An interesting insight from John Kay:

"Only three European nations have been truly democratic sovereign states throughout the last century. The two that are members of the EU, Britain and Sweden, are among the most eurosceptical. The other, Switzerland, has chosen not to join. The stronger a country's own institutions, the less need it perceives for those of Europe."

Usually, such blocs are talked about from a trade perspective rather than a democratic perspective. John Kay underlines the role of the EU as a propagator of institutions, and the difficulties inherent in continuing this role.

And at the other extreme, this:

..."I wish my parents had some hobby other than me," one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child's day, eager to solve every problem for their child--and believe that's good parenting.

While we're talking about identity, how about this from Policy Review:

...I would like ... to ask this question: What is it about today’s music, violent and disgusting though it may be, that resonates with so many American kids?

As the reader can see, this is a very different way of inquiring about the relationship between today’s teenagers and their music. The first question asks what the music does to adolescents; the second asks what it tells us about them. To answer that second question is necessarily to enter the roiling emotional waters in which that music is created and consumed — in other words, actually to listen to some of it and read the lyrics.

As it turns out, such an exercise yields a fascinating and little understood fact about today’s adolescent scene. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem — these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today — suicide, misogyny, and drugs — with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world.

Yet again, we get an analysis of a problem. But what is the solution?

From EGR, this interesting thought:

Why, for instance, do I have to check a box on my driver's license application indicating that I'm "Caucasian"? Last time I checked, the Caucasus Mountains, from whence the adjective derives, were somewhere in Russia or thereabouts. Where's my atlas? Where's my dictionary? Ah, here's one...

Cau | ca | sian (ko ka'zhên) adj.

1. of the Caucasus, its people, or their culture
2. Caucasoid
3. designating or of the two independent families of languages spoken in the area of the Caucasus: North Caucasian includes Circassian, and South Caucasian includes Georgian

also Cau | casic (-kas'ik) n.

1. a native of the Caucasus
2. Caucasoid
3. the Caucasian languages; Circassian, Georgian, etc.

from: Caucasian
source: Webster's NewWorld Dictionary, 1988
via: HighBeam Research

So far as I remember (which means I could be wrong), I've never been to the Caucasus, nor do I speak any of the above languages. Yet I am purportedly "Caucasoid." Go figure.

The last century seemed to be obsessed with the notion of time - will this one become obsessed with the notion of identity?

Well, I'm off to Hokitika next year. Should be quite an experience.

I've almost jumped through all the hoops here at Teachers' College - just 5 weeks to go :-)

A Muddled Manifesto

The big benefit of blogging for me is that the act of typing out an idea tends to help clarify the idea and sort out the inconsistencies in my thought (its amazing how many contradictory ideas I can hold in my head simultaneously). However, occasionally the thought will still be half-formed and contain inconsistencies. I will still blog those thoughts, and indicate their muddled state, so long as they have some sort of coherence - after all, sometimes the beginnings of an idea are more interesting than its final form.

And you thought you were unbiased...

In a second study, Pronin randomly assigned subjects high or low scores on a "social intelligence" test. Unsurprisingly, those who were given high marks rated the test as being fairer and more useful than those receiving low marks. When the subjects were then asked if it was possible that they had been influenced by the score on the test, they responded that other participants had been far more biased than they were. In a third study, in which Pronin queried subjects about what method they used to assess their own biases and those of others, she found that people tend to use general theories of behavior when evaluating others but use introspection when appraising themselves. In what is called the introspection illusion, people do not believe that others can be trusted to do the same: okay for me but not for thee.

Psychologist Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley and I made a similar discovery of an attribution bias in a study we conducted on why people say they believe in God and why they think other people do so. In general, most individuals attribute their own faith to such intellectual reasons as the good design and complexity of the world, whereas they attribute others' belief in God to such emotional reasons as that it is comforting, that it gives meaning and that it is how they were raised.

None of these findings would surprise Francis Bacon, who, four centuries ago, noted: "For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced."

A review of Samuel Huntington's new book Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity:

In the course of a remarkably distinguished academic career, Samuel Huntington has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to realism. Distaste for sentimentality is certainly on display in his best-known book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (which originated as an article in this magazine before its publication in 1996). It has also been characteristic of his analysis of U.S. domestic politics. The heroes of The Soldier and the State, his 1964 book on civil-military relations, are neo-Hamiltonians such as Secretary of State Elihu Root and the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, members of "the first important American social group," as he describes them, "whose political philosophy more or less consciously borrowed and incorporated elements of the professional military ethic." In American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981), Huntington identifies four moments of "creedal passion" in American history: the Revolutionary era, the ages of Jacksonianism and Progressivism, and the 1960s. During these periods, he argues, Americans' unrealistic expectation of moral perfectibility prevented their leaders from doing the right thing. Throughout his career, Huntington has rejected ideology in favor of down-to-earth practicality, drawing cries of protest from critics, mostly on the left, who accuse him of cold-minded moral indifference and complicity with the powers that be.

Few subjects call out for Huntington's realism as much as immigration does. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, which effectively abolished quotas on immigrants from Europe, the United States has experienced one of the largest migrations of foreigners to its shores since its founding; nonwhite people whose first language is not English now make up a greater percentage of the U.S. population than at any other time in history. And although some writers treat this dramatic change with Panglossian optimism, the challenges are in fact staggering: bilingualism, dual citizenship, religious diversity, and multiculturalism place increasingly tough demands on U.S. culture and politics. If the United States tries to prevent immigrants from coming, it risks breaking its promise of freedom to the oppressed. But if it admits everyone who wants to come, it risks losing its distinctly American ideals -- including the creed that holds out the promise of freedom and opportunity in the first place.

Who Are We?, Huntington's new book on the subject, offers dollops of the clear thinking that has characterized his work in the past. He rightly points out that post-1965 immigration from Mexico is different from earlier waves: the sending country is close by, the numbers are much larger, the areas to which migrants are attracted already have large Mexican-American populations, and there is no indication that the movement is likely to stop. And he offers a tough-minded evaluation of the tradeoffs that immigration involves, insisting, for example, that bilingualism can stand in the way of immigrants' success and that dual citizenship is problematic when so few Americans fulfill even the obligations of single citizenship. Huntington also convincingly demonstrates that ordinary Americans are more nationalistic than liberal elites: if a referendum were held today, a majority would support strong and effective enforcement of borders and stringent tests for citizenship. Glib, politically correct talk finds no place in Huntington's analysis, and for that readers should be grateful.

More on identity:

Trow creates three kinds of “being-in-place,” as a means of demonstrating how virtue comes to exist. For Trow, virtue cannot exist outside of place. Who we are depends on how we behave in a particular place. Thus, people can be:

Mostly here: When “here,” people are affected by and responsive to specific local conditions. The ethos of human settlements, this is people doing what they have to do to survive. It is “what works.”

Here and there: Trow defines this as the “manner of the museum.” The location of a museum usually has a relation to its collection, but the tendency is to remove the substance of the collection from any sense of place. The ultimate destination of this logic is London Bridge in Arizona.

Everywhere and nowhere: The modern ethos par excellence. A strip mall is nowhere and everywhere. It has nothing to do with a particular place, and yet it is inescapably present in every American town.

Trow critiques our movement away from the virtue of “honorable men” doing the “work of men” in a particular place to the less-than-honorable work done by “impersonal forces” that are both nowhere and everywhere. These forces now rule the world. Trow writes, “Clever men ally themselves with these forces, while idealistic men struggle to move certain valued things out of their way.”

Moving valued things out of the way of voracious impersonal forces is a very good way of describing the preservation work of organizations like the Nature Conservancy. But it makes their save-an-acre projects in the rainforest seem desperate. It’s like a family whose house is in the way of a wildfire and they must decide whether to save Fido or grandpa’s heirloom rocking chair. Either way, the house is doomed.

Even worse is that this force that will take your place has no interest in it as a place and has no place of its own. It is drifting, hungry, anonymous, but sadly familiar. It’s what 7-11 did to that charming, dilapidated Victorian house on the corner. It’s what ADM does to family farms. It’s what Clear Channel does to local radio broadcasting. It’s like a virus. It has nowhere to be that is its own. It has nothing to do but replicate itself. It will colonize you.

The place of virtue, for Trow, is in none of these places. It is in what Trow himself practices—the virtue of being both “here” and “everywhere.” People acting in a particular place with “clarity and sense” generate local virtues, running “like a small channel throughout history,” that ultimately become the spirit of a people.

From The National Interest something of significance for New Zealand but from an American perspective:

The views of the general public on issues of national identity differ significantly from those of many elites. The public, overall, is concerned with physical security but also with societal security, which involves the sustainability--within acceptable conditions for evolution--of existing patterns of language, culture, association, religion and national identity. For many elites, these concerns are secondary to participating in the global economy, supporting international trade and migration, strengthening international institutions, promoting American values abroad, and encouraging minority identities and cultures at home. The central distinction between the public and elites is not isolationism versus internationalism, but nationalism versus cosmopolitanism.