Introduction

“An understanding of the process does not exempt one from the process.” - David Mamet, Chicago

What're you ... You guys are, what … Mostly Paris? Is that right? So we’re all urban? We’re all urban people. Which is good because - not because “urban” is so amazingly great - but because it actually makes my job a lot easier because of what I’m going to talk about. 

I’m not exactly sure what you guys are expecting from this class. It’s never the same class twice. It’s not even going to be the same class I taught an hour ago. I can give you a basic idea, and I’m going to do that. But I thought I’d introduce a few things first.
Once upon a time, this class was designed with the assumption that students would learn this stuff and then they would go out into the global world and then from there they would learn how to communicate at business meetings in Japan. That’s not really what we’re really going to do here. We’re mostly going to talk about “what is culture” and we’re going to talk about “what your place in culture is” and with an emphasis on you. Or maybe rather us. Who we are and why we are who we are.

I don’t think you need to go anywhere to be part of a global intercultural mess, for lack of a better word. I mean, you’re in your room, in Paris, on your computer talking to an American in Dublin about… I mean, this is already global. It’s not going to get any more global than this. And one of the interesting things about this class right now is that we are at such a weird time. We’re in a time when culture is redefining itself openly and explicitly. And quickly. And I think one of the best things we can do with this class is look at why we are where we are now. Because things that are changing that are not going to go back to the way they were before.

Oh. This quote, but I like it, because it’s going to relate a lot - this is a quote from David Mamet that reads “An understanding of the process does not exempt one from the process” - which basically means that just because you can identify a problem (or schism, or a whatever you want to call it) doesn’t mean that you get a pass. Nobody gets a pass. Everybody is in the game, whether you want to be in the game or not.

It’s important to think about your own place in it.

We’re going to talk about a lot of complicated and uncomfortable things here. Knowing that it’s uncomfortable and complicated doesn’t mean that you are somehow - magically and through a state of grace - separated from the thing. So, for example, I’m an American. And I’m not - to put it mildly - I’m not a Donald Trump guy. But it is part of my culture. Just because I don’t like it, and just because I try to be a “good guy”, doesn’t mean that I’m not part of that culture - even the most uncomfortable part of that culture.

So, for example, racism, which we’re going to talk about in class as well. Look, I’m a liberal middle-class academic from New York and I don’t think I’m a racist and I would hope not to become one, but I’m also a middle-aged middle-class white guy and I’m part of a system where middle-aged middle-class white guys do better than middle-aged working-class black guys and I do well out of that system.

And I can say “Well, yes, and that’s wrong” - and I do - and I can congratulate myself on recognizing how wrong that is, but I continue to do pretty well out of that equation. Now, I’m not going to change the system, and I’m not even sure I’d want to pay the price changing that equation would cost me, but I don’t like hypocrisy. Especially my own. Paying lip-service to the inequalities and then continuing to benefit from them seems like having your cake and eating it, too.

Everybody is connected to everybody, whether you want to be connected to them or not. I’m an American, and while I’m not a big Trump fan, I’m not a big “guys with guns yelling about masks” fan, but - whether I like it or not - those guys are a part of my culture and - whether they like it or not - I’m also a part of theirs. And so just going “Ew, yuck, hunters” doesn’t get me out of it, it just signals a kind of class-based snobbery. It doesn’t exempt me. And, to be totally honest here, I've shot guns, and I had a lot of fun at the time. We all have a responsibility towards each other if we’re going to understand “culture.”

Because look, if this class is going to work, we’re going to have to talk about things that are sensitive. We’re going to have to talk about things that are uncomfortable. We talk about class. We talk about race and racism, and we talk about nationalism. And we have to talk about that stuff, because if I don’t talk about that stuff, I'm not really teaching a class on culture and communication. And that’s my job. And while I would like to think of myself as an enlightened non-prejudiced, anti-racist, New York liberal guy (which is for the most part true) I’m also a middle-aged middle-classed white guy from New York and I’m part of the process whether I want to be part of the process or now. Just because I think I’m a pretty good guy, that doesn’t mean I’m not part of the system. So that’s the reason I bring up the Mamet quote.

And, by the way, you so are too. Implicated, I mean. In the game. In the process.

I’ve been teaching this class for about ten years - ten or eleven years - and it’s been a really interesting (really interesting) class to teach. 

Mostly, I mean obviously, before the pandemic I would be in a room talking to you guys. Most of my students tend to be either American or French, which makes a really interesting combination because they’re all in the room together and the French kids don’t talk to the American kids and the American kids don’t talk to the French kids and I think I’m OBVIOUSLY failing at “intercultural communications” if I can’t even get these guys to talk to each other. The differences between the American kids and the French kids become really clear really quickly. And everybody gets very paranoid for a little while before they calm down.
But eventually they do.

This can be a fun class. This can be a really fun class, but you have to want to play. And I think that’s fine as long as we can be honest and straightforward about it and with some degree of mutual respect about the whole thing. 

So, for example, two of the big issues I talk about in class are the role of “race” and racism and the role of “class” and classism. And it’s really interesting, because when you talk about “race” with the French students, they get really uptight. And I understand that, I get that. I understand why. “Race doesn’t exist or if it does it’s a social construct” and that sort of stuff, but basically it doesn’t exist. Well, we’ll see. And then you talk about “class” with the American students and they get very weird about that. Class doesn’t exist. Well, and again, we’ll see, we’ll see. My argument is that the two are obviously tied together - and we’ll look longer at that the more we go along. 
The other thing is to be as objective as you possibly can with this. I want you to look at these things less emotionally and more objectively so that ideally you can try to understand people that you disagree with. People that you may profoundly disagree with. You don’t have to agree with people. You don’t have to like them. But the whole point of communication and culture is to understand the perspective of someone you don’t understand. At least not automatically. Someone that you will go out of your way not to understand.

A lot of my students are American. And some of them are from real conservative red-state territory, and instinctively I’m not one of those guys, but I'm with those guys. But I’m not going to be a good teacher if I can’t listen to them, if I can’t talk to them, and if I can’t figure out why they look at the world the way they look at the world and why I look at the world the way I look at the world. I can’t grade them on whether or not I agree with them. But what I can grade people on, and what I do grade people on, is “can you come up with a good argument for why you think what you think?” Other than “My dad says so, so it must be true” OR “My dad says so, so it must NOT be true.” And I would equally ask the same things of my right-on Brooklyn progressive students, too. Who more often than not subscribe to the orthodoxy without really examining it, and are suspicious of the need to examine it. Orthodoxy scares the hell out of me, because it tends to get people shot.
That’s the job of being an adult, really. If nothing else. And hopefully it’ll get confusing. I always tell my students that if you leave the class more confused than when you came in, I did my job. 

* * *

Here’s the central hypothesis. How did we end up where we are now? I would say a whole lot of factors came into place at one time, and it’s been happening for a while but now we’re at this moment - this really interesting and kind of scary moment - and how did we get where we are? I think it all ties in with the way culture is used as power, who determines what a culture is, and then how do you communicate across that. So these, I think, are the factors.

First of all, I would say globalization. The idea of shifting market forces, shifting populations, all of that. And population itself. A hundred years ago the world’s population was something along the lines of 2.5/3 billion people. 1920 sounds like a long time ago when you’re young, but my grandparents were alive in 1920. It’s not that long ago. It’s now 7.5 billion, and in 2050 - which is just under 30 years - it’s going to be 9 billion. That’s a lot of people. You guys are all business students, you understand the law of supply and demand. If you have ten houses and you have five people, then a house is cheap and easy to get. If you have ten people and five houses, a house suddenly becomes more expensive. Well, when you have 9 billion people, who gets the house? And who gets the job? Who gets the education? And who gets the clean drinking water? More recently, who gets the vaccines and who gets the ventilators? The competition gets fierce when there’s not enough for everybody.

And then you have this idea of rising power distance, which is pretty central to this class. Power distance is the accepted ratio of power, from the most powerful to the least powerful in a society. And when I say “society” that could be a country, that could be a company, that could be a town or a family. Whatever. But the main word here, the important word in the definition, is accepted. Now obviously, the people on the top of the power structure accept the ratio because of course they do. They get all the stuff.

Where it gets interesting is at the bottom. How do you get people to endorse a system that doesn’t work for them, and what happens when they stop? When the people at the bottom of the power structure don’t accept it anymore, then you have a reordering of society.

In 1789, they stopped accepting the ratio of power in France, for example. And in a lot of places, what you have now is you have a lot of pushback as more and more people are becoming disenfranchised from the resources. Which goes back to the population figures we looked at a minute ago. 

In part, because of the population and in part because of  globalization. And then you add to this the phenomenon of shifting demographics, and I understand why talking about race is uncomfortable,  and I understand why. But racism does exist - obviously - and race is used in a very real socio-economic way. In America, but also in France and also in Britain. If anything, I’d say that the explicit socio-economic racist history in the United States has let other countries off the hook.

And demographics are changing. I don’t know if you know why the year 2042 is important in the United States, but it’s the year that the demographics are projected to reorder America as a “minority/majority” country, which means that there isn’t one new majority, but that the majority that exists now - which is basically white, Christian, originally European people - is no longer going to be the majority population. And I’m all for it, I think it’s great. The problem is, America’s supposed to be a representative democracy, right? It’s supposed to be led by the people that essentially reflect the people they are leading. And that is increasingly not true. And it’s easy with America. It’s easy to see this stuff. But what do most politicians in France look like? Pretty much the same. And people who have power don’t give up that power easily. 

And then you have diminishing resources, and environmental changes, and it all collides. And now we’re at this moment when the culture that we all took for granted becomes untenable, and we come up with a new culture. Culture is an agreement. We agree to a certain set of circumstances and then we don’t, when the situations change.

I mean, America is not a permanent thing. It really isn’t a divine promise.

And France is not a permanent thing, either. France is an idea. France is an agreement. It wasn’t France forever, and it won’t be France forever. It just happens to be France right now. America happens to be America right now, and the ongoing sustainability of that idea depends on everybody constantly negotiating what it means to be American, or what it means to be French.  And there’s a lot of power in getting to be the people that decide “well, THIS is what being French is” or “THIS is what being an American is”. Being French means being white and Christian and so on and so forth.

And when that abstract idea of a culture no longer reflects the lived experience of that culture, then one of two things has to happen. Either the definition of America or France has to change or you’ve got to come up with some way of maintaining the existing system contrary to the desires and needs of its majority population. And I think for a lot of people that’s the crossroads we’re standing at now.

What happens when that disagreement becomes impossible to reconcile?

And these cultural differences become increasingly important because cultural differences determine who gets the house and who gets the drinking water and who gets the education and all that.

The Bernie Sanders/Donald Trump thing from 2016 is interesting for this. I mean, one was progressive left (for America) and the other was conservative right, but they were both looking at the same situation and they were more or less agreeing what that situation was. They both recognized that essentially there are more people than there are resources to provide for them. The progressive left response to that is to redistribute the resources so that everybody gets something. Everybody gets healthcare. It might not be great, because you have to spread it out, but everybody gets it. Everybody gets access to education, everybody gets access to housing. OK, that’s one approach. The other approach - the individualistic response was - no, you lower the number of people you’re responsible for taking care of. You lower the number of “citizens”. You build a wall. Or, in England, you leave the EU. You strengthen the borders. You stop the census. You limit voting, and so limit the obligations of political representation. So it’s two different responses but it’s recognizing the same essential issue.

As a society, the “hard right” and the “hard left” are basically polarized where they can’t come to a consensus about what it means to be an American.

Once upon a time, after the United States split from England in 1776, and if you were lucky enough to be a property-owning white male, everybody could agree on the core values of the new society. Everybody agreed on liberty, equality, diversity, self-government, individualism and unity (by the way, we now all the retrospective irony, but they didn’t, and so it only becomes ironic in retrospect). These were the established values of the new culture. We are a new culture, we’ve come to a new agreement on what our culture is.

But things happen and culture progresses and populations grow. You get more land and you get more people and you get more industry and you start to have a separation. If you took high school biology at some point you learned about cells. You have a cell and then the cell splits into two cells and then they split into four. That’s basically what’s going on here. You have this one cell - the Liberty Equality Diversity Self-Government Individualism Unity cell - and then it starts to split.

You’ve got this one group over here, and these guys are really into liberty, and property ownership, and the guns and police and military you need to protect them. And they tend to live in the country and they tend to be kind of conservative. And they’ve got their culture, and that’s fine. They’re entitled to those beliefs.

And over here, in Brooklyn, you’ve got these guys and they’re into marriage equality and reproductive rights and civil liberties. Not a lot of guns, but a fair number of Strand Bookstore tote bags. And that’s fine, too.

And these guys and those guys - there are certain things that they are never going to agree on. But there’s still enough in the middle for them to compromise. “I don’t know if I like you and I suspect that you don’t like me, but I think we can both agree that road safety is important. I think we can both agree that it’s important to have public schools. My survival depends on your survival, whether or not I agree with you.”

But then the next stage - what we may have now - is where you have two very different fundamental ideas of what the culture is. And this separation is being encouraged. It didn’t just happen. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, but what I am saying is that events and opportunistic politicians and very real anxieties all add to the mix. For a considerable number of people within the culture, they recognise this schism as essentially a civil war - and I don’t mean allegorically or metaphorically but literally - and seeing themselves at war they’ve done nothing but encourage the polarisation of culture. And so now you’ve got these guys over here and those guys over there and no common ground left for them to agree on, even down to road safety and public schools.
And then you end up with the Union and the Confederacy, it’s not like we haven’t been here before. And this is not a uniquely American thing, would that it were.

But what I think is interesting is that these guys over here, who tend to live in the cities and tend to be more collectivist and all of that, the diversity-and-tote-bag guys, my guys, these are the guys who are in the eventual ascendancy. Their future is looking good, or at least it’s looking brighter than it is for the other guys. They’re in the right place at the right time.

And the other guys - the guys who aren’t at the right place at the right time - they’re not stupid. They can see their futures slipping away. They have kids, who they love, and whose future they see as more or less fucked. And they’re understandably angry about that. You would be, too.
And people are going to do whatever they have to do to keep the power - which was once theirs and unchallenged - as long as they can. And to hell with the consequences because they’ve got no real future to look forward to anyway. And mock them at your peril. Because who the hell are you anyway, laughing at the losers from your summer house in Martha’s Vineyard? It wasn’t your enlightened politics that got you that summer house, it was your money. And how’d you get that money?

Resentment is a dangerous thing.

* * *

If you know what a “Perfect Storm” is, when everything is set up perfectly for something to come along and blow it all to pieces, everything has to be perfectly aligned for maximum chaos. And the summer of 2020 was pretty close to a perfect storm with Covid-19 and the killing of George Floyd. Horrible but in a way predictable.

The Coronavirus, how do you look at that? Do you look at it collectively, or do you look at it individualistically? Because what it turned into, from an individualistic point of view, was an assault on freedom. My rights as an individual are more important than my collective responsibility. My survival does not depend on your survival. The reason to wear a mask is because we are all in the same room and we are all going to get sick if we're exposed to the virus. The reason not to wear a mask is because nobody - certainly not the government - can tell me to wear a mask. We took a biological phenomenon and they turned it into an ideological stance. But you can’t beat a virus through rugged individualism, any more than you could beat the Nazis through rugged individualism. You can lose to a virus through rugged individualism, evidently.
And then George Floyd. Look, this happens all the time in America. And not just in America, but most explicitly in America. I am as annoyed at the perpetually shocked - maybe more annoyed at the perpetually shocked - than I am at anybody else.

And there are two ways of looking at this situation. You can look at it as “This is a bad policeman killing an innocent man” - which is true as far as it takes us, but it doesn’t really take us very far. What’s also true is that this is an ongoing systematic pattern of state-enforced socio-economic discrimination. To say “It’s a bad cop” and leave it at that  - or to carry it further as some of my students have done in the past and say “All cops are pigs” - doesn’t really address the bigger issues, or get at where the more fundamental problems are. And you get off easy, because it was just “a bad cop” or “all cops are pigs” - but this brings us back to the quote at the beginning of the class. To be aware of the process doesn’t exempt you from the process, and to write off “all cops” as “pigs” is essentially posturing.

Of course, you could also look at it as “this is war, be realistic, and as horrible as the cops actions were, they were necessary because we’re in a war.” And a lot of people, the people who look at our current cultural schism as a civil war in everything but name, do look at it like that. “Look, as regrettable as Derek Chauvin’s individual actions were, these things happen in a war.” In this reading, Derek Chauvin was a soldier in a war who got carried away. 
 
I told you, a lot of my American students refuse to recognise that class exists in America, that if you are born poor in America you are probably going to die poor in America. That’s the way it works. And in America that goes against every myth of what being an American is. So they get very weird talking about money and class.

My French students get very very weird talking about race. There’s no such thing as race. Race doesn’t exist. And I know what you mean, I get what you mean. But what’s interesting to me is that it’s only my white French students who make this argument. My black French students never do.

And going back to the Mamet quote, you’re not exempt from this. To say “Race doesn’t exist” means that to recognize racism is essentially racist, and so we don’t look at a racist system - a racist system that you might be benefitting from, by the way - because to recognize it would be to endorse it. It’s quite a nice piece of justification, really. In France, the argument behind “laicite” seems to be, essentially, “we’re all the same, we’re all French.” Well, I’ve been to the rich parts of Paris and I’ve been to the poor parts of Paris and the rich parts of Paris are all, overwhelmingly, white. And the poor parts of Paris overwhelmingly aren’t. And so telling me that race doesn’t exist, and that to speak about race is racist, well, that’s fine if you can afford it. But it’s the same hypocrisy, and you can’t treat cancer by pretending it isn’t there.

One of the more basic moral obligations of being lucky is to acknowledge your luck. But to say “No, we’re all the same but I’ll be over here in the 16th Arrondissement and you can stay over there in Clichy-sous-Bois...” or, in New York, “OK, we’re all the same but I’m heading off to Cobble Hill and you’re heading off to East Orange. See you Monday!” and then not to hear the insult in that … And I’m certain that I’ve said that myself.

There used to be this old homeless guy, and I wish I could remember his name, but he used to ride up and down the Number 6 line panhandling. And the Number 6 line is interesting because it goes from one of the richest parts of New York - the Upper East Side - to some of the poorest, Harlem, Spanish Harlem, etc. The cut-off was basically 96th Street. So as the guy was doing his spiel, asking for change and all, and as the train was approaching 96th Street - he’d go “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now going to perform a magic trick for you all. I am now going to make all the White people disappear.” And sure enough, the doors would open and all the white people would flood out of the subway. 

* * *

If I say “post-industrial economy” do you know what I’m talking about? Once upon a time in Detroit or in Sheffield or in Belfast, they manufactured things and then they sold those things and then they took the money from the things they sold and they put the money back into the manufacturing. And they ate and they drank and they had families, and it was all relatively local. Well, you know, it’s much cheaper to make things across the border in Mexico instead of Texas because Mexican labor is cheaper. The pay is cheaper, the health and safety standards aren’t so strict, and if a factory burns down you can always build another one. And so the factories left. Southerners were cheaper than Northerners, so the factories left Brooklyn and moved to South Carolina. Mexicans were cheaper than Southerners, so the factories moved again. 

But we were talking about the American Dream a minute ago? If you are a working-class guy who believes in the American Dream, why are you not winning? Why are you failing? Why are you losing? “My Grandfather was a working class guy. He worked in a factory in Kentucky. And because he worked in a factory, my mom got to go to university. It wasn’t a great university, but it was OK. And because she went to university, she was able to get a decent job. Better than the factory. And because she got a decent job, I got to go to a better university than she did. Success!” 

     
Well, the factory’s gone, and once they take the factory out of town and move it somewhere else, because Mexicans are cheaper, there’s no way your kid is going to go to university. It’s just not going to happen, because you can’t afford to send a kid to a university in America working at McDonald’s. And that’s the only job left. So there’s a lot of understandable anger and resentment in working-class America, and these guys you’re dismissing as “rednecks”, they’re pretty angry. And I can understand why they’re angry, I just think they’re angry at the wrong things.

One of the interesting things that’s happening in America is they did a study on life expectancy rates, and everybody’s living longer. Poor people are living longer, Black people are living longer, women are living longer. The one exception to that is high-school educated middle-aged white guys. That’s the one group that’s dying younger. And they’re dying in basically one of three ways. They’re either drinking themselves to death, overdosing on heroin/opioids, or just suicide. Just shooting themselves. That’s the one group, working-class white guys. And the reason that they’re doing it is because they are failing and they think they shouldn’t be.

Then somebody comes along and tells them “It’s not your fault. And it’s not really the fault of the factory owners, either. It’s the fault of the Mexicans coming over the border. It’s the fault of the black people tearing this country down. It’s the fault of the EU, or the Poles, or the Syrians. It’s the fault of the Muslims. That’s why you’re failing.”

Trump’s base is the industrial midwest and south, Le Pen’s base is the industrial northeast. Brexit was supported by working-class Manchester and Sheffield.The AfD’s base is the former East Germany. That’s not a coincidence. And so you look at the way the demographics are used to support these politics. Is Europe white and Christian? Is that what Europe is supposed to be? Well, if you’re white and Christian and failing, it’s easy to follow that line of thought. Are you failing or are you at war? It’s better than putting a gun to your head.

The demographics change. People aren’t coming to America from Europe, and they’re not coming from northeast Ohio. They’re coming from Asia. They’re coming from Central America. And they’re following opportunities. From a purely Marxist analysis of the situation, it’s fairly straightforward. If 80% of the country only has 15% of its wealth, and 20% have 85%, a Marxist reading would be to overcome your cultural differences and take the resources. But that’s not what happens. Instead, within that block of 80%, these guys are white and these guys are black and these guys are Mexican and they’re all fighting over the 15%, you’ve got a whole different dynamic at play. And that scramble is encouraged by the politicians we just talked about, who have ties to the guys who own the factories that they’re not even trying to hide.

Alepo gets blown to pieces and so you’ve got refugees because of course you have refugees. And where are refugees going to go? They’re going to go where it’s safe, and where there are opportunities. You wouldn’t? The only thing worse than getting into the leaky raft is not getting into the leaky raft. With your kids. Without a map. The only thing worse than crossing the desert of northern Mexico is NOT crossing the desert of northern Mexico. With your kid. Without a map.

And so the Brexit campaign took the picture of the refugees crossing into Slovenia and turned it into the emotional argument for leaving the European Union. People say “Well, they left the EU because of food restrictions.” Well, this was the poster that they used, the zombies are coming. Nothing to do with food restrictions. It wasn’t about food restrictions for most people, it was about Muslims from the middle-east marching across Europe. That was the message that resonated with enough people to carry Brexit. And I’m not saying that the people who supported Brexit are evil, I’m saying that the people who supported Brexit are in trouble. Maybe some of them were evil.

And it’s not just in England, or America. You have this same polarization. It’s not Black Lives Matter and the Proud Boys, because when you reduce it down to that kind of reductive Marvel Universe narrative it’s easy to pick a side. It’s the AfD and Brexit and Orban’s Hungary and then Antifa and it just keeps splitting off again and again and again into a million different branches. And this, again, this is that fundamental schism that I’m talking about. He likes the Yankees, I like the Mets. She likes the White Sox and I like the Cubs. 

But, you know ... who gets the drinking water?

* * *

Alright, let’s try this.
   
You’ve got Matt Damon alone on Mars. There he is, out there on his own, using his shit, growing his potatoes. EATING his potatoes. Is that a culture? Do you have a culture?

I would have to argue no. You might have an ethos, you might have a ruling set of beliefs. But an actual culture? I wouldn’t say so. Because he’s alone, it’s just him, and so he can only see the world from his own unshared perspective.

So, OK. We clone Matt Damon, because he’s lonely, and now we have two Matt Damons on Mars. Do we have a culture?
 
Again, I would have to say probably not. Because even though there’s two of them, their experience of the world is essentially exactly the same. So two Matt Damons on Mars, still no culture.

So let's give him a turtle. We’ve got two Matt Damons and a turtle on Mars, do we have a culture?
Again, I would have to argue no. Because while the two Matt Damons see the world in exactly the same way, the turtle sees the world in such a different way -  and can’t really communicate with the two Matt Damons anyway - that the differences are overwhelmingly stronger than the commonalities.

So now, if nothing else other than just to be kind, we drop Riannah on Mars. Do we have a culture now?  

I would say we do! I’d say at last we finally do! But actually, I’d say we have two cultures, not just one. Because - just like those cells splitting in High School biology - you can’t have one without the other. Riannah and the two Matt Damons share enough of the same perceptions to make the same basic conclusions about “where we are”. Unlike the turtle. But they’re different enough - white/black, male/female, Boston/Barbados, etc. - that their experiences of the world are different. I don’t want to say “opposing”, but a counterbalance anyway. So, if we’re right, what you need to have a culture is another culture to give it definition.
   
Cultures only appear when they come into contact - or conflict - with other cultures. When Germany became a country, how did it become a country? It went to war with France, basically. Going to war with France was the most effective way for Germany to solidify itself as a culture in opposition to another culture, and it got close enough to Paris that it was firing rockets into the city. Ireland needs England to define itself as Ireland in a way that - annoyingly to the Irish at least - England doesn’t need Ireland to define themselves as English. But the English do need France. Batman needs the Joker, because without the Joker, he’s just some guy in a Halloween costume. But once you get the Joker, it gives Batman purpose. It gives him a reason.

Culture has to be dynamic. I’ve never been there, but I’ve seen pictures, and Bruges doesn’t strike me as a living city in the way that Brussels is. It’s like a museum of a culture. I know it’s beautiful, and that’s the whole point of it, but culture has to be dynamic even if it’s ugly. Culture has to be negotiated, a negotiated idea, and negotiations can be ugly. Paris is interesting in that same way, because you go to central Paris - the postcard city where the tourists go - and it’s all very pretty and it’s all very nice and it’s all very well maintained, but it doesn’t really seem like the living part of the city. It’s “Paris” Paris, and you get the feeling that even the French people who live there are kind of performing. They’re being Parisian. But you go a couple of miles in any direction, and there’s the city itself. 

A couple of things that we’re going to keep coming back to - “Who determines what is acceptable in a society (culture)” right? If culture is an agreement, if “France” is an agreement, who gets to decide what that is, what that looks like? If… who gets to determine if, for example, “Ireland is a Catholic Country”?

About six years ago there was a doctor from India here in Ireland and she was pregnant. And she miscarried and she was bleeding internally and she knew she needed an abortion right away because she knew otherwise she was going to go into septic shock and die. And in the emergency room, and she told the nurse that she needed the abortion and the nurse said “We can’t give you an abortion because this is a Catholic country.” And the woman died. And the pushback from that - against the role of the Catholic Church in healthcare, for example, eventually led to the legalisation of abortion rights in Ireland.

Who determines what is acceptable in a society? If culture is an agreement, if culture is - if France is an agreement - who gets to decide what “France” is? What does “France” look like? Who gets to determine what you are, what we are?