Diventity: Identity, Density and Diversity

“A city is much more than its stones, a city is memories and relationships and friendships and fears and ambitions; it is stories and histories interacting in the society-space-time continuum.”

This is to put a positive spin on ideas of ‘memory’ and ‘identity’. One might equally say that cities oppress us with their weight of associations, assumptions and expectations - that the memories they evoke pull us towards nostalgia, regret, sentimentality. And the kind of collective ‘identity’ that is reinforced by shared memories is always a force for homogenisation, simplification, conservatism: it opposes diversity, opposes complexity and contradictions, opposes change. How easy does Arida’s vision of the city make it to live in the moment, to renew one’s own sense of identity from within, to let go of the past and embrace change and difference? Do we really want to be relentlessly reminded of our first kiss, day after day, like Sonny and Cher waking Bill Murray on Groundhog Day? Or is it better to watch the spaces around us gradually changing in occupancy and use and relation to one another, reflecting the constant movement that is life - setting the backdrop for ever new kisses?

Dhakir (’zakar’), incidentally, does not mean ‘Man’ in Arabic - although it can mean male (and, indeed, a penis). The root dhakara means to bring to mind, to bring to presence - to lift a recollection of someone or something into the moment. This is a very different proposition from living in the past, wallowing in one’s associations and memories. The noun, Dhikr, is often used in a spiritual sense of the ‘practice of the presence’ of God - the ‘Dhakir’ is someone for whom the Divine is an ever present reality, “Whom neither buying nor selling distracts from the rememberance of Allah”, as the Qur’an describes. The more usual Arabic word for ‘Man’ - meaning here ‘humankind’ - is Insan, from a root that means both sociability and intimacy. Significantly, Insan can mean both a person and the pupil of the eye - that which witnesses life, at least in its visual aspect, only in the Now.

james

/james souttar 02/07/2006

…to take up James’ point, I wonder, though, if although you may witness life in the now, it is possible to engagge with it ‘only’ thus? Certainly is easier to live in the now and look to the future if you are comfortable in your past. Cities often comfortably merge the past with the present, quietly. When you walk past somewhere where you once kissed it doesnt necessarily always mean it will be in the thoughts - but it’s there if we need it.

/Leyla B 03/07/2006

James - are you ok? You don’t want memories from your architecture - old kissess - you want your city to renew itself and create the backdrop, if not the opportunity, for new ones. And then I read on Ezri Tarazi’s ‘Design in crisis’ blog: “When this understanding eventually filters into our conceptions of communication, we will undoubtedly see a paradigm shift of an unprecedented kind. But for the moment, angst and same-old same-old.” I sense you want something new…?

My point, which isn’t meant to be personal, is that it’s interesting that it’s only through looking back - at a history, a pattern of use, that we start to build up a picture of things, people, events and flesh them out so we can see the relationships - so we can relate to them - for the future.

/Tyrone 03/07/2006

I think this strand goes off Arida’s point which is very much about diversity - cultural diversity and identity. Also, in relation to what’s come up, emergence - here applied to the bottom-up self-organising notion of the city Arida mentions - depends on positive and negative feedback [two steps forward and one step back] to stabilise. Living in the now (James) only isn’t enough. Tyrone - are YOU ok?

/Gaby 03/07/2006

Tyrone, I take your point about looking back - I don’t have a problem with the ‘presence of the past’, as it were (quite the opposite). But I do distinguish between two types of connection with the past, which seem to be highlighted by Arida’s and my different meanings of the word ‘zakar’. Arida seems to be describing a kind of memory that is always drawing one away from the moment, towards emotions that could best be described as ‘addictive’ - nostalgia being perhaps the best case in point. No matter how horrible the reality of the memory, these emotions manage to make it seem more appealing than the present. And they are often tinged with regret - they create dissatisfaction with the world of the now, by contasting it with an unassailable ‘golden moment’ in the past. At the time, that kiss was fraught with all the anxieties and uncertainties of growing up, of not yet having achieved anything in life, of not being sure this was the right person or ‘the real thing’. Its recollection,
though, remains forever Elysium…
This does connect to the diversity issue, Gaby, even though the connection may not seem obvious. The enemy of real diversity, it seems to me, is ‘identity’ - meaning here what is often described as ‘cultural identity’, the kind of identity that other people invent for us and try to impose on us. And cultural identity is always built on nostalgia - on heavily edited memories, forever
fixed in the past as some kind of unchangeable standard. A good example, if perhaps a caricature, was John Major’s famous picture of English identity: ‘long shadows on the cricket ground, warm beer, invincible green suburbs…’ It is inherently conservative, opposed to ambiguity or contradiction, and always backwards looking. And the voices of cultural identity do not just want to be
some of many voices in a diverse world, they always want to claim that their version of that identity is the ‘right’ one, and to impose it on everyone.

The alternative to this - at least, so it seems to me - is to experience the legacy of the past in the present. Sure, this building was made in the fifteenth century, but it exists now - it has to function in a world of power cables and computers and of contemporary patterns of occupancy. It has to coexist with what was build last year, and this, and what will be built tomorrow. And the same is true of culture - we need to interpret what we have inherited in the now, for ourselves as individuals, choosing what we want from it - not let some zealots impose on us the mores of hundreds of hears ago, en masse. I’m English, but I don’t like warm beer - I’d rather drink a caipirinha, thank you - and I resent being told what ‘my’ culture should be. I’m happy for Mr Major to enjoy his tepid pint, even celebrate it if he must. But his voice is only one voice in a multitude, and the no-less ‘English’ person next to him in the Huntingdon Weatherspoons is drinking a ice cold Sol with a lime wedge in the bottle-neck…

;-)

james

/james 05/07/2006

In relation to the points on cultural diversity (Gaby) and cultural identity (James):

In Culture as Praxis , Zygmund Bauman gives us a different perspective on cultural identity to the received one that we have – and that, perhaps, James invokes when he says “The enemy of real diversity, it seems to me, is ‘identity’ -meaning here what is often described as ‘cultural identity’, the kind of identity that other people invent for us and try to impose on us. And cultural identity is always built on nostalgia - on heavily edited memories, forever fixed in the past as some kind of unchangeable standard.”

Bauman questions the relevance of these fixed notions of cultural identity and our sense of what happens – say, in cities, where one identity butts up against others. For instance, he looks at a concept like ‘multiculturalism’ (which is a term that Ayssar, presumably deliberately, does not use of course). Bauman tells us that multiculturalism depends on a world where wholesome, well-defined, distinct cultural identities are our primary reality and the moving/mixing of attached values and symbols and their meanings is secondary. He suggests that, today, cultural products travel freely and, with digital technology, faster than people. So conversely, non-rooted identity is primary while related, distinct cultural identities are secondary –and then only as a process of ‘choice’, ‘selective retention’ and ‘recombination’.

In terms of cultural identity, for Bauman, it’s the capacity for change, not ability to cling to once-established patterns that secures the continuity of cultural identity. I think he uses Jewishness as an example but we might find others.

Diventity, seems a more complex issue because the density issue is a key component that makes Arida’s thinking more place-specific than Bauman’s. It’s interesting to think about the difference of emergent identities spatially spread out but connected virtually and ones spatially dense and city-based.

/Monika 05/07/2006

good to see the discussion up and running… will write later hopefully as i have to run, but James: i do find it very interesting that you have chosen to read in my proposal some form of nostalgia, when i tend to look at my interests as definetely anti-nostalgic! my interest in memory relates to its meaning in the most generic way as “information-storage”, and identity as a mode of differentiation and hence diversification that is crucial in self-regulatory systems. i by no means wanted to add any particular value judgement on “memory” or “identity” other than both are very much part of our human condition.

both tyrone and gaby seem to have gotten my point a bit more.

it would be great to know what you think about the construct of diventity itself and if you think it could be helpful in thinking the city one way or the other…

atb,
ayssar

/ayssar 05/07/2006

James, you’re right in pointing out that “zakar” is more “man=male” (same as “rajul”) than “Man=humanity” - i knew that (i’m Lebanese and arabic is my first language) but i did take some poetic license here to make a point, that memory and the need for subjective relationships are inseparable from the human condition. i don’t think we should be scared of memory and identity - off course they have been used as an excuse for terrible things - and that is precisely why we need to better understand them, in particular, we need to understand that identity can be plural or complex and does not need to be pure, just as memory is; and to learn how to transcribe that into urban space.

i am definetely not talking about a memory “that is constantly drawing one away from the moment”, quite the contrary, i am calling for a recognition that the value of every present moment could be enhanced by allowing it to be memorable, and the city is the backdrop here, exactly as Tyrone said. Same for identity, by understanding the value of shifting, complex identity and how subjective it is (like you said, yours is different from john major’s), then we could go beyond historical cultural identity. In other words, in the context of urban form and architecture for example, by accepting that “memory” and “identity” can be extremely personal and individual, and that each user will imprint her own meaning to the place (e.g. that first kiss, which could have happened in an albanian mosque or a serbian church!) could go beyond the “cultural identity” we seem to dread so…

Identity stops being an enemy of diversity when the diversity within that identity is embraced!

To go back to the word “zakira” which is memory in arabic - i would like to use more poetic license to say that it also means “navel” which is both “the central point” (a spatial dimension) and reminds me of the umbilical cord that links generations (socially and historically), my way of calling for contextual diventity in the society-space-time continuum…

Monika, diventity can also be related to time and history, so “historically spread out identities” would be connected through generational memories…

Maybe one reading of the issue of Jewishness (or Islamism for that matter) today would test its consideration of the higher historical density of diverse cultures in the last 1000 years compared to 5000 years ago, but that’s another conversation…

/ayssar 06/07/2006

i like the concept and think it brings together some interesting aspects,
but i have to say that i find the word ‘diventity’, as a linguistic entity, how can i say, it makes me wince:
it’s one of those hybrids that reminds me of obscure soft-drink/alco-pop mixtures (mixery: beer + cola + x, etc
(don’t know if they exist in the uk, they do in germany, it’s awful)
it seems to very much compress things that like to spread in time and space
perhaps a more elegant term that gives more wiggle room could be found?
just a thought

/adriana 06/07/2006

i’m thinking of something like mikhail bakhtin’s term ‘chronotope’:
chronotope from greek chronos/time and topos/space, brings together time and space in a single linguistic entity
and thus carrying within itself and revealing a world view (the quantum paradigm). (chronotope as a concept offers
a unit with which to look at the complex, ‘dialogical’ world. in this very brief description it may sound similar to
ayssar’s idea of diventity, but it is actually something quite different, i just wanted to show this as a, what i
think, quite beautiful ‘fabricated’ term)

/adriana 06/07/2006

‘Identity stops being an enemy of diversity when the diversity within that identity is embraced!’ Ayssar, this is an interesting compromise, but it still asserts the primacy of identity over diversity. My inclination is to see it the other way around - that identity stops being the enemy of diversity when the identity within that diversity is embraced. This might sound like mere semantics, so I will explain what I mean.

The problem I have with the concept of ‘identity’ is that it suggests a stable quality - a set of inherent characteristics that link together a group of people. In practice,it is impossible to find such a set of unifying characteristics. Regardless of our purported ‘cultural identity’, we are all different: in our capacities, perspectives, experience and so on. Furthermore, we are constantly changing and so are our cultures themselves. And a culture is not an entity but a process of continuous engagement, adaptation, movement and change - an ongoing activity in which we may try to discern patterns at ‘macro’ level, but which is really made up of a myriad of individual ‘micro’ interactions.

Human beings are not even stable entities within ourselves - we are subject to numerous contradictions, discontinuities, divergences. But for the last few hundred years we’ve lived with the persuasive myth that ‘instability’ is a negative. We can create stability, so the myth goes, but making up stories about our own consistency - forcing our memories into a pattern that gives an impression of a meaningful narrative. And collectively the same process of weaving memory into narratives gives us our cultural identities - the sets of expectations and beliefs about ‘who’ we are that are passed onto us by our parents, teachers, peers and ‘betters’. Personally and collectively, this is all about ‘oughts’ and ’shouds’ and ‘musts’ - unquestioned and largely unconscious social conditionings that we allow to frame our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Sometimes there can be some diversity - some lattitude - within our social conditionings. In a modern UK context, we have a kind of ‘liberal’ identity that generally manages quite successfully to hide the fact that it is a conditioning behind a degree of flexibility. However, it is not hard to find the boundaries of this flexibility (and there can be few better examples than the events of ‘7/7′ to show how unliberal the British ‘chattering classes’ really are, underneath the patina of multiculturalism). ‘Diversity within identity’ is, to my mind, only marginally better than the kinds of identity that supress diversity - it’s a very modest improvement on a world of dogmatism and certainty.

‘Identity within diversity’, on the other hand, is a quite different proposition. Here, we see that ‘who’ we are is neither stable nor consistent nor created by the conditioning and pressures to conform of others. It is about creating - or, rather, recreating - oneself continuously and spontaneously in the moment. It is about recognising that one is not a set of beliefs, behaviours, memories - but simply a locus where thoughts and feelings and actions can come to be. All the baggage is thrown away, and what remains is a sense of identity that depends solely on the act of existing. If we can say ‘we’ in this state, it is a we that is made up of a myriad of uniquely different locii united only in the fact of existence. Needless to say, this is not exactly a new idea - it is at the heart of all the world’s ’spiritual’ expressions. And it requires a sustained, directed effort to shift to this kind of perspective.

“…it is imperative to keep in mind that the concept of identity, and hence of diventity, is directly linked to the human mind’s inherent needs to recognise patterns and categorise differences.” Or is it that the ‘problem’ of identity is directly linked to the human mind’s neurotic anxiety to create a sense of stability, and that when we let go of this our need to recognise patterns, categorise differences and reinforce the status quo through preserving and editing memories ceases to be a major preoccupation? What kind of shared living spaces could we create them?

james

/james souttar 08/07/2006

“A city is much more than its stones, a city is memories and relationships and friendships and fears and ambitions; it is stories and histories interacting in the society-space-time continuum.”

A lebanese citizen ,at the time being, is watching a house he grew up in,a restaurant he had great meals in,a chapel he was baptized in ,a factory he has invested in, a site he was designing, a beach he first made love at,a tree that kept him from the sun, while he was reading or writing or just looking at the ocean and dreaming,he’s watching all this,
and much more ,reduced into a massive amount of particules of dust.Do u know that he’s not just looking at stone?he sees much much more than that,
James, unless he’s got total amnesia.
i know u must have had enough of what'’our cultural identity'’ has been trying to impose to us through generations ,creating all the conflicts and revolutions and wars here and there , I know sometimes we just feel like breaking all those ‘’chains’’ ,in order to move forward ..but why not try to just evoluate individualy ,taking energy now and then from our rich historical and cultural sources ,in order to create a kind of developement that would be an ‘’extension?'’.. this extension that is certainely different from one person to another,wouldn’t it create an intresting “diversity” ? a diversity that is still full of complexity and contradictions, that doesn’t oppose change?
I can’t imagine that one can be completely disconnected from its ‘’identity'’,he could agree or disagree on certain points,but even then it would still be a kind of reaction, or connexion.ignoring is a kind of connexion as well.
Every stone is related to some memory,even the one that has not been built yet.
if nowadays,a whole city is meant to be built from A to Z,on a different planet,by human beings ,do u think the result would be 100% different of a city or combination of cities we have seen on this planet?

P.S: pardon some English terms which might lose their sense once they re translated from French..

/m.k. 22/07/2006

“A lebanese citizen ,at the time being, is watching a house he grew up in,a restaurant he had great meals in… he’s watching all this, and much more ,reduced into a massive amount of particules of dust.Do u know that he’s not just looking at stone?he sees much much more than that,…”

Indeed. But isn’t this exactly the tragedy of this conflict, that we have two groups of peoples - “Israeli” and “Palestinian” - who have so identified themselves with earth and stones, and with “cultural memories”, that these things have become more important to them than the rights of others to live a peaceful life?

As I walk around this area of Lambeth, it’s still possible to see the evidence of when it was similarly “reduced into a massive amount of particles of dust”. The three Anderson Shelters in the communal garden that I look out onto from my kitchen window are a case in point. Fortunately the memories of fear and anxiety, of high explosive and incendiary bombs raining from the heavens, have long since evaporated. Now a vixen makes her home in one, and raises a litter of beautiful fox cubs. Everything changes - that is the single, universal constant of life in this universe. And sooner or later every city will become dust, every building a forgotten ruin.

It’s only us who try to hold on to the past, who try to create an illusion of permanency and stability, who delude ourselves that our memories can let us hold onto time. As Heraclitus pointed out, we can’t step into the same river twice - to which his disciple Cratylus replied that it doesn’t even remain the same river as we step into it once. And our memories are merely selective distortions - cognitive neuroscience demonstrates this conclusively. So do we really want to identify ourselves with stories that we have so worked over that they have become entirely self-serving - as frequently negative, telling us we are “only” this or that, can’t be something else, as exaggerating our own (individual or collective) sense of importance? And do we really we want environments that reinforce these illusions, monuments that act as photographic albums onto which we can all stick our fading recollections, pretending that that street we walked down with our father, or that corner in which we had our first kiss, is still somehow the same place?

But this is not the only kind of “identity” that is open to us - in fact, this kind of “identity” that consists in hanging-on, not letting go, is a false identity. And we can see in the Lebanon exactly the trouble this can get us into - young men and women who didn’t live through the Holocaust bombing the hell out of people who didn’t have their homes confiscated in 1947, yet who are all somehow stuck in their parents’ and grandparents’ worlds, minds filled with hate from the imagination of other people’s experiences. What’s the difference between any of them? Only “memories”… And the antidote? To stop looking to other people to show one ‘who’ one is, to stop retelling oneself one’s own personal and ‘cultural’ narratives, and just TO BE - in the moment. But that means facing the fear - which is really a non-existent fear, even if perhaps our deepest and most existential one - that without all this garbage, without all this heavy deadening baggage we carry with us, there may not be anything left to answer to “Who am I?”. There is, and it is the experience of it that reveals these other “identities” to be illusions.

james

/james souttar 24/07/2006

my god james, your phobia of memory or identity verges almost on the psychotic - i wonder where this trauma comes from, it is keeping you from appericating that memory and identity can based on something as personal and as benign as a “first kiss” (personal memories leading to sense of individual identity) and as intense as nationalistic rallying calls, e.g the holocaust (group memories entrenching social identity and cohesion) and that the need for a sense of identity is completely hardwired into our brains by millenia of evolution - what i am saying is that we need to accept this fact and then move on to try to find new ways of working with “complex” and “emergent” identities (going beyond the word “hybrid”), precisely so that we can counteract the effect of “pure” identities, which is the simplest point of the diventity concept.

(for example, maybe we could realise that for the palestinians of the gaza strip, their whole identity for generations has now been built upon being an occupied people living in destroyed buildings. maybe if we offer them different memories and environments, they might eventually develop a different sense of identity…)

but when you say

“Indeed. But isn’t this exactly the tragedy of this conflict, that we have two groups of peoples - “Israeli” and “Palestinian” - who have so identified themselves with earth and stones, and with “cultural memories”, that these things have become more important to them than the rights of others to live a peaceful life”

in response to m.k., your language becomes almost offensive: not only you seem to mix “lebanese” and “palestinian” in exactly what we are trying to avoid - the simplification of identity into say, “arabs” - but brushing aside “these things” is an affront to the children and the elderly crushed and burnt to death by a war machine they have no relation to.

I did not want this to transform into a political discussion, that is why i have been not writing anything in the last weeks as i am too furious with the world letting israel destroy my country so blatantly - but i beg you to stop and ask yourself how relevant is it really to the mother who lost her home and her child yesterday if “everything changes” and a “vixen with a litter of beautiful cubs” will eventually come to live in her place!!?

anyway, forgive me if i sound too emotional, i don’t mean to get personal.

i also suggest this article in relation to this discussion, where i also mention the zakar/zakira link:
THERAPEUTIC URBANISM?
http://www.111101.net/Writings/index.php?http://www.111101.net/Writings/Articles/arida_stanton_01.php

/ayssar 02/08/2006

Dear ayssar, your anger is understandable and I don’t take your comments at all personally. But I would like to respond to them, because the very events you draw our attention to illustrate exactly why I have a ‘pathological’ aversion to the conflation of memory and identity.

It was indeed a simplification on my part to make a distinction between ‘israeli’ and ‘palestinian’ in the way that I did, but at that time I didn’t want to try to make a bigger or more complex point. But maybe, though, now is the time to widen the discussion in exactly this way.

You talk about the destruction of ‘my country’, and I appreciate your identification with the beautiful land you and your ancestors inhabited, now so senselessly assaulted and destroyed (again). But if we can step back from the passion for a moment - always a difficult proposition - we have a good example here of some of the problems of identity and memory. ‘Lebanon’ is only a recent invention - as a ‘country’ it is the product of the post 1918 partition of the Ottoman empire, French colonial ambition and, most importantly, Maronite self-assertion. One part of a population - a part whose chauvinistic ‘identity’ had led to many previous abuses of the Muslim, Armenian, Orthodox, Druze and Jewish members of the community - invented this myth of Lebabon as a self-serving proposition, just as much as European Jewish settlers invented the myth of Eretz Israel. This community’s historic links with France, and the accident of fate that put the Ottoman provinces of Syria into the hands of the French, gave what was then a Maronite majority the opportunity to realize it. And just as this assertion of ‘memory’ and ‘identity’ is generally considered to have been the root cause of the tragedy of Lebanon’s meltdown in the 1980s, so it also seems to have precipitated a hardening of false - made up - idenitities and memories in other communities, most notably in the ghastly manifestations of Hezbollah. In response to fear and trauma, previously tolerant and inclusive communities have created pasts for themselves - selectively choosing from and distoring their ‘memories’, in an attempt to rationalize and justify indefensible acts of intolerance and persecution in the present.

And it seems to me that all of this highlights a very simple but hugely important principle. Societies that are able to tolerate diversity, multi-culturalism, change, movement, exchange - as the old Ottoman Empire did to some extent (up to the nineteenth century in places like Bosnia-Herzogovina, Palestine, Iraq and Egypt), and as Britain does to some extent now - are by and large prosperous, creative, peaceful and pleasant places to live. [In the Ottoman Empire, it was the pervasive influence of the Sufi brotherhoods through all strata of the society - and of the radical inclusivity of the ideas of mystics like Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Al-Arabi - that allowed for this to happen. And in modern Britain, it is arguably the result of the eclecticism of the post 1960s period, and the widespread absorption of ideas from the world’s more tolerant and inclusive philosophies.] But the human fabric of tolerance and change in multi-cultural societies is extremely fragile, and there are latent forces for intolerance that lurk within. It seems to me that these forces are always, always, always linked with an overemphasis on identity and memory: that there is a direct and inescapable link between the importance any given group of people places on the myths about what makes it different, and the degree to which its members project their fears and insecurity onto ‘outsiders’.

Connecting this point back to the theme of this site, I should also add that I see a third ingredient in the collapsing of diversity into sectarianism, alongside ‘memory’ and ‘identity’, and that is ‘design’. Meaning here the crafting of words and images to express an idea of ‘us’. One only needs to think of the iconography of Hezbollah - the endless posters of grey bearded and white turbaned Mullahs, exhorting young men and women to ‘martyrdom operations’. But the paradigm example is, of course, the role of designers and communicators in creating the hideous toxic nationalisms of the twentieth century - Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism etc. Design and communication are the tools - as is well understood by commerce and industry - of manufacturing and manipulating a sense of ‘identity’, of giving an apparently coherent narrative to what is in reality an incoherent, arbitrary and disconnected set of attributes, of creating a past (my former boss, Wally Olins, described this as ‘The Invention of Tradition’, following the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm). On the one hand ‘brand’, on the other ‘cultural identity’. At best, trivial and cynical, at worst toxic and malignant.

Lastly, you may not see any relevance in the vixen and her cubs to the mother who has lost her child and her home, but I see a powerful connection. We have to remember that however important our sense of ‘identity’ and ‘memory’ seems to us at a particular time, in the end nobody really cares. The horrendous conflict that caused my predecessors in this apartment to crouch in those Anderson shelters hoping to survive another night of bombing - just as people are doing in the Lebanon now - is long since over. I sit and talk with German friends in my kitchen whose fathers and grandfathers could have been dropping those bombs and none of us care about the absurd ideology and identification that caused them to be doing so - it’s not an issue, not a barrier between us, because it was never based on anything real.

Life goes on without the need to believe we are this or that, that such-and-such or so-and-so has made us who we are. Foxes live without memory or identity, seeking only to bring up their cubs in peace and safety, living in the moment. Why shouldn’t we?

james

/james souttar 09/08/2006

Am I really the only reader of this blog that is baffled by James’s position? can someone else please join this discussion so that we can have a proper argument about the subjects here?
—

Dear James,

Allow me to say that for someone so averse to identity, your language is full of stereotyping that verges on the racist, even though i am sure you don’t mean it. But it might not be your fault that your experience has not given you the opportunity to interact with particular groups of people, so I hope you will one day be able to see through the beards, as many of us have learnt to.

To start with your last question: we need memory and identity because evolution seems to have built us that way, it must have had particularly important survival value, and if anything, we wouldn’t have developed any civilisation if we hadn’t developed social identification, the storage and exchange of memories and ideas, etc… we need memory and identity because it is part of what makes us human, what differenciates us from foxes, the same as laughter and emotions and pleasure do.

Now in this post, I AM tempted to get more personal to test weither I’m talking to an alien lifeform here or some advanced Artificial Intelligence that passes the Turing test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test)… you might not care James and I am sad for you if human empathy is beyond you, but nevermind vixens, even hyenas care for their children.

I refuse to accept such a bleak generalisation, but if James is right that in the “west” the whole concept of “attachment to the soil” that is so dear to people of the middle east is simply beyond comprehension, then perhaps this is precisely the point of contention between a world that still imagines it can “nation build” by uprooting and moving whole populations around as if they were bacteria in a petri dish, and a world that recognises the value of every single human being on this planet. Attachment to the soil and to particular places might not be as urgent in certain (ex)nomadic societies in the arabic gulf for example, or for many of us who like the tag “citizen of the world”, but it still drives the more urbanised societies that live on the eastern mediterranean, and who have been there for thousands of years, working the land, building, rebuilding, and raising their children in a spectacularly rewarding environment.

And it is in the name of the dead children that i will take the opportunity to clarify a few historical facts in this post, even if unapologetically defending Hizballah, which as a religious party stands diametrically opposite of my own politics, but which has proven worthy of respect against all appearances. Perhaps this will help explain my point that in the world of diventity things are not merely black or white, it isn’t a matter of “with us or against us”.

First of all, you can’t compare an event such as WWII that lasted 5 intense but short years with the multi-generational conflict that has been systematically eroding the very fabric of human life and humanity itself in Palestine without any lull since the creation of Israel in 1948! and I don’t know if it was a typo, but I wasn’t criticising you for not making the distinction between “Israeli” and “Palestinian”, but between “Lebanese” and “Palestinian” - BOTH these distinctions should be made to understand the reality of right and wrong of middle eastern politics - while in parallel no distinction should ever be made in terms of humans rights of these different populations, precisely as it is the key to reaching a real and fair solution to the problems involved.

Nevermind the “iran attack dry-run” the US Army wanted the Israeli army to try out for them, now a widely accepted version of events (see Seymour Hirsh’s report in the New Yorker) - What has caused the latest events in Lebanon is not the conflation of identity and memory, but primarily a crossing of interests between the (so-called “existential”) need of one nation built on religious suprematist dogma to destroy the only example of dynamic multi-confessional living left in the middle-east, and those of an apocalyptic junta of racist neocons itching to hear “the birthpangs of a new middle-east”. Add to that a collection of totalitarian arabic regimes (mostly Sunni leaders with restless islamic populations) needing to crush the rising myth of popular power represented by both Shia Hizbollah and a generally secular grassroots uprising (the “Cedar Revolution” last year). I’ll spare you the secondary causes.

Your knowledge of the region seems slightly better than average, so kudos for that, but you do need to brush up on it - Lebanon in its current boundaries may be a recent creation, but Lebanon as a political entity is far from being a recent “invention” as you call it. Egypt and Lebanon are in fact the two only middle-eastern countries that had a political embryo predating the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. in the case of Lebanon, the Maronite and Druze emirate and moutasarrifiyah in Mount-Lebanon predated the declaration of independance of the USA itself by a couple of centuries, and enjoyed relatively independent self-rule throughout most of the Ottoman period. Yes of course it was the greedy insistance of the maronites at the collapse of the empire to extend “Le Grand Liban” to include Beirut and Tripoli for their ports, and the Beqaa Valley for its agricultural plains, that eventually turned their demographic advantage upside down by the mid 1960s, exacerbating political issues that only exploded when confronted to the geopolitical context (the Palestininan-Israeli conflict, the Cold War, and the Syrian desires of annexation). We won’t even go into totalitarian regimes’ need to disperse what had become the haven for all dissentors and intellectuals of the Arab world in the decades leading to 1975, precisely thanks to its pluri-confessional democratic system. You can also look up Ben Gourion’s Plan for Lebanon (published in 1979 in his memoirs), prepared in the early 1950s and very well put into practice in the 1980s, which precisely called for destabilising and dismantling this pluri-cultural nation into religious, military, and conflicting sub-countries copied on the Israeli Spartan model.

I lived through that and it has shaped who I am in different periods as a teenager, with oscillating politics and identification depending on where in the country I happened to be during any particular episode. But since the war ended (in 1990), and as I watched populations mixing again, I saw how much my own personal mixed identity helped me to make sense of it all, and helped bridge between many of my friends who had had purely mono-cultural experiences (I am from a mixed family and have spent the 15 years of war moving around the divided country). Today this same mixed identity, culture, and education helps me bridge between two worlds, western and middle-eastern, without the patronising generalisations of neo-orientalists.

Here’s another personal myth/identity bit for you… perhaps the fact that my great-grandfather was a mystic Sufi follower of Ibn Arabi you so correctly credit with some of the most tolerant thought even in today’s standards (way more advanced if you ask me), even though he lead an armed resistance (against the French colonisation of Algeria), and that my father who fought beside the maronite militias in the 70s married my mother a sunni muslim pacifist has affected my vision of the world, but i do feel my personal sense of identity is more mixed than mixed up, and it has allowed me to see richness where others might see conflict, yet -

even if I was a faraway Chinese peasant (who would have better excuses of saying “nobody cares” than you, at least it is not his country that has created this mess in the middle-east in the first place, in reference to both the cutting out of the Ottoman Empire into artificial nations and the creation of that biggest artifice of all, Israel - and before I am taxed of anti-semitism, let me say that not only am I ethnically semitic by definition, but that my criticism of the concept of an expansionist zionist Eretz Israel is only natural considering the circumstances, while in fact, even though it is even younger than that “invented Lebanon”, I completely support Israel’s right to exist in peace just as much as any other multi-generational country, not less and definetely not more), even if i was Chinese peasant, my blood would still curl seeing a racist, sadistic, fundamentalist, religious army destroying a proudly many-cultural nation that has proven itself particularly robust in spite of its own turbulent past and its internal contradictions, while armchair politicians like you sit in their not-so-comfy grey appartments and lecture us about “grey bearded mullahs” and the irrelevance of destroyed homes.

I am not a fan of religion, and even less fundamentalism, but tell me what is it exactly that you know about Hizbollah that allows you to talk about its “ghastly manifestations”? has Hizbollah ever attacked you or your culture or your country or anyone you know or has it ever really created a threat to you personally? I thought you were beyond identity - what or who exactly are you identifying with here in your criticism of a local resistance movement that has never attacked anyone beyond its own soil except an invading country that is officially at war with Lebanon and has occupied it for decades? So does someone become a terrorist only once his rockets cost less than £1 million pounds a piece? and what is this racist stigmatising of “martyrdom operations” just because they are made by muslims (fact: Hizballah has never attacked civilians through suicide bombings and has only ever used suicide attacks on Israeli military targets inside Lebanon, and hasn’t needed to use suicide attacks since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000. Their only crime is to have destroyed the aura of invincibility of the mighty Tzahal - twice now it seems…)

Turn on the Discovery Channel and you’ll see fascinating british-made documentaries on the mythical heroism of Japanese Kamikaze fighter-pilots of WWII. Are clean shaven asians dying for the cause far enough and exotic enough for you not to be afraid?

I am as suspicious as anyone of mullahs with kalashnikovs, but at least I have a reason, they exist in my country and share my government, duly and democratically elected I must add by more than third of the population. The difference is, I have watched them operate from close-by, and I must say that they have won my respect and appreciation for their honesty, non-corruption, and incredibly involved social welfare toward their constituencies - they have even proved to be more open minded than the most pseudo-secular of christian leaders when it comes to living in a pluri-confessional society (and now, since the “ceasefire”, having understood the importance that this is a war of “place destruction”, they have beaten the government yet again by pledging hundreds of millions to rebuild the destroyed homes, and are paying each displaced family a full year’s rent plus a stipend to buy furniture! - the problems that this rises can be discussed elsewhere -).

In particular, it is important to note the relative ethics (if one can talk of ethics in war) with which they fought this last war, as they only shelled civilian targets in Israel in retaliation after the Israeli airforce attacked and killed dozens of civilians in Lebanon. up to then, they had responded to the attack on the civilian infrastructure (the airport and bridges) by shelling military outposts only (all historically documented facts if you do some research of the timeline of this latest round of destruction). The figures speak for themselves, the official toll says Lebanon: 1200 dead civilians, 35 dead army personel (who weren’t involved in the fighting), and 70 admitted (probably double that in reality) Hizbollah members. Israel: 20 dead civilians, 134 soldiers dead (again, admitted, probably double that in reality). In such a context, all civilian life should be considered equal and differenciated from military. (military is military, designed to kill or die, particularly if it is that of an occupying attacking force).

Of course if I could I would erase every last fundamentalist off the face of the earth, to help save humanity from falling back into barbarism - and right now, the beardless fundamentalists running the world’s most destructive nations (think Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al, not to forget Olmert, Dubya and Tony) seem to me much more dangerous than a bunch of local bearded ones with home-made rockets.

If you read french, I invite you to read Percy Kemp’s fantastically spot-on article in Liberation (http://www.liberation.fr/opinions/rebonds/194593.FR.php) comparing speeches by Hassan Nasrallah (Hizbollah’s leader) and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert during the latest war, where the author is basically expressing how destabilising it is for him, a white frenchman, to watch a bearded, turbaned arab mullah speak calmly and rationally and put through one dialectic point after another, while a white guy in a suit and a tie screams biblical quotes and flimsy rhetoric at a cheering audience (a fact also picked up by at least one israeli member of Knesset in Haaretz)…

…

We might have seemingly drifted off-topic now, but whichever way you look at it the call I am trying to share is that we should, as humans, not only care about who we are, but also who the others are, and why they are. one cannot argue with personal memory and experience, but one can accept the fact that it is as real to “them” as it is un-real to “us”. It is not enough to brush aside the more personal shapers of identity and celebrate a fake mosaicism born simply from the proximity of different cultural identities - even if we call it “multi-culturalism” it is little less than social juxtaposition exacerbated in London by the variety of cultural dresses one sees in the street (compare to Paris for example, where people from different cultures seem to generally adopt western garbs, and which is not much less “multi-cultural”. There is much talk about “integration” of immigrants in France vs in the UK, but we are yet to see “home-bred terrorists” attempt to blow up Air France planes or the metro…)

I repeat my call for an understanding of complex interactive identities that continuously embrace the density of diversity without melting it into a grey backdrop of indifference;

I call for the embracing of memory, passion, emotion, and all kinds of subjective affects that shape our decisions and actions to be respected and celebrated as integral to our most basic and only shared identity: being Human;

I call for the rejection of the culture of fear that we are being pushed into, and for the rejection of indifference as the only way out of this fear;

I call for an awakening of the heart and of the soul, and of enlightened intuition beyond basic instinct;

I call for resistance, against fear, against resignation, and most of all against numbness.

/ayssar 24/08/2006

Dear Ayssar, I don’t think we have drifted off topic at all - but if we have, I for one have found it a most interesting digression and thank you very much for your last, fascinating message. If we are the only ones participating here, I’m sorry, because the things we are discussing have huge relevance for all contemporary design disciplines - particularly (but not exclusively) the area of communications design that this blog is devoted to.

I should start by saying that if my language sounds ‘full of stereotyping’, it is not because I have any desire to paint the world in stereotypes (I don’t), but because I see this as exactly the result of the attempt to define ‘cultural identity’. If I say ‘Israeli’, I’m only echoing the myths and stereotypes presented by Zionist propaganda. In fact, I have experienced Israelis - and Lebanese and Palestinians, for that matter - of many different kinds: Sephardic Jews from Aden to Morocco, some still speaking the ancient ‘Ladino’ language of the Spanish exiles, Eastern European Ashkenazim, Falashas, conservative former New Yorker Hasidim and socialist former Londoners, orthodox and reformed, converts and observing disbelievers. And there was no common denominator between them - they were not a ‘racist, sadistic, fundamentalist, religious army’, but a complex, diverse and often divided community. However, if we talk about Israeli ‘cultural identity’, we are dealing not with this celebration of difference but a series of reductive stereotypes (’looser’ or ‘tighter’, depending on who articulates them).

My problem with this kind of ‘identity’ is that it always empasizes distinctions - what supposedly makes people in any particular group different from others - as well as consistencies - what supposedly makes people in the group similar to each other. It also defines the group in terms of the past - in terms of precisely the ‘memories’ you talk about - which makes the whole concept of cultural identity essentially backward looking, and a tool of social conservatives. Furthermore these memories are always selected, distorted and edited - with greater or lesser contrivance - to suit the beliefs and agendas of the people who use them. And who does use them? Whether we’re considering John Major’s relatively benign ‘warm beer’ Englishness or Ariel Sharon’s militant Zionism, these are always instruments of social control - myths that are used to bring one’s own people into line with a defined set of values, as well as to shape the feelings and perceptions of others.

I have a particular interest in this area, because my own work as a designer and consultant these last twenty-five years has been in the area of ‘corporate branding’ - the creation and shaping of media stereotypes and ‘identities’ for organisations. This is an activity that has a consciously manipulative and reductive intent, even though it is mostly directed towards the hardly malevolent ends of increasing market share and ‘enhancing stakeholders perceptions’. But the deliberate processes through which this commercial activity is carried out can give us a fascinating insight into the much hazier, more chaotic and evolutionary processes that are involved in the shaping of ‘cultural identity’. Fundamentally, however, it remains a dangerous tool - the same objective of creating a simple, memorable ‘identity’ that puts the familiar Shell pecten on our neighbourhood filling station planted a swastika across most of Europe.

The tragedy of Hizbollah is precisely the hijacking of Shi’ite ‘identity’ by an Iranian created - and subsidized - brand. One that is chauvinistic, militant and extremist - in contrast to a community that used to be diverse, peaceable and tolerant. And in the cynical, manipulative way of resistance movements everywhere, Hizbollah have achieved the polarization and radicalization of this community by inviting reprisals upon them through deliberately belligerent acts. Reprisals that they now offer to make good, through the use of their patrons’ ‘generous’ funds. But the reality is not quite as open-handed as these highly publicised acts might seem - just like sectarians everywhere, the law is in the hands of those holding the kalashnikovs, and members of the community that don’t tow the party line run as much risk of the paramilitaries’ rough justice as the inhabitants of Belfast’s Falls or Shankill Roads.

And thus to come full circle back to your original point, density of diversity - ‘diventity’ - by no means necessarily means inclusion, pluralism and tolerance. It can simply mean the kind of patchwork of sectarianism that so many formerly diverse communities have collapsed into - in Ulster, Bosnia-Herzogovina, Lebanon or Afghanistan. In fact, we could almost say that the emergence - generally more by complicity than complexity - of strong ‘cultural identities’ is the kiss of death for multi-culturalism. Something else is needed instead, and I would suggest that this is a critical mass of people who are devoted - not just intellectually, but emotionally and behaviourally too - to the active pursuit of a personal and inter-personal harmony. Sufism provided this in the Ottoman Empire, making it a magnificent example of multi-culturalism - a harmony that began to break down with the emergence of modern nationalism, and the growing influence of politics over spirituality, in the nineteenth-century. In contemporary Britain - and, most particularly in London - I would contend that the leavening factor is the almost opposite trend of the growth of a multiplicity of post-political ‘New Age’ beliefs and practices, that has been happening since the late 1960s.

/james souttar 29/08/2006

Hello James and Ayssar,

I am aware I am jumping in the discussion rather late, but I believe some controversial points you wrote were interesting and my contribution could maybe help disentangle some issues.

I am going to comment on some issues you’ve discussed, and then try to open up a slightly different perspective on the region’s history and current challenges: A bit of historical overview on nationalisms and the territorial bond and their relevance to the current situation.

James, your description of the recent history of the region and its Sykes-Picot partitioning are more or less accurate, and it is true that Lebanon as a country is somehow an artificial entity. I am not going to go into discussing whether it is right or wrong to have a feeling of belonging towards this specific artificial entity, I am more interested in seeing what makes territorial bond the most important social bond in human history, a bond that permitted the development of the different kinds of civilization we live in today.

It is only in recent history, and especially after the disastrous WWII, that the concept of nationalism took this negative right-wing meaning in the West. The European experience of the 14 to 19th century saw a long prosperous development period that the continent witnessed due to the rise of ‘open’ nationalism, before what I am going to call the ‘ghetto’ nationalisms (Nazism, fascism, etc) nearly swept it all away. We also must not forget that the European Community today only exists thanks to the prevalence of the ‘open’ nationalism over the ‘ghetto’ one.

As you rightly pointed out, open societies tend to be very fragile and forces of ‘ghettoization’ are always latent, waiting for an occasion to take over. This is exactly why identity is so important: feeling the belonging to a specific set of civilizational values and struggling for them.
Throughout history, societies have had one main priority: security. And they thrived to achieve that through mainly two major historical experiments: the World/Open Society model and the Empire/Closed Society model.
This is where I strongly disagree with you James. You have given the Ottoman Empire as an example of openness and prosperity, while it was a ruthless barbarian imperial power that ‘locked’ the whole region. And if the region survived it was DESPITE the Ottoman rule and THANKS to its open society heritage that struggled to maintain itself against all odds. The Ottoman Empire and the Crusades before it invaded a region whose caravan networks made the Ancient World the most successful ‘secured’ World that survived prosperously for thousands of years, while the most glorious Empire couldn’t last few centuries. The essence of its security was not a military detachment for each caravan (can you imagine???), but rather that each city, each village, each farm felt they were concerned with the security of these routes because they were benefiting from them. While the roads of the Roman Empire, for example, needed constant military escorts and were continuously attacked. A contemporary example is the oil pipelines: they are constantly attacked because they are a disrupting violence to the territorial fabric, instead of being a convergence of interests (again on the territorial level).

The territorial bond, James, is not something exclusive: it’s the PREVALENCE of territorial bond over any other social bond that permitted the development of our current civilization. It permitted us to go beyond any ‘tribal’ bond (kin, religious, etc) towards a unifying bond that transcended ‘ghetto’ tendencies.
So Ayssar’s Diventity here only means that there could be and there is a unifying bond strong enough to hold a diversity of people: a set of beliefs in specific tolerance and common life values.
The ugly nationalisms you were talking about are but another ‘ghetto’ undercurrent resurfacing. It has nothing to do with the healthy territorial bond that is ‘open’ by nature. Territorial bond, sociologically, tends towards inclusion and openness, while ‘ghettoization’ is by nature expansionist and closed (ghettos do not lock themselves in and live quietly at peace with their neighbors as you might think, they naturally tend to see the “other” as the enemy, and accordingly become aggressive to protect what they think threatens their nature. Israel to my opinion is the perfect example.

Now, Nationalisms in the Arab world all started as leftist revolutionary movements intending at enlarging territorial bond, rather than setting Roman Empire style limes (liminal boundaries) that exhaustingly and constantly need to be protected against the ‘Others’ (understand barbarians). Note that the moment a breach was made to the limes, the ‘Empire’ collapsed. Why? Simply because the issue of ‘security’ was purely linked to military might. There was nothing else to hold the Empire: the limes fall, the Empire falls, and the ‘barbarians’ destroy all signs of civilizational development. The Imperial forces did exactly the opposite to what the middle-east societies where aspiring at: they ruthlessly disrupted the territorial fabric by imposing artificial ‘limes’, not only between the region and the outside world, but within the region itself. They started a process of fragmentation that continues today in Palestine, Iraq, and more recently Lebanon, and that is the main source of our troubles. This ‘ghetto’-oriented methodical process is extremely violent, mainly because it disrupts the territorial fabric, again. Our region DESPERATELY NEEDS IDENTITY and needs to remember ITS HISTORY if it wants to survive: identity, in our situation James, is not an option that we can discuss in ‘chic’ intellectual blogs, and educated circles: it is the main condition for our survival.
You were pointing out the diversity in the Israelis you met and the reductive stereotyping of the “Israeli’ label; well listen to that: nobody is reducing this diversity, the reference to ‘Israeli’ is a reference to a set of values AND ACTIONS that a diverse set of people chose as their unifying bond: THEY CHOSE (after all Israel is supposed to be a democracy that has regular elections and where most of the electoral body is active) a specific identity and they fully support (again electorally) ISRAELI POLICIES IN THE REGION. So when we talk about ‘Israeli”, we are merely using the identity they chose to have-in that case unfortunately to all of us (you included) they chose the ugly undercurrent: they chose intolerance to the “other”, ghettoization and aggression.

You pointed out to the intolerance that could resurface: well I can assure you that in this case it resurfaced big time, and that we need all the ‘open’ society memory we can lay our hands on fast.
Time is running, and we do not have the luxury of the ‘fox life’ option: we are being ‘erased’.

Now it may seem that middle-east people may need it more because the battle is on their territory and they are somehow on the front: big illusion.

‘Foxes live without memory or identity, seeking only to bring up their cubs in peace and safety, living in the moment’

War is coming to you my friend, and you will be swept away by the undercurrent if you have nothing to hold on. So the option of the fox life is not an option, if you don’t want to be -forgive me if I am tempted to borrow Bush’ expression- smoked out of your hole, as in Bush’ world, we are all gradually becoming ‘terrorists’.

So what’s it gonna be, James? What Identity will you join? The Open tolerant one of the Closed aggressive one?
And my advice to you is to do it quickly, and to hold on to it with your hands and teeth, because it may be your only chance to survive with your cubs in these unfortunate times.

Fourat

/Fourat Aschkar 02/09/2006

Dear Fourat, thank you for your stimulating input - at the point at which Ayssar and I feared we might just be talking to ourselves. I would like to pick up on some of your points - and provocative questions! - but with an eye to the overall themes of design and communication.

Let’s look first at this issue of the ‘territorial bond’. It is very evident in Britain (and, again, particularly in London) today that this has become so weak for many people as to be non-existent. And I would suggest to you that the very fact that so few of us feel a sense of historical connection with the place we inhabit is one of the most positive factors in encouraging a multi-cultural society. Indeed, if we look at those commmunities in the UK that do feel that the land ‘belongs’ to them - for instance, in ‘Middle England’ or amongst the few remaining white urban working-class communities - this is precisely where we see the most resistance to multi-culturalism. This diminishing of the territorial bond would seem to me to be a consequence of the dislocations of modern life - the frequent moves and consequent rootlessness of the British urban middle-classes, combined with a large influx of economic migrants. We are, in most respects, a ‘post-territorial’ society.

Interestingly, this is not that different from the conditions that prevailed at the heart of the Ottoman Empire - albeit for very different reasons. The Ottoman civil service was made up almost entirely from slaves - mostly from Christian provinces - brought to Istanbul as small children by the ‘devshirme’ (which one could describe as a people tax, I suppose). Their link with any territorial identity was broken, and a new identity was created for them as a curious kind of servile elite. Interestingly the corps of Janissaries to which they belonged was strongly affiliated to the Bektashi Sufi order, a liberal Shi’ite group (who drank wine and practised the full equality of the sexes), despite the fact that the Sultan held the position of the orthodox Sunni Caliph. The Sultan himself, of course, was - up until the beginnning of the nineteenth century, at least - the child of a slave mother (frequently, again, of Christian origin). And, in many case, it was the Sultan’s mother - the ‘Valide Hanim’ - who was the real powerbroker in the Empire.

Around this strangely composed Ottoman court, the capital was made up of a multitude of nationalities and religious groups - Greek, Armenian, Caucasian, Albanian, Kurdish, Tatar, Arab, Sephardic… even Italian (a ‘Turkified’ version of Italian being the language of Ottoman commerce and seafaring - the original ‘Lingua Franca’). Like the many communities that make up contemporary London, many of these peoples were remote from their territorial bases, and created cultural elites within each group that considered themselves ‘Ottoman’ (curiously, using the link with the ruling family as an identifier) in preference to identifying with their own kind. The Ottomans also encouraged refugees and exiles from persecution - Jews and Muslims from Spain and Portugal after the Reconquistada, Protestants from Bohemia and Transylvania during the Thirty Years War in Europe, political exiles from Poland in the eighteenth century (who were even given their own village of Polonetzköy, outside Istanbul).

So, the evidence from both Ottoman and British multi-culturalism would suggest that both severance of the territorial bond and the weakening of cultural identities were key components. But these are not enough by themselves - there also needs to be a set of values that is more attractive than those promoted by individual communities. For the Ottomans, these were undoubtedly those of the Sufis - tolerant, inclusive, cultured, liberal, humane. And we know that these were established from the top of the society to the bottom - from the Sultan himeself to the lowliest road-sweeper (the Sultan Suleyman, for instance, had no less than three Sufi advisers, whilst the guild of road-sweepers - in common with the other guilds - had its Sufi patron).

In contemporary Britain, we can see the development of a similar kind of mind-set. For me, this is clearly related to what seems to be a ‘growing out of’ politics. So, whereas in the sixties and seventies, strident political activism was a major factor in intellectual and cultural life, it hardly seems to exist in these places any more. In this country, by and large, we have come to recognise that the best that politics can achieve is government that values competence, fairness and opportunity - something that is basically rather unglamorous, even if important. Politics cannot change the world - it can simply make rather ordinary things work better. And there seems to be a growing consensus that real, radical transformation has to happen inside oneself - that one has to “become the change you want to see”. (Many years ago a friend who had onec been active in International Socialism but had given it up to become a Buddhist described it in these terms: “Marx believed conditions create consciousness - the Buddha taught precisely the opposite”. In this respect, the British are becoming more ‘Buddhist’ in their attitudes). We even seem to be recognising that political differences may not be the result of ‘false consciousness’ - as was asserted by the Old Left - but simply of temperaments that are ‘hard-wired’ into our brains: that the difference between someone whose inclinations are ‘progressive’ and someone whose instincts are ‘conservative’ may be in the genes, not the ideology.

[I should add here that the fate of ‘design’ (the ideology, rather than the practice) seems to be similar to that of politics. Twentieth century design also promoted the idea of social change from the outside-in, of making the world a better place through changing the ‘externals’. And unless designers can embrace the idea of renewal from the inside-out, it’s hard to see what kind of future it will have.]

Certainly in the case of the Ottoman Empire, it was the development of political consciousness that destroyed the delicate fabric of its multi-culturalism - beginning with the C19 nationalism of the ‘Young Turks’, which culminated so tragically in the Armenian genocide, the folly of entering WWI, the expulsion of the Anatolian Greeks and the utterly stupid repression of the Kurds. Likewise in the former Ottoman provinces it was politics and nationalism - the identification with sectarian brands - that destroyed the harmony that had prevailed for hundreds of years in the former Yugoslavia (and, indeed, the Balkans generally), Lebanon and Palestine, Iraq and Egypt. It left the region first in the hands of secular dictators - Attaturk, Nasser, Assad, Hussein, Tito - and later in the hands of religous extremists. All have used the myths of ‘memory’ and ‘identity’ as key elements in their toolkit.

Which leads me to your last question - ‘What Identity will you join’. Which for me is the crux of all of this discussion, and raises the point I have been circling around in all of my previous messages. I am not going to ‘join’ ANY identity, because I am suspicious of all ‘identities’ that are defined and offered by others, that are adopted externally as dressing for the personality. ‘I AM’ - I don’t have any need for any more ‘identity’ than this. And nor does anybody, actually - the ‘need’ for identity is neurotic, an infantile (in the psychological sense) desire for reassurance and safety and belonging, a regression. It’s a wish for ‘parents’ to tell us what to think, what to believe, how to act - to be on the back seat of the car, with someone else driving. Who we really are, on the other hand, wells out from the simple fact of our existence, our uniqueness, our ‘being in the moment’. It lets us look at others on the ‘eye level’ - as peers and equals, as similarly unique human beings - without any artificial differences or similarities.

And it is this, in my opinion, that the peoples of the Middle East desperately need right now. Ironically, it is there, implicit, in all the great semitic religious expressions, waiting to be rediscovered. In the first instance, it requires nothing more demanding than putting aside what one believes oneself to be - what one has been taught by one’s elders and betters - and relating to others simply as one human being to another. And there is nothing else to ‘hold onto’ except this - what we consider to be the ‘building blocks’ of identity are fragile, transient, insubstantial things, vulnerable as much to our own doubts and lack of conviction as to the onslaught of others. By contrast, I would suggest that to ‘know oneself’ - to be grounded in the wellspring of one’s authentic being, alive in the moment - is the only real security there is.

/james souttar 04/09/2006

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