Less alert nowadays to possible
ethnic fissures (Norman, Norse and Gaelic surnames all abound in equal measure
in my own roots) the Irish tend to cleave heavily on the inter county divide;
being a Corkman, Kerryman etc. Dubs are 'jackeens', while conversely anyone
outside 'the pale' is a bogtrotter (in many juvenile lexicons at
least).
Also pronounced but still real are the old provincial loyalties - Míde (Co. Meath) was the country's referee and old royal seat for centuries of dynastic squabbling. Some 19th century Irish defendants thrown at the Queen's bench would still claim lineage from one of the 'five great bloods' meaning here the Gaelic clans who controlled the five provinces for centuries (O' Neills, O' Connors etc) - in a futile attempt at self-ennoblement and presumably the chance of a more lenient sentence.
The solidarity of 'the Dubs' then dissolves on your compass relation to the Liffey - Northsider, Southsider - and within the towns if you can't trace continuous inhabitation for at least five generations, well then; "your only a jaysus blow-in!".
Can't win, the eternal internal divisor divides eternally.
Though 'nothing human is foreign to me' should be the watchword the human mind has a propensity to habitually construct these differences (usually and the more successfully as crude stereotypes) as a tactic to isolate and exclude 'the other'.
It seems to be the default function of the human mind to categorise the various domains of reality into easily manageable segments; this, after all, is what Kant spent a lifetime investigating and though modern neurology via MRI and PET technologies have yielded us a much more complex picture of brain function this model of an essentially divisory patterning of cognitive behaviour remains, I think, largely intact.
As part of this task of initial cognitive grouping we then tend to differentiate strongly between the various elements or groupings thus erected in order first of all to recognise them more clearly as distinct entities in their own right and then secondarily to proceed to endow them with further characteristics which mark them out ever more strongly from a competing array of other entities.
I think it's in this second act of fleshing out the characteristics of the entities chosen for distinction that the mind procedes to binarise between one group and another - thus giving birth to simplistic oppositional couplets; for example and most obviously - civilized vs barbarian, freedom vs totalitarianism, capitalism vs communism, primitive cultures vs. industrialised, catholic 'papists' vs protestant 'heretics', god-fearing Christians vs heathens etc. etc. ad infinitum.
It is a fact that we cannot think without language; for even where we to dream up the most lucid images as metaphors for a sequence of events or to depict what we take to be a condensed rubric of a totality of relations - ultimately it is the word alone which can convey any sense of what we wish to express. But language is an unworthy and cumbrous vehicle in itself for conveying truths; it is very much a device for approximations, for narrowing down and shrinking the domain of the Real (that which we cannot grasp) and never in fact capturing it in it's essence. Many of the most resonant and symbolically loaded words over time have belonged to such binaries and each is stuffed with the charged loads of centuries of ideological dispute - so much so that an immense flotilla of associative signifiers have come to stick barnacle-like on each.
So, what is commonly said about a defensive reaction triggered in response to the 'other' is true, it is primal and emotive and it is physically inscribed somehow in our neural pathways through constant repetition, thus to a large extent it has become unconscious. Each of us are schooled to believe a simplistic explanatory tale of 'who we are' and 'how we came to be', what makes our pattern of life justifiable to ourselves and in many respects and by extension superior to all others around us. There is a graded hierarchy established of all peoples through time and space and an intricately woven code knitted together via these emotive binary buttons which are liable at any time to be deployed in Pavlovian fashion by opportunistic ideologues.
Likewise, I think most people are firmly aware of this and while we spend the first quarter of our lives absorbing these localised mythologies (of collective self-aggrandisement), and the second perhaps marshalling them to expertise our quiet and more reflective third quarter is happily engaged in calmly disassociating ourselves from them - thus the possibility for an occasional piece of 'transcendence'
Bottom line, we're all on this rock together I think.
Also pronounced but still real are the old provincial loyalties - Míde (Co. Meath) was the country's referee and old royal seat for centuries of dynastic squabbling. Some 19th century Irish defendants thrown at the Queen's bench would still claim lineage from one of the 'five great bloods' meaning here the Gaelic clans who controlled the five provinces for centuries (O' Neills, O' Connors etc) - in a futile attempt at self-ennoblement and presumably the chance of a more lenient sentence.
The solidarity of 'the Dubs' then dissolves on your compass relation to the Liffey - Northsider, Southsider - and within the towns if you can't trace continuous inhabitation for at least five generations, well then; "your only a jaysus blow-in!".
Can't win, the eternal internal divisor divides eternally.
Though 'nothing human is foreign to me' should be the watchword the human mind has a propensity to habitually construct these differences (usually and the more successfully as crude stereotypes) as a tactic to isolate and exclude 'the other'.
It seems to be the default function of the human mind to categorise the various domains of reality into easily manageable segments; this, after all, is what Kant spent a lifetime investigating and though modern neurology via MRI and PET technologies have yielded us a much more complex picture of brain function this model of an essentially divisory patterning of cognitive behaviour remains, I think, largely intact.
As part of this task of initial cognitive grouping we then tend to differentiate strongly between the various elements or groupings thus erected in order first of all to recognise them more clearly as distinct entities in their own right and then secondarily to proceed to endow them with further characteristics which mark them out ever more strongly from a competing array of other entities.
I think it's in this second act of fleshing out the characteristics of the entities chosen for distinction that the mind procedes to binarise between one group and another - thus giving birth to simplistic oppositional couplets; for example and most obviously - civilized vs barbarian, freedom vs totalitarianism, capitalism vs communism, primitive cultures vs. industrialised, catholic 'papists' vs protestant 'heretics', god-fearing Christians vs heathens etc. etc. ad infinitum.
It is a fact that we cannot think without language; for even where we to dream up the most lucid images as metaphors for a sequence of events or to depict what we take to be a condensed rubric of a totality of relations - ultimately it is the word alone which can convey any sense of what we wish to express. But language is an unworthy and cumbrous vehicle in itself for conveying truths; it is very much a device for approximations, for narrowing down and shrinking the domain of the Real (that which we cannot grasp) and never in fact capturing it in it's essence. Many of the most resonant and symbolically loaded words over time have belonged to such binaries and each is stuffed with the charged loads of centuries of ideological dispute - so much so that an immense flotilla of associative signifiers have come to stick barnacle-like on each.
So, what is commonly said about a defensive reaction triggered in response to the 'other' is true, it is primal and emotive and it is physically inscribed somehow in our neural pathways through constant repetition, thus to a large extent it has become unconscious. Each of us are schooled to believe a simplistic explanatory tale of 'who we are' and 'how we came to be', what makes our pattern of life justifiable to ourselves and in many respects and by extension superior to all others around us. There is a graded hierarchy established of all peoples through time and space and an intricately woven code knitted together via these emotive binary buttons which are liable at any time to be deployed in Pavlovian fashion by opportunistic ideologues.
Likewise, I think most people are firmly aware of this and while we spend the first quarter of our lives absorbing these localised mythologies (of collective self-aggrandisement), and the second perhaps marshalling them to expertise our quiet and more reflective third quarter is happily engaged in calmly disassociating ourselves from them - thus the possibility for an occasional piece of 'transcendence'
Bottom line, we're all on this rock together I think.
No comments:
Post a Comment