The future is African whether in language [Nigeria is the third largest country when it comes to English speakers] or music or politics.
But also when it comes to art - with an exhibition happening at London's Tate Modern on Nigerian Modernism
As a review on the BBC says, Nigerian Modernism gets recognition, as "a transfer of the old ideas, old items, old technologies, old thought into a different, modern time". It is "projecting the present, and showing the way towards the future".
if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word ‘citizenship’ means. [see the Video]
Real cosmopolitanism is not a privilege; it is an obligation. It does not belong to the rarefied circles of some frequent-flyer upper class.It belongs to anyone who cares about global justice, about the environment, about the alleviation of strife and carnage beyond our immediate national borders.
A disease that starts, unnoticed, in an African forest can devastate a Manchester family; CO2 emissions from India can derange the weather around the Gulf Stream; an ideological pathology that incubates in schools halfway around the world can bring down jets and skyscrapers.
We can be tempted to imagine - like children who think they can hide by closing their eyes - that our human concerns can stop neatly at the border, with a wider world kept forever at bay. But that is the unaffordable luxury.
If cosmopolitanism involves a simple recognition that our lives are interrelated in ways that transcend boundaries and that our human concerns must, too, it has brute reality on its side. A citizen of the world? Better believe it.
One of these commentators is David Goodhart, whose book, The Road to Somewhere, ... manages to state the intellectual case for Mayism in a very concise way. The book’s central distinction – repeated ad nauseam throughout – is cleaved through the middle of the UK population. It is between “Anywheres”, who make up roughly 25 percent of the population, and “Somewheres”, who make up about 50 percent (the rest are “Inbetweeners”, although we’re never told very much about them).
The Anywheres are the hated metropolitan elitists of the Mayist narrative: high-achievers whose worldview values “autonomy, mobility and novelty”, placing a much lower value on “group identity, tradition and national social contracts”. They are comfortable with immigration, pro-international development and have progressive views about minority rights. Typically, they have what Goodhart calls “portable, achieved” identities – which means they’ve left the area they grew up in to attend a residential university and now live in London, or “even abroad”. The Anywhere worldview encompasses a broad swathe of educated society from “polished business executives to radical academics”.
Somewheres, by contrast, are the real bloody people of the UK. “Socially conservative and communitarian by instinct,” they have “rooted, ascribed” identities based on “group belonging and particular places”. They feel “uncomfortable about many aspects of cultural and economic change – such as mass immigration… the reduced status of non-graduate employment and more fluid gender roles”...
Goodhart’s central distinction is bogus. Somewheres are supposed to be authentic, rooted in space and place; Anywheres, meanwhile, are inauthentic elites who have abandoned their roots to pursue personal success.
This doesn’t work for at least two reasons. On the one hand, Goodhart struggles throughout with the fact that – far from being placeless – Anywhere identity is in fact associated with one very specific place: London, which has a distinct culture of its own. On the other, it is conveniently forgetful of the very real financial struggles that young Anywheres in particular often face: leaving your hometown and moving to London is hardly any guarantee of great wealth...
First, in his sympathy for Somewheres he caricatures Anywheres. Too easily does his category – which, by his measure, should include between 8 million and 10 million people – collapse into an upmarket version of the hated “metropolitan liberal elite”. He makes the same mistake as Theresa May did when she declared last year: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” This is to assume that those who look outward are automatically disconnected from the people around them. But a visit to even the much derided, ultra-remain districts of, say, north London would show areas that are still genuine communities, right down to their neighbourhood street parties for the Queen’s 90th birthday. Anywheres come from somewhere too...
Where Goodhart goes wrong above all is on Britain’s ethnic and religious minorities. Even though he concedes that these groups can exhibit Somewhere-ish attitudes – prioritising stable families, for example – he frames them throughout as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with.
Perhaps my own experience as a member of Britain’s Jewish community has skewed my perspective, but I’d suggest that the very qualities Goodhart most admires among the Somewheres – including neighbourliness, trust and a sense of shared destiny – are to be found in Britain’s minorities. They have not caused the social fragmentation he laments: globalisation, automation and a thousand other shifts bear more blame than they do. If anything, and especially in the cities, they point to a remedy for those Anywheres Goodhart believes have become unmoored. Minorities might be more of a model than a threat, more to be emulated than to be feared.
Even if that is asking too much, surely the task now is not to look back to the time when homogeneity made a cohesive society easy, but to ask how today’s heterogeneous society might be made more cohesive, despite the difficulties. Goodhart is right that people are more inclined to share with those they regard as their fellows: so the challenge is to make all citizens, including the newer ones, appear to each other as fellows.
A study conducted by Shigeki Kaji of Kyoto University in 2013, centred on inhabitants of the Ugandan town of Hoima, found that the average inhabitant knows 4.34 languages. Interestingly, Uganda has no lingua franca, i.e. no common language used by speakers with different native languages. The average Ugandan therefore has to employ multiple languages during the course of daily life, depending on where he is and to whom he is speaking.
Such multilingualism is impressive, particularly when one considers that we are not talking about language scholars, but about average citizens just going about their business and flicking effortlessly between four or more languages.
Tucked away in the corner of the UK, one of the world’s most monolingual countries, you’ll find a beacon of bilingualism for the rest of the world: Wales. Out of the four home nations that make up the United Kingdom, Wales has led the way in its efforts to revive and promote the Welsh language, and has set a precedent for other countries all over the world. What makes this more impressive, is that it has managed to do so while living side-by-side with global giant English.
Today, I teared up in a bookstore. Today, I bought a book because the first two paragraphs of its final chapter made me feel like crying. I picked it up and leafed through it to kill time, and because the title, Borderlines, caught my eye. I picked it up with some cynicism, wondering what this book might have to teach me about borders. I went to the last chapter, ‘The secret capital of Europe (Ukraine/ Romania)’ because I was curious what this book had to say about a border that tore hearts in half in my family. I read the first paragraph and I felt like crying.
Cernăuți (Chernivtsi) was my paternal grandparents’ birthplace, a home they fled under duress as young people, and where they never returned. A childhood home my grandmother spoke of often, when I went to visit her in the summers. These few lines, read by chance today, seemed to echo her words. Her voice, and not the writer’s, filled the page under my eyes.
Thus it was that, picking up a book at random in a listless moment, I found myself fighting back tears in a little bookshop in a quiet seaside town more than 1,400 miles away from where my grandparents started their lives’ journeys.
I am tired of tyranny, greed, and borders seared with violence, borders that shift with the desires and interests of small-minded men.
Soon after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022, the NY Times looked at the 'culture wars':
Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture
March 2022
In a blast against “cancel culture,” he said the West is “canceling” Russia by going after “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.”
Russia, Mr. Putin’s argument goes, is culturally superior, because it respects history and traditional values. Now, he says, the West is betraying its “Russophobia” by trying to “cancel” Russia itself, including its contributions to the arts and to history, particularly to the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Indeed, how broadly to punish Russian cultural figures in response to the war in Ukraine is a topic of debate around the world. Some have called for Russia’s total isolation, while others argue that blanket bans on all Russian entries at film festivals, for example, go too far.
In the main, however, relatively few Russian artists have been “canceled,” as Mr. Putin would have it. While there have been scattered examples of arts organizations in the West canceling Russian works and performers in the aftermath of Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the vast majority have continued to prominently feature Russian culture.
The Metropolitan Opera on Friday was opening a revival of Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” featuring three Russian artists. That same night, the New York Philharmonic was performing Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony (next week, the orchestra will play Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev). The Chicago Symphony, meanwhile, is in the midst of a series of all-Tchaikovsky concerts.
To Mr. Putin, though, the idea that the West is rising up against all things Russian is a convenient foil. He had the conductor Valery Gergiev join him for Friday’s videoconference, which was held to mark Culture Workers’ Day in Russia and honored the winners of a Kremlin arts prize.
Mr. Gergiev, a prominent supporter of Mr. Putin, was removed from his post as chief conductor of the Munich Philharmonic this month after he refused to denounce the invasion of Ukraine. On Friday, Mr. Putin dangled what appeared to be a reward for Mr. Gergiev’s loyalty: He asked the conductor whether he was interested in “recreating a common directorate” that would unite the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.
A year later. ABC news looked at the developing 'cultural war':
A report by PEN America published in Dec. 2022 said that “culture was on the frontlines” and that Putin “seeks not only to control Ukrainian territory, but to erase Ukrainian culture and identity.”
Olga Kozyrieva lives in the eastern settlement of Petropavlivka, Kharkiv region, which was occupied by Russian forces before being liberated in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in September last year. “Many children came here for books in Ukrainian,” Kozyrieva told ABC News, standing in the ruins of a school that was shelled. “But during the occupation, the Russians brought their own books and they wanted to teach our children the Russian language and literature.”
Families there said they hid Ukrainian books in their homes -- evidence that Russia was not just trying to take Ukrainians land, but turn it into Russia.
In a piece from last year, the Global Government Forum looked at how this battle has become international, pushed by Russia:
Organised chaos: how Russia weaponised the culture wars
December 2024
Social divisions, conspiracy theories and populist politics are rife in the democratic world. And these are not just home-grown problems: Russia and other hostile states have deliberately stoked internal dissent, weakening their opponents overseas. As we enter a year during which more than two billion people will go to the polls, Global Government Forum is publishing a five-part report on foreign interference in elections – beginning with an explanation of Russia’s goals, and the threat its actions pose to democracy itself
Russia’s goals
Various states have sought to surreptitiously influence public debates and election results in the democratic world, including North Korea and Iran. But the big players are Russia and China, whose contrasting approaches illustrate the range of techniques available – with Russia taking a far more aggressive line.
Russia’s over-riding goal appears – in the words of the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) – to be the “poisoning of the political narrative in the West by fomenting political extremism and ‘wedge issues’.” UK Labour Member of Parliament Ben Bradshaw – who is taking the UK government to the European Court of Human Rights over its failure to commission an independent investigation into Russian interference – tells GGF that “Russia’s strategic goals have been pretty clear for some time. Along with other hostile state actors in autocratic countries, it is to do whatever they can in their power to weaken, destabilise, question, and cause division in democratic countries”.
Sometimes, Russia does seek to build support for its own narrative, or to assist into positions of power those sympathetic to Putin’s world view. Trump is the obvious example: Russia’s interventions in the 2016 presidential election campaign remain its biggest single overseas influence operation (see below). But just as often, Putin backs any force likely to weaken and divide western nations – including the Scottish independence and Brexit campaigns. “With regards to the Brexit referendum, it was an openly stated objective of Putin’s that he wanted Britain to vote to leave the European Union,” says Bradshaw. “The allyship he showed with pro-Brexit and far-right politicians in this country was in plain sight.”
Russia regularly supports both sides in the West’s ongoing culture wars, simply to deepen social divisions and stoke anger. In 2016, for example, its Internet Research Agency (IRA) published nearly 600 YouTube videos and 30 Facebook pages about police violence against African-Americans: some of these attracted more visitors than the official Black Lives Matter page, according to a report commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The IRA used its influence, the report found, to stoke anger among African-Americans and to encourage them not to vote. At the same time, the New York Times found, Russian operatives were publishing ‘Blue Lives Matter’ material online – seeking to build support for the pro-police campaign established as a counterweight to Black Lives Matter.
Meanwhile, Russia works to undermine trust in public institutions, established information providers and mainstream media organisations – whittling away the shared truths that support the public discourse, and encouraging people to put their faith only in the partisan voices reinforcing their existing opinions. And it mounts very public attacks on election systems, with the goal of weakening trust in the elections process itself.
“We saw in the 2016 [presidential] election that there were attempts by Russia to manipulate the election,” comments Braw. The US elections system is secure, she says, and Russia did not alter the records of votes cast – but that isn’t the point: “They wanted the public to say: ‘Oh, Russia is interfering. I can’t trust the election system any more’,” she explains. “What matters is that people lose trust in the election system, because if you don’t think that the outcome represents the votes cast, then you won’t have any trust in the politicians elected through that election.”
Pursuing this tactic, Russia has found, can help boost populists in the West – building support for politicians who themselves further divide societies and weaken democracy. Donald Trump has, of course, spent the last four years claiming that the 2020 election was “stolen”: his attacks on the election system’s integrity serve both his own electoral interests, and Russia’s strategic goals.
As Spiked magazine showed after the Trump/Zelensky meeting in the White House earlier in the year, this culture war is very much at the heart of the US response to the war in Ukraine:
Ukraine has become a casualty of America’s culture war
The anti-Ukraine set confuses right-wing boomer memes for reality.
March 2025
Zelensky’s absorption into the American culture war is not his fault, but it is a disaster for Ukraine. As a result, his pleas – about Russia’s tendency to ignore ceasefires, or about Ukraine’s heroism or its gratitude to the US – are falling on deaf ears. To Trump’s base, Zelensky is not a legitimate leader, but an international ‘welfare queen’.
Perhaps Zelensky does not yet grasp how much has changed since Trump took over. After the debacle in the White House, American officials issued a clear warning: Trump is playing a new game, and Zelensky has missed it. ‘There is a new sheriff in town’, as Vance said in Munich last month – and his name is Donald J Trump.
Donald Trump is not an ideologue. I believe big ideas or big questions never interested him. He is more of an opportunist who utilizes ideas — to the extent he is capable of understanding them. During his second term, he relies on ideas more than during his first term, when he relied mostly on conspiracy theories.
As a political animal with strong instincts, he feels that ideologies have more power to consolidate his power. That is why he has decided to create ample room around himself for various ideologues who have big ideas and look for opportunities to test them in real politics. Two opportunisms, thus, meet together and drive Trump’s policies.
Ideologues crowding around Trump represent varying lines and trends: neoconservative, libertarian, post-liberal, etc. Their common denominator is a vigorous opposition to liberalism, which they identify, somehow confusingly, with the Democratic Party. They all are also “culture wars” warriors determined to win these wars, whatever it takes, and showing no mercy to their ideological enemies. Most of them are “burned out” liberals.
In the words of Curtis Yarvin, they are “dark elves” who became disappointed in their “elvish” liberal ideals...
Russian war propagandists claim that they invaded Ukraine to fight Western liberalism and Ukrainian identity. Therefore, by the way, Putin promotes ethnic Ukrainians with Russian identity to key positions—from negotiators to generals. He thereby wants to show that those who, in his view, are “real” Ukrainians cannot have their own identity different from Russian. Putin and his propagandists equate Ukrainian identity with Russophobia.
Thus, Putin’s war is a violent form of American culture wars, with their dichotomization between “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies. This is not the first time that Russia has borrowed Western ideological schemes and turned them into weapons. The most striking example is Soviet Communism. It took as its basis Karl Marx’s ideas and their interpretation by Western socialism theorists and established a totalitarian regime that caused a bloody bath for its own and neighboring peoples...
That is why many Americans who are at the forefront of their “culture wars” have such irresistible sympathies for Putinism. This enhances the bond between Putinism and Trumpism, which share the same DNA.
Here's a look at a specific way to 'train the brain':
This innovative brain health workbook has sold over 2.5 million copies globally! Dr. Kawashima, a prominent neurologist in Japan, developed this program of daily simple math calculations that can help boost brain power, improve memory and stave off the mental effects of ageing. The exercises in this book have even been shown to help those suffering from Alzheimer's.
Dedicated to creative opportunity and its power to bring change. Two free cultural destinations – V&A East Storehouse and Museum – will open up the V&A collection for all, celebrate making in all its forms and create new possibilities for everyone.
This week, the director talks to some teenagers about what he wants them to do - and he lets them handle some of the museum's artefacts:
Gus Casely-Hayford, director of V&A East, is on a mission to create a new kind of museum in the Olympic Park. He wants to attract a diverse audience of 16-25-year-olds, the kinds of young people least likely to be found in the great museums of South Kensington. Part of his plan is to take objects from the collection into schools and to tell their powerful stories. So we are with him in a school for students who have been excluded from other institutions as he opens the treasure chest... Gus also shares his own story of discovering art in books and then travelling to museums and galleries, as a terrified teenager, to encounter the real thing. A life-changing experience.
The English language (but not only the English language) does not really have a 'tense system' for its verbs: rather, it's all about aspect, whether the continuous/progressive aspect or the perfect aspect:
Each verb tense represents a different subjective view of time, and all of the different uses of a particular verb tense can be connected back to this same view. For example, the present perfect can be used in a number of different situations, but all the usages have a unifying characteristic - each use indicates that the speaker is looking back at a past event from the perspective of the present.
There are two tenses in English, the ‘present’ and ‘past’ tense; these are the only verbs forms that do not require an auxiliary. We add further meaning and viewpoints to these basic forms through the use of aspect. Aspect allows the speaker to interpret the events being described and express how they view them.
To what extent, then, can we rely on what the grammar books show us?
The following are the norm - but are really not helpful as they do not reflect how the English language is used - or, indeed, how humans perceive the flow of time (see below):
For example, the 'going to' form is not a 'future form' any more that 'want/hope/plan' to are. The 'going to' form is an exact mirror image of the present perfect - looking forwards from now, rather than looking backwards from now:
A lot of this confusion has to do with how we perceive 'time' - and there are many different ways to do that:
Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers. One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe – a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.[46][47]
The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz[17] and Immanuel Kant,[48][49]holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be travelled.
This is an understanding of time which 'goes against' the science of Newton (and Einstein) but which seems to accord with how humans (and other creatures?) see time: again, it's a question of aspect:
Duration (French: la durée) is a theory of time and consciousness posited by the FrenchphilosopherHenri Bergson. Bergson became aware that the moment one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete. For the individual, time may speed up or slow down, whereas, for science, it would remain the same.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and his ideas about human experience of time passing and how that differs from a scientific measurement of time, set out in his thesis on 'Time and Free Will' in 1889. He became famous in France and abroad for decades, rivalled only by Einstein and, in the years after the Dreyfus Affair, was the first ever Jewish member of the Académie Française. It's thought his work influenced Proust and Woolf, and the Cubists. He died in 1941 from a cold which, reputedly, he caught while queuing to register as a Jew, refusing the Vichy government's offer of exemption.
We don’t really experience life as a succession of separate conscious states, progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we feel time as a continuous flow, with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. We should not therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of practical convenience with the underlying truth that is continuously confirmed by our own experience.
Time Magazine listed the book among the 100 All-TIME non-fiction books indicating that its "impressionist approach deepens the sense of memories relived through prose that is gorgeous, rich and full"
I learned to read English before I could read Russian. My first English friends were four simple souls in my grammar—Ben, Dan, Sam and Ned. There used to be a great deal of fuss about their identities and whereabouts—“Who is Ben?” “He is Dan,” “Sam is in bed,” and so on. Although it all remained rather stiff and patchy (the compiler was handicapped by having to employ—for the initial lessons, at least—words of not more than three letters), my imagination somehow managed to obtain the necessary data. Wan-faced, big-limbed, silent nitwits, proud in the possession of certain tools (“Ben has an axe”), they now drift with a slow-motioned slouch across the remotest backdrop of memory; and, akin to the mad alphabet of an optician’s chart, the grammar-book lettering looms again before me.
Being able to speak another language well is good for your brain:
Psychology researchers provide new evidence that bilingualism can delay symptoms of dementia. Researchers found bilingualism provides the brain with greater cognitive reserve, delaying onset of symptoms.
Brain scans showed that lifelong bilinguals have stronger connections between certain brain areas compared to those who only speak one language – this appears to allow their brains to cope better with damage before they start to show outward signs of dementia.
Why a bilingual brain is more resistant to dementia
My students have asked many times in which language I dream. They smile when I answer that all I can remember is how well I can, in my dreams, speak any of the languages I have learnt and the disappointment when I wake up.
It reminds me of a program I used in workshops to demonstrate the mental effort required to learn a second language in adulthood, even in old age, when your brain is monolingual. However, the benefits are equally powerful.
We all know that speaking several languages has advantages for communication. But it can have other benefits too. Could we be better at multitasking or have less risk of suffering from dementia? Scientists have debated these issues for over a decade without fully agreeing. They do know that using several languages changes our brains physically and how they work. You don't have to be bilingual from birth to leave a positive imprint on your brain. Let's see why...
Bilingual people show increased activation in the brain region associated with cognitive skills like attention and inhibition. For example, bilinguals are proven to be better than monolinguals in encoding the fundamental frequency of sounds in the presence of background noise.
In a cafe in south London, two construction workers are engaged in cheerful banter, tossing words back and forth. Their cutlery dances during more emphatic gesticulations and they occasionally break off into loud guffaws. They are discussing a woman, that much is clear, but the details are lost on me. It’s a shame, because their conversation sounds fun and interesting, especially to a nosy person like me. But I don’t speak their language.
Out of curiosity, I interrupt them to ask what language they are speaking. They both switch easily to English, explaining that they are South Africans and had been speaking Xhosa. In Johannesburg, where they are from, most people speak at least five languages, says one of them, Theo Morris. For example, Morris’s mother’s tongue is Sotho, his father’s is Zulu; he learned Xhosa and Ndebele from his friends and neighbours and English and Afrikaans at school. “I went to Germany before I came here, so I also speak German,” he adds.
Was it easy to learn so many languages? “Yes, it’s normal,” he laughs.
He’s right. Around the world, more than half of people – estimates vary from 60-75% – speak at least two languages. Many countries have more than one official national language – South Africa has 11. People are increasingly expected to speak, read and write at least one of a handful of “super” languages, such as English, Chinese, Hindi, Spanish or Arabic, as well. So to be monolingual, as many native English speakers are, is to be in the minority and perhaps to be missing out.
British culture is a unique blend of many different influences. Romans and Normans shape many aspects of British culture. Britain’s history and heritage profoundly affect its modern identity – everything from its cuisine to its literature reflects influences from around the world.
The country has long been seen as an open-minded place that respects diversity and celebrates it in all forms; this is reflected in its art, music, cinema, keno online casinos, and fashion. In the following blog, we will discuss facts about British culture. Let’s explore!
The UK is full of heavy drinkers with bad eating habits who are ignorant, intolerant and too nationalistic – so it’s just as well that we are also very polite. It might sound like a stereotypical list of national traits, but these are the views of more than 5,000 young adults from five different countries who were asked to give their opinion on modern Britain by the British Council.
Its report As Others See Us, published today, shows that the UK is struggling to overcome certain long-held negative perceptions about its poor weather and cuisine, which are viewed as its least attractive features. Culture and history are seen as its best qualities, with its best-known cultural icons cited as Shakespeare, the Queen, and David Beckham.
Red, white and blue: What does it mean to you? Peter Mitchell grapples with this question in his new book Imperial Nostalgia: How the British Conquered Themselves, which takes stock of how a generalized longing for an invented imperial heyday inflects and infects various fronts in the UK’s so-called culture wars.
It's been around a long time in the United States - since 1984:
No show better illustrates the elements of humiliation television than the highly popular series The Apprentice. The show won huge ratings by pitting sixteen aspiring businessmen and women in a battle to win a $250,000 job with real estate mogul Donald Trump, whose weekly task was to tell a contestant, “You’re fired.” ... what humiliation TV represents is the rise of a pop culture in which schadenfreude has been so artfully disguised that it gives the illusion of being without political content.
I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.
About four years ago, without asking anybody, I changed my job description. It used to be “New York Times foreign affairs columnist.” Instead, I started calling myself the “New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist.” I even included it on my business card. It had become so obvious to me that so much of what I’d been doing since I became a journalist in 1978 was reporting or opining about people, leaders, refugees, terrorists and nation-states acting out on their feelings of humiliation and questing for dignity — the two most powerful human emotions. I raise this now because the success of Joe Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump may ride on his ability to speak to the sense of humiliation and quest for dignity of many Trump supporters, which Hillary Clinton failed to do...
Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you make people feel humiliated, they will respond with a ferocity unlike any other emotion, or just refuse to lift a finger for you. As Nelson Mandela once observed, “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.” By contrast, if you show people respect, if you affirm their dignity, it is amazing what they will let you say to them or ask of them. Sometimes it just takes listening to them, but deep listening — not just waiting for them to stop talking. Because listening is the ultimate sign of respect. What you say when you listen speaks more than any words.
I’ve seen firsthand the power of humiliation in foreign policy: Vladimir Putin’s macho act after Russia’s humiliation at losing the Cold War; Iraqi Sunnis who felt humiliated by a U.S. invasion force that pushed them out of Iraq’s army and government, stripping them of rank and status; Israeli Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by Ashkenazi Jewish elites, something Bibi Netanyahu has long manipulated; Palestinians feeling humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; Muslim youth in Europe feeling humiliated by the Christian majority; and China questing to become the world’s dominant power, after what Chinese themselves call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers.
When George Floyd was being held down by three policemen, one with a knee on his neck, as he pleaded for his mother and onlookers filmed on their phones, he was not just being restrained — he was being humiliated. Resistance to the daily humiliations of racism has fueled the Black civil rights movement from its inception to Black Lives Matter.
In a much talked-about new book, “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (disclosure: he is a close friend) says “the politics of humiliation” is also at the heart of Trump’s appeal. “Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” Sandel notes. These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.” Sandel explains, “Resentment borne of humiliation is the most potent political sentiment of all.”
It's been around a long time in the UK - since before 2016:
Underlying these discourses was a sense that EU membership represented a form of humiliation for a once great country, infantilising the UK and its people. Leave campaigners such as Nigel Farage created direct parallels between the sense of indignity and powerlessness experienced by many of their target voters in their own lives and that allegedly wrought upon their country by the EU and the same elites who look down on them.
In the article Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narrative authors Homolar and Löfflmann look at the use of populist humiliation narratives and voter mobilization in the United Kingdom, France, and the USA. They find that populist appeals to victimhood are used to assign blame with elites in politics, businesses, and media for a sense of loss and marginalisation, for national decline from past imagined glories, and to foster political conflict.
Mr. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it — toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin... Mr. Putin likes to perform both sides of the humiliation drama: from the seething resentment of the put-upon Russian Everyman to cosplaying Peter the Great. This allows him to appeal to Russians’ deep-seated sense of humiliation, which the Kremlin itself inflicts on people, and then compensate for it. It’s a performance that taps into the cycle of humiliation and aggression that defines the experience of life in Russia, and now Ukraine is the stage...
In the “family,” ethnic Russians are known as “the elder brother,” but that doesn’t mean they are spared humiliation. Whether it’s the bureaucrats and cops who threaten and bribe citizens and businesses, the farce of participating in fixed elections or the cloying fear that you might be arrested if you dare to speak up against the Kremlin — or if some bureaucrat just wants your business — living in Mr. Putin’s Russia means enduring the daily humiliation of being governed by an extractive class that takes money and lives from its own people. In this system, even tycoons must live with the uncertainty that someone closer to Mr. Putin than them could take away all their wealth tomorrow. The culture of humiliation goes deep into society. Sexual harassment is routine. A 2017 law decriminalized some domestic abuse against children and women. Extreme hazing has been rife in the army...
In his exploration of humiliation, the contemporary English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in the London Review of Books that, for the psychic survival of the humiliated, it’s necessary for them to “humiliate others, to make others experience what they have suffered” and “to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control.” The perpetrator enjoys his sadism; the victim, in order to deal with the humiliation, might learn to enjoy that too and become a masochist, before becoming sadistic to others. Mr. Putin’s manipulation of the cycle of humiliation and aggression is integral to his psychological grip on Russia. That manipulation can look like legislating to criminalize opposition to the war while also appealing for solidarity in the fight against the West. As the impact of economic sanctions rolls across Russia, Kremlin propaganda has called for Russians to show how tough they are: Haven’t they survived great trials in the past? These calls for toughness can resonate — people can learn to define themselves through surviving pain to the point of getting a certain satisfaction from it.
For Russia to have a chance to come to terms with itself, it will be necessary to confront this history and bring it into the public consciousness — via TV shows or public memorials and educational projects. But admitting one’s own role in this cycle of humiliation and aggression is stymied by the very culture of humiliation: The humiliated feel they have no agency, so why should they feel responsible?
PM Mark Rutte has apologised for atrocities in Indonesia, but some are still nostalgic for days of empire Something long overdue is happening in the Netherlands. After decades of denial, during which pride in its explorers and conquerors has trumped regret at what was done to indigenous people, the country is beginning to grapple with its colonial past. The reckoning began with Black Lives Matter and the Dutch role in the slave trade, but has now moved on to what was once the Netherlands’ prize colonial possession, the vast Indonesian archipelago, which it dominated for more than three centuries. It was as recently as 2006 that a Dutch prime minister praised the can-do mentality of the Dutch East India Company that colonised and exploited Indonesia. But now the Netherlands is prepared to face up to what the prime minister, Mark Rutte, last month called the “shameful facts” of systematic atrocities committed by Dutch troops in its last, bloody, colonial campaign, the attempt between 1945 and 1950 to quell Indonesian independence. Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is known mainly for its Rembrandts and other masters of the Dutch Golden Age, an economic and cultural flowering in the 17th century partly funded by colonialism. It is now showing an exhibition on Indonesia’s independence struggle, called Revolusi!
A very practical piece of research highlighted in the EL Gazette looks at common teaching strategies and procedures:
The importance of prior knowledge BY Carol Lethaby Educational research shows us how essential prior knowledge is to learning new things. The average correlation between background knowledge and achievement is meaning that students who have a lot of background knowledge on a topic will learn new information on that topic better and more easily than students who do not have good previous knowledge of the topic.
... Retrieval practice By Russell Mayne One of the most robust findings in educational research is that retrieval practice is important for learning. That is, asking students to try to recall items previously studied will help them to retain the information.
New learning is constructed on prior knowledge. The more we understand about what students already think, and the more we help them engage their prior understandings, the more likely they are to learn well – and the less likely they are to misinterpret the material in our courses.
If we don't ignite the prior knowledge of our students when we teach, we may fall prey to what the late Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Freire referred to as "the banking concept" in pedagogy -- treating students as if they are empty vessels waiting to be filled with the knowledge of the teacher. Basically, taking on a view that the kids have very little to offer to the classroom learning and discussions.
We do not always consciously make use of what we already know when we try to learn new information. But evidence is piling up that suggests this is a smart thing to do. So how can you make the most of your prior knowledge to prepare for acquiring – and retaining – new knowledge?
Let's focus on getting information "out" of students' heads. Retrieval practice boosts learning by pulling information out of students’ heads, rather than cramming information into students’ heads.
The questions should be always asked: when and why the statues are put up:
A striking graphic from the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed that the majority of Confederate monuments weren't erected until after 1900 — decades after the Civil War ended in 1865. Notably, the construction of Confederate monuments peaked in the 1910s and 1920s, when states were enacting Jim Crow laws, and later in the 1950s and 1960s, amid the Civil Rights Movement:
It's ultimately political, then - with one suggestion being to put statues in parks, when the politics changes:
Perhaps the best example of what to do with unwanted monuments is Coronation Park on the outskirts of New Delhi. On the same ground British King-Emperors and viceroys held their “Durbars”, and obliged Indians of all classes to pledge subservience to British rule, an array of statues erected during the Raj has been gathered from across India, taken down from public buildings and city centres.
