it simply connoted the state of being alone. The lexicographer Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656) defined loneliness as “one; an oneliness, or loneliness, a single or singleness”. Loneliness usually denoted places rather than people: a lonely castle, a lonely tree, or wandering “lonely as a cloud” in Wordsworth’s <a href="https://wordsworth.org.uk/wordsworth/daffodils-and-other-poems/wordsworths-daffodils/">poem of 1802</a>.</p>
<p>In this period, “oneliness” was seldom negative. It allowed communion with God, as when Jesus “withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:16). For many of the Romantics, nature served the same, quasi-religious or deistic function. Even without the presence of God, nature provided inspiration and health, themes that continue in some <a href="https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/environmentalism-as-religion">21st-century environmentalism</a>.</p>
<p>Critically, this interconnectedness between self and world (or God-in-world) was also found in medicine. There was no division of the mind and body, as exists today. Between the 2nd and the 18th centuries, medicine defined health depending on <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b008h5dz">four humours</a>: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Emotions depended on the balance of those humours, which were influenced by age, gender and environment, including diet, exercise, sleep and the quality of the air. Too much solitude, like too much hare meat, could be damaging. But that was a physical as well as a mental problem. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302246/original/file-20191118-66971-1v9u2lc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=630&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The four elements, four qualities, four humours, four seasons, and four ages of man. Lois Hague, 1991.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ww7c2sdj">© Wellcome Collection</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This holism between mental and physical health – by which one could target the body to treat the mind – was lost with the rise of 19th-century scientific medicine. The <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/this-mortal-coil-9780199793396">body and mind were separated</a> into different systems and specialisms: psychology and psychiatry for the mind, cardiology for the heart.</p>
<p>This is why we view our emotions as situated in the brain. But in doing so, we often ignore the physical and lived experiences of emotion. This includes not only sound, but also touch, smell and taste.</p>
<h2>Warm hearts</h2>
<p>Studies of <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9566.12663">care homes</a> suggest that lonely people get attached to material objects, even when they live with dementia and can’t verbally express loneliness. Lonely people also benefit from <a href="https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/a-to-z/p/pets-and-mental-health">physical interactions with pets</a>. The heartbeats of dogs have even been found to <a href="https://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/dog-and-their-owners-heart-beats-sync-when-theyre-reunited/">synchronise</a> with human owners; anxious hearts are calmed and “happy hormones” produced.</p>
<p>Providing spaces for people to eat socially has, as well as music, dance and massage therapies, been found to reduce loneliness, even among people with <a href="https://www.research.va.gov/currents/0119-Mind-body-therapies-for-PTSD.cfm">PTSD</a>. Working through the senses gives physical connectedness and belonging to people starved of social contact and companionable touch.</p>
<p>Terms like “warm-hearted” describe these social interactions. They come from historic ideas that connected a person’s emotions and sociability <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/matters-of-the-heart-9780199540976?cc=us&lang=en&">to their physical organs</a>. These heat-based metaphors are still used to describe emotions. And lonely people seem to crave <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/howaboutthat/8594643/Having-a-hot-bath-dispels-loneliness.html">hot baths</a> and drinks, as though this physical warmth stands in for social warmth. Being conscious of language and material culture use, then, might help us assess if others – or we – are lonely.</p>
<p>Until we tend to the physical as well as the psychological causes and signs of loneliness, we are unlikely to find a “cure” for a modern epidemic. Because this separation between mind and body reflects a broader division that has emerged between the individual and society, self and world.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/302259/original/file-20191118-66973-paeyer.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Increasingly isolated lives.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/kEXSg0okRGc">Pujohn Das/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en">FAL</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The limits of the individual</h2>
<p>Many of the processes of modernity are predicated on individualism; on the conviction that we are distinct, entirely <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674824263">separate beings</a>. At the same time as medical science parcelled up the body into different specialisms and divisions, the social and economic changes brought by <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Modernity-Space-and-Gender/Staub/p/book/9781138746411">modernity</a> – industrialisation, urbanisation, individualism – transformed patterns of work, life and leisure, creating secular alternatives to the God-in-world idea.</p>
<p>These transformations were justified by secularism. Physical and earthly bodies were redefined as material rather than spiritual: as resources that could be consumed. Narratives of evolution were adapted by <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/social-darwinism">social Darwinists</a> who claimed that competitive individualism was not only justifiable, but inevitable. Classifications and divisions were the order of the day: between mind and body, nature and culture, self and others. Gone was the 18th-century sense of sociability in which, as Alexander Pope put it, “self love and social be the same”.</p>
<p>Little wonder then, that the language of loneliness has increased in the 21st century. Privatisation, deregulation and austerity have continued the forces of liberalisation. And languages of loneliness thrive in the gaps created by the meaninglessness and powerlessness identified by <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/palgrave.sth.8700046">Karl Marx</a> and sociologist <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2017/10/energy-contagion-emile-durkheim/">Emile Durkheim</a> as synonymous with the post-industrial age.</p>
<p>Of course loneliness is not only about material want. Billionaires are lonely too. Poverty might increase loneliness linked to social isolation, but <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/07/12/loneliness-as-an-entrepreneur-heres-something-we-can-do-about-it/">wealth is no buffer</a> against the absence of meaning in the modern age. Nor is it useful in navigating the proliferation of 21st-century “communities” that exist (online and off) that lack the mutual obligation assured by earlier definitions of community as a source of “common good”.</p>
<p>I am not suggesting a return to the humours, or some fictitious, pre-industrial Arcadia. But I do think that more attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history. In the context of this history, knee-jerk claims of an “epidemic” are revealed to be unhelpful. Instead, we must address what “community” means in the present, and acknowledge the myriad kinds of loneliness (positive and negative) that exist under modern individualism.</p>
<p>To do this we must tend to the body, for that is how we connect to the world, and each other, as sensory, physical beings.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127056/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fay Bound Alberti does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
More attention needs to be paid to loneliness’s complex history.
Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, University of York
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/120647
2019-08-01T12:35:53Z
2019-08-01T12:35:53Z
As Herman Melville turns 200, his works have never been more relevant
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286496/original/file-20190731-186805-1j854yf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An 1870 portrait of Herman Melville painted by Joseph Oriel Eaton.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Herman_Melville_by_Joseph_O_Eaton.jpg">Houghton Library</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Outside of American literature courses, it doesn’t seem likely that many Americans are reading Herman Melville these days. </p>
<p>But with Melville turning 200 on August 1, I propose that you pick up one of his novels, because his work has never been more timely. This is the perfect cultural moment for another Melville revival.</p>
<p>The original Melville revival started exactly a century ago, after Melville’s works had languished in obscurity for some 60 years. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=i0AsRZRwYjEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">scholars found his vision of social turmoil to be uncannily relevant</a>.</p>
<p>Once again, Melville could help Americans grapple with dark times – and not just because he composed classic works of universal truths about good and evil. Melville still matters because he was directly engaged with the very aspects of modern American life that continue to haunt the country in the 21st century. </p>
<h2>Finding fellowship</h2>
<p>Melville’s books deal with a host of issues that are relevant today, from race relations and immigration to the mechanization of everyday life.</p>
<p>Yet these aren’t the works of a hopeless tragedian. Rather, Melville was a determined realist. </p>
<p>The typical Melville character is depressed and alienated, overwhelmed by societal changes. But he also endures.</p>
<p>Ultimately, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=XV8XAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Moby-Dick</a>” is about the quest of the narrator, Ishmael, the story’s lone survivor, to make meaning out of trauma and keep the human story going. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=779&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286498/original/file-20190731-186801-d3ngvi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=979&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In ‘Moby Dick,’ Ishmael seeks communion and adventure outside the stultifying confines of a capitalist economy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://no.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ishmael goes to sea in the first place because he’s feeling a particularly modern form of angst. He walks the streets of Manhattan wanting to knock people’s hats off, furious that the only available jobs in the new capitalist economy leave workers “tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.” The whaling ship is no paradise, but at least it affords him a chance to work in the open air with people of all races, from all over the world. </p>
<p>When the crewmen sit in a circle squeezing lumps of whale sperm into oil, they find themselves clasping each other’s hands, developing “an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling.” </p>
<p>Then there’s Melville’s novel “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=7sh2-5vM7mYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Redburn</a>,” one of the author’s lesser-known works. It’s mostly a story of disillusionment: A young naïf joins the merchant marine to see the world, and in Britain all he finds are “masses of squalid men, women, and children” spilling out from the factories. The narrator is abused by the ship’s cynical crew and swindled out of his wages. </p>
<p>But his hard experience nonetheless broadens his sympathies. As he sails home to New York with some Irish families fleeing the famine, he remarks: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Let us waive that agitated national topic, as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores; let us waive it, with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come…. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world.” </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Melville’s fall and rise</h2>
<p>In November 1851, when “Moby-Dick” was published, Melville was among the best-known authors in the English-speaking world. But his reputation started to decline just months later, <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=MLpSGShP-hcC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">when a review of his next book</a>, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Pierre_Or_The_Ambiguities.html?id=JXK7HN62EcQC">Pierre</a>,” bore the headline, “Herman Melville Crazy.” </p>
<p>That opinion was not atypical. By 1857, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Melville.html?id=tGsCgkhkq2QC">Melville had mostly stopped writing</a>; his publisher was bankrupt; and those Americans who still knew his name may well have thought he’d been institutionalized. </p>
<p>Yet in 1919 – the year of Melville’s centennial – scholars started returning to his work. They found a writer of grim, tangled epics delving into the social tensions that would ultimately lead to the Civil War. </p>
<p>It just so happened that <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=a7UMG78Z9i0C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">1919 was a year</a> of labor strife, mail bombs, weekly lynchings, and race riots in 26 cities. There were crackdowns on foreigners, privacy, and civil liberties, not to mention the lingering trauma of World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic.</p>
<p>Over the ensuing three decades – an era that included the Great Depression and World War II – Melville was canonized, and all of his works were reprinted in popular editions. </p>
<p>“I owe a debt to Melville,” <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Van_Wyck_Brooks_Lewis_Mumford_letter.html?id=TFpaAAAAMAAJ">wrote critic and historian Lewis Mumford</a>, “because my wrestling with him, my efforts to plumb his own tragic sense of life, were the best preparations I could have had for facing our present world.”</p>
<h2>Why Melville still matters</h2>
<p>America is now dealing with its own dark times, full of foreboding over climate change, extreme class divisions, racial and religious bigotry, refugee crises, mass shootings, and near-constant warfare.</p>
<p>Go back and read Melville, and you’ll find apt depictions of white privilege and obliviousness in “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15859/15859-h/15859-h.htm">Benito Cereno</a>.” Melville paints consumer capitalism as an elaborate con game in “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21816">The Confidence-Man</a>,” while excoriating America’s imperial ambitions in “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1900/1900-h/1900-h.htm">Typee</a>” and “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4045">Omoo</a>.” He was even inspired to break his silence at the end of the Civil War and <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Civil_War_World_of_Herman_Melville.html?id=-R1bAAAAMAAJ">write an earnest plea</a> for “Re-establishment” and “Reconstruction.” </p>
<p>“Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity,” he wrote, “gladly we join the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.” But now it was time to find ways for everyone to get along. </p>
<p>His 1866 book “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=UOEIAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">Battle-Pieces</a>,” though full of bitter fragments, has a final section dominated by idealistic nouns: common sense and Christian charity, patriotic passion, moderation, generosity of sentiment, benevolence, kindliness, freedom, sympathies, solicitude, amity, reciprocal respect, decency, peace, sincerity, faith. Melville was trying to remind Americans that in democracies there is a perpetual need to carve out common ground.</p>
<p>It’s not that society doesn’t or shouldn’t change; it’s that change and continuity play off each other in surprising and sometimes bracing ways. </p>
<p>In dark times, the rediscovery that human beings have almost always had to confront terrible challenges can produce powerful emotions. </p>
<p>You might feel like knocking someone’s hat off. But you might also feel like giving the Ishmaels of the world a gentle squeeze of the hand. </p>
<p>And in doing so, you might help to keep the human story going.</p>
<p>[ <em>You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=youresmart">You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/120647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Aaron Sachs does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
While clear-eyed about the country’s injustices, Melville never succumbed to cynicism. On the author’s bicentennial, American readers could use a dose of his ability to fuse realism with idealism.
Aaron Sachs, Professor of History and American Studies, Cornell University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/99556
2018-08-01T10:39:28Z
2018-08-01T10:39:28Z
The infantilization of Western culture
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/230110/original/file-20180731-136664-naxxtb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What happens when an entire society succumbs to childlike behavior and discourse?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/blue-pacifier-mouth-young-man-stubble-1105791701">Elantseva Marina</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you regularly watch TV, you’ve probably seen <a href="https://goo.gl/images/ySFg45">a cartoon bear</a> pitching you toilet paper, <a href="https://goo.gl/images/cx81R4">a gecko</a> with a British accent selling you auto insurance and <a href="https://goo.gl/images/ETbcDE">a bunny in sunglasses</a> promoting batteries. </p>
<p>This has always struck me as a bit odd. Sure, it makes sense to use cartoon characters to sell products to kids – <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Born-Buy-Commercialized-Child-Consumer-ebook/dp/B00AK78VYK/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1531343047&sr=1-12&keywords=schor%252C+juliet">a phenomenon that’s been well-documented</a>.</p>
<p>But why are advertisers using the same techniques on adults?</p>
<p>To me, it’s just one symptom of a broader trend of infantilization in Western culture. It began before the advent of smartphones and social media. But, as I argue in my book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Terminal-Self-Everyday-Life-in-Hypermodern-Times/Gottschalk/p/book/9781472437082">The Terminal Self</a>,” our everyday interactions with these computer technologies have accelerated and normalized our culture’s infantile tendencies.</p>
<h2>Society-wide arrested development</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS721US721&ei=yfdZW9uHJM_q_Aait5KwBA&q=infantilize+definition&oq=infantilize+definition&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0j0i22i30k1l6.3917.6387.0.6633.22.20.0.1.1.0.165.1933.14j6.20.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..1.21.1935...0i131k1j0i131i67k1j0i67k1j0i22i10i30k1.0.coCX7JbbpCw">The dictionary defines</a> infantilizing as treating someone “as a child or in a way that denies their maturity in age or experience.”</p>
<p>What’s considered age-appropriate or mature is obviously quite relative. But most societies and cultures will deem behaviors appropriate for some stages of life, but not others. </p>
<p>As the Bible <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Corinthians_13">puts it</a> in 1 Corinthians 13:11, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.”</p>
<p>Some psychologists <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4578899/">will be quick to note</a> that not everyone puts their “childish ways” behind them. You can become fixated at a particular stage of development and fail to reach an age-appropriate level of maturity. When facing unmanageable stress or trauma, you can even regress to a previous stage of development. And psychologist Abraham Maslow <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Toward+a+Psychology+of+Being%2C+3rd+Edition-p-9780471293095">has suggested</a> that spontaneous childlike behaviors in adults aren’t inherently problematic. </p>
<p>But some cultural practices today routinely infantilize large swaths of the population. </p>
<p>We see it in our everyday speech, when we refer to <a href="https://scholarworks.uni.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=70&q=infantilization&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&httpsredir=1&article=1072&context=etd">grown women</a> as “girls”; in how we treat senior citizens, when we place them in adult care centers where they’re forced to <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2190/1219-B2GW-Y5G1-JFEG">surrender their autonomy and privacy</a>; and in the way school personnel and parents <a href="https://search.proquest.com/openview/72164c229dfcadcfb0ab495c76f62d54/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=33810">treat teenagers</a>, refusing to acknowledge their intelligence and need for autonomy, restricting their freedom, and limiting their ability to enter the workforce.</p>
<p>Can entire societies succumb to infantilization?</p>
<p>Frankfurt School scholars such as <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_dimensional_Man.html?id=XwC0xZU5z7kC">Herbert Marcuse</a>, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Escape_from_Freedom.html?id=d2g8L1sLykwC">Erich Fromm</a> and other critical theorists suggest that – like individuals – a society can also suffer from arrested development. </p>
<p>In their view, adults’ failure to reach emotional, social or cognitive maturity is not due to individual shortcomings. </p>
<p>Rather, it is socially engineered.</p>
<h2>A return to innocence</h2>
<p>Visiting America in 1946, French anthropologist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24250266">Claude Lévi-Strauss</a> commented on the endearingly infantile traits of American culture. He especially noted adults’ childish adulation of baseball, their passionate approach to toy-like cars and the amount of time they invested in hobbies. </p>
<p>As contemporary scholars note, however, this “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Consumed-Markets-Children-Infantilize-Citizens-ebook/dp/B00125OKRQ/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1533065685&sr=1-4&keywords=barber+benjamin">infantilist ethos</a>” has become less charming – and more pervasive. </p>
<p>Researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have observed how this ethos has now crept into a vast range of social spheres. </p>
<p>In many workplaces, managers can now electronically monitor their employees, many of whom <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-new-study-should-be-the-final-nail-for-open-plan-offices-99756">work in open spaces</a> with little personal privacy. <a href="https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo22228665.html">As sociologist Gary T. Marx observed</a>, it creates a situation in which workers feel that managers expect them “to behave irresponsibly, to take advantage, and to screw up unless they remove all temptation, prevent them from doing so or trick or force them to do otherwise.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/">Much has been written</a> about higher education’s tendency to <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/college-infantilization-martin-center-article/">infantilize its students</a>, whether it’s through <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/21/georgia-techs-monitoring-students-social-media-causes-concern">monitoring their social media accounts</a>, guiding their every step, or <a href="https://attitude.co.uk/article/stephen-fry-hits-out-at-infantile-culture-of-trigger-words-and-safe-spaces/10345/">promoting “safe spaces” on campus</a>.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, tourist destinations <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254220253_May_the_farce_be_with_you_On_Las_Vegas_and_consumer_infantalization">like Las Vegas</a> market excess, indulgence and freedom from responsibility in casino environments that conjure memories of childhood fantasies: the Old West, medieval castles and the circus. Scholars have also explored how this form of Las Vegas-style “Disneyfication” has left its stamp on <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Pyrotechnic_Insanitarium.html?id=u71s2gNZqJoC">planned communities</a>, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238032000071667">architecture</a> and <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238032000071667">contemporary art</a>.</p>
<p>Then we’ve witnessed the rise of a “therapy culture,” which, as sociologist Frank Furedi <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Therapy_Culture.html?id=gGkHK7Y9-dwC">warns</a>, treats adults as vulnerable, weak and fragile, while implying that their troubles rooted in childhood qualify them for a “permanent suspension of moral sense.” He argues that this absolves grown-ups from adult responsibilities and erodes their trust in their own experiences and insights.</p>
<p>Researchers in Russia and Spain have even identified infantilist trends <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2775821">in language</a>, and
French sociologist Jacqueline Barus-Michel <a href="https://www.amazon.fr/Lindividu-hypermoderne-Collectif/dp/2749255473/">observes</a> that we now communicate in “flashes,” rather than via thoughtful discourse – “poorer, binary, similar to computer language, and aiming to shock.” </p>
<p>Others have noted similar trends in <a href="http://www.postmodernopenings.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/PO_June2014_1_39to55.pdf">popular culture</a> – in the shorter sentences
in contemporary novels, in the lack of sophistication in political rhetoric and in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Ages-America-Final-Empire-ebook/dp/B004HW6A88/">sensationalist cable news coverage</a>. </p>
<h2>High-tech pacifiers</h2>
<p>While scholars such as <a href="https://nyupress.org/books/9780814715987/">James Côté</a> and <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/men-to-boys/9780231144308">Gary Cross</a> remind us that infantilizing trends began well before our current moment, I believe our daily interactions with smartphones and social media are so pleasurable precisely because they normalize and gratify infantile dispositions. </p>
<p>They endorse self-centeredness and inflated exhibitionism. They promote an orientation towards the present, rewarding impulsivity and celebrating constant and instant gratification. </p>
<p>They flatter our needs for visibility and provide us with 24/7 personalized attention, while eroding our ability to empathize with others. </p>
<p>Whether we use them for work or pleasure, our devices also foster a submissive attitude. In order to take advantage of all they offer, we have to surrender to their requirements, agreeing to “terms” we do not understand and handing over stores of personal data.</p>
<p>Indeed, <a href="http://apps.bostonglobe.com/business/graphics/2018/07/foot-traffic/">the routine and aggressive ways our devices violate our privacy</a> via surveillance automatically deprive us of this fundamental adult right. </p>
<p>While we might find it trivial or amusing, the infantilist ethos becomes especially seductive in times of social crises and fear. And its favoring of simple, easy and fast betrays natural affinities for certain political solutions over others. </p>
<p>And typically not intelligent ones. </p>
<p>Democratic policymaking requires debate, demands compromise and involves critical thinking. It entails considering different viewpoints, anticipating the future, and composing thoughtful legislation.</p>
<p>What’s a fast, easy and simple alternative to this political process? It’s not difficult to imagine an infantile society being attracted to authoritarian rule.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, our social institutions and technological devices seem to erode hallmarks of maturity: patience, empathy, solidarity, humility and commitment to a project greater than oneself. </p>
<p>All are qualities that have traditionally been considered essential for both healthy adulthood and for the proper functioning of democracy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99556/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Gottschalk is affiliated with the Democratic Party and other organizations affiliated with it.</span></em></p>
Our social institutions and politics suffer from a collective arrested development – and our relationship to technology has only exacerbated this trend.
Simon Gottschalk, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/95998
2018-05-31T10:44:06Z
2018-05-31T10:44:06Z
In praise of doing nothing
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220829/original/file-20180529-80633-1gvg6vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Modern life seems to encourage acceleration for the sake of acceleration – to what end?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/moving-traffic-light-trails-night-487507315">JoeyCheung/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the 1950s, <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Take_Back_Your_Time.html?id=_UmpZOlnvU0C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false">scholars worried that</a>, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.</p>
<p>Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=KjZ54lNDE2EC&dq=overworked+american&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">notes</a>, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society. </p>
<p>It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.” </p>
<p>It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness. </p>
<p>Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “<a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Terminal-Self-Everyday-Life-in-Hypermodern-Times/Gottschalk/p/book/9781472437082">The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times</a>.”</p>
<p>In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable. </p>
<p>But it’s never been more important. </p>
<h2>Acceleration for the sake of acceleration</h2>
<p>In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?</p>
<p>Why aren’t things easier?</p>
<p>It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration. </p>
<p><a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/social-acceleration/9780231148351">According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa</a>, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions. </p>
<p>We see this on factory floors, where “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=bdBTAAAAMAAJ&q=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&dq=inauthor:%22Edward+J.+Hay%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs5vHLm6vbAhUjLn0KHaRSAqcQ6AEILjAB">just-in-time</a>” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.</p>
<p>Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration. </p>
<p>To Rosa, this acceleration <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/hartmut-rosa-essay-acceleration-plagues-modern-society-a-909465.html">eerily mimics</a> the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight. </p>
<h2>The oppression of speed</h2>
<p>Unchecked acceleration has consequences.</p>
<p>At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed. </p>
<p>At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"860938163526799362"}"></div></p>
<p>For example, <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Gender-Divisions-Working-Time-New-Economy-Diane-Perrons/9781847204974">research finds</a>
two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.</p>
<p>When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – <a href="https://globalnews.ca/news/3395457/this-is-how-much-time-you-spend-on-work-emails-every-day-according-to-a-canadian-survey/">a number that’s only expected to grow</a>. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.</p>
<p>American workers’ productivity <a href="https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/">has increased dramatically since 1973</a>. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.</p>
<p>Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.</p>
<p>It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.</p>
<h2>Doing nothing and ‘being’</h2>
<p>In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/220008/original/file-20180522-51091-3h8byt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1226&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An ad for Microsoft Office stresses the importance of being able to always work.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/migrated-images/62/1440.MODHarrisSurveyInfographic_110613-FinalHighRes.png">Microsoft</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.</p>
<p><a href="https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1809754">Much research</a> – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.</p>
<p>Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with nonproductivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2432964">research suggests</a> that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060750510/in-praise-of-slowness">As legends go</a>, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well-known for staring for hours into space in his office.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40222893?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">The academic sabbatical</a> is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas. </p>
<p>Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something. </p>
<p>The key is to balance the two.</p>
<h2>Taking your foot off the pedal</h2>
<p>Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/cyber.2016.0259">Danish researchers found</a> that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html">In another experiment</a>, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.</p>
<p>Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The <a href="https://www.slowfoodusa.org/about-us">Slow Food</a> movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming. </p>
<p>As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/being-busy-is-nothing-to-brag-about_us_5a4b9a6de4b0d86c803c7971">those who are very busy</a> must be involved in important projects. </p>
<p>Touted by the <a href="https://twitter.com/nbcnews/status/898748875225260032?lang=en">mass media</a> and <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2013/11/06/microsoft-office-declares-get-it-done-day/">corporate culture</a>, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “<a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226">the good life</a>” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness. </p>
<p>French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/20617-idleness-is-fatal-only-to-the-mediocre">put it best</a> when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95998/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Gottschalk does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Technology has made many aspects of daily life much easier. So why do we still feel so overwhelmed?
Simon Gottschalk, Professor of Sociology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/91542
2018-03-19T10:36:27Z
2018-03-19T10:36:27Z
A history of loneliness
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210855/original/file-20180316-104673-jg1o1y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Edward Hopper's 'Office in a Small City' (1953).</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gandalfsgallery/6276080794">Gandalf's Gallery</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Is loneliness our modern malaise?</p>
<p>Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy <a href="https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/09/work-and-the-loneliness-epidemic">says</a> the most common pathology he saw during his years of service “was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” </p>
<p>Chronic loneliness, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/12/duncan-selbie-isolated-bad-health">some say</a>, is like “smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” It “<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2013/08/dangers_of_loneliness_social_isolation_is_deadlier_than_obesity.html">kills more people than obesity</a>.” </p>
<p>Because loneliness is now considered a <a href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/08/lonely-die.aspx">public health</a> issue – and even an <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/">epidemic</a> – people are exploring its causes and trying to find solutions.</p>
<p>While writing a book on the history of how poets wrote about loneliness in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-Romantic-period">Romantic Period</a>, I discovered that loneliness is a relatively new concept and once had an easy cure. However, as the concept’s meaning has transformed, finding solutions has become harder.</p>
<p>Returning to the origins of the word – and understanding how its meaning has changed through time – gives us a new way to think about modern loneliness, and the ways in which we might address it. </p>
<h2>The dangers of venturing into ‘lonelinesses’</h2>
<p>Although loneliness may seem like a timeless, universal experience, it seems to have originated in the late 16th century, when it signaled the danger created by being too far from other people. </p>
<p>In early modern Britain, to stray too far from society was to surrender the protections it provided. Distant forests and mountains inspired fear, and a lonely space was a place in which you might meet someone who could do you harm, with no one else around to help.</p>
<p>In order to frighten their congregations out of sin, sermon writers asked people to imagine themselves in “lonelinesses” – places like hell, the grave or the desert.</p>
<p>Yet well into the 17th century, the words “loneliness” and “lonely” rarely appeared in writing. In 1674, the naturalist John Ray <a href="http://www.thesalamancacorpus.com/varia_various_1500-1699_ray_a-collection_1691.html">compiled a glossary</a> of infrequently used words. He included “loneliness” in his list, defining it as a term used to describe places and people “far from neighbours.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=470&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210858/original/file-20180316-104645-1pdjjk6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=591&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Gustave Doré engraving for an 1866 edition of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Paradise_Lost_12.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>John Milton’s 1667 epic poem “<a href="https://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Emilton/reading_room/pl/book_1/text.shtml">Paradise Lost</a>” features one of the first lonely characters in all of British literature: Satan. On his journey to the garden of Eden to tempt Eve, Satan treads “lonely steps” out of hell. But Milton isn’t writing about Satan’s feelings; instead, he’s emphasizing that he’s crossing into the ultimate wilderness, a space between hell and Eden where no angel has previously ventured.</p>
<p>Satan <a href="https://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Emilton/reading_room/pl/book_2/text.shtml">describes</a> his loneliness in terms of vulnerability: “From them I go / This uncouth errand sole, and one for all / Myself expose, with lonely steps to tread / Th’ unfounded deep.” </p>
<h2>The dilemma of modern loneliness</h2>
<p>Even if we now enjoy the wilderness as a place of adventure and pleasure, the fear of loneliness persists. The problem has simply moved into our cities.</p>
<p>Many are trying to solve it by bringing people physically closer to their neighbors. <a href="https://www.aarp.org/research/topics/life/info-2014/loneliness_2010.html">Studies</a> point to a spike in the number of people who live alone and the breakdown of family and community structures. </p>
<p>British Prime Minister Theresa May has set her sights on “combating” loneliness and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/17/world/europe/uk-britain-loneliness.html">appointed</a> a minister of loneliness to do just that in January. There is even a <a href="https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org">philanthropy</a> called the “Campaign to End Loneliness.” </p>
<p>But the drive to cure loneliness oversimplifies its modern meaning.</p>
<p>In the 17th century, when loneliness was usually relegated to the space outside the city, solving it was easy. It merely required a return to society.</p>
<p>However, loneliness has since moved inward – and has become much harder to cure. Because it’s taken up residence inside minds, even the minds of people living in bustling cities, it can’t always be solved by company. </p>
<p>Modern loneliness isn’t just about being physically removed from other people. Instead, it’s an emotional state of feeling apart from others – without necessarily being so. </p>
<p>Someone surrounded by people, or even accompanied by friends or a lover, can complain of feelings of loneliness. The wilderness is now inside of us. </p>
<h2>Populating the wilderness of the mind</h2>
<p>The lack of an obvious cure to loneliness is part of the reason why it is considered to be so dangerous today: The abstraction is frightening. </p>
<p>Counterintuitively, however, the secret to dealing with modern loneliness might lie not in trying to make it disappear but in finding ways to dwell within its abstractions, talk through its contradictions and seek out others who feel the same way.</p>
<p>While it’s certainly important to pay attention to the structures that have led people (especially elderly, disabled and other vulnerable people) to be physically isolated and therefore unwell, finding ways to destigmatize loneliness is also crucial. </p>
<p>Acknowledging that loneliness is a profoundly human and sometimes uncurable experience rather than a mere pathology might allow people – especially lonely people – to find commonality.</p>
<p>In order to look at the “epidemic of loneliness” as more than just an “epidemic of isolation,” it’s important to consider why the spaces of different people’s minds might feel like wildernesses in the first place. </p>
<p>Everyone experiences loneliness differently, and many find it difficult to describe. As the novelist Joseph Conrad <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=8P99Y2HWGK4C&dq=under%20western%20eyes&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=true%20loneliness&f=false">wrote</a>, “Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask.” Learning about the range of ways others experience loneliness could help mitigate the kind of disorientation Conrad describes. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210857/original/file-20180316-104645-13lkk5m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Baleen’ (1982).</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/miafeigelson/14268749324">Mia Feigelson</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Reading literature can also make the mind feel like less of a wilderness. The books we read need not themselves be about loneliness, though there are lots of examples of these, from “<a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/69506-10-books-about-loneliness.html">Frankenstein</a>” to “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/24/teju-cole-top-10-novels-solitude">Invisible Man</a>.” Reading allows readers to connect with characters who might also be lonely; but more importantly, it offers a way to make the mind feel as though it is populated.</p>
<p>Literature also offers examples of how to be lonely together. British Romantic poets often copied each other’s loneliness and found it productive and fulfilling. </p>
<p>There are opportunities for community in loneliness when we share it, whether in face-to-face interactions or through text. Though loneliness can be debilitating, it has come a long way from its origins as a synonym for isolation. </p>
<p>As the poet Ocean Vuong <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/someday-ill-love-ocean-vuong">wrote</a>, “loneliness is still time spent with the world.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91542/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Amelia Worsley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Although loneliness may seem timeless and universal, the word seems to have originated in the 16th century,
Amelia Worsley, Assistant Professor of English, Amherst College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/90713
2018-01-30T15:10:14Z
2018-01-30T15:10:14Z
Achille Mbembe on how to restore the humanity stolen by racism
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203978/original/file-20180130-107694-1wr3y5q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>African philosopher, <a href="https://wiser.wits.ac.za/users/achille-mbembe">Achille Mbembe</a>, has gained an enviable reputation as a scholar that challenges the tenets of modernity. Some aspects of modernity Mbembe is known to challenge are characterised by the move towards more capitalistic economies, an increase in social stratifications and the universalisation of Western European thought. From <a href="http://www.africanbookscollective.com/books/on-private-indirect-government">“On Private Indirect Government”</a> (2000) to his recent book, <a href="http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/critique-of-black-reason/">“Critique of Black Reason”</a> (2017), his interest has always been on how the world can account for the construction and consequences of race and racism. </p>
<p>In “Critique of Black Reason” Mbembe challenges us to rethink the present with the view of charting a future that, according to Mbembe, will differ from the past and the present.</p>
<p>A key interest of the book is on how race and racism have played a role in how the modern world is organised. However much the world might have benefited from modernity, what is unavoidable is the integral role of race and racism in the construction of modernity. This is why for Mbembe it is of utmost importance that we examine this aspect of modernity as it continues to exclude subjects and create new and old victims that are “the wretched of the earth”. </p>
<p>He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>race, operating over the past centuries as a fundamental category that is at once material and phantasmic, has been at the root of catastrophe, the cause of extraordinary psychic destruction and of innumerable crimes and massacres.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For Mbembe, the construction of race emanates from the symbolic. It accounts for the ways in which subjects live and where they live. It explains the kinds of debates that prohibit – or allow them – to lead meaningful lives.</p>
<h2>Age of Reason</h2>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=906&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203766/original/file-20180129-100923-ni4qyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1138&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cover of ‘Critique of Black Reason’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wits University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The book focuses more on how discourses of race and other differences emerged in the eighteenth century during what is popularly known as the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/enlightenment">Age of Reason</a> or the Enlightenment. </p>
<p>This was a period in which science, philosophy and other disciplines, and social debates, constructed differences between people.This was driven by two factors: material interests and an unwillingness to live with the unfamiliar. Mbembe’s book takes to task this idea of Enlightenment to show how it is responsible for the construction of race and racism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Black Man is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and above all, when one wishes to understand nothing. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This, for Mbembe, is not coincidental. This is because,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the term ‘Black’ was the product of a social and technological machine tightly linked to the emergence and globalisation of capitalism. It was invented to signify exclusion, brutalisation, and degradation, to point to a limit constantly conjured and abhorred. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Capitalism, from this perspective, is only possible because it’s exclusionary. For much of our contemporary history, this has been through the discourse of race.</p>
<h2>History of Africa</h2>
<p>Africa is the continent where most “black” people live. Mbembe’s book therefore looks into the history of Africa and how it has been used, and abused, as the antithesis of Western modernity. Since the West depends on the “rest” in order to construct itself, it is not surprising, Mbembe writes, that,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when Africa comes up, correspondence between words, images, and the thing itself matters very little. It is not necessary for the name to correspond to the thing, or for the thing to respond to its name.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is because,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when one says the word ‘Africa’ one generally abdicates all responsibility.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And it is in this abdication of responsibility that Mbembe argues for a different way of being in the world, and of living with others that are different from oneself. </p>
<p>While, then, the word Africa might speak to a historical and present suffering, there is also something in the word, Mbembe writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>that judges the world and calls for reparation, restitution, and justice. Its spectral presence in the world can be understood only as part of a critique of race.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mbembe argues that while race and racism still play an important role in the present, it is also clear that there is a “Becoming Black of the world” that has to do with the numerous forms of exclusion and violence that haunt the contemporary.</p>
<p>For instance, Mbembe writes, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects relegated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>To be hopeful</h2>
<p>How, then, does one continue to live, and to be hopeful, when it seems as though the history of the world is a history of depredation and cruelty? To answer this question, Mbembe turns to philosopher <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-fanon-continues-to-resonate-more-than-half-a-century-after-algerias-independence-43508">Frantz Fanon</a> (as he does in much of the book) and writes that one of the important lessons that he taught us is,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the idea that in every human subject there is something indomitable and fundamentally intangible that no domination - no matter what form it takes - can eliminate, contain, or suppress, at least not completely.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is here that the possibility of a different future is possible.</p>
<p>This is because for Mbembe,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>until we have eliminated racism from our current lives and imagination, we will have to continue to struggle for the creation of a world beyond - race. But to achieve it, to sit down at a table to which everyone has been invited, we must undertake an exacting political and ethical critique of racism and of the ideologies of difference…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that is precisely what this book does.</p>
<p>In bringing together thinkers us such as Fanon, <a href="http://science.jrank.org/pages/7919/Negritude.html">Aime Cesaire</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/the-philosophy-of-friedrich-nietzsche-explained-with-8-bit-video-games.html">Friedrich Nietzsche</a>, <a href="http://marcusgarvey.com/?p=225">Marcus Garvey</a>, <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/page/biography">Nelson Mandela</a>, <a href="https://scholar.google.co.za/scholar?q=Michel+Foucault+philosophy&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjmsfS49vzYAhXKAsAKHUSPAwoQgQMIJDAA">Michel Foucault</a> and many others, “Critique of Black Reason” is an impressive book. It offers readers insight into how the construction of race and racism underpins our understanding of modernity and therefore of the world we inhabit. </p>
<p>More than this though, it challenges readers to undo forms of exclusionary thinking that still haunt the ways we live. It is only in doing this, according to Mbembe, that we can,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Critique of Black Reason” is an illuminating and brilliant addition to Mbembe’s corpus. It is the kind of book, I suspect, that will become compulsory reading for undergraduate and graduate classes worldwide.</p>
<p><em>“Critique of Black Reason” is published by Wits University Press</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90713/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Manosa Nthunya does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
“Critique of Black Reason” offers readers insight into how the construction of race and racism underpins our understanding of modernity.
Manosa Nthunya, PhD Candidate, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/89380
2018-01-10T13:57:46Z
2018-01-10T13:57:46Z
Why the sartorial choices of Salafi clerics sparked a debate on morality in Nigeria
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/201146/original/file-20180108-83559-1l8pf5u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Muslims pray at the Kofar Mata Central Mosque in Kano, Northern Nigeria. Liberal and fundamentalist Islam are in a contest of legitimacy in the region.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Reuters/Akintunde Akinleye</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The innocuous <a href="http://www.hutudole.com/2017/11/waazin-malaman-izala-kasashen-turaishin.html">photos</a> of two Nigerian Islamic clerics shopping and relaxing in London sparked a fierce debate on social media platforms in northern Nigeria in early December 2017. The photos were quite unremarkable. One showed the two men sitting on a park bench; another showed them in a clothing store wearing cowboy hats. In both, they were dressed in suits. And they were wearing gloves and scarves to protect themselves from London’s cold, wet weather. </p>
<p>The pictures caused a fierce online debate about piety, hypocrisy, morality, the sartorial prescriptions of Islam, and the tyranny of religious authorities in Muslim-majority northern Nigeria. The violent Islamist group, Boko Haram, is <a href="https://africacheck.org/factsheets/factsheet-explaining-nigerias-boko-haram-and-its-violent-insurgency/">active in the region</a>, which has become a hotbed of <a href="http://time.com/3712517/boko-haram-history/">extremism</a>. </p>
<p>So, why were these ordinary images so controversial? Why did they spark heated debates among educated northern Nigerian Muslim men and women? </p>
<p>The answer is simple. The two men are <a href="https://tif.ssrc.org/2017/04/11/salafism-in-nigeria/">Salafi</a> clerics, members of a clerical order that has come to wield <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Salafism-Nigeria-Preaching-Politics-International/dp/1107157439/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1515432356&sr=8-1&keywords=salafism+in+Nigeria">outsized influence</a> over Muslims in northern Nigeria. The clerics act as enforcers of an increasingly puritan Islamic order. They are uncompromising in defining what is moral and permissible and what is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh10ZpnI2Cw">haram or sacreligious</a>. They often equate Muslims’ engagements with modernity and Western ways of life with immorality and sinful innovation or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52LRSiRbKAI">bid'ah</a>. </p>
<p>This leaves them open to charges of hypocrisy when they appear to make choices seen as contradicting their teachings. And this is what happened in London. The two clerics were wearing what in northern Nigeria is considered western dress. This touched off debates between two camps of young Muslims: those who resent the growing intrusion of the clerics into their lives and are eager to criticise their adventures in a Western city, and those who continue to look on the religious figures as revered exemplars of piety. </p>
<h2>Wahhabism and the roots of Salafi Puritanism</h2>
<p>The Islamic sect to which the two clerics belong heightened the controversy. Sheikh Kabiru Gombe and his mentor, Sheikh Bala Lau, are prominent clerics of the <a href="http://www.bigsas.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Alumni_c_research_p/the_izala_ben_amara/index.html">Izala sect</a>, the most visible face of a growing community of Nigerian <a href="http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-255">Salafism</a>, a branch of Sunni Islam which holds to a strict, uncompromising doctrine. </p>
<p>Leaders of the sect are gaining popularity and displacing mainstream <a href="https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/116410/pub989.pdf">Sufi</a> clerics in the region. They accuse traditional Sufi Muslims of hobnobbing with modernity and failing to practice Islam in its pure form. Sufis are vulnerable to these accusations because their creed focuses on individual mystical paths to God rather than on outward, political and authoritarian expressions of piety.</p>
<p>This difference has led to an increasingly intense contest between the two sides. The photographs of the two clerics catapulted the contest onto social media, blogs and web forums. </p>
<p>The personalities and profiles of the two clerics contributed to the intensity of the debates.</p>
<p>Sheikh Gombe is known in the region for his ultra-radical Salafi theological <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va7xl74UqlI">positions</a> and pronouncements. He has made his voice heard in local and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j2Q_Csmz08">foreign</a> settings, capturing the imagination of some young Muslims in northern Nigeria. He presents an argument that being a pure Muslim means eschewing association with Western modernity. He is against modern and Western institutions such as secular film making, mixed gender socialisation and goods such as Western clothes. All, he argues, can pollute the piety of Muslims.</p>
<p>In my ongoing research on the historical roots of <a href="http://time.com/3712517/boko-haram-history/">Boko Haram</a> in northern Nigeria I call the rise of this branch of Islam the Salafi Islamic wave. Tracing its roots, I have found that it began with the slow but well-funded arrival of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saudi/analyses/wahhabism.html">Wahhabism</a> in northern Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990s. Wahhabism is the puritan strain of Sunni Islam birthed in Saudi Arabia by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. </p>
<p>The Wahhabi-Salafi’s most dominant organisational umbrella was – and still is – the <a href="http://www.bigsas.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Alumni_c_research_p/the_izala_ben_amara/index.html">Izala sect</a>, which was founded in 1978 in Jos, Nigeria, by followers of the late Sheikh Abubakar <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-sheikh-abubakar-mahmud-gumi-1551628.html">Gumi</a>. </p>
<p>At the time Gumi was travelling throughout the Muslim world and spending time in Saudi Arabia as a member of both the Supreme Council of the Islamic University in Medina and the Legal Committee of the Muslim World League. He returned to Nigeria in 1986 and was recognised as the spiritual leader of the Izala anti-Sufi reform movement. The movement’s following expanded dramatically under him. </p>
<p>The Izala group set up schools and the best graduates were sent – on generous Saudi Arabian scholarships – to the University of Medina to study Islam under a Wahhabi curriculum with a tinge of ultra-radical Salafism. They returned in the 1990s and inaugurated a new Salafi era in northern Nigerian Islam. </p>
<p>In the 2000s, Medina-trained Salafi clerics, backed by Saudi money and patronage, succeeded in upstaging the old Izala clerical order through a mix of youthful charisma, theological novelty and populism. They began entrenching their strict moral code conforming, according to them, to the Islamic Sharia law. </p>
<h2>Beyond photos and suits</h2>
<p>Western culture and lifestyle dominate popular culture in Nigeria. For many young Muslims in northern Nigeria, Salafism’s prescriptions and prohibitions are suffocating, particularly for those who want a more pragmatic engagement with a Western lifestyle. Many believe they can pursue these lifestyle choices and still practice their religion. </p>
<p>But Salafi clerics and their followers see no acceptable compromise. They are increasingly making themselves custodians of public morality. They routinely condemn conduct that they associate with decadent, permissive western modernity. For example, they dictate what northern Nigerian <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2017/01/salafism-physical-appearances/">Muslims can and can’t wear</a>. </p>
<p>The debate around the two clerics was therefore not a trivial conversation about the dress and the recreational choices of two Salafi clerics. The photos were loaded with symbolism and contradictions. Participants in the online debate used the opportunity to criticise – or excuse – the perceived tyranny and hypocrisy of a powerful Salafi establishment. And to express personal anxieties and fears. </p>
<p>The debate about modernity, Islam, and morality has migrated to online platforms because the internet is relatively anonymous. This has given both sides greater freedom to express their views. The debate encapsulates the ongoing ideological struggle in northern Nigerian Islam between those who live and defend a modern lifestyle, and those suspicious of Western modernity and the unmediated influence of Western education and culture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/89380/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Moses E. Ochonu does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The debate around photos of two Nigerian Salafi clerics taken in London wasn’t a trivial conversation about dress and recreational choices. It was loaded with symbolism.
Moses E. Ochonu, Professor of African History, Vanderbilt University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/88856
2017-12-26T18:18:06Z
2017-12-26T18:18:06Z
What can be done about our modern-day Frankensteins?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200474/original/file-20171222-16518-9f9hlq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Can technology be tamed? Or have we already lost complete control?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/randar/29249221823">Tom Simpson</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1797, at the dawn of the industrial age, Goethe wrote “<a href="https://germanstories.vcu.edu/goethe/zauber_e4.html">The Sorcerer’s Apprentice</a>,” a poem about a magician in training who, through his arrogance and half-baked powers, unleashes a chain of events that he could not control. </p>
<p>About 20 years later, a young Mary Shelley answered a dare to write a ghost story, which she shared at a small gathering at Lake Geneva. Her story would go on to be published as a novel, “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus,” on Jan. 1, 1818. </p>
<p>Both are stories about our powers to create things that take on a life of their own. </p>
<p>Goethe’s poem comes to a climax when the apprentice calls out in a panic: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Master, come to my assistance!
Wrong I was in calling
Spirits, I avow,
For I find them galling,
Cannot rule them now.
</code></pre>
<p>While the master fortunately returns just in time to cancel the treacherous spell, Shelley’s tale doesn’t end so nicely: Victor Frankenstein’s monster goes on a murderous rampage, and his creator is unable to put a stop to the carnage.</p>
<p>Who foretold our fate: Goethe or Shelley? </p>
<p>That’s the question we face on the 200th anniversary of “Frankenstein,” as we find ourselves grappling with the unintended consequences of our creations on Facebook, to artificial intelligence and human genetic engineering. Will we sail through safely or will we, like Victor Frankenstein, witness “destruction and infallible misery”? </p>
<h2>Will science save us?</h2>
<p>In Goethe’s poem, disaster is averted through a more skillful application of the same magic that conjured the problem in the first place. The term for this nowadays is “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_modernization">reflexive modernity</a>” – the idea that modern technology can be applied to deal with any problems of its own creation and that whatever problems arise from technoscience, we can fix with more technoscience. In environmentalism, this is known as <a href="https://orionmagazine.org/article/evolve/">ecomodernism</a>. In transhumanist circles, it is called the <a href="http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.html">proactionary principle</a>, which “involves not only anticipating before acting, but learning by acting.”</p>
<p>“Frankenstein,” by contrast, is a precautionary tale. Imbued with the impulse to transform nature, humans risk extending beyond their proper reach. Victor Frankenstein comes to rue the ambition to become “greater than his nature will allow.” </p>
<p>He laments: “Learn from me…how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world.” </p>
<p>Hubris, he seems to warn, will be the death of us all. </p>
<h2>The rise of the Silicon Valley refuseniks</h2>
<p>This same worry over hubris appears to be creeping up among today’s scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, many of whom seem to be getting cold feet. After creating something, they’ve turned around and denounced their very creations. </p>
<p>Are they like the apprentice calling for the master to rescue him? Or are they, like Frankenstein, engaged in a futile quest to squelch something that is already beyond our control? </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=802&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/200476/original/file-20171222-16505-kjrlwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1007&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sean Parker has now dubbed himself a ‘conscientious objector’ of Facebook, the company he helped spawn.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Sean-Parker/da0ba5e485b642708b12ae98061d2214/10/0">Paul Sakuma/AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Consider Sean Parker. The co-founder of Napster and an early investor in Facebook recently <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/9/16627724/sean-parker-facebook-childrens-brains-feedback-loop">announced</a> his status as a social media “conscientious objector.” Facebook, he claims, is likely damaging children’s brains and definitely exploiting human psychological weaknesses. </p>
<p>There are more Silicon Valley refuseniks. Justin Rosenstein, the inventor of the Facebook “like” button, has <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/facebook-like-inventor-deletes-app-iphone-justin-rosenstein-addiction-fears-a7986566.html">deleted</a> the app from his phone, citing worries about addiction, continuous partial attention disorder and the demise of democracy at the hands of social media. Former Google employee Tristan Harris and Loren Brichter, who invented the slot machine-like, pull-to-refresh mechanism for Twitter feeds, are both <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia">warning us</a> about the dangers of their creatures. </p>
<p>Anthony Ingraffea spent the first 25 years of his engineering career trying to figure out how to get more fossil fuels out of rocks. From 1978 to 2003, he worked on both government and industry grants to improve hydraulic fracturing. His own research never panned out, but when he learned of the success of others and the magnitude of chemicals and water required, he was “aghast” and <a href="http://www.sustainablecampus.cornell.edu/blogs/news/posts/cornell-professor-speaks-out-against-fracking">said</a>, “It was as if [I’d] been working on something [my] whole life and somebody comes and turns it into Frankenstein.” Over the past 10 years he has become one of the nation’s leading fracking opponents. The industry that once funded him now regularly trolls and attacks him. </p>
<p>Jennifer Doudna is one of the main scientists behind the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR. In her new book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Crack-Creation-Editing-Unthinkable-Evolution-ebook/dp/B01I4FPNNQ">A Crack in Creation</a>,” she writes that CRISPR could eliminate several diseases and improve lives, but it could also be used in ways similar to Nazi eugenics. Doudna has revealed that she has nightmares where Hitler asks her to explain “the uses and implications of this amazing technology.”</p>
<p>Elon Musk <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/03/elon-musk-billion-dollar-crusade-to-stop-ai-space-x">worries</a> that with artificial intelligence we are “summoning the devil.” AI is, for him, “our greatest existential threat.” Musk has gone beyond Dr. Frankenstein’s initial impulse of evading his abominable creation: He is working on interplanetary colonization so that we can run all the way to Mars when AI goes rogue on planet Earth. </p>
<h2>Treating technology like a child</h2>
<p>The anthropologist Bruno Latour chastised Musk for this kind of thing. The way Latour <a href="https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/love-your-monsters">sees it</a>, the moral of Frankenstein is not that we should stop making monsters but rather that we should love our monsters. The problem wasn’t Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris, but his unfeeling – he abandoned his “child” rather than educating it so that it could learn how to behave.</p>
<p>Latour’s point is that no amount of technological advance will give us total control and a blissful detachment from the world. Instead, technology, like parenting, will always require being constantly folded into new developments, tending, fretting and caring. </p>
<p>Musk’s initiative <a href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a>, which seeks to develop safer AI technologies, is more what Latour has in mind.</p>
<p>As it turns out, Latour is putting his own advice to the test. He is the creator-in-chief of the scariest monster of our times. This creature is not actually a product of science, but rather a way of thinking about science. Latour spent his career showing how scientific facts are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Laboratory-Life-Construction-Scientific-Facts/dp/069102832X">socially constructed</a>, and that there is no such thing as unbiased access to truth. </p>
<p>In short, he argues that objectivity is a sham and science is never really settled or certain. </p>
<p>Now, of course, he’s watching in horror as this spirit of deconstruction and distrust takes root in our post-truth age of alternative facts, climate change denialists and partisan media bubbles. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/latour-qa">In a recent interview</a>, Latour admitted that he now regrets his earlier “juvenile enthusiasm” in attacking science and vows to reverse course:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We will have to regain some of the authority of science. That is the complete opposite from where we started doing science studies.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In order to love our monsters, we have to have some basic agreement about when they are misbehaving and what to do about it. That agreement comes through widespread trust in the traditional institutions of truth: science, the media and universities. Latour sought to liberate us from the paternalism of the experts inhabiting these institutions, and it was a noble quest. </p>
<p>But his acid, combined with the chaos of social media and the greed of big money, has corroded things more deeply than he imagined. Now it is bias all the way down, everything is susceptible to a knee-jerk accusation of “fake news.” Climate change may be the ultimate abomination or maybe it’s a hoax. Who can tell? The skepticism-induced paralysis is hardly conducive to chasing monsters.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88856/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam Briggle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Much like the fictitious Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, more and more scientists are running away from their real-life creations.
Adam Briggle, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/73033
2017-03-03T09:27:57Z
2017-03-03T09:27:57Z
How the Italian Futurists shaped the aesthetics of modernity in the 20th century
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158577/original/image-20170227-25959-iodyg1.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Visions of the future, from the early 20th century. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Umberto_Boccioni%2C_1913%2C_Dynamism_of_a_Cyclist_%28Dinamismo_di_un_ciclista%29%2C_oil_on_canvas%2C_70_x_95_cm%2C_Gianni_Mattioli_Collection%2C_on_long-term_loan_to_the_Peggy_Guggenheim_Collection%2C_Venice.jpg">Umberto Boccioni: Dynamism of a Cyclist</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><strong>This article is based around a transcript of a segment from <a href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-10-the-future-73404">The Anthill 10: The Future</a>, a podcast from The Conversation. Gemma Ware, society editor at The Conversation and a producer of The Anthill, interviewed Selena Daly, an expert on the Italian Futurists.</strong></p>
<hr>
<p>When the Italian journalist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-italian-avant-garde-survived-the-trenches-of-world-war-i-65508">went off to the frontlines</a> of World War I, he was thrilled to be pedalling there on a bicycle. Back in 1915, bikes were an avant-garde mode of transport – and Marinetti was an avant-garde kind of guy. He’d made waves across Europe a few years earlier when he launched the <a href="http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html">Futurist Manifesto</a>.</p>
<p><em>Selena Daly: Marinetti, who was a master at advertising and self-promotion, got the first manifesto published on the front page of the Paris daily newspaper Le Figaro in February of 1909. This really was a very bold launch of an artistic and cultural movement at this time and got a lot of attention also around the world.</em></p>
<p>Selena Daly is a lecturer in Italian studies at University College Dublin and an expert in the Italian Futurists. Marinetti’s vision of the future was built around high praise for technology and the aesthetics of modernity. </p>
<p><em>SD: So he praised in this manifesto the speeding automobile, steamships, locomotives. All of these technologies that perhaps to our eyes now may seem a little bit quaint but at that time were really at the cutting edge of technology. So very famously, Marinetti in that manifesto praised the speeding automobile as being more beautiful than the famous Greek sculpture the Winged Victory of Samothrace which stands in the Louvre then and still today.</em> </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="513" data-image="" data-title="An extract from The Anthill episode on The Future" data-size="8445867" data-source="The Anthill" data-source-url="https://theconversation.com/anthill-10-the-future-73404" data-license="CC BY-ND" data-license-url="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/1078/futurists-segment.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
An extract from The Anthill episode on The Future.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://theconversation.com/anthill-10-the-future-73404">The Anthill</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a><span class="download"><span>8.05 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/1078/futurists-segment.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<p>It was a movement that began with literature and poetry and spread to sculpture, fine art, music and even textiles. For example, this 1921 piece called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI77NRTpC8Q">Fox-trot Futurist</a> by an Italian composer, Virgilio Mortari, was influenced by the Futurists. Marinetti’s vision was as destructive and provocative as it was creative and forward-thinking. </p>
<p><em>SD: He felt that Italy as a country was completely weighed down by the baggage of the Renaissance and the baggage of ancient Rome and its classical past. And he really wanted Italy to just stop looking backwards always and instead look to what the future could offer them in terms of inspiration for art and literature. And in that first manifesto he says he wants to rejuvenate Italy which he found very stagnant and therefore he said that everyone should set fire to the libraries, flood the museums and in this way break all links with the past.</em> </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158575/original/image-20170227-26337-1a9qd9l.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1912 photo of the futurists. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti centre, and Umberto Boccioni, second from right.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/Russolo%2C_Carr%C3%A0%2C_Marinetti%2C_Boccioni_and_Severini_in_front_of_Le_Figaro%2C_Paris%2C_9_February_1912.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With World War I in the offing, Marinetti and his band of followers quickly agitated for Italy to join the fight. They felt that war would help bring their Futuristic vision into being. </p>
<p><em>SD: One of the most famous slogans that Marinetti coined was in that very first manifesto where he said that he praised war as the “sole hygiene of the world”. The idea there should be a purging war which would rid Italy and Europe of all of its obsession with the past and they could move forward to a brighter future.</em></p>
<p>It took nine months for Italy’s leaders to agree to join the war – during which time the Futurists campaigned vigorously for intervention. When Italy did enter the war on the side of the Allies in May 1915, Marinetti and his group of fellow Futurists signed up as soon as they could.</p>
<p><em>SD: They were terribly excited by the bombardments. They found this to be an inspiration also for their art and in very many ways putting into practice what they had preached and what they had thought about and imagined in advance of World War I.</em> </p>
<p>When the war ended in 1918, the Futurists went through an intense period of political engagement, forming the Futurist Political Party – and forming a close alliance with Benito Mussolini and his Fascist movement. The Futurist party <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c-B9EJGYbAMC&pg=PT253&lpg=PT253&dq=futurist+political+party+1918&source=bl&ots=01SsmKcMvU&sig=7kwWReR88nsbbkjNPQF3IUkWUFQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwip45rSn5fSAhUEuBQKHVqHBscQ6AEIRTAJ#v=onepage&q=futurist%20political%20party%201918&f=false">wanted</a> to make Italy great again. They wanted a country that was no longer in “servitude to its past” where the only religion was the “religion of tomorrow”. Their manifesto promised revolutionary nationalism, and included ideas such as totally abolishing the senate and the gradual dissolution of the institution of marriage.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158576/original/image-20170227-26337-kdbbin.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=769&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1914 design by futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Casa_Sant%27Elia.jpg">Antonio Sant'Elia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>SD: But in the end of 1919 there were Italian elections and the Futurists and the Fascists performed disastrously. So they received less than 2% of the vote in Milan and it’s at that point that Marinetti actually decides that parliamentary politics isn’t for him and he withdraws. He disbands the Futurist political party and he withdraws completely from parliamentary politics because he feels disillusioned and he feels that the message that he has isn’t getting through.</em> </p>
<p><em>Post-1920, Futurism no longer goes down the parliamentary politics route but it was, after 1924, very closely aligned with Mussolini’s Fascist movement. So while they may not have been engaged in parliamentary parties they were very much on the side of the Fascist regime and that didn’t change at all during Marinetti’s lifetime.</em></p>
<p>Marinetti’s association with Fascism has <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1354571X.2013.810800?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=rmis20">tainted</a> the Futurists’ legacy ever since.</p>
<p><em>SD: Obviously some Futurists distanced themselves from the movement because of this alignment with Fascism. But others didn’t. It’s interesting – a lot of the art in the 1930s and some of the 1940s is what can be described as Fascist pro-regime art. There are a lot of portraits of Mussolini done in a <a href="http://fascionable.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/futurist-mussolini.html">Futurist style</a> for example. And the Futurists, while they were never the official state art of Fascism – because Mussolini never wanted to proclaim one art to be the state art of Fascism – the Futurists were still featured at official events and did have this very strong alignment with Musssoini’s regime at that time.</em> </p>
<p>Marinetti’s allegiance to Mussolini went right up to his death in 1944 in Bellagio in the north of Italy, near to the puppet regime run by Mussolini towards the end of World War II.</p>
<p><em>SD: Because there was such a cult of personality also around Marinetti – and he was really the focal point of the entire movement – it did rather peter out at that stage after his death and then at the end of the war as well. So there were surviving Futurists who did try in the 1940s and 1950s to keep Futurism alive and there was an interest in Futurism most definitely, but it was tainted by Fascism and there was a reluctance in many circles to really address the Futurist art and Futurist literature on its merits because of the shadow of Fascism that was hanging over it.</em></p>
<p>Italy’s relationship with Futurism is still complicated, but some Futurist images have remained iconic.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=596&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158573/original/image-20170227-26337-4s577o.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=749&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The 20 cents Italian coin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:0,20_%E2%82%AC_Italia.jpg">European Central Bank via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><em>SD: There is a sculpture of Boccioni, one of the most famous Futurist artists, actually featured on the <a href="https://www.fleur-de-coin.com/coin-shop/Italy-20-cents-2014-Sculpture-Umberto-Boccioni_eur30374">Italian Euro 20 cents coin</a>, just to give an indication of how important the Futurist aesthetic is to a vision of modern Italy today. Boccioni, died actually in 1916. He died under arms, he actually fell off his horse in training so he didn’t have the glory of a battlefield death that he may have wished for because he was also very belligerent.</em> </p>
<p><em>But he was never tainted by Fascism because he died before Fascism actually came into being. So therefore it’s much easier to place a Boccioni sculpture on a Euro coin in Italy because he doesn’t really have those other connotations and other associations with Fascism.</em> </p>
<p>And the Futurists did help shape the way others in the 20th century went on to imagine what the future could look like.</p>
<p><em>SD: The Futurist aesthetic had a very profound influence on the language of advertising for example in the 20th century. For example, BMW recently <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-futurist-art-inspired-the-design-of-a-bmw-160900416/">said</a> that they were very much influenced by the Futurist aesthetic in the design of one of their cars. There are fashion houses that are still using Futurist prints and Futurist textiles to inspire their collections. There is still an affinity for the Futurist aesthetic even today.</em> </p>
<p>So while Marinetti’s technological, streamlined vision of the future may have been born out of a specific political moment, it has continued to resonate. Even the generic use of the word Futurist today remains strongly connected to Marinetti’s vision from 1909.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73033/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Selena Daly has received research funding from the Irish Research Council, the Fulbright Commission, and the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. </span></em></p>
A transcript from a segment of The Anthill podcast about the futuristic visions of Filippo Marinetti.
Selena Daly, Assistant Professor in Italian Studies, University College Dublin
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/66697
2016-10-17T15:12:11Z
2016-10-17T15:12:11Z
Jo'burg by night: A time for dreamers, graffiti artists, lovers and dancers
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141431/original/image-20161012-13462-zpo1bs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Chilean-German DJ Matias Aguayo performing at Kitchener's Bar in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Charles Leonard</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For someone who only frequents Braamfontein in downtown Johannesburg during the day, De Beer Street at night would be almost unrecognisable. The city’s main party suburb is always an entanglement of cars and bodies. Always a lane of hovering vehicles, their hazard lights flashing, limbs and bass-lines pouring from the open doors. Always a current of club-goers claiming the night-street for pedestrians, willing to encounter strangers in ways they would not normally do during the day.</p>
<p>From the one corner, where the club cum bar <a href="http://www.jhblive.com/Places-in-Johannesburg/restaurants/kitcheners-carvery-bar/5118">Kitchener’s</a> is, all the way up to the next corner next to the <a href="http://bannisterhotel.co.za/">Bannister Hotel</a>, people queue for the dancefloor and find solidarity in waiting. Someone argues with the bouncers, a child begs those in line, a dealer offers marijuana, a young woman yells to a friend across the street.</p>
<p>Yet not too far away from the De Beer Street turbulence are inner city roads that only a few hours earlier were a knot of activity. Congestion dissipates with the daylight and these streets are left empty, creating a cavern in which pedestrian footsteps echo, and drivers move seamlessly from one near-redundant traffic light to the next.</p>
<p>The night has a different rhythm, feel, and aesthetic to the day. This “second city”, academic William Sharpe once <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8744.pdf">said</a>, “comes with its own geography and its own set of citizens”. We occupy space differently at night. Yet so little attention has been given (both within academia and without) to the multifaceted articulations of place, power, atmosphere and identity that constitute Johannesburg after dark. </p>
<h2>Fear of the dark</h2>
<p>Scholars of urban studies are increasingly acknowledging that the discipline, and indeed the wider imagining of cities, is characterised by nyctaphobia: A fear of the dark, and relatedly, the night. As is so often the case, it is artists that are giving us a creative language to describe and engage with that which was once impenetrable.</p>
<p>Elsa Bleda’s recent “<a href="http://www.redbull.com/za/en/music/stories/1331814793620/nightscapes-by-elsa-bleda">Nightscapes</a>” exhibition is one such example. The young photographer’s arresting images capture the serenity, mystery and other worldliness of Johannesburg by night. A primary impetus for her work lies in the century-old Rupert Brooke <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=xgypAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=robert+brooke+cities+reveal+themselves+cats&source=bl&ots=_2bBVIT0TJ&sig=DrBe6g7NRygh-QCkaFBVRyREfw4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB-oXq3IHPAhUFLsAKHRIXB70Q6AEILTAD#v=onepage&q=robert%20brooke%20cities%20reveal%20themselves%20cats&f=false">quote</a> that “cities, like cats, will reveal themselves after dark”. Nevertheless, urban residents are all-too-often strangers to the night.</p>
<p>Darkness often comes with a web of seedy associations – of terror, shadow, deviance, abandonment and impenetrability. There are anxieties about criminals using the night as camouflage, about the vulnerabilities of women, and about the dangers of poorly lit roads.</p>
<p>And indeed the dark is often charged with ambivalent possibilities. On Friday, October 14 slices of Braamfontein’s night-streets, including <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2016/10/15/Popular-jazz-club-damaged-in-Braamfontein-violence">The Orbit Jazz</a> club, were torched amid turbulent protest: sites of play incidentally colliding with those of fierce, volatile struggle.</p>
<p>Darkness can also awaken the imagination, offering atmosphere for transgression, abandon and fantasy. Social anthropologist <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/staff/academic-a-z-listing/h/juliahornbergerwitsacza/">Julia Hornberger</a> <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books?id=hNONyzwm420C&pg=PA285&dq=julia+hornberger+nocturnal+johannesburg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwishMnh2oHPAhXMIMAKHXZVAc4Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=julia%20hornberger%20nocturnal%20johannesburg&f=false">said</a> of Johannesburg dusk: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Going forward into the night is like going backwards in time. Chipped corners on balconies heal, cracks in the plastering disappear … </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The night is a time for dreaming, for graffiti artists, for activists, lovers and dancers.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=318&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141433/original/image-20161012-13471-1o7qunc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of Johannesburg’s most adventurous DJs Mxolisi Makhubo behind the decks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Charles Leonard</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Paradoxically, darkness is often the necessary backdrop for glistening electric illumination, with all the associations of developmental modernity and consumptive excess. Indeed, despite the ways in which electricity blackouts have brought Johannesburg residents into new encounters with the dark, much of our urban night lives take place amid a superfluity of light technologies – traffic lights, nightclub LEDs, police sirens or fluorescent towers in the distance. Light has been a mechanism to claim nocturnal time and territory – to make the dark habitable, exploitable, police-able, profitable and beautiful. </p>
<h2>After-dark nightscape</h2>
<p>Curated lighting is so much a part of the nighttime infrastructure – designating areas of safety, enchantment and surveillance, and then disappearing as day breaks. Braamfontein’s after-dark nightscape is marked by the multi-coloured spectacle of the Nelson Mandela Bridge overhead, abrasive car lights, flash billboards and flickering neon. Again in <a href="https://networks.h-net.org/node/22277/reviews/22974/reitano-sharpe-new-york-nocturne-city-after-dark-literature-painting">New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950</a>, Sharpe <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8744.pdf">tells</a> us: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Like a city, night has a history. And the two come together explosively with the spread of artificial light.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A recent event, <a href="http://10and5.com/2016/08/24/introducing-alight-a-festival-of-light-based-art-in-jozi/">"Alight”</a>, saw artists and designers launch audiences into a series of encounters with electric light in the night. There was a maze of illuminated blocks that responded to touch. Also, a net of sparkle strung to the ceiling. Lasers sketched silhouettes across a cement wall. There were glowing balloons and networks of interactive video technology.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/141423/original/image-20161012-13467-15haak2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Part of the recent ‘Alight’ exhibition in Johannesburg, a net of sparkle strung to the ceiling.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Beth Vale</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the darker side of the Juta Street intersection, it connected audiences to Johannesburg’s nocturnal city and promoted a sense of place through play, light and music. But what “Alight” also achieved, in my mind, was to make explicit the infrastructure of our nightlives, which rather than being assembled from bricks and mortar, is more tangibly a composite of sound, darkness, illumination, and moving bodies.</p>
<h2>A nightclub without the music and lights</h2>
<p>Ever been to a nightclub during the day, without the darkness, the music, the ambient lighting or the intimacy of the crowd? It feels like a non-place. So much of our attachment to nightclub spaces is made from bodies in motion, set to carefully curated sound and light-scapes, all of which disappear at dawn. In urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone’s <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173743/summary">words</a>, we might begin to see “people as infrastructure”. </p>
<p>Human practices, the absence or presence of others, in the city gives places particular contours, creates obstruction or permissiveness, and alters the look and feel of a place.</p>
<p>Moving through Johannesburg’s night city, particularly as a young woman, has meant adopting particular protective sensibilities. But it has also opened up alternate ways of knowing and encountering the city and its practices. </p>
<p>In the realm of the urban night, artists are exposing the dearth of academic language and imagery, prompting us to research and collaborate outside our conventional bounds. They are showing us how much of human life goes unnoticed, while most of the world sleeps.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66697/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Beth Vale does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Scholars of urban studies are acknowledging that the discipline is characterised by a fear of the dark and the night. But artists are giving us a creative language to engage with the darkness.
Beth Vale, Post-doctoral Fellow NRF Chair: Local Histories, Present Realities, University of the Witwatersrand
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/66073
2016-09-29T07:27:05Z
2016-09-29T07:27:05Z
Senegalese wrestle with ethnicity while reaching for dreams of success
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139404/original/image-20160927-14589-1mey3ap.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bombardier (right), the reigning champion and 'King of the Arenas', prepares to defend his crown against the popular young challenger Modou Lô</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Hann/ Global Sport</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>On my mother’s side I’m Diola. That’s why I’m a good wrestler. Well, actually my family is Socé from Sédhiou, in Casamance. Before my next fight, I want to go to Casamance to solicit prayers from the marabouts there. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It came as something of a surprise to me when Omar, an aspiring Senegalese wrestler whom I had come to know during my fieldwork, revealed to me his Casamançais ancestry. Of course, there was nothing really surprising about the fact itself.</p>
<p>Dakar’s ever-expanding suburban areas are populated by people who have moved to the capital from all over <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14093674">Senegal</a> as part of an ongoing rural exodus since the mid-20th century. There are Diola and Mandinka from Casamance, Peulh from the Senegal river valley, Sereer from the Saloum delta, and Wolof from the country’s interior, to name just some of the groups that make up Dakar’s complex ethnic landscape. What was surprising to me was that Omar himself brought up the topic. </p>
<p>Among young Dakarois, ethnicity often appears to be a somewhat vague category that they rarely mention. It is less central to urban identity than, say, religious affiliation or place of residence. In other words, the district in which one lives today is more significant than the village where one’s parents or grandparents were born. </p>
<p>Observers have suggested that urbanisation in this west African country has been accompanied by processes of de-ethnicisation and Wolofisation. Urbanites adopt “Dakar Wolof” – a French influenced Wolof dialect – as their lingua franca and develop urban ways of life that blur boundaries of ethnic differentiation.</p>
<p>For young men like Omar and his friends, these urban ways of life are a source of pride and a key part of their identity. Being from the “ghetto” – as they often refer to their neighbourhood on the fringes of Dakar’s sprawling commuter zone – gives them a sense of toughness, urban knowledge and a style that eludes their rural cousins.</p>
<p>In such representations, the city is portrayed as a site of modernity and progress, a gateway to the world – albeit one where morality is at risk. Conversely, village life is considered backward and underdeveloped, while simultaneously venerated as the site of “pure” language, “pure” culture – and also “pure” wrestling.</p>
<h2>A truly national sport?</h2>
<p>Wrestling is popularly presented as Senegal’s national sport and is considered to be a shared heritage of Senegambian peoples. Yet, today it comes in a variety of forms. These include Olympic wrestling, numerous styles of “traditional” wrestling, and the commercially popular <a href="http://www.sportspromedia.com/magazine_features/a_nation_gripped_inside_the_world_of_traditional_senegalese_wrestling">“lutte avec frappe”</a>, loosely translated as “wrestling with punches”. It is a hybrid sport that combines elements of traditional wrestling with bare knuckle boxing. </p>
<p>It is this discipline that has succeeded in capturing the attention of the Senegalese public. This style provides young men like Omar and his teammates with dreams of lucrative careers. It is this dream of wealth and success that drives the wrestling boom in Dakar.</p>
<p>When the first wrestling associations, known as écuries, were established in Dakar, ethnicity and geographical provenance were the main organisational principle: écurie Sereer, écurie Diola, écurie Halpulaar, écurie Baol and écurie Walo each brought together wrestlers of a specific ethnic group or historical region. Only the écuries of Pikine and Fass defied this logic in grouping together athletes from a specific area of Dakar. </p>
<p>Today, however, this form of organisation dominates and the associations are generally multi-ethnic. At the same time, other ethnically specific elements of wrestling – notably the bakk or self-praise singing – have been gradually erased from the sport. Contemporary wrestling in Senegal is now a professionalised commercial sport dependent on individual stars who are widely seen as aspirational celebrities.</p>
<p>The famous wrestler Mohammed “Tyson” Ndao did much to popularise the image of the wrestler as an entrepreneurial self-made man. Fashioning his image on that of his boxing namesake, he engaged heavily in marketing and commercial activities. He promoted himself as an icon of youthful rebellion.</p>
<h2>Wrestling’s commercial explosion</h2>
<p>Wrestling’s development from a village pastime to an urban and entrepreneurial pursuit has led to a commercial explosion of the sport since the 1990s. Still, ethnicity has not completely disappeared. In fact, it persists in a number of particular ways. It surfaces in discourses of physical qualities associated with wrestlers of specific groups. Political and economic alliances are forged along ethnic lines between wrestlers and their patrons.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/139406/original/image-20160927-14618-11lhcwa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Faux lions’, traditional figures at major events in Senegal, provide pre-fight entertainment.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mark Hann/Global Sport</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ethnicity features in narratives of pre-destination, in which wrestlers of specific ethnic backgrounds – especially Diola and Sereer – claim that wrestling is “in their blood”. Ethnically specific clothing, objects or cultural performances are displayed at fights. Magico-religious powers are also associated with wrestlers of certain ethnicities – again, especially Diola and Sereer.</p>
<p>Established star wrestlers regularly evoke their ethnic provenance in the buildup to big fights. As in any other sport, young hopefuls are quick to copy their idols. Omar’s (technically incorrect) insistence on his Diola heritage was just one of several examples I came across during my fieldwork of young wrestlers referring to ethnicity to strengthen their claims of athletic prowess. </p>
<p>Another young wrestler, Modou, would regularly tell me that his Sereer heritage meant wrestling was an ancestral calling. He said he was unable to follow another path in life. Ama, an aspiring wrestler from the city of Pikine, visited his mother’s Sereer village for the first time after starting to train for a career in the arena. He told me that he has sought out the services of Sereer marabouts and diviners ever since, reconnecting with his grandparents’ belief system.</p>
<p>There is a shared motif in these stories. Young men who do not seem to have grown up with a clearly defined ethnic identity return to paradigms of ethnic difference to strengthen their identities as wrestlers. In the context of urbanisation and Wolofisation in Dakar, this seems almost paradoxical. In the context of a professionalising sport and an increasingly globalised society, even more so. </p>
<p>This return to ethnicity disrupts commonly held assumptions about rural and urban relations. It also calls into question the nature of Senegal’s modernities. In addition, it poses a challenge to Senegalese nationalism: Does the presence of an ethnic discourse within the sporting arena threaten the notion of the multi-ethnic nation state?</p>
<p>It is impossible to adequately address these questions without further enquiry into the state of ethnic relations and discourses in society at large. This, particularly in politics where accusations of ethnic favouritism are never far away. </p>
<p>At the very least, one might conclude from these observations that sport can intervene in social dynamics in surprising ways. The re-ethnicisation of wrestling leads us to reconsider what we mean when we speak of a national sport and a traditional sport - and by extension, the very categories of tradition and nationhood.</p>
<p><em>Mark Hann is part of GLOBALSPORT research team. GLOBALSPORT (@GlobalSportUVA) is a multi-sited comparative ethnographic project. GLOBALSPORT is funded by the European Research Council and based at the University of Amsterdam.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66073/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Hann receives funding from the European Research Council. </span></em></p>
Wrestling is Senegal’s national sport. But the presence of an ethnic discourse within the sporting arena may well threaten the notion of the multi-ethnic nation state.
Mark Hann, Doctoral student in Anthropology, University of Amsterdam
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/48727
2015-11-17T11:03:02Z
2015-11-17T11:03:02Z
Is Islam incompatible with modernity?
<p>In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, political leaders have lined up to denounce the acts as inhuman and uncivilized, unworthy of our day and age.</p>
<p>French President Francois Hollande <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34816077">denounced them</a> as “a barbaric act,” while President Obama <a href="https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2015/11/15/targets-terrorism-financing-and-border-controls-after-paris/E9qXvgk9v5sF8UYYABoMLK/story.html">called them</a> “an attack on the civilized world.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the horrific actions of ISIS – done in the name of Islam – often get attributed to Muslims as a whole. There is the underlying assumption that there must be some core aspect of the religion that is at fault, that the religion is incompatible with modernity. </p>
<p>It hasn’t helped that some non-Muslim thinkers have conflated ISIS with mainstream Islam. They’ll often point to ISIS’ desire to return civilization to the seventh century as further proof that Islam – and its followers – are backwards.</p>
<p>Yet many leading Muslim thinkers are going to some of Islam’s earliest texts to actually promote reform. Contained within these texts are ideas many consider progressive: peaceful coexistence, the acceptance of other religions, democratic governance and women’s rights. </p>
<p>Indeed, Islam and modernization need not be at odds with one another. And in the aftermath of tragedy, it’s important to not lose sight of this. </p>
<h2>A single model of modernity?</h2>
<p>The question is posed, time and again: will Muslims ever be able to reform and modernize and join the 21st century?</p>
<p>Yet the subtext is almost always that the Western paradigm of modernity – the one that developed in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, that firmly embraced <a href="https://thereformedmind.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/when-calvin-and-qutb-went-smashing/">secularism</a> and the (sometimes ferocious) marginalization of religion – is the only one worthy of emulation. Muslims, the thinking goes, have no choice but to adopt it themselves.</p>
<p>However <a href="http://www.havenscenter.org/files/Eisenstadt2000_MultipleModernities.pdf">some scholars have increasingly challenged</a> the notion of a single model of modernity. According to them, there’s no reason that religion and modernization must inevitably be at odds with one another for all societies and for all time.</p>
<p>In 16th-century Europe, the priesthood had achieved considerable wealth and political power by often allying themselves with local kings and rulers. The Protestant reformers, therefore, regarded the Church as an impediment to political empowerment. </p>
<p>But Muslims, due to their unique religious history, continue to view their religion as an ally in their attempts to come to terms with the changed circumstances of the modern world. </p>
<p>Muslim religious scholars (<em>ulama</em>) never enjoyed the kind of centralized and institutionalized authority that the medieval European church and its elders did. The <em>ulama</em> – from the eighth century’s al-Hasan al-Basri to the 20th century’s Ayatullah Khomeini – traditionally distanced themselves from political rulers, intervening on behalf of the populace to ensure social and political justice. </p>
<p>Such an oppositional role to government prevented the emergence of a general popular animosity directed at them, and by extension, toward Islam.</p>
<p>For this reason, today’s Muslim thinkers feel no imperative to distance themselves from their religious tradition. On the contrary, they are plumbing it to find resources therein to not only adapt to the modern world, but also to shape it. </p>
<h2>Islam turned on its head</h2>
<p>Yet 21st-century Muslim religious scholars have a challenging task. How can they exhume and popularize principles and practices that allowed Muslims in the past to coexist with others, in peace and on equal terms, regardless of religious affiliation? </p>
<p>Such a project is made more urgent by the fact that extremists in Muslim-majority societies (ISIS leaders currently foremost among them) vociferously reject this as impossible. Islam, they declare, posits the superiority of Muslims over everyone else. Muslims must convert non-Muslims or politically subjugate them. </p>
<p>As a result, <a href="http://theweek.com/speedreads/554266/rick-santorum-isis-bomb-back-7th-century">many have accused</a> these extremists of trying to return Muslim-majority societies to the seventh century. </p>
<p>If only that were true!</p>
<p>If these extremists could actually be transported miraculously back to the seventh century, they would learn a thing or two about the religion they claim to be their own. </p>
<p>For starters, they would learn to their chagrin that seventh-century Medina accepted Jews as equal members of the community (<em>umma</em>) under the Constitution of Medina drawn up by the prophet Muhammad in 622 CE. They would also learn that seventh-century Muslims took seriously the Qur'anic injunction (2:256) that there is to be no compulsion in religion and that specific Qur’anic verses (<a href="http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=2&verse=62">2:62</a> and <a href="http://corpus.quran.com/translation.jsp?chapter=5&verse=69">5:69</a>) recognize goodness in righteous Christians and Jews. </p>
<p>Most importantly, fire-breathing extremists would learn that peaceful non-Muslim communities cannot be militarily attacked simply because they are not Muslim. They would be reminded that only after 12 years of nonviolent resistance would the Prophet Muhammad and his companions resort to armed combat or the military jihad. And even then it would only be to defend themselves against aggression. </p>
<p>The Qur'an, after all, unambiguously forbids Muslims from initiating combat. Qur'an 2:190 states, “Do not commit aggression,” while Qur'an 60:8 specifically asserts: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>God does not forbid you from being kind and equitable to those who have neither made war on you on account of your religion nor driven you from your homes; indeed God loves those who are equitable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Extremist groups like ISIS are often accused of being scriptural literalists and therefore prone to intolerance and violence. But when it comes to specific Qur'anic verses like 2:256; 60:8 and others, it’s clear that they cherry-pick which passages to “strictly” interpret.</p>
<h2>Going to the source</h2>
<p>Not surprisingly, Muslim reformers are returning to their earliest religious sources and history – the Qur'an and its commentaries, reliable sayings of Muhammad, early historical chronicles – for valuable guidance during these troubled times. </p>
<p>And much of what we regard as “modern, progressive values” – among them religious tolerance, the empowerment of women, and accountable, consultative modes of governance – can actually be found in this strand of Muslims’ collective history. </p>
<p>Like 16th-century Christian reformers, Muslim reformers are returning to their foundational texts and mining them for certain moral guidelines and ethical prescriptions. For one reason or another – political upheaval, war, ideological movements – many had been cast aside. But today they retain particular relevance. </p>
<p>As a result, the reformers are distinguishing between “normative Islam” and “historical Islam,” as the famous Islam scholar Fazlur Rahman <a href="http://www.jstor.org.proxyiub.uits.iu.edu/stable/pdf/20840179.pdf">has phrased it</a>. </p>
<p>But unlike the earlier Christian reformers, Muslim reformers are hardly ever left alone to conduct their project of reform. Their efforts are constantly stymied by intrusive outsiders, particularly non-Muslim Western cultural warriors who encroach on the Muslim heartlands – militarily, culturally and, above all, intellectually. </p>
<p>Such a multipronged assault was particularly evident during George W Bush’s presidency, during which the neoconservatives championed a “clash of civilizations” between the West and the Islamic world, a theory <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/1993-06-01/clash-civilizations">popularized by political scientist Samuel Huntington</a>.</p>
<p>Western Muslim reformers are not immune to this onslaught, either. They are frequently derided by <a href="http://nocompulsion.com/why-the-west-loves-lying-to-itself-about-islam/">self-styled “expert” outsiders</a> for subscribing to what they characterize as newfangled beliefs like democracy, religious tolerance and women’s rights. According to these “experts,” there is supposedly no grounding or room for these beliefs in their religious texts and tradition. </p>
<p>One wonders how effective Martin Luther would have been in 16th-century Europe if he had to constantly deal with non-Christian “experts” lecturing him about Christianity’s true nature. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, there are a number of pundits who are eager to tie the actions of Islamist terrorists to mainstream religious doctrine.</p>
<p>Journalist Graeme Wood’s <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/">alarmist article</a> in The Atlantic is a most recent example of such intrusive punditry.</p>
<p>“The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic,” he wrote. “…the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.”</p>
<p>Caner Dagli, a well-known scholar of Islam, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/what-muslims-really-want-isis-atlantic/386156/">rejected</a> Woods’ argument: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of this puts Muslims in a double bind: If they just go about their lives, they stand condemned by those who demand that Muslims “speak out.” But if they do speak out, they can expect to be told that short of declaring their sacred texts invalid, they are fooling themselves or deceiving the rest of us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite such formidable challenges, reformist efforts continue unabated in learned Muslim circles. Sometimes crises and the subsequent marshaling of moral and intellectual resources can bring out the best in an individual and in a community. </p>
<p>The Qur’an (94:6) promises that “Indeed with hardship comes ease.” Committed Muslim reformers who take the Qur'an’s injunctions seriously (unlike the extremists) are working toward the easing of current circumstances of hardship – and calling on others to help, not impede, them in this global human endeavor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48727/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Asma Afsaruddin is affiliated with the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. </span></em></p>
Religion and modernity need not be at odds with one another, and many leading Muslim thinkers are plumbing early texts to promote progressive ideas.
Asma Afsaruddin, Professor of Islamic Studies and former Chairperson, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/35826
2015-01-06T10:45:36Z
2015-01-06T10:45:36Z
Tolkien and the machine
<p>My grandfather was a carpenter, and I don’t think he ever developed much of a sense of trust in machines. I remember him laboring away at our home one summer, transforming our screened-in porch into a dining room. He could drive a nail through a 2x4 with a single blow, a skill I still haven’t mastered. He simply loved making things, and he was good at it. But he referred to the family car simply as “the machine,” and he regarded what lay under its hood with suspicion. He believed that such machines enabled us to travel too far too fast, preventing us from getting to know our own backyards. He feared that the machine age was depriving us of the joy of craftsmanship.</p>
<p>Though he never knew it, I think my grandfather’s attitude toward machines closely paralleled that of Lord of the Rings and Hobbit author JRR Tolkien. Tolkien’s views on the matter are apparent throughout his work, and before the final installment of the Hobbit trilogy fades from cinemas, the time is ripe to revisit Tolkien’s critique. No one is suggesting that we should toss our machines onto the scrap heap of history, but the devices my grandfather and Tolkien decried are now so integral to the world we inhabit that we may have difficulty seeing them, let alone assessing their impact on our lives.</p>
<h2>Tolkien’s dark side of machines</h2>
<p>To Tolkien, the machine is something far more menacing than a mere mechanical device. Fundamentally, it represents the lust for power – in particular, for power over others. The evil lord Sauron wants the one ring more than anything and is willing to stop at nothing to get it precisely because it will enable him to exert absolute control. The ring is machine par excellence, the device that will enable its possessor to establish absolute tyranny over every other living creature. It is not a means of liberation but a tool of coercion, domination, and enslavement. As the British historian Lord Acton would have warned, the power of the ring not only corrupts but corrupts absolutely.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68127/original/image-20150102-8198-qdw3x3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=691&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tolkien’s ring can be thought of as machine par excellence, the device that will enable its possessor to establish absolute tyranny over every other living creature.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/lotr/images/3/3a/Sauron.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120620000759">LOTR Wikia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The machine’s corrupting power is visible not only in warfare and military conquest, but also in everyday life. For the machine takes something human – the power to produce, which is both creative and life-giving – and transforms it into something dull and enervating. Hobbits like to make things and delight in what they produce – furniture, utensils, carts, simple crops, bread, cheeses, and perhaps above all, ale. But they produce such things for two simple reasons: because they are necessary and because they are a source of pleasure. Labor-saving devices among the hobbits are of the simplest variety, and they make use of their leisure for enjoyment, not to acquire still more.</p>
<p>Men, by contrast, can be duped into supposing that the power to produce is the power to dominate. And domination is possible not only by wielding weapons of war but also by so automating everyday life in the name of saving labor that we become alienated from the very work that defines our lives. Instead of making what we need to live and enjoy life, we simply purchase it; the more wealth we acquire, the more we can afford to purchase. Soon the craftsman at his bench is replaced by a factory full of assembly line laborers. Before long, the laborers are replaced by robots. The joy that comes from making is replaced by a dull ache to consume more.</p>
<h2>The orcs take it one menacing step further</h2>
<p>The dire implications of the machine are captured in Tolkien’s orcs, as portrayed in Peter Jackson’s cinematic trilogies. These creatures do not come to exist naturally, but are bred by an evil power out of the slime of the earth. They are deformed and ugly creatures, whose hands are sometimes replaced with weapons. They seem to hate everyone (perhaps even themselves), and they take pleasure only in destroying and defiling. Tolkien suggests that they make no beautiful things, perhaps because they cannot recognize beauty. They care only about efficiency and conquest, to which they are driven by evil masters who rule through fear. </p>
<p>The metaphorical orc-ish machine is buried deep within the earth, a hot, constricted place filled by the sounds of clanging and grinding. Here, living things such as trees represent nothing more than raw materials, to be sliced up to produce the implements of domination and destruction. The scene resembles caricatures of Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century Pittsburgh steel plants and Henry Ford’s 20th century River Rouge automobile assembly plant, where men have been turned into mere means of production, mindlessly performing the same repetitive task, hour after hour and day after day. It is a place devoid of love and hope, animated only by a lust to enslave.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/68102/original/image-20141231-8213-10moc6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The world of the orcs could be thought of as a caricature of Henry Ford’s assembly line, where men mindlessly performed the same repetitive task.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The orcs use technology to enslave others, yet they are also little more than a pseudo-living technology of enslavement. Though sufficiently powerful to threaten goodness, they lead utterly miserable existences. They seem inhuman in part because their humanoid physiognomy deviates so disastrously from our own. But even more, they are utterly lacking in respect for the freedom and dignity of other creatures, something that even wayward dwarfs, elves, hobbits, and human beings are at least capable of recovering. Were the orcs’ conquest ever to be completed, they would have nothing left to live for, nothing good or beautiful to which to aspire. </p>
<h2>Have faith: Tolkien gives us hope</h2>
<p>Tolkien’s dim view of the machine is awesome in its simplicity. If a means of organizing human life can respect human freedom and dignity, it can be a force for good. A factory is not necessarily a forge of enslavement. But as soon as it starts putting efficiency and productivity ahead of humanity, it begins to resemble the worst chapters of the industrial revolution, as Blake and Dickens damningly portrayed. Human ingenuity becomes nothing more than a tool for inflicting hurt and destruction – exactly what the orcs embody. The machine represents coercion, and it is impossible to virtuously coerce a human being, even for good ends. </p>
<p>But Tolkien’s perspective on the machine is not a fatalistic one. The lust for power is not the sole contender for the human heart. Other longings, such as those for beauty, justice, and fellowship are also at work, and if we listen to them we can reap many of the fruits of technology without selling our souls. Like my grandfather, who tended his grapes on a backyard trellis that he crafted by hand, Tolkien seems to have loved the world, and to have believed that human beings are capable of making it a better, more enjoyable place. To do so, however, we must recognize the machine for what it is – a mere tool with the potential to enslave, against which we must be ever on guard.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/35826/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Gunderman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
My grandfather was a carpenter, and I don’t think he ever developed much of a sense of trust in machines. I remember him laboring away at our home one summer, transforming our screened-in porch into a…
Richard Gunderman, Chancellor's Professor of Medicine, Liberal Arts, and Philanthropy, IUPUI
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/33006
2014-10-28T09:36:23Z
2014-10-28T09:36:23Z
Confucius doesn’t live here anymore
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62666/original/7gpjj6z3-1414088324.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C1%2C1310%2C862&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Confucius stands guard at Beijing's Renmin University.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">George (Sam) Crane</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In today’s China, the philosopher Confucius is back. To mark his 2,565th birthday this September, the nation’s President, Xi Jinping, paid homage to the sage at an <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/xi-jinping-confucianism_b_5897680.html">international conference</a> convened for the occasion. “Confucianism,” Xi said, is key to “understanding the national characteristics of the Chinese as well as the historical roots of the spiritual world of the present-day Chinese.” </p>
<p>But for all the fervor of his contemporary defenders, it is unlikely that Confucianism, as a serious moral theory, will significantly shape the character of modern Chinese society.</p>
<h2>The comeback story</h2>
<p>The Confucian revival that started in the mid-1980s has been expertly described by Sinologists and journalists alike.</p>
<p>The best academic reference is John Makeham’s magisterial <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674028111">Lost Soul: ‘Confucianism’ in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse</a> which richly illustrates how intellectuals inside and outside of China worked, from the 1980s onward, to resuscitate Confucian thinking in China following its harsh repression under communist leader and founder of the People’s Republic, Mao Zedong. </p>
<p>What is clear from this work is that the impetus for the reinvention of Confucian tradition is not simply a cynical ploy by the Chinese government to bolster its legitimacy – though it is that, too. The point is that there are a variety of social forces that see in Confucianism a potential source of stable cultural identity and soothing historical continuity in a turbulent modern world. </p>
<p>The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, in his new book, <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/ageofambitionchasingfortunetruthandfaithinthenewchina/evanosnos">Age of Ambition</a>, shows us just how diverse the new Confucianists are. </p>
<p>He describes the Confucius Temple in Beijing, which dates back to the fourteenth century but fell into disrepair during the <a href="http://www.history.com/topics/cultural-revolution">Cultural Revolution</a> (1966-1976.) It has now been restored but its manager is more entrepreneur than adept. A minor Communist Party functionary, he has to ensure that temple activities are politically correct. But in creating new public “rituals”, he takes a certain artistic license. He makes up Confucianism as he goes along: some out-of-context quotations here; a new dance number there; a bit of faux classical music to keep the spirits up. A dim understanding of the past is shaped to suit the social and commercial needs of the present.</p>
<p>But what is Confucianism? And what might a more genuine return of Confucian morality look like? </p>
<h2>Confucian ethics</h2>
<p>These are vast questions that occupy the entire intellectual lives of serious scholars. <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269705">Confucianism</a> itself is not a singular thing: it has branched and permutated over the centuries into a variety of expressions. Perhaps the most essential elements, however, are those that emphasize conscientious ethical behavior that focuses on cultivating our closest loving relationships, especially with our family and friends and neighbors. </p>
<p>Many experts begin a description of <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/#ConEth">Confucian ethics</a> with the notion of <em>ren</em> - 仁 - which can be translated as “humaneness” or “goodness” or “righteousness”. It suggests in its very structure that humans are always embedded in social contexts: the left side of the character (人) is “person,” the right side (二) is “two.” We are not completely autonomous and self-determining. Rather, we find our best selves when we respond to the needs of those closest to us. As Confucius says in <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14164-2/the-analects-of-confucius">Analects 6:30</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The humane person wants standing, and so he helps others to gain standing. He wants achievement, and so he helps others to achieve.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The imperative to do right by others is of central importance to Confucius. We should not be distracted by selfish material gain or social status or political power in our effort to maintain and reproduce humaneness in the world. And that is where the exigencies of modern life obstruct the realization of Confucian ideals in China today. </p>
<h2>Where Confucianism clashes with contemporary reality</h2>
<p>In the political realm, the ruling Communist Party has, rather ironically, embraced the Confucian revival. Invocations of Maoist-Marxist socialist rectitude ring hollow now in a society roiled by neo-liberal, crony-capitalist economic transformation. Better to say that the “rise of China” has returned it to historical greatness, creating all sorts of possibilities for connecting the Chinese present with the Chinese past, including Confucianism, however strained the allusions might be. </p>
<p>A decade ago, President Hu Jintao began to extoll China as a “harmonious society,” <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/2010/oct/01/opinion/la-oe-gardner-confucius-20101001">resonant with Confucian idealism</a>. More recently, President Xi Jinping has <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/09/literary-leaders-why-chinas-president-is-so-fond-of-dropping-confucius/">regularly cited</a> classic texts to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/leader-taps-into-chinese-classics-in-seeking-to-cement-power.html">bolster his image</a> as a learned exemplar of civilized leadership. </p>
<p>But these official references to Confucius, even if they were something more than political posturing, cannot counteract the much more powerful social and cultural changes sweeping across China. Rapid modernization in all of its manifestations – commercialization, urbanization, social mobility, the <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-individualization-of-chinese-society-9781847883780/">rise of the individual </a> – have fundamentally transformed the contours of Chinese society. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/62884/original/n7n6n3hq-1414421549.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ultimate symbol of success: a Lamborghini Murcielago makes its debut in China (Tim Wang)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jiazi/3713520748/in/photolist-6E9LkN-6kpCE6-6ktPmd-6qmDB4-6ktNBy-6hVgaG-6hVfN9-6hR64e-Gq696-GqbQe-6E5DJi-6E9NWf-6E5GNK-6E9M4u-6kpCdM-6hR8ia-9yifX8-9yifEK-9ymg8w-6kpDLZ-6hR6rM-9yieKi-9yih4x-9ymfyh-9ymfLf-9yighx-6hR8Ep-6hR8TR-6hR9qX-6hVgsw-6hR576-6hR5mM-6hVeg7-6hVhz3-6hVe11-9EtaQg-9Ew5xd-9Ew5rY-9ymfg9-9yigQV-6E5DSr-6E5E3V-6E9Sms-6E9R67-9FrTXf-9FoVxT-6hVfwo-6kpCKk-9FoWmc-9FoVPz/">Tim Wang/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A yawning <a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/society/james-palmer-chinese-youth/">generation gap</a> has opened up between current twenty-somethings and their elders. Younger people take for granted certain social and cultural freedoms to define themselves for themselves. They are too busy competing for spots in elite universities or vying for the best jobs to attend to filial duties. Family and social bonds are fraying. <a href="http://chinawatch.washingtonpost.com/2012/04/nursing-homes-booming.php">Nursing homes</a> are a growth industry.</p>
<p>There is much talk, across all age groups, of <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/political-theory/moral-china-age-reform">a “moral crisis” in a society that has lost its normative bearings</a> as the economy and society and culture (though not the political system) precipitously shatter and reconstitute. </p>
<p>Some Chinese might desire a settled “Confucian” ethical framework, but there is no real basis for enacting and institutionalizing it. Material incentives erode social relationships, constant change destabilizes moral continuity.</p>
<p>Historically, Confucianism was embedded in an agrarian society, a complex interweaving of families and villages and market towns steeped in ancient cultural beliefs. At the pinnacle of political power, the Son of Heaven (aka the Emperor) watched over All Under Heaven (aka the Empire) with the aid of a Confucian-educated elite. That world was destroyed first by civil war and foreign invasion and then by the revolutionary Maoist fanaticism of the 20th century. </p>
<p>China today impatiently modernizes at breakneck speed. All that was solid in the Confucian past has melted into air. In the tumult of the present, Confucius has returned, but only as a vague yet unattainable desire for a more stable cultural identity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/33006/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Crane does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
In today’s China, the philosopher Confucius is back. To mark his 2,565th birthday this September, the nation’s President, Xi Jinping, paid homage to the sage at an international conference convened for…
Sam Crane, Chair and W. Van Alan Clark '41 Third Century Professor in the Social Sciences, Williams College, Williams College
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.