Ch. 3: Working Definitions of Communication

I think you could probably make an argument that culture is just the constant negotiation of what reality is, you know? We talked about this before, that kind of constant negotiation about the meaning of experience. For example we were talking about racism yesterday, and the whole idea of “What is a Black Person? What is a White Person?”

What do those terms even mean? Are they fixed? Are they real? And as the culture changes over time, the definitions of things change along with it. What does “Liberty” mean? What does “Freedom” mean? All this bottom of the iceberg stuff. What does "Beauty" mean? And it’s never the same. Day to day, my "freedom" and your "freedom" aren't the same. My freedom might really mess up yours. My "beauty" and your "beauty" ... Well, there's some room for disagreement.

It’s never “Oh, it just means THIS.”

I mean, some things are consistent. I guess.

A tree is pretty much a tree, but abstract ideas like “Freedom”? Well, it depends on who’s asking, and it depends on why they’re asking and where they’re asking it. And how they’re asking it. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

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I’ll see if I have more luck with this class than the last class about my omelette metaphor.

You know an omelette? You guys are French, of course you know an omelette. So you have the egg and the… OK, here’s my omelette metaphor for communication and culture. You can’t have culture without communication because communication has to be shared. Culture has to be shared and culture has to be negotiated, and so culture depends on communication. They work together, it’s not a separate thing. So with an omelette, you’ve got the peppers and the onion and the cheese and it’s all cooking around in there in the egg and then you flip it over and you’ve got the omelette. Right? So in my metaphor, basically the peppers and the onions and all that, that’s rituals and heroes and all that. But the egg, the essential egg is the communication that holds the culture together. You understand? It’s the base. It’s the network. Without it, you don’t have a culture.

So we’re going to talk about different types of communication. We’re going to try to figure out what we mean when we talk about communication. It’s not just, you know… What somebody says but also how they say it, and how it’s heard as determined through the culture and…

I mean, the reason that humans have a culture and that Silverback Gorillas don’t have a culture is that human beings have a language that outlasts their own individual lives and the gorillas - cool as they unquestionably are - don’t have a language that lasts longer than they do. They have a set of rules of behaviour, but what they don't have is a written language that outlives them. They don't have art, for example. They don't have a means of collectively solidifying a shared ethos in an abstract way, which is pretty much what language is.

And so communication is really the cement of culture. I mean, if culture is shared and culture is agreed, then communication is the means of reaching that agreement. Communication is the way we kind of construct a working “reality”. I know it sounds a little philosophical, but that’s exactly what culture is - an agreed reality. That's what culture is, it's an agreed reality.

OK, this is what I want you guys to take from the class. What do we mean when we talk about communication as an essential element of culture? And then different ways of communication, different means of communication.

Another aspect, which I’m probably not going to talk too much about in this class, but the idea of Individualistic and Collectivist modes of communication.

But let me digress for a second here. People talk about Collectivist and Individualistic societies, right? And I know it’s pretty obvious what it means, but an individualistic society puts the needs of the individual before the needs of the group, and a collectivist society puts the needs of the group before the needs of the individual. Pretty obvious, I guess. And the reason that you have societies along those lines… Well, it varies. It’s about population, it’s about resources, all that. But the point is that communication varies depending on what kind of culture you’re talking about. So we're going to talk a bit about that.

We're going to talk about Hate Speech and Freedom of Speech, I am going to talk about that. Especially - and I don’t want to get heavy here - but especially… I mean, you guys are in Paris, right? The whole “Charlie Hebdo” issue. The question of “What are the limits of speech in a free society?” Anyway, we’ll talk more about that in a minute. 

Othering and Prejudice. I don’t know if you know the term “Othering”? We’ll get to it. We'll get to all of this in a couple of minutes.

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First of all, defining communication. You know, I have this old Oxford English Dictionary, and this is what they say.

And when we're talking about communicating here, at least for the purposes of this class, we’re pretty much talking about intentional communication, if you know what I mean. You know, I have an idea, and I want to get that same idea somehow into your brain. That’s my intention, so we can come to an agreement. A consensus.

Of course, there’s also unintentional communication, and I don’t know if any of you play poker. I can’t really play cards because my math skills are terrible, but when you play cards with somebody, and you get good cards - or maybe bad cards, but either way exceptional cards - you try not to show that you have good cards, because you don’t want other people to know what you have. Right? So you try to keep a straight face. It’s called a “Poker Face” and I think there’s a song called “Poker Face” and I can’t remember who…

Lady Gaga, of course. Thanks. Lady Gaga.

People do things unintentionally, or subconsciously, that tell you things. For example, apparently if you lie, and you’re if not a good liar, you touch your nose a lot, or you touch your face. That kind of thing. And it’s called a “tell”.

But we’re not really going to talk about that kind of communication today.

So, intentionally stimulating meaning in others through the use of symbols. Do you remember we talked about Hofstede's four categories of culture? Symbols, rituals, values and heroes? Well, these are the symbols that he was talking about. Language is a set of symbols, for example. Gestures are a set of symbols. Signs, advertisements. I mean, you’re bombarded with symbols all the time. I don’t know where you are right now, but if you could see my desk, there’s just stuff everywhere. I’ve got a flag over there and I’ve got a calendar over here and a clock over here and… a lot of stuff. A lot of information going in at once.

Which brings us, in a roundabout kind of way to semiotics, which I want to go over for a couple of minutes. Have you guys done anything with semiotics? It’s really kind of cool. When I was at school, my professors and some of the smarter students in the class would all talk about semiotics, and I spent a lot of time pretending I knew what they were talking about, but I think I thought it was too complicated for me. And I think it probably still can be. But basically - and we’re not going to get deep here - basically semiotics is just about the way that signs - Hofstede's symbols or whatever, the flag or the wristwatch or the calendar on your desk - communicate.

A sign basically has three forms, right? Or, maybe not forms. Maybe principles. First, there’s the actual sign. There’s the concrete thing itself. The Signifier, the piece of paper that has words written on them. The actual words, the ink on the paper. You know, when you look at the piece of paper the way your dog would look at a piece of paper, as just a thing. So that’s the signifier, that’s the concrete form.

And then you have the signified. Well, what does that piece of paper actually say? I mean, it isn’t referring to itself, it’s referring to the message on it. Do you understand what I mean by that? I mean, you know, it’s really pretty basic. It’s pretty intuitive. At least for us, but your dog can't do that. Your dog can't interpret signs. I don't know if you've ever tried to point something out for you dog. You know, you point, and the dog just looks at your hand.

And then the third thing - and this is where culture comes in - the third thing is that a majority of the people have to agree to the meaning of the sign. For it to be effective, most people have to be able to look at the thing, at the concrete piece of paper thing, and say “Ah, yes. The store is closed today.” I mean, it’s not just referring to the paper, it’s referring to the fact that the store is closed. And that’s all. And you do it all the time. You don’t even realize you do it. But you do it constantly. You’re doing it right now, just reading these words. Every sign that you see, every word that you…

A word doesn’t represent itself, it represents the idea behind the word. We’re going to talk more about that later. Anyway, that’s the job of a sign.

And so this painting by Magritte, “This is not a Pipe.” What Magritte is doing here is reversing, or at least kind of calling attention to, the process of semiotics. Of course, he’s also trying to show you how well he can paint a pipe. Because what you do is you look at this painting and you go “Ah, that’s a pipe!”And he says “No... It’s not a pipe. It’s a picture. It shows a pipe, but essentially it’s a piece of canvas hanging on a wall.” And so you’ve got to pause, because you’re so used to making that jump from concrete form to the thing it represents that… I mean, I get it, but it takes a second because your association is so immediately not the image but the meaning behind the image. And that’s semiotics. That’s basically the way semiotics works.

By the way, this was one of the central problems modern artists had getting people to accept their work. Guys like Jackson Pollock. People wanted a picture of something. People wanted to know what it was supposed to represent and it wasn't supposed to represent anything. It wasn't supposed to be anything, it was what it was supposed to be. Pain on canvas, that's it.

I just want to make sure you understand the “agreement” - that the culture is based on that agreement - and in this case the agreement is “pipe”.

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So, if we look at Craig’s theoretical approaches to communication, and some of these I am more interested in than others, I just want to go through them quickly. At least, I want to go through the first three.

The first form of communication that we’re going to talk about is “Rhetorical” Communication, and that’s more or less what we’re doing here. Right? I have an idea in my head, and I want to communicate it to you and then you absorb the idea and then hopefully that sparks an idea in your head and then you communicate it back to me. You know, debates or dialogues or that kind of thing.

And semiotics, which we just talked about. You know, the signs and symbols as a form of communication.

And then one that I’m really interested in, and that we're going to talk about for a little while, is the idea of phenomenology. Do you know what that is at all? OK, Phenomenology is - and again, remember that culture is aa agreement about experience and about the shared understood meaning of that experience, right? - So, at least for our purposes, phenomenology is the contextualisation of what that experience means. The collective shared experience, which becomes "culture" when we can form a consensus on what the experience collectively means.

So, for example, September 11th. I was in Dublin. I grew up in New York, and for a lot of my life I lived a mile and a half from those buildings, but I was in Dublin. And so when the towers went down and all of that, for all of my friends who were in New York - you know, once the shock wore off - there was like a big debate about what that event meant to New York. Not globally, but locally. For a while, for a long time. There's still a debate over what that event means to the culture in New York. I’m not talking about political culture, I’m not talking about national culture, I’m just talking about the actual experience of being in New York on 9/11. And there’s a negotiation about what that means. But for all of those guys who experienced that event - directly - that ties a culture together.

I remember being on a bus once in the city, and when you’re on a bus you have this very strong sense of yourself alone surrounded by a group of strangers, right? I mean, nobody knows anybody on the bus, we’re just waiting for our stop to get off. And then this taxi comes flying in out of nowhere and smashes into the side of the bus. It was bad, the taxi driver is all messed up, and everybody on the bus is checking with each other “Are you OK, are you OK?” and suddenly, at least for a little while, we were a community. And, you know, eventually we got off the bus and went our separate ways, but because we all happened to be on the same bus when the taxi hit us... That's how cultures are formed.

And one of the interesting things is that even though I’m from New York, I wasn’t there. September 11th, and I wasn’t there. And because I wasn't there, it became one of those moments when I realized “OK, you’re not quite part of the culture anymore because you’re not part of the experience-slash-agreement of what that event meant.”

And this was a culture I defined myself by. If you know what I mean. But not anymore, because I'm off doing another thing. And that’s just what happens when people move from one place to another place, and we’ll talk about that later in the term.

But that’s sort of what I mean by phenomenology. And I’m going to talk more about that in a little while. And that one’s important, I want you to remember that one because that one is really - for me - like the base of culture, in a way. I'm going to talk more about it in a little while.

So, Rhetorical, Semiotic, and Phenomenology.

The Rhetorical Model

And so let’s look at “rhetorical” for a minute, OK? OK, this is the rhetorical model of communication. The basic model.
 
When you were in school did you read Socrates and Plato and all those guys? You know, the Greek guys. Did you read those guys in school? Yeah, I’m not sure I did either. But anyway, the point is these philosophies were written as dialogues, as explanations. There’s this very wise old bearded Greek philosopher, and he’s talking to these curious younger guys, and the way that the education or philosophy or enlightenment comes out is in the conversation between these two people. And that’s really the origins of the official model of rhetorical communication.

“But, Plato, what do you mean?” “Well, I’m glad you asked. You see…”

Now you guys don’t get Plato, I’m afraid, but in this case ’m the teacher, and I've got information that needs to get to you guys. And so I’ve got to figure out the best way to encode that information. And, you know, it’s tricky. Because I’ve got to figure out a few things in order to do that well enough for you to understand me. For example, you guys speak French, and I don’t speak French. And you guys are like 650 miles away, and you guys are all sitting in front of your computers, and I have to figure out “OK, what is the best combination of words and pictures and - you know, symbols, basically - to get the idea across.

You know Peanut M&Ms? Everybody knows Peanut M&Ms, right? Now here’s the thing. The peanut, that’s the message, that's the central idea I'm trying to get across. But the chocolate that goes around the peanut? The chocolate and the color and the shell? That’s the encoding. That’s how I best get this message across.

And then the channel. In this case the channel is… well, it’s a class. Right? It’s a communications class. That’s one way of looking at the channel. It’s also a powerpoint, and it’s also a computer screen, and it’s… you know, that kind of thing.

And then the receiver, that’s you.

And then the decoding. That’s you taking the chocolate off the peanut. Translating the words into French, making sense of the pictures on the slides, all that.

And then the effect, that’s you going “Yes, I understand!” And then the process reverses itself and then you become the source and then you have the message and then you encode it and then it goes to me. Right? You know, it’s like playing tennis with ideas, basically. It’s also the kind of communication they use in politics and debates and…

We’re going to talk about “High-Context” and “Low-Context” communication and it’s a central. Ands it's maybe the central, form of communication in a “Low-Context” environment.

OK, so, "noise" is the thing that blocks the message getting through, or changes it, or mutes it. And some of these forms of communication “noise” I’m more interested in than others. Not because they’re not all valid, but because some are culturally determined, and some aren't. If you know what I mean.

So, for example, environmental noise. If a siren is going off it makes noise in Japan and it makes the same noise in Brazil and it makes the same noise in Canada and it’s not culturally dependent, right? The response might be, but the noise itself not really. The same with the next one, “impairment”. I mean, if you are deaf in Brazil and you are deaf in Portugal and you are deaf in Denmark, it’s the same basic deal. Right? It’s interesting - and it’s especially interesting how impairment can create subcultures and it’s also especially interesting when people get used to environmental noise to the point where they don’t hear it anymore - but at the same time, the noise itself isn’t culturally dependent.

But then you get into some really interesting ones. Like semantics. Essentially attaching meaning to a word or meaning to an expression, right? On some levels it’s really basic. But then you also have idioms, which… So in English, for example, if it’s raining heavily we say “It’s raining cats and dogs” but in France it’s something along the lines of “it’s raining rope” or “string” or something? “Cords”, right. And if you don’t don’t know what that means, even if you understand French, if somebody says “It’s raining ropes”... I mean, it’s kind of poetic, but… You know, I used to teach English and you can spend days just walking about idioms and just translating them and it makes no sense to people. “They get on like a house on fire. It’s a red letter day. He’s a horse of a different color. They’re like chalk and cheese.”

And then, one more with this, is the idea of conceptual semantic misinterpretation. You know what a “false friend” is, when you’re learning a language and a word sounds like a word you know, like “Actually”? Where in French “Actually” - or I guess “Actuellement” - means “currently” and in English it means “really”? You know, that kind of thing? But then you have these abstract ideas like “Liberty” and “Freedom”. What do those even mean? Freedom in America is usually understood as freedom from something. Like freedom from the government. Freedom from the rules. And that makes sense within the context of why America happened in the first place. Freedom from Europe, essentially. Whereas in England, where they talk about Freedom it is freedom to the rights that other people have. The freedom to healthcare, the freedom to education. And there are historical reasons behind those different understandings of the word, but we’ll get to that in a few weeks. So, even though it’s the same word and kind of the same meaning, even then it’s culturally dependent, if you understand what I mean.

And then syntactical, and this is really just more of an issue for immigrants coming to another country or when you’re struggling with another language. If somebody isn’t able to structure a sentence correctly, do you still hear what they are trying to say? And I don’t mean do you understand the words, I mean if somebody can’t put a sentence together correctly, do you discount the message? That’s one form of noise. So if you’re an immigrant to another country and you don’t know how to put a sentence together in that language, you might be very smart but your message is still going to be discounted by native speakers, for example.

And then you have “Organisation”.

It’s interesting, because I was thinking about this… in the past two days I’ve spent all this time trying to negotiate with the university's I.T. people, and so many of these issues have applied. And I only realised this today.

Organisational noise? Yeah, because I don’t know how to talk about computer systems at all. Syntactical? They don’t speak English very well, and I don’t speak French very well. So there’s that. Semantics? Well, it’s like “You take the platform of…” Whatever it is, I don’t understand it. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Environmental? They’re in France and I’m in Ireland. Cultural? They’re I.T. people. Oh, my God! And they think I’m an idiot. Just a stupid teacher who doesn’t know how to do anything practical and I’m like “you could help me immediately if you weren’t trying to prove your superiority.” Sorry, I’m still processing. I’m still angry. And it’s all my fault. I mean, I get that I clicked the wrong button somewhere, but…

OK, Cultural Noise. Stereotypes and Prejudices. It could be everything from racial to nationalist. Like “Yeah, but he’s American, so he's going to be sincere but you can’t trust him.” or “He’s French, he’s going to…” whatever. But either way, that idea that whatever the message is, you’re not hearing the message because you’re so busy filtering it through your ideas of the source of that message. 

And then finally “psychological”. The emotionally influenced… You know, I learned to never give bad news to a hungry person. Make sure somebody has eaten before you give them bad news because they’re already angry. So if you’ve got bad news… “Here, have a muffin. Eat something. Eat something, and then we’ll talk.” Or, more seriously, how do you communicate with somebody who's gone through a traumatic event? How do you convince somebody who's been taught their whole lives not to trust ... What, they should suddenly trust you? How do you talk to somebody who's had to develop - for whatever reason - abuse or whatever - an immediate "fight or flight" response system? I came from that kind of background, second generation, and let me tell you, it's tricky.

OK, one last aspect of the Rhetorical Model. I’m not entirely done with the Rhetorical model, but almost. The Rhetorical Triangle. Basically, you know, in a rhetorical model of, uh… communication, this balance that you’re trying for. Right? You want to make sure the message itself is logical and clear and true. The source, which is where the message is coming from, needs to have credibility and character. And the receiver… You know, the source needs to be able to appeal to the needs and emotions of the receiver. The receiver needs to be heard.

Now here’s the thing about this. Like these guys, you’ve got Obama and you’ve got Trump, and this credibility thing? It depends entirely on the… do you remember when we talked about “cultural relativism”? About how you can’t apply your own judgements across all cultures because… because. Just because you can’t?

Well, it’s the same thing here. Because, uh… like, I personally don’t think Trump’s got any credibility, but these guys standing behind him in this photograph certainly think so. And I think Obama has got a lot of credibility, but a lot of people decidedly disagree. It boils down, pretty much, to an act of faith. “Credibility” is not an objective thing.

And in a weird way, both of these guys are very good at this, though essentially polar opposites. I mean, Obama is very very articulate, and Trump is decidedly not articulate, but Trump’s inability to articulate speaks to his audience and establishes as much credibility as much as Obama’s almost preening articulateness spoke to his own audience, if you know what I mean. George Bush did the same thing. By being inarticulate, he gets to cast suspicion on the more articulate. Being articulate is suspect, you can’t trust it. No wonder college professors hated him.

And I don’t want to get too much into American politics here. But if you remember Trump and Hillary Clinton, running against each other. And Clinton had the message. She … You know, she wrote the books and the policy papers and had loads of experience. She was aggressively "on message".

But where she was not good - she was not good at understanding the emotions and the interests of the people that she needed to win over. Because she didn't think she needed to. And those same people resented her for it. And so, message? OK. Source? OK. But if you don’t have the pathos...

I don’t know. Have you ever had teachers that they just kind of walk into the classroom and read their lecture and then they’re done? They leave the room? Right. I mean, the problem with that kind of environment is that the students don’t listen. Why would they? The students don’t listen because the professor isn’t really talking to them in the first place. You know, the teacher might have a good message, probably knows all the stuff, but… Well, the school has a lot of credibility, but… if you don’t feel like you’re being talked to, you’re not going to listen. You just tune out. At least, I know I always did.

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OK, phenomenology. And I really want you to learn this because I’m going to refer to this again, and again, and again. Probably until the end of the term, all right?

Did I ever ask you guys the question of “If a tree falls in the woods?” If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s nothing alive anywhere around it to hear it, does it make a sound? No? OK.

If there is a tree, and if it falls in the woods, and there are no living things anywhere around the tree, does it make a sound? yes? Yes? You're all saying yes? Well, that’s the thing. That is the thing. Berkeley would say “no”. And for years, I said “yes”. For two thirds of my life now I’d have said yes as well. But Berkeley would say “No it doesn’t.”

And it’s not about “does the tree send sound-waves across the air as it…” Of course it does. Of course that happens. But that’s not the question he's asking. What Berkeley would say is the way you define “sound” is in the receiving and the naming and then the understanding of what “sound” is. That existence isn’t the thing - in this case the sound waves coming from the falling tree - but existence is the reception of the thing. If you understand what I mean. The understanding depends on the reception, and “culture” is basically when enough people agree to what that thing is.

Basically what Berkeley said was that “reality” is subjective, reality is not an objective thing. Reality exists in our heads, and is based on our conscious observed experience of everything that is outside of our head. And so "culture" is only everybody seeing something and everybody taking it in and then everybody agreeing what that thing is.

I don’t know if you ever thought about this or not, but when you’re walking down a really busy street in Paris, and there are a lot of people on that street, and everybody on that street has a different perspective of that street. So you’ve got like five hundred people walking down the street and everybody’s looking at the street, but everybody’s vision of that street is different, OK? This guy’s looking at the grocery store on the corner and the other guy’s looking at the dog that some woman is walking and some other guy is looking at a garbage can and some other guy is looking at a guy looking at a grocery store on the corner. And collectively, we're calling all of those individual perspective "The Street". It’s like flashlights. It’s like a whole bunch of people took a flashlight and they’re pointing those flashlights at some spot on the street. You know, grocery store, woman walking a dog, garbage can, whatever. But if you turn off one of the flashlights, there’s less of the street. BOOM, no more garbage can. BOOM, no more grocery store. And if you turn off another flashlight, there’s even less of the street. And if you turn off ALL the flashlights, there is no street. If you understand what I mean. Right? Because the street's no longer being “received”.

Basically, the street exists because everybody - yeah, sure, from their own perspective - but everybody is agreeing that that is what that experience is. That is “A Street”. Well, you can take that same model, and you can apply it to a country. You can take that same model and you can apply it to an idea, or a religion, or all of that sort of stuff. That culture is dependent on… I mean, we talked about this already, that… about slavery, right?

I mean, once upon a time and not that long ago, if you look at a black person, it meant one thing. A black person was a commodity, pretty much like a tractor or a chair. And if you look at a black person now it means something else. Not because the person changed around the culture, but because the culture has changed around that person.

Do you remember we talked about semiotics? The sign and then the reading of the sign and the mutual understanding of the sign and all that?

Money, for example. I mean, when you think of money - here, this is a U.S. dollar. But essentially, it’s a piece of paper. Post-Its are paper, too. So on one level, this dollar and this Post-It are physically the same thing. They’re just pieces of paper. But, this one - the dollar bill - is a sign and this other one - at least until you write something on it - is just a yellow square of paper. So you look at this first piece of paper and you go “Ah, that’s money!” And then you bring this to a store and you say “Hello, Mr. Store-owner. I would like to buy a Coke.” And the Store-owner looks at this same piece of paper and he goes “Ah, yes, that is a dollar!” And he recognises that the value of this thing equals a Coke. So I perceive it as money, you perceive it as money, the shop-owner perceives it as money, we agree on the value of that money, and I walk away with a Coke. Everybody's happy.

That’s essentially the basis of culture. That's it. You know, as long as we all agree on the value of this thing - in terms of semiotics, as long as we all agree to the third stage, where we recognise what the sign refers to, then we are in agreement about the culture. This thing is worth a Coke.

But that process of that agreement, which is a constant process of negotiation. Through communication. And it's a constantly shifting thing. And once people start to disagree to the meaning, or at least the value, of the thing. Once you say “Yeah, you can’t get a Coke for this anymore.” then my idea of what the value of this thing is and your idea of what the value of this thing is out of balance, and one of us has to win. It’s pretty straightforward. The power is with whoever in the culture gets to determine the value of the thing, of the dollar.

And, as far as money itself goes, the value of that changes all the time. I mean, at the New York Stock Exchange, that’s all they do every day, is argue and negotiate the value of a dollar and the price of a Coke. "The FTSE's up today..."

Do you remember when we talked about culture being a set of values and then the culture begins to expand and then it becomes two cultures when that fundamental agreement is no longer true? The culture cells metastasised into two cells? Two becomes four becomes eight becomes sixteen? In the very first class, I was saying when you have a culture you start off with a set of values, right? And we talked about the foundations of American culture, when everybody was into self-government and liberty and all that, and then it starts to shift because these guys over here start to like these sets of values more while those guys over there start to like these other values more. But they still share a certain understanding. They all agree on the price of a Coke.

You and I might completely disagree on a lot of fundamental issues and still hold together as a culture. You and I might disagree on very fundamental issues, but it’s still very important - say in America, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or whatever - that we agree that this thing is worth a Coke. Once we don’t agree on that anymore, and there are enough people on both sides of that disagreement, then you have to split.

Or, again, you and I might disagree on fundamental things, but as long as we both agree that when you’re driving a red light means “Stop” - it doesn’t matter what your politics are anymore, we depend on each other to recognise the meaning of that red light. I mean, that’s why I was saying that culture and communication depend on each other. Because I need you to understand what a red light means and you need me to understand what a red light means and they only way we’re going to do that is if we communicate with each other.

And then recognise our own self-interest in looking out for the other guy on the road. I think that's crucial, finding a selfish reason to be selfless. I might not want to stop a the red light, but at the same time it's in my own best interest to.

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I wanted to talk a little bit about free speech, while we’re in the neighborhood, as a form of communication, or as an off-shoot of communication. I don’t know if you know the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Basically the First Amendment is Freedom of Speech, and it’s important to remember that America came from a colonial monarchy, right? Meaning that once upon a time, the King could determine what people could say and what they couldn’t say. Or the King could determine whether or not groups of people could meet.

And so one of the first things that happened when the United States was founded was this idea of “We can say whatever we need to say. We can put whatever we need to put in the newspaper. If people want to meet, we can meet.” And I’m all for it. But it’s complicated. Right? Do you remember the guys with the tiki-torches, the “Unite the Right” guys in Charlottesville? The “You will not replace us” guys? I really don’t like those guys. I don’t like their message, I don’t like their tactics. I don't like what they think, what they say, or how they say it. I don’t like anything about them. And I doubt, I hope, that they don't like me either.

At the same time, I have to endorse their right to wave their stupid torches and say their stupid things, even if I disagree with it, because if they don’t have the right to do what they’re doing, I'm not going to have the right to do what I'm doing, either. I mean, that’s the price of free speech. Essentially. We both have to stop at the red light.

But I don’t know. I don't have an answer for this. I just have a couple of questions about it. So, should there be limits on free speech? I mean, there are limits on free speech in Germany, for example. When you get to into neo-Nazism, there are very clear limits on free speech. I mean, it’s not all just “censorship”. It’s not all just North Korea. There are degrees of freedoms as well as absolutes. There are arguments for limiting free speech that you could make in support of a liberal western democracy.

In the United States, there are a lot of people out there that I don’t agree with. For example, there’s a church called the Westboro Baptist Church, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of these guys. But it’s sort of like a small Christian fundamentalist cult, really. And they hate homosexuality. They regard homosexuality as the most evil sin of all the evil sins in the world. Worse than murder. Worse than rape. Worse than anything. And that’s one of the central pillars of their religious belief.

And about thirty years ago, the U.S. military allowed openly gay and lesbian people to join the military. And for this church, that was the last straw. That was the definitive sign that America was going to hell. Literally going to hell. And so their response is to go the the funerals of soldiers, and they hold up these big signs. And the signs say things like “Your son is in hell” or “Thank God your son was killed” or “God Hates Fags”. Stuff like that. And the mothers and the fathers of the person who dies, or the wife or the husband and children of the person who died - they’re all there. And then you’ve got these guys holding up these signs. And they have every legal right to do that. And, if you support the First Amendment, they should have that right to be there holding their stupid signs. And, yeah, it IS sad. But that's the price of free speech. You have to let these guys do their thing.

But what you can do, and I’ll show you an example of this in a second, but what you can do is you can show up with your own sign. So I really kind of like this. You’ve got your Westboro Baptist Church guy with his “God Hates Fags” sign over here and standing next to him you’ve got this kid with a sign with an arrow pointing at the first guy and it reads “Fuck This Guy”. Which you really have to admire. And there’s nothing this guy can do about that guy, because there’s nothing else that guy can do about this guy. So the other people show up, and they kind of counter-protest the protesters. And that’s how it works. At least in America.

And then, the “Charlie Hedbo” thing, the “Je suis Charlie” thing.

“Charlie Hebdo” is an interesting one. Do you remember when we were talking about the 1958 French Constitution, and that first amendment? “We don’t recognise race and religion” and all that sort of stuff? But we also looked at the very different experiences of the people living in Clichy sur Bois and the 16th Arrondissement. Do you guys remember this? I have to admit, I’ve got a lot more questions than answers about “Charlie Hebdo”. Because I mean my sympathies are both instinctively and completely with a secular liberal laicitie multi-culture, right? I mean, those would be my guys. Those would be my values. But here’s the thing about “Charlie Hebdo”. I understand that their satire was mocking the role of religion in a secular Western society. I get that. Absolutely. The thing is, though, that in the context of modern French society, it goes beyond religious affiliation and into socio-cultural and socio-economic identity, right? I mean, it certain seems like it does.

And I’m trying to figure out how I think about this myself, but - if you go “OK, we make fun of all religions, OK? We make fun of the Catholic church and we make fun of Islam and we make fun of Judaism and we have satirical cartoons of the Pope making out with Mohammed and all that sort of stuff” - and again, I get that, I completely get that - but I don’t think that in a contemporary French context it is just about religion, right?

Because if I were Catholic - and I know we’re not supposed to talk about this, because of the French constitution - but if I were a white Catholic in France, I could afford for you to make fun of the Catholic Church, because I have other socio-economic advantages and securities so that the Catholic Church is not the single thing that defines me in the society. Right? When I'm walking down the street, nobody's saying "Look at that Catholic guy, why's he in our neighborhood?" I mean, they might in Belfast, but...

I have other things. So you want to make fun of the Pope? Go ahead and make fun of the Pope, I can afford it. It doesn’t cost me anything.

But, if I am already living on the sort of disenfranchised edges of society, and I am a working-class North African French guy living in the Banlieues, one of the… you know, my identity AS a North African French Muslim guy becomes that much more important and it’s not really so much about the religion as it is about the subcultural ethnic identity. Not only to myself, in fact maybe not even primarily to myself, but in the way the rest of the society regards me, First Amendment of the 1958 constitution or not. And these are guys who are already kind of on the edges of acceptance into the wider culture. Which is something that they can’t even constitutionally address, because that would be referring back to an ethnic origin that legally doesn’t exist.

So when you print a cartoon where you’re making fun of those guys, you’re not just making fun of religious doctrine, you’re not just making fun of the Koran or whatever, you’re also making fun of one of the fundamental things that gives these guys self-definition at a time and a place where they really need self-definition. Do you understand what I mean? So it’s one thing if you’re in an environment where everybody’s equal. It’s an entirely different thing when you’re doing this kind of thing in an unequal environment.

You can only be equally mocked when you're also equally advantaged. Otherwise, it's punching down.

And please understand, I’m not for a second defending or justifying what happened. There is no defending or justifying what happened. But what I am saying is that that is the price of free speech. And you don’t have to agree with me on this. I’m not even sure I agree with me on this. But I think it’s a conversation worth having.

And I think this debate is happening in France, right?

It’s a delicate subject, you’re right. It IS a very delicate subject. But you can’t talk about culture without talking about delicate subjects, if you’re going to do an honest job of it. And again, that “delicate subject” thing - we talked about this before - about how “we don’t recognise race” but… “We don’t recognise race because it’s an uncomfortable subject or we don’t talk about religion because it’s an uncomfortable subject, but ... at the same time all the money and opportunities are over here.”

Anyway, something to think about.

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OK, I don’t know. What constitutes “offensive speech”? And why does talking about this make me nervous?

I think there should be free speech, because I don’t trust the powers that would determine… I mean, right now? I certainly wouldn't trust the people in power to determine what’s offensive and what I can and cannot say, because ultimately they’re going to work that to their own political advantage. I mean, then you just have censorship wrapped up as being nice, if you know what I mean. I've been hearing this argument a lot from my American students, the argument against "offensive speech”.

And I don't think you should go out of your way to be offensive. Why should you? It's rude? But at the same time if people can’t say things that are “offensive” - and who determines the boundaries of “offensiveness” - then we can’t have this conversation. And I’m not deliberately trying to offend anybody, but at the same time the argument that “we’re not going to talk about that because it’s offensive” is essentially the same argument that Macron, for example, uses when he argues against an interpretation of French society as a multicultural one. Which then effectively shuts down the argument that to be Black or North African in France is a different experience than being Christian and White in France, because those distinctions “offend” notions of French secularism.

Remember what we talked about earlier, that culture is constantly negotiated. People are always fighting over what culture means, and have always been fighting over what culture means, and one way to shut down that negotiation is to say “Well, that’s offensive.” But if we can’t talk about it because you're offended, that means we have to stop the conversation here, where it best suits you, which means you win. Basically, you get to determine the acceptable boundaries of a culture. You get to determine the price of a Coke.

This is just from a book that I have called “Free Speech on Campus” and it’s by these American academics from California - Chemerinsky and Gillman - and this is basically the argument that I tried to make. They make it better. What they say is “Yeah, hate speech is terrible. Absolutely. But, protecting hate speech laws is necessary because the alternative - giving government the power to punish speakers they don’t like ultimately creates even more harm. The argument in favour of hate speech laws is essentially an argument for granting people in authority the power to censor or punish individuals who insult, stigmatise, or demean others, and it is inevitable that such vague and broad authority will be abused or used in ways that were not contemplated by censorship advocates.”

They're basically saying that that’s the way it starts. It starts with something we can all agree on. It starts with us objecting to the guy who’s holding the sign that says “God Hates Fags” at the military funeral. Because we can pretty much all agree that that’s terrible. But once you set that legal precedent, you can start to extend it into “Well, actually, I’m kind of offended by that over there. Or I’m kind of offended by this.”

I thought these two signs were really interesting, they were from two U.S. college protests, and one of them reads “We condemn freedom of speech that hurts other people’s feelings” - and I mean that’s such a vague way to try and enforce what is and isn’t allowable -  and the other reads “We will not be silent so that you can remain comfortable”.  What’s interesting to me is that the first sign, the once condemning free speech, is from the progressive left side of the argument and the other is from what’s considered the conservative right.

Let me back up a bit, because this is about hate speech, but it’s really about the sources of hate speech. Prejudice and racism. The thing about racism is that it is taught. It’s acculturation, right? And it’s generally taught to people by people who love them. For the most part. Which complicates things. I mean, your mother tells you not to put rat poison in your mouth because it’s bad for you. And she teaches you to brush you teeth and make up your bed and do your homework. And that same mother teaches you not to trust black people because they’re dangerous. And so it becomes an emotionally understood thing, not a rationally understood thing. Which means it’s much harder to argue somebody out of being a racist on a rational level. Do you understand what I mean? For the same reason it’s very hard to argue somebody into putting rat poison into their mouth on a rational level. I mean, it’s possible. It happens. But it’s not easy.

If it’s not about intelligence, if it’s about acculturation, why is it important for people to become acculturated in that way? Why's it important to hand it down? If it’s a question of influences and education from the very beginning of your life by your society. And that society could be your family or your friends or your neighbourhood or your country. Remember the kid who threw rocks at the Yeshiva School in New Jersey, "my brother was in the car, my best friend was in the car..."

I mean, look, my grandfather was a racist. My mother wasn't, and she was able to get out of that house. But she was taught as a kid - just from listening to her father who she fortunately didn’t trust on any other level either - but she was taught by her father not to trust black people or Jewish people or… So, no, you don’t have to go down the line with what your parents say, but it’s an emotionally complicated thing when you break from them.

And yeah, it’s not easy, because again, you’re leaving your tribe. You’re leaving the group that gives you power and support and definition. Worse, you’re turning on your tribe, and rejecting one of the fundamental things that defines your tribe. And so why do you need the tribe? Well, let's go back to Malthus for a minute. We talked about this before. Who are you without your people? Then it's just you, and good luck if that's all you've got.

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OK, “Othering”. “Othering” is basically the segregating of some portion of the population, often - not always, but - for political ends. Right? If you think about Germany in the 1920s, especially if you think about Berlin in the 1920s, Berlin was a cosmopolitan European capital city with a vibrant Jewish population. Vienna was a cosmopolitan European city with a vibrant Jewish population. Paris, for that matter, was also a cosmopolitan European capital city with a vibrant Jewish population.

But within ten years or so, not only were the Jewish people in Germany not seen as PART of the German “population” anymore, or as German, they were seen as the antithesis of the German population. Suddenly what made Germans “German” was that they were not Jewish. Right? There is “them” and then there’s “us”, and the zombies are coming. The zombies are coming to eat your brain. Or the zombies are already here. And if you go with the “Yeah, the zombies are already here” narrative, then you have to vote for the guy who says “I will save you. I alone can save you.” Of course you do.

So the Mexicans or the Syrians. Or black people in cities. Or gay people. Or whoever.

When Trump tried to reframe the corona virus as the “Chinese virus" it was because then he could then A.) turn it into a cultural thing instead of a biological thing and then he can B.) say it’s those guys. We are under attack. And random assaults on Asians suddenly skyrocketed in America, attacked for "bringing their disease".

And so “Othering” really is a political manoeuvre. You remember when we talked about the Belgians in the Congo and the chopping off of hands? It was OK if they weren't quite human. I mean, human enough for the punishment to be effective, inhuman enough for the punishment to be acceptable.

Recently I got into this debate with this guy about immigration and illegal immigrants in America and in the course of the debate he referred to these illegal immigrants as “low-life criminal animals”. And the most interesting thing to me about what he said was the word “Animals” - the idea that they’re not quite “human” and so they're not deserving of humane treatment. I mean, we still do that.

I mean, we talked about the narcissism of small differences. The Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda, right? The Catholics and the Protestants in Northern Ireland. Serbs and Croats. As long as there is competition for resources, I think there’s going to be some kind of “othering” going on.

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OK, this “top-down/bottom-up” thing, and I want to make sure you understand this term. Sorry, I know I’m going fast, I’m trying to get as much in as I can. “Top-down” means othering that is led from the top. Simple enough. That is led from the government, or from whatever authority figure. “Bottom-up” basically means street-level.

So, for example, I have a friend from back in New York, and he’s a generation older than me, and he was a soldier in Vietnam. And, you know, when he was eighteen he was just this kid in Brooklyn and he surfed and he had a car and he had a girlfriend, and that’s all he cared about. You know, he was a simple guy. And within a month… well, within two months, he was in Vietnam and he was shooting people. Because suddenly, that was his job. Now, he’s a nice guy, I really like him a lot, but he did kill people, and the whole thing really messed him up later. And I asked him once “how do you do that”? And he says “Well, you don’t think about it.” He says  “You think about the first one." And that’s trouble, that’s terrible. Because everything you’re taught as a kid - this guy was an altar boy back in Brooklyn. He was a boy scout when he was a kid - you’re now doing the opposite. But you just don’t think of them as people anymore. Anyway, that’s bottom-up, right? OK?

So these are examples of “top-down” othering. Uh, these are the Nuremberg Laws and this is the way it worked… I mean, these were laws, this was a set of laws in Germany and it was a legal process to determine how Jewish somebody was. And so if you were born over here and if all four of your grandparents were Jewish, well then you were just Jewish. But if you were born over here… you know, then you were of a different legal degree of Jewishness. I mean, we talked about this with Darwin, a hundred and fifty years ago. This was Europe in nineteen thirty-five. Your grandparents were alive. Maybe. Anyway, my grandparents were alive.

You know, it goes back to that "who determines the price of a Coke?" thing. "Who determines the status of a German Jew?" But what’s interesting to me about this is that, um… So, when there was a war in Yugoslavia, in what used to be Yugoslavia, back in the 1990s. There was a town called Srebrenica, and basically the Serbs went in and they took all the Muslim men and boys out of the town and - this is like 1993 or something - um, and they brought them into the forest and they just shot them. More than 8000 people. Right? And they just left them there.

The Germans didn’t do that. Right? I mean, not officially. The Germans passed laws, because - remember what we said before - laws are an indication of civilisation, and a civilised society has laws. A civilised society doesn’t just march people into the forest, a civilised society finds itself unfortunately compelled to enforce the laws needed to protect civilisation. It would have been offensive to the German sense of itself as an enlightened society to do things illegally, if you know what I mean. And so, having laws in place, it wasn’t about the Jewish thing anymore, it was about the German thing.

So, you know, when they were putting people on trains and sending them off to the camps, people stood in long lines to write their names into books before they were put on the train because it was a contract, essentially. It was a legal contract. Because societies have laws, right? And so jump forward 75 years, and they’re separating little kids from their parents on the Texas border with no was of reconnecting these families, and it's too bad but hey, these are the laws.

Do you remember when we talked about “hegemony” before? You know, the controlling agency, or the way that people, or… do you remember this? The stuff that you absorb in popular culture that informs the values of the mainstream culture. Well, this is what popular culture looked like in Germany leading up to the Second World War.

And it was this constant message of - do you know the term to “anthropomorphise”? To make human of a non-human? You know, you think of your cat as a person, and you anthropomorphise your cat? Anyway, this is the… to give human characteristics to a non-human thing. Right? Well, this stuff was the opposite process, right? Or, in this case, to make non-humans of humans. And so, for example, this was a move called “The Eternal Jew” and in the movie what they would do is they would show Jewish men - Hasidic Jewish men - and then they would show rats running down the street. And then cut back to the Jewish men, and then more rats running down the street. And after a little while, it didn’t take long to make the association, you go “Ah, Jewish Men are Rats!”

And this stuff still goes on. Now here’s the thing, if you have a civilised society, and you are infested with undermining rodents, then as a member of a civilised society you are obliged to do whatever you have to do to preserve your hard-won civilisation. If there are rats in the house, you have to get rid of them, right? You have to kill the zombies, because if you don’t kill the zombies, they will kill you. And if they can’t afford empathy, you can’t afford to feel any, either. Right?

I mean, are you following the logic of this?

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Hannah Arendt, who was a German Jewish journalist who lived in New York and after Eichmann was arrested he was brought back to Jerusalem where he faced trial for genocide and he was eventually executed, but Arendt wrote about the trial for the New Yorker. And Eichmann was so dull, he was such an unimaginative little administrator, essentially, that Arendt had to reconsider the whole nature of evil. I mean, monsters make sense, monsters are unambiguously evil, but this guy - given another set of circumstances and this guy just would have been some accountant somewhere. Some bureaucrat, which is more or less what he was. And in a way that's more frightening. So Arendt writes about this phenomenon that existed in the culture where she says that the process turns around. It’s not that “we are the bad guys”. It’s more like “isn’t this terrible what we have to do to preserve our society and "poor us" - and they mean it. These are normal people who are transformed by their culture to do terrible things, and the way that you live with yourself - like my friend Steve who was shooting people in Vietnam - the way that you live with yourself is you go “Goddamn it, why do I have to do this? Why are these people making me do this to them?” And if you go “Well, I had to do this for the good of my society” then suddenly it becomes the only choice you have. Suddenly the only thing worse than doing these things is not doing them.

And so you’ve got this. These guys? I mean, I’m looking at them, and I’m thinking maybe they’re twenty-one? Twenty-two? I mean, how old are most of you guys? Twenty? Nineteen? Twenty? Twenty-one? And I mean, these are Europeans, right? These are educated cultured Europeans. Just like you. And if you guys had come up in the same set of circumstances... Right? I mean, this is the way it happens. I mean, you’ve got these guys, who are probably nice guys, and who probably love their mothers and have girlfriends back home and all that sort of stuff, but there are laws and you have to obey the laws.

And that was true in Germany, and it was true in Vietnam and it was true in Algeria.

And before that it was true in Texas. This is a picture from the Texas/Brownsville lynchings. And it was true in Tulsa and it was true in Derry and it is true right now in places as unexpected as Switzerland. And this poster here, I mean it’s obviously anti-Islamic, but it’s… I mean, ravens, picking at the corpse. They’re animals. They’re not quite human. They’re animals.

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I used to think that we were marching together towards a more ideal society, but these days I don’t think history works like that. I think everybody kind of moves along in this direction for a while and then something changes and then everybody starts moving in another direction for a while. And then something changes again and we all start moving in some other direction. I mean, I think we have to keep moving, but at the same time, I don’t think there’s ever going to be a utopian moment of “A-HA! We’ve done it! We’ve gotten there!” I just don't think it works like that.