If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
A propos of Hallowe’en, the following appeared yesterday in my Facebook feed, titled “Let’s have fun, but not forget about history”:
“Annual reminder about where the ‘ugliness’ of witches comes from. That ugliness was the result of beatings and torture by animals. This is why I deplore the green face witch caricatures.
Each year they parade her about, The traditional Halloween witch. Misshapen green face, stringy scraps of hair, A toothless mouth beneath her disfigured nose. Gnarled knobby fingers twisted into a claw protracting form. A bent and twisted torso that lurches about on wobbly legs.
Most think this is abject image to be the creation of a prejudiced mind or merely a Halloween caricature, I disagree, I believe this to be how witches were really seen.
Consider that most witches were women, were abducted in the night and smuggled into dungeons or prisons under secrecy of darkness and presented by the light of day as a confessed witch.
Few, if any saw a frightened normal looking woman being dragged into a secret room filled with instruments of torture, to be questioned until she confessed to anything that was suggested to her, and to give names or say whatever would stop the questions.
Crowds saw the aberration denounced to the world as a self-proclaimed witch. As the witch was paraded through the town, in route to be burned, hanged, drowned, stoned, or disposed of in various, horrible ways, all created to free and save her soul from her depraved body.
The jeering crowds viewed the result of hours of torture. The face, bruised and broken by countless blows, bore a hue of sickly green. The once warm and loving smile gone, replaced by a grimace of broken teeth, and torn gums that leer beneath a battered disfigured nose.
The disheveled hair conceals bleeding gaps of torn scalp from whence cruel hands had torn away the lovely tresses. Broken, twisted hands clutched the wagon for support. Fractured fingers locked like cropping claws to steady her broken body.
All semblance of humanity gone. This was truly a demon, a bride of Satan, a witch.
I revere this Halloween Witch and hold her sacred. I honor her courage and listen to her warnings of the dark side of humanity.
Each year I shed tears of respect.”
Author unknown
This post illustrates the general point that most people seem unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Both the poster and comments on the post take this as “history,” while it is clearly speculation. “I believe this…” There is one fact in the entire piece: “most witches were women.” The rest is imagined.
There is not a great deal of documentation, but witches were safer in Medieval Europe than in pagan societies. For the Catholic Church did not believe in witchcraft. Pagan societies, on the other hand, like Canadian “First Nations” before Christian conversion, or pre-Christian sub-Saharan Africa, believed in witchcraft. Sorcerers were commonly tortured to death for cursing. If you believe in witchcraft it follows, just as you must prosecute someone for stabbing another to death with a knife. If cursing works, it is the most serious crime imaginable.
Witchhunting in Europe, a pagan practice, revived with the Reformation, and was more common in Protestant lands. This because, the authority of the Church having been thrown in doubt, folk beliefs resurfaced. In this “anything might be true” atmosphere, the witches of fairy tales, who were imaginary supernatural creatures like trolls or fairies, were taken by many to be real, and possibly in the neighbourhood.
Halloween is here. Another round of culturally illiterate claims that it is based on the pagan Celtic feast of Samhain.
It is not. It is All Hallows Eve, part of a three-day Christian celebration in honour of departed souls; just as Christmas Eve is part of Christmas, and New Year’s Eve part of the New Year celebration. Next day is All Saints Day, and the day after All Souls Day. First a day to remember the souls in heaven, then a day to pray for the souls in purgatory.
There is no point in praying for souls in hell.
If it is all based on a pagan Celtic feast, why is it celebrated in Mexico, with no Celtic traditions to speak of, as the Day of the Dead? Why is it celebrated in the Philippines, as an evening you spend in the graveyard, burning a candle and holding a family picnic at the graves of your ancestors?
It is a reminder that the dead are still with us, and a memento mori, a reminder that for us too, this life on earth is temporary, not our final destination. And so the souls of the dead may wander the streets.
The claim that it is all Samhain is in part Black Legend, a survival of English anti-Catholicism, which wanted to portray anything Catholic as pagan.
And it is in part an irrational fear of death.
Because we moderns are terrified of death and the afterlife, we have transferred the meaning of the festival to fear itself. Children now simply dress as scary monsters, and Hallowe’en is supposed to be scary. The real theme, death and the afterlife, is suppressed precisely because we find it too scary. We sublimate it by having children dress up as spooks, and give them candy and pretend to be scared, so we can pretend it is all make-believe.
Good people are not afraid of death; they do not whistle past graveyards. It is our conscience that makes Hallowe’en frightening to us. It implies judgement.
It is a curious fact, in need of explanation, that much of
the world is currently cursed by awful leadership at once. Justin Trudeau, I
would argue, is the worst prime minister Canada has ever had. Joe Biden is
certainly in the running for worst US president. Francis is so historically
awful as pope some Catholics wonder if he is a sign of the end times. Rishi
Sunak in Britain is, at best, a technocratic cipher.
And why is it that, not so long ago, the US, Britain, and
the Catholic church all had outstanding leaders at once: Ronald Reagan, Margaret
Thatcher, John Paul II?
I am reminded of the adage, “hard times produce good men.
Good man produce easy times. Easy times produce weak men, Weak men produce hard
times.” This may be the cycle.
Reagan followed the appallingly pusillanimous Jimmy Carter
and his time of “malaise.” Thatcher followed a period of labour chaos presided
over by the forgettable Jim Callaghan. John Paul II followed the notoriously
prevaricating Pope Paul VI, the “Hamlet pope,” who seemed not to know his own
mind.
Conversely, Justin Trudeau came in following a period of tranquility
and prosperity, thanks to the fiscal discipline of Stephen Harper and, to some
extent, Paul Martin and Jean Chretien before him. Although Trump’s presidency
was superficially chaotic, Joe Biden followed a period of unusual peace and
prosperity under Obama and Trump. Francis was elected after JPII and the
intellectually impressive Benedict XVI.
I think this tendency to elect medicrities can be put down
to envy. In ordinary times, people do not want to vote for someone better than
they are. They will actually prefer a mediocrity. They turn to impressive
leaders only in an emergency.
This is especially a problem in the US Democratic party. The
party starts out representing the bottom half of the US IQ range: there is
truth to the old saying that anyone who is not a socialist in youth has no heart,
but anyone who is not a conservative once they grow up has no brain. And it is
positively founded on envy as its chief principle. So this coalition is going
to want to elect people with a lower than average intelligence. This explains a
lot.
Winston Churchill is the perfect exampleof this envy principle. He had been in
government for decades—but he was not popular with his colleagues. They
preferred to give the premiership to Neville Chamberlain, a dull mediocrity,
perfectly suited, as someone remarked, to be mayor of Birmingham. He blew with
the wind.
Only once in the most desperate crisis, did his country turn
to Churchill. As soon as the crisis passed, they turned away again, in favour
of another cipher, Clement Atlee, “a modest man,” as Churchill described him, “with
much to be modest about.”
The sin of envy is all-powerful; it holds us all back. it
tears down statues of the great. It holds human civilization back in
uncountable ways.
It is not entirely clear what the CBC should have done instead; the author seems to say that aboriginals should have been given more time to digest the news.
How do you report the news more slowly? Note the meaning of the word “news.”
Leaving aside the implied assumption that Indians are helpless forest creatures unable to look after themselves or deal with the real world, necessarily, what both spirits really meant is that the CBC should have kept it secret. In other words, suppress rather than report the news.
This seems an unreasonable deman.
I think the real reason some indigenous people are upset is that the Buffy Sainte-Marie story, following so closely after the revelation that there were no mass graves at residential schools, is getting dangerously close to exposing the whole “First Nations” and “reconciliation” industry as a fraud.
Uptown in King’s Square today, the traditional centre of Saint John, there was a demonstration of perhaps thirty people, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” Ironically, only a half-block away from a sign advertising Saint John’s historic Jewish Museum.
We need to be clear about this.
This is not a call for democratic government. Israel is a democracy. Arabs under the Israeli regime are freer than in any Arab state.
This not a call for peaceful coexistence. “From the river to the sea” rules out any two-state solution.
This has to be read as an intention that seven million Jews be either deported or killed. Rather more than Hitler put to death in the Holocaust.
And to what purpose? Why should this be to anyone’s advantage, since Israel is a democracy? Surely only out of anti-Semitism.
One upside: back when I was an undergrad and a grad student, it was common to argue that antisemitism was caused by Christianity. I think Rosemary Reuther was the author who became famous for this thesis. A fellow grad student, Jewish, insisted to me that all Christian children were taught that the Jews murdered Christ. Having attended Catholic schools and never having heard such a thing, I demurred. But she assured me I must be wrong.
Now this claim is never heard--Muslims have shown themselves to be more anti-Jewish than Christians. In fact, now Christians are scapegoated for being too pro-Jewish; as recently by friend Xerxes.
It should not be illegal to say such things as the pro-Palestinians uptown were chanting. But I am shocked and disturbed there is not more social disapproval.
The actual CBC documentary on Buffy Sainte-Marie has dropped. It’s even worse than reported. It looks as though, to protect her claim of aboriginal ancestry, she falsely accused her brother of abusing her sexually as a child—to shut him up about it.
The initial response of one acquaintance on Facebook—I doubt they had yet seen the documentary—was that The Fifth Estate should not have run the story, should have buried it; it is just mean. After all, the bottom line is that Sainte-Marie is immensely talented. What else matters? And it is not as if she was doing it to real natives: she was advocating for them. This is close to my own initial take: all’s fair in marketing your art.
The common response to that position is that, in accepting numerous awards, grants, media attention and advantages on the premise that she was aboriginal, she was taking away opportunities from real aboriginals.
But my counter to that is that any system that gives awards, grants, and advantages based on some unalterable characteristic, something over which you had no control, is deeply unjust and racist. Accordingly, Sainte-Marie is a freedom fighter by subverting the system. We should all declare ourselves indigenous, and restore human equality. I feel worse about her flinging accusations of being discriminated against as a Native American, when she was not.
Yet I also feel it is important that The Fifth Estate exposed the lie. Truth is an intrinsic and absolute value, and need not be justified in any way. The devil is the father of lies.
And this went beyond marketing. Donald Trump does marketing: he makes exaggerated claims, but everyone pretty much knows he is exaggerating. P.T. Barnum made exaggerated claims; but everyone really knew there were no Fiji mermaids. These are not really lies, but jokes.
Sainte-Marie definitively lied about being aboriginal. This being so, we can assume she also lied about being abused by her brother. It follows a similar pattern. Which means she was prepared to blackmail, to slander, to sustain the lie.
Once you begin to lie, you go down a dark path leading you to worse and worse acts. By exposing Sainte-Marie, The Fifth Estate has taught us all an important moral lesson.
“The Chosen” has become wildly popular among Christian TV viewers. I am not so enthusiastic.
The premise of the series is to stick closely to the gospel, but dramatize the imagined backstories of the various figures. What was Mary Magdalene’s life before she met Jesus? What was the life of Nicodemus? These are “the chosen.”
The fact that it makes this assertion, or projects this impression, of strict authenticity, makes it more egregious when it tinkers with the text. I would have more tolerance for Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
To be fair, I I am only in season one; but a recent episode covered the calling of Simon, Andrew, James and John; the first four apostles. And it is not as the gospels have it.
“The Chosen” has Jesus call on Simon and Andrew to follow him. And a discussion follows later between Simon and his wife, in which he points out how unreasonable it is for him to leave her, especially as her mother is ill. But she is adamant that he must go; he must answer the call of the Messiah; don’t worry about her.
In the case of James and John, the series has their father Zebedee insists they must go with Jesus. No need to worry; he assures them he can deal with the catch, and look after the fishing by himself from now on.
But this is not the story in the gospel:
Matthew:
While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 19 And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”[a] 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.
Mark:
Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. 17 And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.”[f] 18 And immediately they left their nets and followed him. 19 And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. 20 And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
Luke:
On one occasion, while the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he was standing by the lake of Gennesaret, 2 and he saw two boats by the lake, but the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets. 3 Getting into one of the boats, which was Simon's, he asked him to put out a little from the land. And he sat down and taught the people from the boat. 4 And when he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” 5 And Simon answered, “Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” 6 And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking. 7 They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both the boats, so that they began to sink. 8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” 9 For he and all who were with him were astonished at the catch of fish that they had taken, 10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. And Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men.”[a] 11 And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.
John’s gospel does not include an account of the calling of the four.
In all three accounts, it is emphasized that they answered the call immediately. James and John simply abandoned their father in the boat. Simon did not go home and tell his wife. They dropped everything.
The makers of “The Chosen” obviously did not like how this violated “family values.” So they twisted the gospel to make it conform. Surely there must have been these intervening conversations? Surely it was a family decision? But this is not a fair inference; all three gospels stress “immediately.”
This is the Hallmark Christianity, the “happy happy joy joy” Christianity, the Christianity of plaster saints and pastel prayer cards that I despise. This is a false doctrine in which the name of Christianity is just co-opted to sanitize and justify whatever someone wants to do, or to support whatever powers be. There is no worse sin, for this is the sin of idolatry.
I see the same tendency in Pope Francis’s current “Synod on Synodality,” which clams to aim at a “listening” church. That is, a church that only echoes back whatever people want to hear.
Christianity is emphatically not about “family values.” When one man asks if he can bury his father before coming to follow Jesus, Jesus refuses, with the words “Let the dead bury their own dead.” James, John, Simon and Andrew are demonstrating this imperative.
The appeal to family values is akin to the appeal to patriotism: it is as often as not, as Samuel Johnson said, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
A lot of famous Indians turn out not to be. Grey Owl; Iron Eyes Cody; Elizabeth Warren; Sacheen Littlefeather, the “Indian” who rejected Brando’s Oscar.
And Buffy Sainte-Marie?
A current CBC investigation points out that she cannot establish Indian ancestry. She was raised in a rather unexotic adoptive middle-class home in Maine. And they did not know who her real parents were. They might have been Sicilian, or Lebanese, or Sephardic Jews, for all anyone knows.
She looks Indian to me; but does it matter what her genetics are? She had the same upbringing, the same cultural influences, as any “white” child growing up in North America in the forties and fifties. She is ethnically simply American.
The broader point: any pretense that North American Indians, “First Nations,” have a distinct and separate culture is a romantic fantasy. “Indians” get what knowledge they have of traditional “Indian” culture the same place the rest of us get it: from movies, TV, comic book and dime novels. If they are more learned, from the accounts of missionaries.
And “Indians” have never been discriminated against. It was essential to Sainte-Marie’ career success to play the Indian card. She sold herself, in her own words, as “Pocahontas”; and the public loved it. Following in the footsteps of the performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows, and the Kickapoo Medicine shows; of Grey Owl, Pauline Johnson, and many another performer in buckskin. The general public of North America loves Indians, has always loved Indians, wants to cheer for them—which is why Indian references are popular names for sports teams—and will always give them the benefit of the doubt.
That said, to be clear: Buffy Sainte-Marie deserves every bit of her fame, and more. I don’t deride her marketing tactics, any more than I scorn Elvis Presley for performing in white jumpsuits with sequins. I’m proud she is an Indian like me.
Friend Xerxes has apparently now expressed the official leftist position on the Gaza War. It is that we in North America are too prone to take the Jewish side, This is due to Jewish money, and the influence of the Bible. If only they had their own Holy Book.
“The root of this unequal support has to be the Bible.”
To begin with, Xerxes and the left fall here into the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy: the idea that two opposing positions must both be valid. It is far more likely, if matters have come to blows, and, as Xerxes himself laments, no rational discussion is taking place, that no compromise or appeal to reason is possible. And this is almost always precisely because one side is in the right, and the other in the wrong. Those who know they are in the wrong are not going to listen to reason—because then they lose.
Accordingly, in all such cases we must evaluate the two positions, to see who is right. Not insist that both sides be “supported,” and supported equally—a perfect way to ensure the problem is not solved, and injustice and violence go on forever.
Moreover, if one side is right, and the other wrong, we have a moral obligation to intervene on the side of right.
Consider, for example, a man wanting to have sex with a passing woman in an alleyway; and the woman does not want to have sex. So he forces her.
A moral person does not try to support both sides. He does not negotiate a compromise; he does not watch with interest, then walk on.
So too in international affairs. Chamberlain negotiated his “compromise” between Hitler and Czechoslovakia at Munich. How did that work out?
How about Hitler and the Jews? Were both equally in the right, or in the wrong? Would a compromise have been possible, or acceptable?
If we can conclude that one side in Gaza is in the right, one should hope to see most nations line up and offer assistance. This is the swiftest way to end the violence.
Xerxes blames the Bible, and says it would all be easily solved if the Bible were abandoned, with its claim of Jewish ownership of the land.
This seems to suggest that the “compromise” he and the left prefer is the elimination of Israel, and the deportation or execution of all the Jews.
But as to it being down to the Palestinians not having their own Holy Book, of course they do: those who are not Christian have the Quran. Awkwardly, however, the Quran , like the Bible, also recognizes Moses as a prophet, Jewish residence in Palestine, and at least implicitly a Hebrew claim to the Holy Land in perpetuity.
Not that this, either Quran or Bible, need be the justification for supporting Israel. It has more to do with the right to ethnicity, the right to exist, the right to self-government, and who is the aggressor.
I got a quick lesson in economics the other day. Someone was wondering why clay for crafting was so expensive, and why it was shipped in from Ontario. After all, there are rich clay deposits here in New Brunswick. And had it explained to them.
It’s all due to underpopulation.
You can mine clay here, but it must be processed. By the time you get it to Ontario, it cannot compete there with the cost of Ontario-mined clay. But the local market is not large enough to support the cost of a processing plant.
And so, historically, industry after industry has pulled up stakes and moved to Central Canada.
The Canadian Atlantic Provinces are generally underdeveloped, because they are too far from markets. Granted, they are closer to Europe; but transportation by water is cheaper than by land. It still makes most sense to ship to and from the big markets of Central Canada through the St. Lawrence Seaway.
I saw the same thing in the BC interior; vast stretches of what could be fertile land, unused or left in forest because too far from any large market.
I have heard the same problem has kept Latin America historically poor.
The obvious solution is to get more people living in Atlantic Canada: then the economies of scale would make it worthwhile to mine that clay, to grow those vegetables, to be used or consumed locally.
We have been fed the lie for many years that “overpopulation” leads to poverty. Since each individual human, on average, produces more than they consume, the reverse is true. Cities are generally more prosperous than the countryside, and young people do not pull up roots and head to a small town to make their fortune. Some of the most densely populated countries are also the richest: Singapore, Bahrain, Korea, Netherlands, Japan. Some of the least densely populated are the poorest: Mongolia, Western Sahara, Namibia.
The young Herakles chooses between virtue and pleasure
I recently participated in a public poetry reading. There were nine poets featured. Three were long in the tooth. Six were young, in their twenties. Five of these six openly identified on the program or during the performance as LGBTQ.
This seems to be the trend: the number of young people declaring themselves gay or transgender is growing exponentially.
One thing is clear, at least: people are not “born this way.” You cannot have an epidemic of a genetic condition.
It is happening because sex is boring.
The urge to reproduce is powerful. That first time having sex is powerful, and tends to bond emotionally. But once you separate sex from reproduction and emotional commitment, and make it about physical pleasure, it soon loses its magic.
Then one of two things happen. Many or most move on to other interests. In Japan, they have always been into rather kinky sex in youth. At the same time, after the kids are born, most Japanese marriages become sexless. But in our current society, sex has been glorified as almost the purpose of life. We have separated sex from love for several generations; the slogan at the recent LGBTQ clambake in a local park, “Love is louder than Hate” is a lie. Sex is not love, and conflating the two reduces others to objects existing for your pleasure.
And then it can be like an addiction: trying to find some new twist and heavier and heavier doses in order to recover that original thrill. Hence not just promiscuity, but sexual experimentation. Sex with other men; sex in the role of the woman; sex with pain; sex pretending to be an animal …. At some point, sex with children inevitably comes to mind.
“What good thing is yours, madam, or what pleasant thing, if you do nothing to earn them? You do not even wait for desire, but fill yourself with all things before you crave them. …. You rouse your lust by many a trick, when there is no need nor end in children. Thus you enslave your friends, waxing wanton by night, consuming in sleep the loveliest hours of day.” – Xenophon, “Herakles at the Crossroads.”
The problem has grown quickly in recent years with the easy availability of online porn. The young, impelled to it by instinct, are bound to get jaded with normal sex at an early age. Some lose interest in sex; and so in reproducing. And that is a growing problem for society. Others become sex addicts, often publicly advertising their availability, and will, sooner or later, be coming for the children…or dispensing with the requirement for consent.
Yesterday in Saint John, there were two opposing demonstrations scheduled: the second One Million March for Children, protesting sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools, and “Love is Louder than Hate,” demanding sexual orientation and gender ideology in the schools. All over Canada, there are large demonstrations protesting the genocide of Jews by Hamas in Israel, and competing demonstrations protesting the genocide of Arabs by Israel in Gaza. And this on top of the longstanding demonstrations for and against abortion.
Opposing demonstrations are not in themselves alarming. But these positions seem irreconcilable. There seems to be no room for calm debate or compromise. After all, to the one side, it looks like the other side is committing genocide. To one side, it looks like the other is trying to harm their children.
It looks like civil war is coming inevitably closer all the time, and seems the necessary ultimate result. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Sooner or later, here or somewhere, competing demonstrations are going to clash violently, there will be a body count, there will be calls for vengeance, and the fighting will spread. One thinks of “Bleeding Kansas.”
The underlying problem is that we have lost or abandoned all our shared values or principles. Any society needs shared values to function: some underlying set of shared premises from which to argue and eventually come to an agreement. We used to all agree, or nearly all agree, on Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. Now a large portion of the population no longer do.
The only way to prevent a civil war is either a wholesale return to these values, or general adoption of some new set of shared premises. Marxism offered one, based on material progress and “dialectical materialism”; but, leaving aside its philosophical flaws, Marxism has surely by now been discredited in practice. Bad things happen wherever it is tried. Nazism offered one, a new morality based on the Theory of Evolution; but I think we can agree that did not turn out well. Islamism is one current candidate; but the state of the Muslim world does not inspire confidence.
I vote for a return to Judeo-Christian principles and the principles of liberal democracy. To be clear, that means restrictions on abortion, absolute preference for Christian and Jewish over Muslim immigration, and no mention of sexual orientation or gender ideology in the schools.
It is not generally understood, but Western civilization shattered sometime in 1917.
Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. – T.S. Eliot
Before this, the culture was a mirror, in which you could see the face of man. This is Shakespeare’s “Mirror held up to nature.”
Since then, what do you see?
Only a shattered land, a shattered landscape, only shards of mirror reflecting each another’s emptiness.
Had occasion in the course of my teaching to watch a video of the Futurama ride at the GM pavilion, New York Worlds’ Fair, 1964-5. I was there at the time, in 64; I remembered some of it. But this time I was struck by how our attitude towards the future then was so different from today. GM was confident the future would be abundant, thanks to improvements in technology. Progress marches on! Roads through the tropical jungles, bringing goods to market! Submersibles reaping the limitless harvest of the seas! Vast cities of light.
Nowadays, rather than celebrate technology, we fear it as the enemy. Even though technology has indeed brought us many marvels since 1964: the Internet, the smart phone, longer lifespans, abundance of food from the green revolution. So why did we sour on it?
Granted, the GM exhibit might not have been fully representative of all the voices of 1964. Or rather, 1962 or so, when the exhibit was presumably designed. This was big business talking. But the ride was highly popular during the fair, a reprise of one of the most popular pavilions of the 1939 Fair, and did not get any pushback at the time for overplaying the wonders of technology. It seemed to express the broad consensus. Science conquers all.
I have long thought that western civ lost its nerve in the carnage of the First World War. I think of Eliot’s “The Waste-Land” emerging at about that time. Or W.B. Yeats’s discovery that “We are but weasels fighting in a hole.”
But watching this video, I had another thought. It seems to be our view of technology in particular that has changed. This seems to be the pivot.
Perhaps the underlying cause, even the cause of WWI in the first place, is what Alvin Toffler called future shock. Since about the second half of the 19th century, and especially with the personal computer revolution beginning circa 1980, things have been changing rapidly due to technology. In effect, none of us lives any longer in the land or in the culture we were born into. This can cause, and perhaps has caused, a general trauma, a sense that we are losing control of our lives. “Stop the world; I want to get off!” Perhaps this is seen in Kipling’s 1897 lines:
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard
Already, to him, technology is the enemy.
Toffler’s “future shock” is based on the known phenomenon of culture shock.
I know a little bit about culture shock. Alarmingly, governments and medical establishments seem not to. I have lived through culture shock more than once. It is no trivial thing.
For the first little while in a radically new culture, say the first three months, you are on vacation. Everything is new and wonderful. What you feel the most is that all the old constraints of daily life back home are gone. All the weary chains of habit and social convention that we secretly resent are gone, and we want to run naked in the woods. We want to hook up. First of all, nobody knows you, so you need not worry about your reputation. Screw up, and you just take the plane home. And the first impression when faced with new rules is that there are no rules. You can go ahead and just do as you want; as you always wanted.
This crazy optimism somewhat describes, in cultural terms, the Fin de Siecle, the Edwardian period, the period just preceding the First World War. The automobile, the airplane, the moving picture, the phonograph, were rapidly transforming individual lives. In politics, “progressivism” was born: the application of science and technology to society would solve everything.
For another good representation of this state, see Margaret Meade’s “Coming of Age in Samoa.” Any old foreign hand should have seen she was in the first stage of culture shock. But for decades, it was taken as solid anthropological work. Yeah, everyone In Samoa just had sex whenever they wanted. None of our Western hangups.
This is also why “exotic dancer” is a synonym for “erotic dancer”: the nearest foreign country is usually imagined to allow free love. Absurdly, this was the reputation of the Muslim Middle East in the Victorian Era. Those guys with the women in abayas. Even in my youth, the most famous stripper in Montreal went by the name “Fawzia Amir.”
Ironically, the same culture shock leads young Muslim men coming to northern Europe to think it is okay to rape young local women. After all, here in the “Wicked West,” anything goes.
In England, syphilis was long known euphemistically as the “French pox.” In France, it was called “the English malady.”
And so it goes, as Billy Pilgrim would say.
An expat can get themself in a lot of trouble during this stage.
Now imagine a government that welcomes large numbers all at once from a quite different culture. What do you think might happen? But I digress….
But the next stage is worse. After about three months, in the usual course of expat life, you come to the impression that the rules no longer apply both ways. These foreigners have no morals; and they are insane. Nothing here makes sense. And this is not a vacation; you realize you cannot go home again. You are stuck here.
At this point, a large proportion of expats sink into a state of depression, and never recover. They cannot bear to go out in the street. They want to stay in their apartment, the only place they feel safe. Or they begin to haunt the expat bars, where they sit there all evening getting drunk and complaining to other drunken expats about this godforsaken hellhole. Every foreign station has such an expat bar.
A college I worked in, transported virtually wholesale from Canada, after a few months redesigned the “learning centre” to look like Fort Apache, with the foreign teachers on raised platforms behind high counters. This was all psychological; there was no threat of violence or threat on campus. It was soon all “us” and “them.”
And this may explain the First World War, and the Second. They were nativist outbreaks, nationalist outbreaks of paranoia at how their distinctive culture was threatened by this rapid change.
Similarly, Darwin chronicled in “The Descent of Man” how, whenever European adventurers encountered some primitive people, the primitives seemed to stop working and reproducing. They started to drink heavily, and their numbers rapidly declined. Everyone was experiencing culture shock at once’ everyone was depressed. And for groups like the Canadian “First Nations” or the Australian aborigines, this state of culture shock and depression has continued to this day, for centuries. One might suggest that the same culture shock lingers among American blacks, their ancestors suddenly uprooted from tribal cultures in Africa. That’s how severe culture shock can be, if the cultures are sufficiently different.
Now imagine again what might happen if you rapidly introduce into your country large groups of people from a widely different culture.
A not insignificant proportion of expats undergoing culture shock have a psychotic break. When nothing around you makes sense anymore, almost anything you imagine might seem true. I have experienced this myself briefly once or twice. In some it seems to be more serious, and last longer. And some may act out their fantasies in dangerous ways. There are stories in every expat enclave of how old Tom or Bertha went off, and did something like take all their clothes off in front of the class. Or decide that their daughter was the current incarnation of a Bodhisattva.
And this is what we may be seeing now throughout Western society. Nobody can count on the old verities any more: marriage, children, the female role, the male role; even the accepted meaning of words; even the meaning of such words as pronouns. A growing proportion of us get depressed and want to retreat to some “safe space,” or start acting in destructive ways, becoming violent; treating neighbours as deadly enemies. A certain proportion take to alcohol and drugs. Others, in fear , retreat to group think, become NPCs, increasingly afraid of any new ideas. A certain proportion imagines that now everything is permitted, “conventional morality” no longer applies, and they can do whatever they want. And almost all of us now sit around complaining about technology and imagine it is destroying the world. It’s causing pollution! It’s using up all available resources, and soon we will starve in the dark! It’s causing climate change! Climate change will soon kill us all!
Rather than being able to manage matters and reassure, those in charge are the most fully culture shocked and hysterical. They are most threatened by the earth moving unpredictably beneath them. Their status depends on the status quo. This explains why governments and big corporations are rapidly getting oppressive and controlling: wanting censorship, wanting to arrest development with more and more regulation, imagining bogeys under every bed.
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