Christian Bale on a rant. I really wish people weren’t so obnoxious to each other, life is too short for this kind of unpleasantness.
What struck me about this audio is just how muddled Bale’s accent has become. At times he comes over all South London. At other times he has an American drawl, complete with the idioms. He was probably so red faced, he couldn’t hear it properly.
I quite understand how peoples who share an language can evolve different accents over time (e.g. Antipodean, Southern African, North American, The British Isles). But I’m never quite sure how it can happen within a single person? When I lived in Scotland, it was easy to pick up the idoms (“a wee baby” &ct), but not the accent.
Other people afflicted with Muddled Trans-Atlantic Accent Syndrome include Julie Andrews, Anthony Hopkins, and Madonna. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has it too. Who is your favourite?
Tag: Multiculturalism (Page 7 of 19)
The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu gave a speech to the Smith Institute last week, ‘Regaining a Big Vision for Britain’, as part of their ‘Reinvigourating Communities’ lecture series. Its available to view via Policy Review TV:
He outlines the Big Vision of the Beveridge Report, and the influence of William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury of the time, in the development of the Welfare State. The Big Vision, Sentamu argues, was built on a distinctly Christian ethic and conception of humanity. Now we need a new vision, which leaders must articulate, so that we can all once again pull together to realise the social and economic changes required to mend our fractured society.
Archbishop Sentamu clearly believes that the Church of England has a role to play in articulating, and providing moral leadership, on this new Big Vision for Britain. But I see some pitfalls along the way. First, he acknowledges that communities and families are the blocks around which a society should be built. But the Church’s conception of these building blocks is very traditional: Communities built around a parish, a place of worship, or at least a shared location; and families in the hetrosexual, nuclear sense. It comes into friction with the non-traditional versions of these same building blocks: communities built online, say, or homosexual couples. Its not clear to me how Anglicanism can claim particular expertise in building these new groups into a grand coalition that will move us forward.
The Archbishop also repeats his analysis of how the policy of multiculturalism went too far in favour of minority cultures, at the expense of any respect for the idea of Britishness (this is something I have taken issue with him before). He asserts that if we want integration, there must be a strong, broad, primary culture available to integrate with! This is fine, but I do wish that the Church of England would apply this insight when managing its own multicultural issues, as found within the world-wide Anglican Communion. The British approach is supposed to be a core principle of the Communion, yet many of its constituent Churches have, in recent years, seemed to reject that approach. If the Church of England cannot provide a common moral vision for the world-wide Anglican Community, why should we suppose it would be any better at providing one for 21st Century Britain, diverse, modern and glorious?
Meanwhile…
… over at the Secular Right blog, Heather MacDonald writes on the phenomenon of “Drive-Thru Religion”, and how the rise of secularism does not seem to have resulted in a country-wide a descent into Sodom and Gomorrah:
Only a quarter of Americans attend church weekly. Yet moral chaos has not broken out; society has grown more prosperous as secularism expands. Empathy with others, an awareness of the necessity of the Golden Rule, survive the radical transformation of religious belief, it turns out. Perhaps because a moral sense is the foundation, not the result, of religious ethics.
(Via teh Dish). Applied to the British case, perhaps the values of the Anglican Church have arisen due to the values of British culture, and not vice-versa. Given that the Church of England grew out of the reformation, and the freedom of non-conformism was a hard fought for political fight, that analysis seems more accurate to me. Its not a binary argument of course, but it seems to me that Archbishop Sentamu is on uneven ground if he is claiming the great social achievements of the past century to be a product of the Anglican approach, even if William Temple did have an hand in the Beveridge Report.
Time to bang this particular drum, again, methinks. Here is Barack Obama campaigning in Virginia, taking on the divisive rhetoric of McCain-Palin:
This is the real war that is being fought, on every longitude around the globe. Between those who seek to divide and rule, and those who seek to unite us in our shared humanity.
Where does multiculturalism sit in all this? Perhaps it is a means to this end. Multicultural policies are essential in a diverse society to allow everyone to flourish. And done right, they can also foster better understanding of our shared humanity. From my conversation with the Dalai Lama:
“Actually, my rough impression is that in the UK, ‘multiculturalism’ means a society where there are people from different backgrounds: Multi culture, multi racial, multi religion. In this sort of society, it means we need harmony, respect each other, and recognise others rights.”
The Dalai Lama suggests that most cultures and the morals that underpin them are based on religious faith, so to talk of multiculturalism is really to talk of ‘multi-religious faith’… What is important is finding the common ground between religions and therefore cultures, identifying those common morals that can unite us all. Multiculturalism, then, is not so much about celebrating differences, but emphasising our similarities.
It also occurs to me that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its talk of freedom of religion &tc, is a multicultural document (that’s a good excuse to link to this animated version). The paradox is, that by accepting and allowing that people want to live in different ways, we recognise a shared humanity. (I’ll try to put this more eloquently some other time).
A second point in Stan Rosenthal’s article:
South Ossetia has its own culture and language, and is essentially part of North Ossetia, which is inside Russia and very much orientated towards Russia in a way that the South has never been orienated towards Georgia.
Isn’t this always the way? Like a set of Russian dolls, if you try and explore the ethnic make-up of any country, there always seems to be smaller, more well defined ethnic sub-groups within that country. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is the fractal. The outline of the shape (or country), looks quite simple from far away. However, as soon as you zoom in, you notice ever more levels of detail and complexity.
I said earlier that Georgia’s rulers have created problems for which their people are now paying. In South Ossetia, it looks as if they have been suppressing a minority for a political win. Again: Isn’t this always the way? Accentuating differences, exploiting divisions, demonising the Other. Multiculturalism can guard against this, by saying “here is someone different from you, and yet they have value,” although stressing the similarities between cultures may, paradoxically, be the best way to convince people of that value.
Clay Shirky’s comments, about how technology might actually entrench cultural differences, is worth recollecting here. In this era of digital communications, it is possible to travel globally but live locally, maintaining your cultural roots and relationships with ever more efficiency. Technology could mean that ever smaller cultural groups remain viable, when in the past they would have been assimilated. This, in turn, could see an increase in conflict, as these smaller groups assert their right to self-determination.
I’m looking forward to reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody
Particularly interesting are his musings on the future of the Nation State. Since the internet allows people to associate with people in geographically disparate areas, and to associate on ever more specific grounds. If people live and love online, then other types of ‘polity’ might become more politically relevant.
This is a really crazy moment in the history of the Nation State… The pull outwards into smaller, more ethnically coherent groups is actually overcoming what was, in the 20th Century, and argument for economies of scale in Nation States. Whether that is good or bad , I don’t know, it would be such a profound shift that it would transcend good and bad, it would be a new world order.
He was talking specifically with regards to ethnicity – Tiawanese students reading the Taipei newspaper online while studying in New York, say, or Indian immigrants watching nothing but Zee-TV on Sky. I haven’t thought about the implications for multiculturalism in this, but if true, it seems an essentially insular development, where the chance of exposure to new and different thoughts is reduced. In this sense, it is similar to the social gerrymandering that is occurring in the USA, with families moving homes and states in order to surround themselves with like-minded people.
However, I wonder whether the most profound shift might come when people transcend ethnicity as well as geography. With people spending so much time, and actually making money in worlds like Second Life, or building large guilds of allegiences in Eve Online or WarCraft, perhaps those bonds could be the basis for some other kind of nation or ‘polity’ with real power and relevance.