Ch. 1: Working Definitions of Culture

Did you guys think about this "What is Culture" thing at all, the "Matt Damon on Mars" thing?

Culture is… a group of people. Yeah, that’s true.

Culture is… defined in space and time. OK, not bad. A little vague. A set of values and beliefs that makes people see the world in… Yeah, I’d go along with that.

A country is a culture… Yeah, OK. I guess that's more or less true. I mean, when you put a boundary around a culture and give it a name. That’s what a country is. “OK, this culture goes from this line on the map to that line on the map.” Until it doesn’t. And then it changes. And then the map changes. And you’ve got to get a new map. Remember when we talked about France being an agreement or America being an agreement. You know that Charles de Gaulle quote where he asks “How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?” which I thought was pretty funny because it’s like, OK, “This border is the limits of our culture” but within that border you have such a mix of… such a plurality of culture.

Any thoughts on who defines culture? 

We’re going to try to come up with today is a working definition of culture. And it’s a very open-ended thing, you know? And then disputes over defining culture. Who gets to define what a culture is? Which is very complicated and problematic and politically charged. For a long time, culture was defined by colonial power. “African culture” was defined by the people who went to Africa, not by the people who were already living there. The Belgians defined what “culture” was in the Congo. The French defined what “culture” was in Algeria. Neither definitions might have been accurate, and it might not have been reflective of the way Algerians saw culture in Algeria, but it didn’t matter because the French had the power and they had the guns. They had the armies and the map-makers and the anthropologists to decide what culture was. So the idea of defining your own culture - instead of having your culture defined for you - is a very politically charged and emotional kind of thing, and a relatively new phenomenon.

I don’t know if you have this in France, the idea of "Identity Politics." I know it’s a very big thing in America. It’s almost a competition of subcultural identities, especially in academia. Again, I don’t know if this is a thing in France, but I know in America, the power of Identity Politics is huge and it’s always messy. 

And then “Race” and Ethnicity. And I think we talked about what we mean by “race”, didn’t we? And then Subcultures and Subgroups. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. 

I just had these two quotes that I wanted to give you. One of them is from David Cameron who, you know, unfortunately took a chance on Brexit and it did not work out the way he thought it was going to work out. I don't much like the guy, and I certainly don't share his politics. But he has this quote about liberal western society and… By the way, when I say “liberalism” do you understand what I mean by that? I don’t mean “progressivism”. I don’t mean “leftism”. I mean… how do I explain this? I don’t want to talk about Trump all the time but I would say that Donald Trump is probably a liberal in this sense of the meaning. I don’t think Trump really cares one way or the other who sleeps with who, I don’t think he personally cares if people take drugs. All he cares about is money, right? Money and power, that’s all he cares about. So to an extent he is a liberal in the libertarian sense of liberalism. Do you know what I mean? I’m not sure if it’s the same concept in France. I mean, you have Libertie, but I’m not sure it’s the same.

Anyway, this is Cameron’s speech about a liberal western democracy.

“Frankly, we need less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism. A passively tolerant society says to its citizens; as long as you obey the law we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values. A genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them. Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, sex, or sexuality. It says to its citizens: This is what defines us as a society.”

Now, that’s a deceptively complicated quote. All the more complicated, because you look at it and you instinctively go “Yeah, of course. Sure. Absolutely, it makes perfect sense.” But it’s more complicated than that, right? It’s a much more complicated idea because while on the surface this list is all very pretty and admirable, sometimes these things are not compatible with each other. Freedom of Speech. Yeah, OK. Should there be limits on Freedom of Speech? I can think of some pretty persuasive arguments for putting some limits on Freedom of Speech. For example, what do you do with "Hate Speech"? And who gets to determine what "Hate Speech" even is? I always agree with Freedom of Speech until it goes against what I believe. Freedom of Worship? OK, but what happens if the Freedom of Worship goes against the laws of a secular society? I mean, who do you obey? Do you obey the state’s laws or do you obey God’s law, if you believe in God? How are you with the naqab in France? How are you with mass weddings in Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn during Covid lockdowns?

Because if you take your religion seriously, ultimately the state is only here for a little while but God’s here forever so which law are you going to obey if the two don’t agree with each other? Which horse are you going to back?

"Equal rights regardless of race, sex, and sexuality." OK, but again you could bring in the religion thing. Some religions don’t believe in equal rights regardless of race, sex, or sexuality. 

There was a case in Belfast a couple of years ago where these two guys decided to get married, and they went to an Evangelical Christian bakery - which they knew was an Evangelical Christian bakery and which is why they went there- to order a wedding cake. And the baker said no, absolutely not. Gay marriage ran against everything the guy believed in. And the two men, the guys getting married, sued him for discrimination. Which was the whole point. 

Now, I’m all for the two guys getting married, but I also have some sympathy for the baker, even if I disagree with him. They knew the response they were going to get, which is why they asked that particular baker in the first place. They were making a point. He may be a bigot, in fact it’s pretty safe to say he is, but he has every right to be. He believes what he believes and his freedom of worship is as legitimate as their right to marry.
     

It looks really nice, when you just see the quote, but it's complicated.
    
And that’s the constant negotiation that builds and maintains a society, if you know what I mean. You really have to learn to surf on ambiguity here. 

The other thing about the Cameron quote is that ultimately he was wrong. He bet wrong. It turned out people didn’t really want an "active, muscular liberalism". Maybe they did in London, or in the Cotswolds, but not in Sheffield. It turned out there were more Belfast bakers than he’d anticipated. 

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And this, I took this from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is their working definition of Culture…

I think for the purposes of this class, we're going to want to start off with the third definition, probably, and start digging. You’re going to want to start off with some artifact of a culture, the music or the food or the literature. The fashion, or whatever. Something you can see. And then work your way from that down down down down. So, for example, let me show you this very quickly. I’m going to talk more about it later, but this guy Edward Hall came up with this “Iceberg” model of culture. Maybe you’ve seen this before, I don’t know.

It’s fairly self-explanatory, I hope. I mean, with an iceberg you see the top and that’s all you can see, and you kind of have to work your way down to the bottom. I tend to think of it is the stuff at the top is the stuff that people do. This is the stuff you can see that’s obvious and explicit. And then, below this, next layer down, this is the stuff that people believe. The stuff that people know. And then, down at the bottom, this is the stuff that people don’t even know that they know.

So, for example, people get very upset if.... Well, different cultures eat different food, right? And in some cultures they eat horse, and in some cultures they don’t eat horse. I’ve eaten horse, mostly so I could tell my students that I have. It wasn’t bad. And in some cultures, they eat dog, and in some cultures they don’t. And what’s more interesting to me than the food people eat are the responses. If you see somebody eating dog meat you are shocked and disgusted and revolted and all that. And why is that your response? “Because it’s wrong.” Well, yeah, but why is it wrong? “Well, I don’t know. But it is. And you know it is.”

That’s the interesting thing, that visceral “I don’t know, but I know” response. That’s the bottom of the iceberg, that's the stuff that you don’t know that you know. 

For years I used to teach English. And I was teaching a class on food. And what you do when you teach a class on food is you go around the room and ask the students “What’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?”

And one guy said snake, and another person said kangaroo. One guy said that when he was in Mexico he ate fried cricket. Another student ate alligator. And then there was this guy from Spain, from Barcelona, named Jordi and - oh, by the way, everybody in the room was either French, Spanish or Italian, OK? - and it’s his turn and I ask him “Jordi, what’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?” and he thinks about it for a minute and they he says, "well, maybe kitten." And there's a pause, and I said “what?” and he shakes his head and says again “Yeah, you know, kitten.” And I ask “you mean, baby cats?” and he looks kind of confused and says “yeah.”

And everybody in the room is just… Oh, my God! Everybody’s horrified. And Jordi shakes his head and says “No, no, it’s OK. It's OK. It’s a Spanish tradition!” and all my Spanish students are like “No way. No it’s not. You’re not putting this on me.”
 
So I’m asking Jordi a couple of questions, because at this point I’m not even sure I completely believe him. But he doesn’t seem to be lying.

I asked him how many kittens do you need, right? I mean, they’re small. And he says “Oh, yeah, you need a few.” And I asked, you know, how do you prepare kitten? And he says well, usually with rice. You know, sometimes with pasta, but usually with rice.

And finally I ask, you know, where do you get kitten meat? I mean, do you buy it or is it a specialty item or ... where do you get it? And the guy goes, “Well, I have a cat. And every so often, the cat gets pregnant and I can’t take care of the kittens and so after a couple of days…” You know, he starts miming snapping their necks and everything. And at this point everybody in the room is just horrified, you know? This is true. And then I ask him one more question. And remember, everybody in the room is either Spanish, French or Italian. I ask him, you know, “So, kitten. Would that be more of a red wine or a white wine kind of dish?” and he looks at me like I’m stupid and he says, you know, “red”.

And all the students, who were horrified a second ago, now they’re kind of reluctantly nodding their heads. “Yeah, makes sense.” I thought that was hilarious. I mean, you wouldn’t eat kitten, but if you did eat kitten, you’d never drink white.

Anyway, the response. That’s what I’m interested in. Your response right now. Why NOT eat kitten? Not a kitten, because that’s just wrong. Entirely too specific. But kitten in general? Dog, not a dog. You don't eat a lamb, you just eat lamb. Kitten's probably delicious.

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I came across this quote by this guy Terry Eagleton, he’s an English academic and he was writing about the difference between culture and civilization. And what he said was basically they started off as the same thing, but as time went on... I don’t know, in France are “culture” and “civilization” the same thing? The same idea? What Eagleton says is this.

I kind of like that idea. I like the idea that civilization is the stuff that you need to survive as a species, sort of, but culture is what makes it yours. The color is “this is who we are”. Yeah, everybody has a mailbox but OUR mailbox is green. And by the way, a lot of the mailboxes you see in Dublin are even more complicated than that. Because they’re green, but a lot of them are also really old, and have the British Crown on them as well, underneath the green paint. They’re very complicated mailboxes.

Going back, we talked about Edward Hall's iceberg model, and I also want to talk for a minute about Geert Hofstede, who you might have heard of. Dut basically Hofstede was a Dutch sociologist who travelled around the world looking at cultures, the differences in cultures.

 

He’s kind of an interesting guy, and I’ll probably tell this story again, but he basically worked for IBM in the 1960s and early 1970s, and IBM couldn’t figure out why their productivity was different in different countries, right? Because it was the same job. But productivity was different in Germany from productivity in France from productivity in Japan from … you get the idea. And so they hired Hofstede, who travelled around and studied German workers and studied French workers and studied Japanese workers. And he came up with different categories of culture. And so he’s kind of influential in corporate culture circles. But anyway, he also came up with the idea that these are four categories that every culture has. It doesn’t matter if it’s Brazil or Germany or France, or China or India. All cultures have these commonalities. 

Every culture works on a set of symbols, right? Language, gestures, art. Rituals. Collective activities. Every culture, and it can be national or regional or local. You know, “We are this because we do this.” 

Then we have values and judgements. You know, “it is wrong to eat kitten.” “It is wrong to hit children.” But also ideas of what is beautiful, what is cool. What is delicious.

And then heroes. Behavioral models in a culture. The importance of King Arthur in English self-identity. The importance of a hero that reflects the values of a society. I think it’s interesting - unpleasant, but interesting - that when you look at somebody like Marine Le Pen, who is anti-immigrant and believes that France is fundamentally a white Christian country and all that sort of stuff. And the hero that she relentlessly associates herself with is Jeanne d’Arc. That hero makes sense to her message. Because Joan of Arc was fighting an invader and she was a simple peasant girl. She was illiterate, so she couldn’t be corrupted by high urban culture, and she worked with the land, so she was rooted in the locality. And she was told by a Christian God to vanquish the invader (who, in this case, happened to be England). Right? I mean, that works very well with her message of simple Christian French anti-immigrant values. I mean, I don’t like her. Those aren’t my values, but it makes sense to have a hero you can point to, that reflects the aspirational values of the tribe.

And cultures need villains as much as they need heroes, and sometimes - often, in fact - they’re the same person when the culture turns. In America, Christopher Columbus was an absolute hero until he became an absolute villain. In the South, Robert E. Lee was an absolute hero until he became an absolute villain. They have to be unambiguously good, and then they have to be unambiguously bad.

And by supporting either position, the rest of us get off easy. Man, thank God Columbus was such a dick, because otherwise I’d have to look at my own (ambiguous) role in the following 500-plus year system of oppression, etc. But to park it all at the door of one guy is a little much. Does anybody think that if Columbus didn’t arrive in America, no European ever would? It’s one of the dangers of orthodoxy. One of the other dangers is not jumping from “I LOVE that band!” to “I HATE that band!” soon enough.

Cultures within Cultures

OK, so we’re looking at subcultures, we’re looking at ethnic identity and ethnic groups - and I think the whole ethnic group and ethnic identity thing is really interesting because it’s self-perpetuating, in a way. I don’t know, is ethnicity an important issue in France? Ethnicity is a big thing in America, I know that.  

I grew up basically in and around New York, and most of my friends were either Italian-American or Irish-American or Jewish or whatever. They weren’t just “American” but they were Irish-American. They were Italian-American. They had one foot in the old country. And that is that’s voluntary, you know? That means of self-identification. I would talk to friends and they'd tell me that their families were Irish and I ask “Huh, that’s interesting. So when did they go from Ireland to the United States?” 
     
And the answer was usually a little cloudy. 1840's. 1850's. The Famine. And I’m talking to these guys in 1985, so it’s a century and a half ago. Your family went from Ireland to America but you still identify as “Irish”. You still marry the “Irish” girl from the neighborhood. You give your kids "Irish" names, like Kevin. Brian. Sean. I didn't know any Italian kids named "Kevin."

And I’m not saying it’s not real. It’s a real definition. But at the same time it’s an assumed definition. You have to decide to keep it going. But what does that mean to be “Irish American” if you’ve lived in another country for 150 years? How “Irish” are you? But you need the tribe.
   
It’s always interesting when Irish-Americans come to visit Ireland, and especially when they come to Dublin, and they see Black kids or Chinese kids with Irish accents. And it makes no sense to them, it throws them because their idea of “Irish” doesn’t include the Black kids or Chinese kids. But those kids were born in Ireland. Those kids are Irish. They’re from Ireland. Whereas the Irish guy from New Jersey, whose great-great grandfather came over from Ireland, he’s not really "Irish" in the same way. But he is Irish-American, because he’s decided to keep it going. And that is a real thing, I’m not trying to take anything away from it.
     
They also don’t know who or what to be scared of, which can be kind of funny. Because the street kids they’re traditionally afraid of back in the States tend to be black, but this is Ireland. And so when they see a bunch of street kids who look like their nephews or whatever, it really messes with their minds. Urban danger stripped of a racial dimension, it's hard for these guys to figure out.  
     
And that eventual trip "home" to Ireland really messes them up, because they've built you build their entire tribal identity around this abstract idea (in this case “Irish” but it could be pretty much anywhere) and then the reality of that idea - black kids with Dublin accents - goes against criteria they've established for themselves. And I certainly get that. I get that. I’m exactly the same. I remember being shocked - watching the film “Gomorrah” - to realize that there were Black Italians. And I’ve never even been to Italy. That made no sense to me at all. And then, of course, it made perfect sense. Why wouldn't there be black Italians? And then I've got to go back and redefine my own sense of "Italian."

I always thought it was interesting that the Aryan Brotherhood - kind of the national franchise for Aryan-Nation White Power guys in prison - is anchored in this fetish for “Celtic” blood. Shamrock tattoos are the indicator that you belong to the tribe. How those guys confront the reality of Black and Chinese Irish kids, I don’t know. Not well, I’d imagine. Fortunately, they don't get out that much.

You remember what we talked about before about resources and competition? If you have 9 billion people, who gets the drinking water? There’s only so many people who are going to get housing and education and all that. Ethnic groups are a way of forming a clearly identifiable tribe, and the strength of your tribe is the measure of your power, and so when we go back to the issue of Identity Politics, it’s about “does my tribe get the… do we get housing? Do we get jobs? Do we get education?” So it’s important to have an ethnic identity even if it’s not connected to a place anymore.

     
It’s interesting that in America European ethnic identity is very strong on the East Coast, right? So if your family went from Ireland to New York, or from Ireland to Boston, 150 years later you’re still Irish. You might live in an Irish neighborhood. You name the kid Kevin. All that. But by the time you get to the West Coast, by the time you get to Los Angeles, it doesn’t really matter what your ethnic identity is. By the time you get to Los Angeles you are just an American. You’ve assimilated, and connections to European culture really don’t matter anymore. Maybe in a purely abstract romantic way, but not the necessity it continues to be for the guy in South Boston. Except in San Francisco, and I have a theory about that but some other time.

And going back to that “Batman-needs-Joker” thing, where my father grew up in rural central Kentucky everybody was basically Matt Damon on Mars. Everybody was white and Christian and “Scots-Irish”, and my dad didn’t really come across anything else until he was 17 years old. The first time he heard any language spoken that wasn’t English was in 1963. When he went to New York and all of a sudden he was the exotic one. 

And then sub-groups. A subgroup is a group that you join. Sometimes it’s connected to a ethnic groups, sometimes it’s not. Again with the Irish-American thing, a lot of cops in New York and Boston tend (or at least tended) to be Irish, and the ones who weren’t Irish tended to mimic the Irish ones, because there’s a connection between the subculture ("Irish") and the sub-group ("cop").

You have skin-heads in France, right? I mean, skin-heads are a ubiquitous subgroup, and so ritualized that when you join them, the first thing you do if is you conform to their rules of behavior. I mean, you know what to expect. You shave your head. The Marines have the same initiation. You were an individual, now you're one of the tribe. And the thing about skin-heads is that they tend to come from lower/working-class White industrial areas. Nobody becomes a skin-head when they have better options. Now that’s a subculture, that’s what they’re born into. The subgroup that they join - the skin-heads in this example - is a way of forming (or joining) a tribe in order to get power they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. And the thing about a subgroup is that they have the power to kick you out, and sometimes you have to play along and do things you’d rather not do to keep the security of the tribe.

When I was a kid - and this is in suburban New Jersey, fifteen miles from Manhattan - there was this Yeshiva School in our town, all these little orthodox kids would come in from … I don’t know where, but anyway they would go to this school. And some of the kids from MY school, the public high school, what they would do on a Friday night or whatever is they’d drive around, they’d drink beer, and sometimes they’d drive past the school and throw rocks at the window. And I never got that, I never got the animosity of that. I mean, a lot of the kids we went to school with were Jewish, though not the ones throwing rocks. And I remember talking to one of the guys who did that later, and I asked him. I said “I never got why you guys did that” and - to this guy’s credit, he didn’t get defensive, he just looked kind of sad, and he said “Well, yeah, the truth is I wasn’t crazy about that myself. But, you know, my brother was in the car. And my best friend was driving the car. And my best friend's brother was sitting in the front seat next to him…” So you have a choice, you either split with the tribe or - in this guy’s case - you throw a rock at the Yeshiva School.

The Kardashians are a reference group. The cool kids in your high school cafeteria. It’s a group you want to join - maybe - but anyway model your behavior on. You can’t join the Kardashians, and I guess that's the whole point of the Kardashians, but maybe you can join the cool kids at school.

I saw a presentation a couple of years ago about the Turkish rap scene in Central Berlin, which was really interesting. Basically, there are all these Turkish kids - the grandchildren of the original “guestworkers” brought over in the 1950s I guess - and they grew up in this weird sort of “Half-German/Half-Turkish” disenfranchised community in central Berlin. In this neighborhood called Kreuzberg. And so they looked at other subcultures that seemed to be living in a similar kind of "half-in/half-out" ghettoised situation, and they really responded to the LA Rap culture. Dre, Snoop Dogg, NWA, all that made sense to them as another disenfranchised group. So they copied the styles, but their rap was about being working-class and Turkish in Berlin. And then, inevitably, the white suburban kids from Berlin came across it and thought “Oh, this is pretty cool!” and started copying the Turkish kids who were copying the LA kids.

And then “Standpoint Theory.” Alright, I’m going to have to use a metaphor for “Standpoint Theory” You have a spotlight, and you put a yellow filter in front of the light. What color is the light? It’s yellow, right? It’s not a trick question. OK, so you’ve got this yellow light and then you take a red filter and you put that in front of the yellow filter. Now what color do you have? Orange, you’re right! So “Standpoint Theory” is basically the idea that every cultural lens that you look at the world through influences the way that you look at the world. Right? So, for example, to poor people experience the world in the same way rich people do? OK, do poor women experience the world in the same way poor men do? OK, do poor Christian women from Scotland experience the world in the same way poor Muslim men do in Kreuzberg? No? Why now?

So, for example, I’ve got a cousin who lives in Kentucky. And he has a pickup truck and he likes to fish and he works for an insurance company. Big guy, beard and baseball cap. So you go, “OK, he’s an office guy but he’s also a country guy and he has a pickup truck and he has a dog.” And he also likes jazz. He’s a record collector, he plays drums. So you go “OK, so he’s office guy and he likes to hunt and fish and he’s got a pickup truck and he’s also got this jazz thing going on.” Oh, and he’s also gay, about as gay as they come, and he’s married to another guy named Bill. And he’s a progressive Democrat. He’s a liberal gay democrat pickup-truck driving jazz-drumming bass-fishing insurance guy. He’s always out there on the march. And there’s nothing in his life that says you can’t be all of those things at the same time. But each one of those is another filter, you know? The yellow and the red and the green and the…

So what are the cultural lenses you look at the world through? They're really hard to see, because you see them all the time.

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OK, let me talk about subcultures for a minute. I’m going to talk about Ireland for a few minutes. 

Subcultures can depend on a lot of things, right? They can depend on economic background. They can depend on education - and by the way, these are connected, right? Educational background and economic background are all obviously connected, right? The more money you have, the better an education you get.

Social class, which is often connected to money again but - like in England - not necessarily (you can be broke and still upper-class in Britain, just as you can be rich and working-class).

Region. Did you grow up in the country or did you grow up in the city? Did you grow up in the North or did you grow up in the South? Did you grow up in the mountains or by the sea or surrounded by corn? People from the north of France and people from the south of France - it’s different, right? One is industrial, the other is agricultural. Which shapes the way - you know, are people on time in the North, are they late in the South, are family structures different in the North and the South? All of those things. Occupation, ethnicity and race. These are all subcultures, right?

Now, the reason I wanted to show you this map.

This is a tiny tiny little corner of Ireland, which is itself a tiny little island in the northwest corner of Europe. This is Northern Ireland, and maybe you’ve heard of Northern Ireland - Belfast is in Northern Ireland? The Titanic was built in Northern Ireland? It's kind of a hard-luck corner of the world. But basically it’s - for about 100 years it was partitioned from the rest of Ireland, and about fifty ago there was a low-level war, essentially, in this area between the “Catholics” and the “Protestants” in this area. It lasted about thirty years, on and off. It still sparks up occasionally.
     
And it’s not really a religious war. They’re not fighting over the importance of the Pope in religious doctrine or the right to divorce. They’re fighting over jobs, and they’re fighting over economics. You know, who gets the housing and who gets the education and who gets the drinking water? But the tribes - the subcultural tribes - are nominally split into teams “Catholic” and “Protestant”. The Protestants on this map are represented by the color orange, and the Catholics are represented by the color green. Now, this is a small group. There’s like - maybe - one million/two million people that live in this area? Something like four thousand people have been killed over these incredibly small tribal differences. 
     
And I promise you - if we were to go to Belfast today, and I were to ask you to show me the Catholic and show me the Protestant, you couldn’t do it. It would be impossible. Because there is almost no difference at all, outside of Northern Ireland. But INSIDE of Northern Ireland, the differences are huge. These are tribes that are fighting over resources. And in this case what defines their tribe is the social and religious background. And the tribal battle between these guys is… I mean, 4000 people got killed over this thing. And it was intimate. Because it was so small. Everybody knew somebody on all sides of this equation. 

ethnicity. A group of people from the same descent and heritage who share a common and distinctive culture passed on through generations.

Language or Accent
Physical Features
Family Names
Customs and Religion

Ethnic Identity: Identification with and acceptance into a group with shared culture or heritage. 

In this case we’re talking about Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Physical features. I remember somebody telling me once that “You can always tell the Catholics because their eyes are closer together” but I have to admit, they look the same to me. Family names. Is your last name Thompson or is your last name Riordan? Because if it’s Riordan you’re Catholic and if it’s Thompson you’re Protestant. Maybe. Now again, it’s very small differences, but not there. There, saying “Thompson” or “Riordan” that has occasionally been the difference between going home that night or getting shot in the face. “Ivan Robertson” is an unmistakably Protestant name, by the way, which I only found out when I moved here. Another question they always ask in the North - and this is a big one - is “What school did you go to?” Just to find the context. Because if you say “St. Genevieve's” you’re on one team, and if you say "Bloomfield Collegiate" you're on the other. And it's not like you had much of a choice either way.

Are they Anglican? Well, that’s an interesting question.

If they have money, they tend to be Anglican. Or Church of Ireland. If they don’t, they tend to be Baptists or Presbyterian. Scottish lowland Presbyterians, originally. There's a real social hierarchy to Protestant denominations. In America as well. Just because they were on the up-side of that power distance structure in the North, that doesn’t mean they were doing especially well. “Winning” in Northern Ireland, back when there was an industry at all, meant having access to some fairly terrible jobs. “Losing” meant you didn’t even get that. But either way, Anglican or Baptist or Presbyterian, they’ve been in Northern Ireland for the past 500 years. So the whole "they should just go back to where they came from" argument sounds pretty rich when it's some third-generation Irish American who's saying it.

And, by the way, that presumed entitlement really messed up the Protestant community when the industry left. The "Catholics" were able to mobilise in a way that the "Protestants" didn't feel obliged to do, because the Catholics never presumed their place in Northern Irish society in the first place. The joke was that while the Republican paramilitaries were using the prison libraries, the Unionist paramilitaries were using the gyms.

And this is them fighting each other during the Belfast riots of 2013. And what’s interesting is that these guys - the Catholics, and I'm using these terms in a really simplistic and reductive way - identify as “Irish”. And those guys - the Protestants - identify as "British". But when these guys come to the rest of Ireland, when they come to Dublin for example, almost everybody in the Republic doesn't really regard them as especially Irish. “Well, I dunno. Kind of. Maybe. But really, you’re from the North. It's different.” And when those guys go to England or Scotland and say “We’re British” everybody in England or Scotland says “Uh, I dunno. I mean, you're from the North. You’re not really British, you’re from the North. It's different.” So even though these guys identify as being from completely separate groups, diametrically opposed groups, really they belong to each other. They give each other definition. They make sense to each other in a way that they’ll never make sense to anybody else.

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the expression “The narcissism of small differences”. I mean, traditionally the English and the French have never really gotten along, right? I mean that’s the traditional Western European cultural schism, or at least one of them. They might not hate each other, but at the same time it’s fair to say they annoy the hell out of each other. But the English and the French have a lot more in common than they don't. The English and the French are very similar compared to the English and the Japanese, for example, or the French and the Mexicans. So the differences between the English and the French are not that big, but within the similarities the differences make a big difference. That’s what I mean by the narcissism of small differences. It goes back to that idea of “I am not you, which means that I am even more me. I know that I am French because I am not German. Or English." The differences become that much bigger. The differences between Paris and Marseilles become bigger than the differences between the Earth and the Moon.

And so an ethnic group can funnel into a subgroup, and in Northern Ireland those subgroups tended to be pretty well armed.

I thought this was pretty funny. I went up to Belfast a couple of years ago with a friend of mine for a conference. And we're in the back of a taxi, and the taxi driver’s driving, and my friend, Eamon, who’s from Dublin and who has a very identifiable middle-class Dublin accent and who never shuts up, is sitting next to me in the back of the taxi. And he says to the taxi driver “Oh, it’s so much better up here than it used to be. I used to come up in the 1980s and it was so scary. Everybody used to hate everybody and…” And you could see just from the back of this taxi driver’s neck, he’s getting annoyed. And then he's getting angry. He’s not saying anything, but he’s really stiff. And my friend won’t shut up. “I remember there used to be soldiers on the street and road blocks and…” My friend just keeps talking. “I mean, my family’s Catholic but I’ve got cousins in England and it’s great to see how everybody’s really getting along and… yadda yadda ya.” I’m not saying a word, just getting more and more tense and the taxi driver’s saying nothing. Finally there’s this long pause my friend isn’t saying anything and the taxi driver says “Yeah, it’s all great except for the fucking Chinese!”

And I thought, that’s it. That’s the lesson. Nothing beats a prejudice more effectively than a bigger prejudice. They should have brought the Chinese into Belfast 40 years ago. A common enemy. Think of the lives that could have been saved.

Let’s go back to Matt Damon on Mars.

The Origins of Culture

Once upon a time, we were all Matt Damon on Mars.

By the way, I'm going to talk about human evolution as a fact, OK? As something that happened? I’ve gotten in trouble before with some students in regards to evolution. They didn’t believe it. “There was Adam and then there was Eve and that's what happened.” I don’t know. While I respect their opinions, I also respectfully disagree with them. I’m pretty sure there was evolution.

OK, so when we were first evolving as a species, when we were finding our feet, we were essentially Matt Damon on Mars. “Culture” didn’t exist because we were all basically the same culture. But then we started to spread out, right? So let's look at the “Eve Theory” for a minute, and about the causes of migration. And population, globalization, and shifting demographics.

So, 150,000 years ago? 200,000 years ago, we were all basically here, in sub-Saharan East Africa. This is us. The “Eve Theory” is basically the argument made by these three scientists - Stoneking, McCann, and Wilson - traced back our shared genetic history to our last common ancestor. And that one person, they named her “Eve” after Eve in the Bible. So basically, if we’re all cousins, we’re all cousins because we started right here. But inevitably, as the population grew things got more and more complicated and groups of people started to split, from this “Macro-Haplogroup L” into “Macro-Haplogroups L-0 to L-6”. Everybody started to spread out. Some people stay in sub-Saharan East Africa, and some people head south, and some people head west, and some people head north. And now you’ve got four cultures, right? And then those groups split and you've got 16 cultures. And then those groups split and … It goes back to the cells splitting, right? Two becomes four becomes eight becomes sixteen becomes …

As communities take root in different geographies, they adjust to different climates and food sources. They develop different political systems, different tribal systems, you start to have different cultures that don’t agree with each other as much. And one of the interesting things - we’re going to talk about this later, when we talk about language - but one of the interesting things is that linguistic historians were able to trace human tribal patterns through the development of language. The origins of language kind of follow and develop along this same route. The Latin that influenced Italian and French followed a group of people going this way. Germanic languages developed along the route of people going that way. Sanskrit followed the route of people going the other way.

So why did people spread around? Well, for the same basic reason people always spread around.

One reason was climate. Along with the development of agriculture. You needed land that would feed you, or at least that wouldn’t kill you. And if it was too cold you left and if it was too warm you left. Flood, famine. There's no food. And we'll talk more about this later, but one of the major impacts of agriculture is that it fundamentally chanced our relationship to the planet. I mean, if you're kind of roaming around eating whatever you happen to find or are able to kill, you're living with nature, but so's every other living creature on the planet. So's a lion. So's a squirrel. But if you can manipulate nature to feed you, you're not just living on the planet anymore. The planet's yours.

Another reason maybe less obviously but still… poor chances of marrying. In Dublin, there used to be a fairly substantial Jewish population. It wasn’t huge, but it lasted for a few generations. And the reason it doesn’t exist anymore, basically, was that they ran out of women. There were no women for the men to marry, and so the men - who wanted families - all moved to England where there was a stronger Jewish community. And that was the end of the Jewish subculture in Dublin.

And then, of course job opportunities. Not everybody gets to stay on the family farm.
A third reason was political separation. War, for example.

Or slavery, where people were brought over to places against their will. Forced migration.

So basically you need something to eat, you need somebody to marry, and you don’t want to get killed. So you move. That was true 150,000 years ago, and it’s equally true now. It’s the same exact pattern. Same carrot, same stick.

Somebody mentioned the famine before, 1847? In Ireland, there was a famine and the Irish were essentially refugees. They left because there was no food and they left because of political oppression and they went to New York or Boston or London or Liverpool. What’s interesting is that those refugees, or their kids or their grandchildren - the guy from New Jersey we were talking about - who all became American, tend to be fairly conservative, and tend to look at current refugees as “Don’t really like them. Don’t really want them.” But at the same time they’re kind of romantic about their own time as persecuted refugees. From a distance. There’s even a band in New York that calls itself “Black ‘47.” But the way the Irish became “White”, if you know what I mean, was by being whiter than the people that came next. By being whiter than the Italians, for example. By being whiter than the Chinese.

In fact, you would have expected the Irish, as persecuted Catholics, to welcome the Italians who followed them to New York. Not in the least. In fact, in a few cities the Italians had to have their religious Masses in the basements of the Catholic churches that the Irish immigrants built a generation before (some of which , like the original St. Patrick's Cathedral down on Mulberry Street, were built with these strong protective walls around them to keep them from being attacked by Protestant nativists).

I remember here in Dublin once, at Trinity College, talking to this fairly famous writer and she said “Oh, you’re from New York! So you know all about the historic affinities between the Irish and the Blacks in the city, as being from similarly oppressed groups.” And I nodded and all, but the truth is the absolute last thing the Irish were going to do when they arrived was build an affinity with anybody even lower than them on the societal ladder. The Irish in New York tended to support the Confederacy during the Civil War (as did a lot of New York City) and during the draft riots, when Irish immigrants protested being drafted into the war, one of the first things they did was burn down a black orphanage. But you don’t really bring that up in polite conversation with famous writers. At least I didn’t.

So that was 1847 and here - in Brownsville, Texas - is 2019. And these patterns of migration, they're not going to stop. We have this kind of romantic story in America about the immigration process. It happened, and then it ended. The boat passes the Statue of Liberty, hopeful fearful immigrants clutch their modest bundles to his chests, and then we all lived happily ever after. Well, that story certainly flatters a certain demographic, but the truth is it didn’t stop. It hasn’t stopped in 150,000 years.

We talked about Malthus yesterday, I just didn’t give you the name for it. Thomas Robert Malthus was this English philosopher who came up with this theory that essentially you’ll always have more people than you'll have resources to look after them. And when the human population outruns the finite resources of nutrition and space - basically food and shelter - the competition for those things gets fierce. When you have more mouths than you have food, you have a point of crisis. And we talked about this yesterday, but when you have nine billion people and limited, finite resources, you have a point of crisis. And so tribal identity becomes more and more important. Because tribal identity determines who gets the food and who gets the shelter and who gets the drinking water. Who gets to go to Grad school?

I admit, it’s pretty basic, as theories go. But it’s also fairly useful.

We talked about post-industrial economies, and in a post-industrial economy the resources go down even as the population goes up. Here are two graphs concerning immigration in America, which are kind of useful. European immigration to America has basically stopped, right? People don’t come to America from, say, France in big numbers. But if you’re from Guatemala or Honduras, it’s still worth the risk. There are more immigrants in America now than there ever were. Again, we might like to think that immigration was something that happened and now it’s over. That didn't happen. But what did happen was that the demographics shifted. In the 1820s, the 1840s, it was about white European immigration to America. England, Ireland, Germany. And that pretty much stopped in the 1890s. And then it got a little further East. It basically shifted from White Northern Europeans to darker Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, to even darker people from Asia and Central America.

So when you have something like in Charlottesville, in 2017, with the “Unite the Right” rally where these self-professed “alt right” guys - you know, white guys with tiki-torches - what they were chanting was “You Will Not Replace Us!” That’s the anxiety. That’s the fear. We all know who they mean by "You" and they're not talking about the Famine Irish anymore. Hang around these guys long enough and you start to hear a lot of mumblings about “Race Suicide.” It's a fairly bleak and nihilistic future they're envisioning.

Remember we talked about the demographic shift in America - 2042, when the country becomes a “minority/majority” country? Well, that prospect terrifies these guys. If the majority doesn’t look like this anymore, then - in theory - the power and the access to resources shift. And that’s the anxiety that allows the demagogues - in America but also in Europe and elsewhere - to say “We are at war. These are not Americans in any way we recognise as American. They're usurpers. They want our resources - our food and our shelter and our women”.

None of this is anything new. Some of these guys with the tiki-torches are the great-grandkids of the Irish guys getting off the boats in Boston and New York. The guys building walls so nobody burns down their churches. If you look at the names of some of the guys on Fox News - Hannity and O’Reilly - those are Irish names. This is a famous Thomas Nast cartoon called “The American River Ganges” showing Irish immigrants as alligators, bringing Roman Catholicism into Protestant America. The implication was that the Irish were going to come in and replace American religious culture. As late as 1959, when he was running for president, Kennedy had to get on television and promise not to take orders from the Pope if he were elected. It’s the same pattern. One of the most conservative anti-terrorist Congressmen in America, this guy Peter King from Long Island, has a long and proud (unapologetic) history of supporting the Irish Republican Army.

A couple of months ago, I was walking down the street in Dublin and I came across this sticker on a lamp-post. I always read those, you never know what you're going to find. Anyway, it’s a sticker from a far-right anti-immigrant party from Poland. The ONR, which translates into the "National Radical Camp". It reads “Nationalism is Super!” in Polish. But what was interesting about it was that it was a sticker in Ireland from this anti-immigrant party has a group of anti-immigrant people who are immigrants in Ireland. I mean, the irony of the anti-immigrant immigrant…

And I’m sure the people didn’t see the irony in it at all. But you can’t really study culture without having some appreciation for irony.

So I just wanted to go over these two terms before we continue. One of these is from the Oxford English Dictionary, and the other isn’t. 

I know it’s a rude word, and I apologize, but it’s also a very accurate word when you’re talking about culture. Studying culture is kind of like pulling a hair out of a shower drain. You think you’re pulling out one thing and you end up with this messy interconnected clump of indecipherable gunk. The interwoven complexity of culture. 

Globalization

Do you know the term “Cultural Imperialism”? or "Americanisation"? Cultural Imperialism is basically… Well, Military Imperialism, which is where I send some kid from Kentucky over to your country with a gun and tell you what to do, is very straightforward. Do what I say or I'll kill you. Cultural Imperialism is a lot more subtle, because I don’t need to send a guy with a gun. All I need to do is show you a TV show and you watch that TV show and you go “Oh, that’s cool! That’s cool! I like that.”

And popular culture is a very effective means of Cultural Imperialism. I’m not saying it’s evil, but what I am saying is that my popular culture affects your down-at-the-bottom-of-the-iceberg cultural values. What’s cool? What’s beautiful?

When I usually teach this class half of my students are American and half of them are French, and so when I talk about this stuff, I ask my American students if they can name me five French movie stars. The answer is almost always “Not a chance”. Maybe one - maybe "the woman from Inception” - but that’s it. And the student who can name her is always incredibly proud of themselves. Then I ask my French students if they can name me five American movie stars and they’re like “Please. I can name you fifty. I can name you a hundred.” Because what you see in France when you go to the movies or turn on Netflix is American culture. Those Turkish kids were paying attention to the LA rap scene, I doubt if the LA rap scene knows much about the Turkish rap scene in Berlin.

When you take in the movie, you’re also taking in the values that inform that movie. We’re essentially talking about Cultural Hegemony, right? Cultural Hegemony is the governing influence of a culture - enforcing the cultural norms of a culture - and it can be through education, it can be through movies and TV, it can be through all sorts of things.

One of the better metaphors I've seen for how hegemony works is the "pitcher of milk" metaphor. You take a large pitcher of milk, and it's white. You take a couple of tablespoons of red food coloring and you stir it in, and now the milk is pink. Now, there's a lot more milk than there is food coloring, but if you distribute it in the right way ...

So a room full of academics get together at a Think Tank and come up with some ideas about immigration reform. It's all very abstract and academic, but depending on the nature of the Think Tank, they've got an agenda one way or the other. And then they meet with politicians who are going to be sympathetic to their agenda. And then the politician gets on a TV network that's going to be sympathetic to that agenda. He's going to talk to newspapers and magazines that are sympathetic to that agenda. And then all of a sudden everybody in your office is talking about immigration reform, until the next thing comes along. But it starts off with ten academics sitting around a table at the Heritage Foundation.

In Dublin, this Polish guy and this Irish guy are drinking in a bar. They get into an argument and the Polish guy punches the Irish guy, who falls and cracks his head and dies. Now, there are a lot of ways you can tell that story, right? Depending on the agenda you want to chase. You can report it straight; “Man dies in bar altercation”. But say you’ve got an anti-immigrant agenda; “Foreign Man kills Irish Man in bar fight”. Or even “Foreign Man BRUTALLY kills LOCAL man in Bar Brawl”. And you see this stuff so much that you stop seeing it, if you know what I mean.

I hate the show “Friends.” I have an irrational hatred for that show. And the reason I hate it is that I think it reinforces a certain set of values that ruined the city I love. That’s not entirely fair. “Sex in the City” helped, too. But enough people wanted New York to be the “Friends” version of New York - young and white and wealthy - and enough people wanted it so to an extent that’s what it became, which is basically New York for people people who don't like New York. And it’s always on. And it’s always reinforcing the values of this group of people.

David Schwimmer, the actor from “Friends”, has a house in my old neighborhood. This is an interesting story. So he bought an old 19th-century townhouse on East 6th Street and he wanted to tear it down so he could build a kind of TV-Star modern mansion. And the city said no, absolutely not. It was a historic old house. So the city was about to put a protection order on the house but the night before it went into effect Schwimmer had the house torn down so he could build his modern mansion.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. If you were to walk down that block, you’d never notice it. Because Schwimmer designed the house in such a way that from the street it looks just like an old neighborhood house that’s been there forever. But it’s basically a set. So you have David Schwimmer, who was born in New York but grew up in California, and who made all his money in California creating a fake New York, then took that money and came to the real New York where he tore down a piece of real New York and replaced it with a real fake New York.

One last thing with globalization, I wanted to talk about the idea of increased corporate and decreased state power. Not in every country, but in a lot of countries, the corporation is stronger than the country itself. So, for example, where I live in Dublin I can look out my kitchen window and I can see the Google European headquarters and the Facebook European headquarters and I can see Twitter and my kid goes to school right down the street from Amazon’s European headquarters and… they’re all here. And the reason that they’re here is because the taxes are so low that, if they want a European headquarters, this is the country where they’re going to have it because it doesn’t cost them anything.

In fact, the one fight that Ireland had with the EU in Brussels was about Apple Computers in Cork. I don’t know if you know this story or not. But after 2008, Ireland lost a lot of money and had to borrow a lot of money from the EU. And then somebody from the EU looked at the books and it turned out that Apple owed Ireland some huge amount of money, something like 6.5 billion euro in unpaid taxes, some huge number. And Ireland said, “Nah, it’s OK. We don’t want it. We don’t want the money”. And the EU said “No, you have to take the money. They owe you the money”. But Ireland didn’t want the money. And the reason they didn’t want the money, obviously, is that they needed Apple a lot more than they needed the 6.5 billion. Especially since the 6.5 billion euro was just going to go straight back to the EU anyway because we borrowed money from them. So in effect Apple is more powerful than Ireland. Which means that the citizens of Ireland have less power than the shareholders at Apple.

Another related example is Dell Computers, which had a manufacturing base in Limerick (also in Ireland) for something like twenty years. They had a factory here, and before they built the factory they said “OK, we want to put our factory here, but we have a couple of conditions. First, we don’t want to pay taxes” and Ireland said “Sure, of course.” Limerick is traditionally one of the poorer parts of an already poor country, and this was really going to help the region out. Ireland needed Dell, Dell didn’t need Ireland. And so Ireland actually gave money to Dell to get the factory built.

“The second condition is we don’t want to have to deal with trade unions. We don’t want union labor.” And again Ireland said no problem. And for twenty years, it was all fine. People were making computers, people were making money, people were buying houses and cars. And the cost of living rose. And so the workers asked for more money and instead of giving them more money, Dell Computers moved its manufacturing base to Poland. Because Poland was more or less in the same shape that Limerick was twenty years before. And there was nothing anybody in Limerick, or for that matter anybody in Ireland, could do, because there were no unions. So basically the power isn’t with the state, it’s with the corporation.

I mean, not everywhere. France is more powerful than Apple, and Dell probably wouldn't try that in Germany, but that’s why you don’t have Apple’s European headquarters and we do. But you have better healthcare. And Apple won't stick around forever.

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By the way, when you have higher populations and lower resources, when everybody either forms or finds their tribes to compete for what’s left? Competition getting fierce?

Well, here’s an interesting thing about that, and I don’t know if you saw the news this morning or not. But Trump and Biden were having an election debate last night and in the middle of the debate the President was invited to distance himself from one of these alt-right White Power groups that call themselves "The Proud Boys" - maybe you've heard of them. Anyway, he didn't. What he did do, however, was tell them to “stand back” - which is what you command your troops to do in an army, and which basically means “Wait” - and he told them to “Stand by” - which basically means “be ready for the fight”.