Anti-Social Behaviour Disorder IT’S WORDPLAY  

Forget writing: until recently most humans couldn’t even see out of their faces. They were too busy having rickets or yanking loved ones from assembly line fires. Learning was a luxury.

When you read about Romans you’re reading Cicero, not Dave the Roman; when you hear about the British people it’s not from ‘people’ but learned and wealthy men who had about as much in common with the common man as an exploding sun.

After a while, working-class humans got book smarts enough to keep records of their own lives. This is social history. History otherwise (the practice of telling and teaching it) ignores the contribution of the working classes, the uneducated and… who else? Oh yeah, immigrants.

Of course, British students learn all about the derring-do of sticking swords in children (probably) but not about the migration of these people to the British Isles. Nor does it so much as doff its cap to the in-flow of non-white immigrants that’s been going on for at least five hundred years, thanks in all to the slave trade what white people did; presumably because the slave trade is bad, and Britain in history is resoundingly good, and by God that’s the way it’s going to stay.

The problem with this is it paints immigration as this event that happened within the last ten years, as opposed to forever, which does skew your average human’s idea of what it means to come from places. And it doesn’t half make some you really racist.

Sorry. No. Really. It’s good to come from a place!

Mongrel Horde

So now it’s been established that a nation’s ethnic makeup isn’t fixed, and the idea of national identity most certainly is, it’s worth asking the question of why it matters to come from a place when that place is mostly a figment of fallible (stupid) human imagination, and more importantly, why humans cling to it.

Change happens by definition. Between beginning this sentence and right now the world has changed. In fact, its survival is dependent on this ability for constant and confusing shifts, sometimes in line with human sensibilities but most of the time not. When shorelines dip into the sea or cities laid waste by humans (who don’t seem to struggle with the notion of change en masse when it’s a good old genocide) then other humans are forced to move around, into new areas, where they become a minority – a minority that is, for the most part, excluded or abused under the pretence of protecting the status quo.

What sense is there in clinging to a national identity that’s three hundred years old? It was out of date two hundred and ninety-nine years ago. If you’re looking for advice, I’d say “keep up.”

Death Pun

Mary Beard’s recent ball-explodingly wonderful work SPQR analyses Roman attitudes not by revisiting the city’s origin story and studying the trickle-down effect of old moralising – in other words, using fictitious events to justify later attitudes – but by looking at the behaviour of the political elite and working backwards, to discover just how this story was engineered to fit contemporary attitudes towards rape, murder and war. Does coming from a place justify behaviour, or is it the other way around?

In the eighteenth century Carl “my middle name is ‘Caring'” Linnaeus presented his taxonomy of the different races in which the cunning Asian and greedy black were presented as fact; nowadays the fear of the other is couched in more emotional, harder to clarify terms like un-British, un-American, etc. Like a fast-acting yeast the fear of non-whites changing a known way of doing things with their foreignness spread to all kinds of minds. And not just the stupid ones.

Point is, all kinds of justification exists for holding certain views, and considering for a second just who wants you to have these opinions or beliefs, and why, it opens up all kinds of doors into rationality. The adage that history is written by the victors is not self-evident, but it should be; history is not an objective force like the wind but man-made, the product of strange creatures with agendas and prejudices and the need for stories and sense.

So what does it mean to have an idea of nationality, of national identity, of placing significance in a place of origin? The more you try to hold on to it the less relevant you become in a changing world; the more dated your ideas the more offensive new ones appear.

The geographical placement of countries is not an autonomous ranking system; when the world was created by one, none or all of the gods it wasn’t a case of putting the best humans in more temperate climates and sticking the scrag ends in inhospitable hellholes as punishment. The separate continents once clung together like Chinese students on a campus tour but, gradually, over time, they fractured and drifted apart like humans without Facebook. The oceans rose, further separating one tract of land from the next; small offshoots became windy, sodden islands, while vast central swathes endured heat upon heat and grew to be barren and infertile hellholes later, as a consequence of location. Eventually the oceans will rise and those little bits of land that currently mean so much to the people living on them will get smaller until they’re swallowed completely – either that or the sun will give out and the whole planet will just be really, profoundly in the shit – and then that’s it. No more nationality, no more coming from a place. Why not stay one step ahead and sneak a peek at who’s hanging that flag in front of you now?

Dockhead

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