Say Goodbye To Revolutions

Conversations With My Barber

Some days you realise you take your freedoms for granted. These days those reminders come from places like communist China or Putinist Russia during election time, or North Korea all the time, but occasionally you're reminded that there are some countries that continue to be very uncomfortable for personal liberty without reaching a lot fo headlines like Iran.

My local barber says he is Persian. I asked him about how it is that he identifies himself in that manner. 

"Aren't you Iranian, in modern parlance?" I asked. 

"But I feel like I'm Persian. Being Persian makes more sense to me than what is going on there today in the country that cals itself Iran."

I tried to dig deeper into the sentiment, trying to catch the drift of his defiance. There wasn't much to it - he basically disagreed with the theocracy that has been in place since the Revolution. Otherwise, he likes customising Japanese cars and driving really fast. He likes middle eastern cuisine and thinks Shakira is still hot. Things the Revolutionary Council in Tehran would not like. 

I remember the damn Revolution taking place on TV no less (unlike the song about revolutions not taking place on TV) but my barber is way too young for that experience. To him, the Revolution is somewhere in the deep mists of history where dinosaurs lurk with Don Bradman. 

I asked him if he remembered anything about the time a young woman by the name Neda Agha-Soltan was shot in the chest by the paramilitary during protests. He did not recall the incident, but he said he hated all of that civil unrest and going-on in Iran. Being Persian allowed him to disown all of it. I guess that's defiance enough to be called cultural. 

Come Join The Fun!

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance Part 3

This Stuff Is Everywhere

If you want to get a better understanding of how widespread this simple problem is, you only have to look at points of conflict around the globe. When people are insisting on preservation of their culture, there is always much defiance against what is considered 'civilised'. Sometimes we don't say it out loud, but whenever you hear of somebody complaining about other people's cultural practices being 'barbaric', you can be fairly certain that what that person is pushing is civilisation as a universal value. 

Don't get me wrong - I like civilisation. Yet I can see how that falls on deaf ears to those who are wedded to their culture. It's do-or-die time when civilisation comes knocking and tells you to surrender your cultural practices. If your thing is bagging a bunch of baby seals and clubbing them or keeping mink in cages and then skinning them for fur coats, the civilised world is going to come at you hard. And you will be saying ""but this practice is deep and old in my culture. All the same, civilisation won't have a bar of it. 

So, don't get me wrong, I do have sympathy for the cultural practices of the peoples of this planet - but I do draw the line at marching with Nazi flags or Confederate flags and retrograde monsters trying to sneak through racism and anti-semitism as something acceptable. If you can't tell you're on the side of assholes-in-history and act accordingly, then you don't get much sympathy from me. 

The reality is everybody picks and chooses their moment to side with civilisation and then culture. People act according to their interests in a very Machiavellian way. It's the kind of sad wisdom that comes from having seen too much. A young person ought to get used to that and learn not to judge too harshly. 

On Why Whaling Is A Terrible Battleground

Here's an example of the defiant cultural shibboleth that just won't die. 

There used to be a lot of countries that used to do commercial whaling. Then, in the 1980s, there was a sea change of public opinion about whether people really should be doing this stuff any more. The process of civilisation had arrived to a rather brutal 19th century kind of industry. The International Whaling Commission which used to decide which countries were allowed to catch how many tonnes of whale, suddenly grew this higher consciousness and decided that all commercial whaling should be banned. And so commercial whaling came to an official end. 

As we know there are a number of holdout nations - Japan, Norway, Iceland, and Russia.  Of the 4 countries, Japan was perhaps the most vocal about its desire to re-commence commercial whaling. At the core of its defiant attitude towards the prevailing winds of banning all commercial whaling was a belief that whaling is a cultural practice in Japan. When we pick a little bit at Norway and Iceland's commitment towards whale hunting, you hit a similar kind of bedrock belief that catching whale for food was, and should remain a part of their lives. If you talk to them, they don't see why you living in some country that has anything and everything in your supermarkets, gets to tell them what they can and cannot eat. 

As I pointed out in the previous entry, the cultural argument is implicitly bolstered with defiance precisely because that's how culture works - by being defiant. Over the years, the Anglophone nations have spent considerable rhetorical energy in a bid to stop Japan (and to a lesser extent Norway and Iceland) from their commercial whaling. Most of the time, those attempts fell on deaf ears, and it only resulted in ever more occasions for the Japanese whaling fleet to go sailing the open seas. 

Even the ICJ case which deemed the scientific whaling was actually commercial whaling in disguise resulted in Japan withdrawing from the IWC. Japan declared her whaling fleet would not go whaling in the Southern Oceans near the antarctic. Instead the fleet would whale within Japan's territorial waters. The point is, they're not going to stop because in their paradigm, it is in their culture to go whaling, and we know this by the very ferocity of the defiance. Maybe the gentle hand of civilisation will come to the Japanese eventually, but right now, the world has spent 40 years making it a matter of culture. It didn't set out to do so, but that's kind of where it has ended up. 

Why The Cultural Argument Isn't Always Great

This leads me to the next point. Mounting a defence over an action or practice based on culture is actually widespread. The "we do 'X' because it is our custom to do so" has tremendous sway all over the globe. If the cultural practice argument comes from an indigenous person, we the civilised colonisers are inclined to back right off from whatever is triggering their defiance. Most of the time, we play it cool and try not to invoke the defiance of the cultural defenders. It's the polite thing to do, it's the right thing to do. 

I have a friend Roddy who is half Samoan and he once said to me "mate, the cultural argument is not so good, eh? Like Samoans used to eat people as their culture. You can't really be saying to other people that it's okay to eat people because it's part of your culture. Some things are just wrong. Eating people is wrong".

Like I said before, the process of being Civilised demands we draw some firm lines somewhere. 

On Why Civilisation Can Be Bad Too

As Australia Day/Invasion Day rolled around again this year, and the debates get more strident every year. On the one side is the default/conservative position that the arrival of the white colonisers is worthy of celebration. Set against that is the indigenous voice that says it was a horrible invasion, an undeclared, unwarranted act of war followed by genocide. As history goes, so goes the narrative, and with the narrative go all the judgments so in many ways the rancour has to do with the representation of historic events. 

If you're not white like me, and therefore not of the demographic that claims kinship with the first fleet colonists, it's a little more abstract. Historically speaking, we don't get to come to Australia without the events of 1788 onwards. The problem with Australia is that the civilisation that came hand in hand with colonialism totally washed over the continent like a tidal wave. It did a lot of damage and washed away lives. There is nothing but the defiance of indigenous people to offer up resistance to this civilisation. 

The civilisation that has covered itself all over Australia is at once optimistic and exploitative. Whether it is Macarthur and his flock of merinos, or the gold rush, or the deep mines we have cut into the land, the process of civilisation as has transpired in Australia is brutally efficient at exploitation of natural resources and brooks no dissent; all of this was/is in exchange for ever more material wealth. Yet we find so much hope in the material wealth we can exploit from this land. This process is so much so, the best way to understand the Australian economy is as a quarry, shearing shed, and abattoir. 

Culture does not really come into Australian life much. I think it might be a land of philistines. Sydney is never going to be like New York. Melbourne is never going to be like London. Brisbane is always going to be a provincial, parochial, country town. As for the other capital cities of Australia, the less said the better. Australia is the land where Toynbee's Civilisation has smashed David Graeber's Culture. In Australia, culture lost, still loses everyday, and will keep losing out to the process of civilisation - getting beaten up, pretty much like a punching bag. 

And it is against this monolithic wonder that is modern civilisation with no real concern for culture, that the Indigenous people are defiantly raising their flag. If you don't have some sympathy for that, you have no heart, and most likely you are one of the many philistines. For the record, that is not a good thing. 

Civilisation, Culture, and Defiance - Part 1

A Little Something About Culture

In the time I wasn't blogging, I spent a lot of time just surfing YouTube. One of the things I came across was David Graeber giving a short talk about what 'culture' actually is, and how culture might not be your friend, so to speak. Graeber's talk hones in fast on saying culture is defiance. He gives some anthropological anecdotes that delineate the notion that culture comes from the desire to differentiate one's own group from another set of people, with a good deal of defiance. 

Up to that moment I saw the video, I was operating under an older consideration which I got from Arnold Toynbee whereby Toynbee said habits, memes, methods and objects that allow themselves to be transported across peoples is the essence of civilisation. Things that do not lend themselves to be transported across peoples, is culture. That's pretty abstract, but the example I like giving is this: you can experience sushi anywhere because serving  raw fish on rice with vinegar is something that has traveled all over the globe. If you live in any Australian metropolitan area, there is some place that serves up sushi. If you're not Japanese, this is perfectly fine - the food being served is sushi, well enough. 

However, if you are Japanese, then this food being served is far from the proper cultural practice of what sushi is, and how it should be served. A proper cultural experience of sushi is if you had it served to you by a Japanese chef in Tsukiji, Tokyo, right near where the fish markets used to be. It will cost you a  pretty penny, around a thousand dollars for two people - and you have to settle the account in cash. In other words, it has to have the right time, place, people, materials, and atmosphere. The entire practice cannot be transported, and so we can see sushi properly served, is a deeply cultural practice. And Japanese people will tell you with defiance, you can't take that experience out to some shopping centre in say, Chatswood, NSW, Australia and call it proper sushi. What you get in Chatswood is some blonde girl working her summer job, serving up sushi made by a machine in plastic containers! (gasp, horror) It's sushi, Jim, but not as the cultured Japanese know it. As experiences go it ain't bad, but the connoisseur of culture says it's an ersatz experience, tainted by the wrong place, people and ingredients. 

And that, in a nutshell is Graeber's point. If you look around the globe, all kinds of people are doing things in the name of culture, and most of the time, it's in defiance of the other. "That's not real tequila", "That's not real salami", "That's not how you sew a quilt" and so on and on it goes. Quite often, 'the other' being defied is the Hegemony of Western civilisation which brings technology, the flattening of social hierarchies, reification of values, and porn. The people who bang on the most about their culture or some sovereignty derived from culture are the people who stand to lose the most social power within their society should the process of civilisation further erode their social status within those societies. 

So in short, Toynbee says Civilisation is what goes around the world and Culture is what stays put. Graeber says Culture stays put because it's an act of defiance. Graeber says a lot more in the video but for today's point, that's the salient bit. 

What's Wrong With Civilisation Then?

Now, here's the bad news. There is plenty wrong with civilisation as we experience it today. The process of civilisation is such that it destroys entire eco-systems in order to exist. There is something manic about the power of civilisation to travel the globe and deliver things on demand, disregarding its costs. 

Yet when I rhetorically ask, "what's wrong with civilisation?" I'm not going to talk about those sorts of issues.  I want to talk more about the reaction of people who encounter it, without having invited it. 

Civilisation historically arrived with colonisers. This is not limited to the European expansion into the world starting with Columbus, but also Rome into Gaul, Germania and Britain. That process is the entire point of 'Heart of Darkness' by Joseph Conrad. Everywhere people went with better technology enabled them to outcompete the local population for survival. We may even look at colonialism and the spread of technological civilisation as effectively interchangeable. But it brings about carnage. 

This plays out in a funny way in a place like Australia. On the one hand you have white settlement in Australia backed up by the tremendous technological gap between the British settlers and the indigenous people leading to the defiance we see with indigenous people denouncing Australia Day. Yet you have certain parts of the old White Australian community wanting to join Pauline Hanson's defiance against Asians (in the 90s) and Muslims (this side of 9/11). Australia's ratbag knee-jerk crypto-fascist-right are defying the predominant progressivism, citing a largely imaginary 'Australian culture' which is somehow sacrosanct. It's only sacrosanct because without it, their identity might go up in a puff of smoke. 

Civilisation is a process that chips away at your current state of being. Civilisation makes you ponder things about the future where culture would ask you to ponder the past and history. Civilisation asks you to consider changing your ways whereas culture asks you to preserve the old ways. To stand with civilisation, in a sense is inherent to the global process where local cultures get swallowed up by the tidal wave of capitalism - the process whereby the woodland park gets turned into a carpark, or a lookout over a landscape gets a tourist centre and a kiosk that sells tourists a variety of generic food you would never wish to critique. As civilisation washes out culture from our lives, gone are discernment, and aesthetic judgments. Civilisation isn't all good for everybody - it can't be all good for everybody - exactly because it is tied into global capitalism as it was once tied in implicitly with colonialism.  

What's Right With Civilisation Then?

That said, it is worth considering what good civilisation is in terms of what it brings about. When you look at progressive causes, a lot of them are to do with equality. Equality is about fairness a lot of the time. Whether that is emancipation of women or recognition of LGBTQ rights, it has a decidedly civilising edge to the simple fact that we make accommodations for fairness. The angry right that snarls at the mere thought of political correctness and censoring freedom of speech and hating on science, to any kind of critical revision of history, basically strikes a pose of defiance agains these simple moves towards progress. 

This kind of defiance as cultural credo is at times gently persuasive but more recently we have entered a time when the extreme rhetoric of both sides has obscured the middle ground, right under the incessant footwork of the culture wars. Thus it is quite fitting that David Graeber argued 'Culture' is not your friend. The defiance inherent to cultural positions keeps us from improving a civilised, technological society. 

If we can all evolve our consciousness just a little bit, and leave behind notions created in feudal times or the dark ages, maybe we can bring about a true egalitarian utopia without killing the planet or killing lots of people. That's the promise of civilisation. Of course, whether we can actualise it is another story. 

All the same I'm writing all this down because I want people to consider who they are and what they hold to with defiance and why. Perhaps they are not as important as a better future. Maybe we all have to realise Culture is not our friend, and find a way forwards with civilisation. 

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

"Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee"

A long time ago, I first learned of 'Mohammed Ali'. I must have been nine. Muhammad Ali was going to fight Antonio Inoki, a wrestler in Japan. it was a bit of a farce. What I understood of the farcical 'fight' was that Ali was the greatest boxer on the planet and Inoki was the greatest wrestler and so it was going be a fight to sort out who was 'the Greatest'. What it was, was the greatest farce, but for us Gen-Xers, the greatest moments of Ali-as-fighter were already in the past by the time we were conscious of Muhammad Ali. He was like Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, a figure whose record I had to piece together in the library. And I was a young sport nut enough to put the pieces together in the school library in NYC. Sometimes it takes stupidity to open the door to knowledge.

There also was this one fight they keep playing over and over in replays of past glory:



That right there is the famous fight with Sonny Liston where he knocked him out and demanded Liston say his name. Liston leads with his left and Ali gets a cross-counter over it, into the head and Liston drops. It looks nothing like a Rocky movie, but it's considered one of the great moments in boxing.

Ali loomed large in my imagination the more I read about him. His record prior to his suspension seemed immaculate. Although he had lost to Joe Frazier in '71, he had gone comeback to beat him in '74 and '75. He certainly fit the bill of the Greatest as far as I could tell.



There was also the 'Rumble in the Jungle' fight with George Foreman in '74 that kept coming up in conversation to do with Ali.



Ali lost some important years during the middle of his career when he conscientiously objected to being drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam. He famously quipped "No Vietnamese ever called me n-gger". How could he not be a cultural hero to the world after that?

The defiance and race consciousness were of its time, yet Ali transcended the kind of ordinary discourses on race. He was beautiful - "how can I be humble when I'm so pretty?" he asked rhetorically. He was fast and graceful, and possessed that marvellous wit. Above all, he demanded to be recognised as "the Greatest". When he met the Beatles he still insisted he was the Greatest, but that they were beautiful too, just like him. And so the banter went with Ali.

I did catch the broadcast of a few his fights towards the end of his career. I remember distinctly the two fights with Leon Spinks, one where he lost surprisingly on a split decision, and then the one where he came back and beat Spinks on an unanimous decision. Just as he had done with Frasier, Ali had gone back and beaten the guy who beat him. Then he fought Larry Holmes and lost and then Trevor Berwick and lost, which were his last fights. If anything the Holmes fight showed he had stayed the ring too long. Even as a kid, I could see that he wasn't the guy that he once was when he thumped Sonny Liston with the cross counter.

I think about it now and I'm a little surprised my parents let me watch this stuff but the truth is, Ali was such a showman, it was must-see television. And as good as Holmes and Spinks were, they were never the kinds of campions Ali was in his heyday. Truly, we would not see that kind of dominance until Iron Mike Tyson came along, and Tyson was a completely different kind of boxer and champion as well as a showman. Just as Ali - myth, record and all - belonged to the Baby Boomers, Iron Mike - his myth, record and all - was very much of Generation X. Ali was such a presence in the world, he was like a one man mission statement.

Then, there was this carton show:



The years after he left the ring were more fraught. He was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in his early 40s, and by the time he was carrying the torch at the Atlanta Olympics in '96 he was shuffling like an old man. It was sad, watching him with his arm shaking and his stiff facial expression without a smile. He wasn't tense, he was fighting his twitches all the way as he raised the torch. It was meant to be triumphant but looking back on it now, it's painful and pathetic.

Perhaps Ali is better to be remembered for his greatest win, the one against George Foreman, immortalised in the documentary 'When We Were Kings'.



Rest in peace Muhammad Ali; we will certainly never see the likes of him ever again, for he truly was The Greatest.

Rubbishing Pop

Crap For Consumption

Here's a corker.

Stravinsky famously noted that "most art is bad". He didn't go on to point out that this is the almost inescapable consequence of its genesis, for art - real art - is not about rehashing the tried and true, but rather of smashing the rules and creating something never seen before, most examples of which must inevitably fail.

The new new is not the last new improved. No painter today would be congratulated for painting an impressionist masterpiece. This is not to try to invert our sense of success. Failure is failure, and true artists are excruciatingly aware of their mistakes and miscalculations.

These same observations cannot be made of what is sometimes referred to as popular culture, the sort of thing you find when you turn on the television or radio, or turn up at the local leagues club. While art is the province of the unexpected and the challenging, and likely to provoke incredulity and even rage, popular culture is the domain of the familiar, the mawkish, the sentimental and the trite and bears the same relationship to culture in general as a McDonald's hamburger does to food.

You might think I'm trying to draw a distinction between high and low art, but I'm not, because there is no low art, there's just rubbish. Rubbish with its own stars and award ceremonies, rubbish with a sense of its own importance even, but rubbish nevertheless, being foisted on the rest of us in all the myriad ways people working for the great corporations of the world can come up with to flog us their crap.

..and so it goes, on a true tirade against the populist entertainment branch of culture. It's a great read. The blistering attacks on the middle ground are merciless. It feesl great to read, even though um, I do my work in entertainment.

Such snobbery, such dismissive contempt can only come from somebody who works in theatre as opposed to say, cinema. It's easier to be snobby about the arts when you live at the rarefied end eating mist and living on fog. It's easier to diss pop music if you're a classical musician; It's easier to diss comic books if you're a painter; It's easy to diss jazz ballet if you're a classically trained ballet dancer; and so the list goes for the canonised artforms we are willing to accept as authoritative epicentres of our culture.

Then again, pop culture doesn't help itself. Take Television. TV is always made for the demographic and everybody has to admit before they write anything that in Australia, the median demographic consists of 14year old girls living in the outer suburbs of our major cities. She is ignorant and not terribly bright, but she has hours to burn and so she watches the most TV of anybody. And so most things on TV are made to please her; and you have to admit it would be a losing proposition to try and win over her viewership with something cultural.

Equally, radio has the same issue and so we get ...Kyle Sandilands. Need we say more? Yet this phenomenon stretches across all the arts.

If an artist wants to make a living out of their art, they have to win a portion of a market that is spending money and this is why the market may not ever get the best out of the artist - they're busy trying to please somebody, most likely not you. It's a tough proposition. So this bit was very interesting:

Must art be relevant? Topical? Educative? Uncomfortable? Perhaps not, but when it cannot be any of those things because the sponsor won't like it, then we're in trouble. And we are in trouble. The dumbing down process we have been experiencing now for many decades has been successful, as is clear in everything from the inability of people to retain more than a couple of soundbites to guide them through the intricacies of democracy to the complete ignorance of the scientific process recently demonstrated in the so-called climategate scandal.

People read less, understand less and retain less than they did even 20 years ago. The mindless pap of undemanding popular culture is as responsible for this as the fast food industry is for the obesity epidemic. We are becoming a culture of fat, stupid know-nothings bombing the rest of the world into submission in wars we only understand in the comic book morality of Kiefer Sutherland's 24.

It's a little sad that what started as a great aesthetic slap across the face devolves to an argument about morality. I would contend that the arts have naught to do with bloody morality. The claim that society's dumbing down is at fault is also disingenuous. The market is what it is. If somebody spend money on something for entertainment, they are right to expect to be entertained. The truth is that society has become stingy about art - especially the high-falutin' variety - simply because it doesn't deliver the expected service.

Let's face it, I love Glenn Gould, but not everybody who plays Bach is Gould. I love modernist painting, but not everybody who attempts it is Picasso. So, it's a brash, brave argument but ultimate faulty. The punters do get a say in what gets made for good reason. Even the crap of American/Australian Idol has some meaning in it - even if I can't spot what it is either. Heck, even McDonalds has utility.