Archive for April 2005
[LINK] Ikram Saeed on Canadian Muslims
Over at his blog, Ikram has assembled a very interesting array of data about Canadian Muslims. His conclusion? Canadian Muslims represent an exceptionally diverse but well-integrated community in Canada, and the likelihood of a Dutch-style breakdown of interethnic relations correspondingly low.
[BRIEF NOTE] Star Wars
Darth Vader has a weblog. Or rather, someone playing him self-consciously does.
Oh, a quiz:
[BRIEF NOTE] More on the AUT
Jonathan Edelstein has a post up about the British AUT’s selective boycott of Israeli academic institutions. I’ve written about the boycott already. The accusations of anti-Semitism are understandable, but still strike me as (mostly) ill-founded and bordering upon gratuitous slurs. But then, I should know better than to expect die-hard protagonists of either side in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute to be intellectually honest and deserving of respect. More fool me.
No, I don’t support the boycott. I’m motivated equally by optimism and pessimism. Optimistically, Israelis and Palestinians are nations strongly marked by talent which have already contributed much to the wider world and should be allowed to contribute much more. Pessimistically, Israelis and Palestinians have shown little sustained willingness to compromise on core demands but have demonstrated a willingness to inflict as much suffering as possible upon the other side’s civilian population, and one may as well let Israelis and Palestinians participate in the wider world before their mutual annihilation.
Yes, I know that I’m talking in generalities about large diverse populations which probably don’t want to head towards this outcome, but that’s part of what’s Greek tragedy’s about. If only the maniacs weren’t in control of the state apparatuses and military forces. For the time being, I’ll simply echo The Simpsons and echo Principal Skinner’s exhortation to his students in “The PTA Disbands”:
Edna: Our demands are very reasonable. By ignoring them, you’re selling out these children’s future!
Skinner: Oh, come on, Edna: we both know these children have no future!
[all the children stop and look at him]
[chuckles nervously] Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.
[BRIEF NOTE] Defections and the Free Choice Problem
William Baird observes that states and cultures which can deal with variation from norms–sometimes a little variation, sometimes a lot–are destined to thrive and to push out their more intolerant contemporaries. He’s right: The collapse of traditionalist cultures which can’t deal with, as their dissenting members are lost to less pure cultures and the hard-core remnant is left to try to negotiate its way through a world that’s decidedly pro-hybridity. It’s simple Darwinian selection at work.
This is as it should be. If, say, Prince Edward Islanders are reluctant to consider Island residents of–let us say, politely–“non-European background” as potential Islanders, I’m not necessarily opposed to the province’s utter marginalization. In fact, I think it a good thing: Accelerate Atlantic Canada’s depopulation, please! (The Noodle House has closed down incidentally after five years of harassment, its owners planning on moving to Toronto. And people wonder why more immigrants don’t head to Atlantic Canada? But I digress.) If French Muslim leaders want to make membership in that community conditional on accepting a misogynistic set of cultural norms, or if German Jewish leaders are reluctant to accept Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union as proper Jews, or if third-generation ethnic Korean residents in Japan have to pass insanely rigourous exams to demonstrate that they are Japanese enough to qualify for citizenship, fine. Stupid Prince Edward Islanders, or French Muslim leaders, or German Jewish leaders, or Japanese nationalists, and all of their ilk, just shouldn’t claim to be surprised when they find that their claimed constituencies are hemorrhaging members by the tens of thousands.
In those societies where social mobility–most particularly intermarriage, but also including porous class structures and institutions of civil society–is a reality, differences will fade, as satyadasa suggested, in the space of several generations. Mobile societies–particularly, though not exclusively, First World social-democratic societies in the West–do a very good job indeed of breaking down social barriers. Even on Prince Edward Island, the distinctions between Islanders of English and Scottish and Acadien and Irish background are more theoretical than anything else.
Opponents of hybridity don’t want these possibilities to exist at all. One highly prominent form of opposition lies in the desire to regulate marriage. We see this tendency manifested, worldwide, by citizenship laws which discriminate against binational couples and their children, by the strong opposition of the Catholic Church to same-sex marriage, and by a persistent denigration of anything that isn’t a highly restricted and conservative marriage regime for heterosexuals only, with specific forms in mind (the presence of covenant marriages in the US South, the absence of civil marriage in Israel). If it’s impossible to form non-traditional sorts of bonds across communities, then defection will obviously become more difficult than ever before. It’s a stopgap measure that won’t slow things down entirely–in Israel, certainly and unarguably a sensible liberal-minded society, the main effect of the absence of civil marriage has been to promote the Cypriot tourism industry (civil marriages contracted abroad are recognized), further weaken the institution of marriage, and, in the time-honoured fashion of religious monopolies everywhere, weaken the legitimacy of religious institutions in general–but at least it’s something.
One might almost think that these organizations and attitudinal clusters are protesting the mandatory imposition of these laws on all of their communicants, rather than representing an option available for anyone to freely choose. (I recall a memorable article in The Onion which described the protests against Massachusetts’ mandatory same-sex marriage laws). In a way, that is what they’re protesting. The idea that they can no longer regulate strictly their memberships, that they can be free to make their own decisions and construct their own identities in the context of an unregulated and pluralistic society, without the possibility of an automatic veto on their part, is terrifying for them. Without change on their part, it spells their doom.
[BRIEF NOTE] McDonald, The River of Gods
I’ve a particular fondness for the works of British science fiction author Ian McDonald. Perhaps it’s because I was exposed to a story of his (the 1990 novella “Toward Kilimanjaro”) at an early age, through a magazine of my uncle’s. That’s what clued me on to Geoff Ryman and The Child Garden, though my introduction to Ryman came through a different uncle. “Toward Kilimanjaro” was later expanded into the very enjoyable 1995 novel Chaga. I’m pleased, then, to report that I was able to acquire his latest tome, 2004’s River of Gods (reviews here and here), at a very affordable price in trade paperback. From my brief perusal to date, this novel looks quite enjoyable, set as it is in a changed India in 2047, precisely a century after the declaration of independence.
One thing I’m curious about: How does he, a British citizen, represent (formerly British-colonized) Kenyans and Indians in Chaga and River of Gods? Does he do an effective job? What do Kenyans and Indians think? Is this the empire trying to write back?
[REVIEW] 5 Alarm! Diner
I was hungry and walking south Church Street when, passing by the 5 Alarm! Diner (555 Church Street), my attention was caught Wednesday evening special, pork roast with mixed vegetable and potatoes for $C8.49. Deciding that this had to be better than the Korean noodles in a bowl awaiting me home, I climbed up the stairs and entered, passing past a departing lesbian couple with child.
NOW‘s June 2004 review is quite right to note that 5 Alarm! Diner is a restaurant that specializes in comfort food. 5 Alarm! Diner doesn’t make any pretensions to be anything but a diner. It does this well, for instance with the retro decor: the colour scheme and tables reminding me of nothing so much as Al’s Diner on Happy Days with added modernist sheen in chrome-legged chairs and a certain amount of camp in the ubiquitous firefighting-related decorations.
I enjoyed myself. There’s certainly worse things to be doing than to be eating a well-cooked and tasty meal with a bottle of Stella Artois on hand, sitting by the window and looking out on Church Street as the two people seated next to you talk about their relationship woes.
[BRIEF NOTE] On Intermarriage
The reaction from my father’s family when he, a Roman Catholic of good indiscriminately Celtic descent, decided to marry my mother, a good Island woman of the 1970s of mainly Scottish ancestry and a communicant in the United Church of Canada, was not one of pleasure. His parents had already broken up another interreligious coupling among their children, and they didn’t want to have to deal with another one. But then, Island society in the 1970s was liberalizing quite remarkably thanks to the collapse of the old traditional rural-agrarian lifestyle, and neither of my parents was living in the godforsaken wastes of rural eastern Prince Edward Island any more, so they were married by UPEI’s sympathetic Catholic chaplain.
We’ve not talked about the issue much, and more than thirty years on the aftershocks of that hitherto remarkable decision have dissipated. I have noticed a certain reserve on the part of certain relatives, but that might just be the family culture, and in any case, we have never had any relations with those of my father’s relatives who were most unhappy. I’m sure that they wonder why his children weren’t raised in the Roman Catholic tradition; if they don’t, I’m sure they believe that this is a natural consequence of his committing a sin. I can only imagine how they’d react if I ever decided to come out to them (I won’t, because they’re irrelevant.
There is still a reluctance, on the parts of certain religious and ethnic and geographical subpopulations, to deal with hybridity, with the establishment of communities and communal bonds stretching across certain categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, race, nationality, orientation). Many of the people who back the survival of these attitudes claim that they’re necessary in order to maintain the coherence of their memberships. This may be true, especially if you set the bar high so as to discourage new entrants.
Even so. I can’t help but suspect that many of these people–perhaps most of these people–would be, if their genealogies were suitably transformed, the sorts of people who would be the sort of successful bourgeois in Lübeck and Darmstadt at the end of the 1930s who would boast that their ancestries have been certified as being purely Aryan back to the mid-18th century.
And no, the “God says so” argument doesn’t exactly work for me. Why should it? Appeals to unreachable authorities on the grounds that they are unreachable authorities are classic tactics of bad debaters.
A Bit More Detail 