If the Ancestry post was your first contact with the Alarmingly Bushy Family Tree Problem, then I hope it didn’t upset you. I worry about these things sometimes because the ABFTP can leave you feeling rootless. It needn’t, logically, but when has logic ever mattered to human beings?
Feeling rootless or otherwise doesn’t really bother me particularly, but for some people, especially those claiming to be Scottish it seems, it’s a big deal.
It is significant that the genealogy TV show is called Who do you think you are? Some ancestry researchers get a shock when they discover the skeletons in the tree because it affects their sense of identity. Good heavens, I'm part Belgian and Jeremy Kyle is my fifth cousin! But they’d get an even bigger shock if they contemplated the Alarmingly Bushy Family Tree Problem instead - not dissimilar, in fact, to the effect of the Total Perspective Vortex torture device in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here”.
So now that you have the truth about ancestry, be judicious about where and when you reveal it, especially if Scots of a nervous disposition are in the room. Remember: along with great power comes great responsibility. Mind how you go, folks.
Showing posts with label delusions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label delusions. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Monday, October 26, 2009
'British Muslims' and the Demographic Delusion
Before 2001 there were a lot of brown-skinned people of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan extraction living in Britain. The primary objections of Nick Griffin and his equivalents to these people were that they stole our jobs and took over our cornershops and they didn’t support the cricket team. After 9/11 these people disappeared and were replaced by a sinister organisation called ‘The British Muslims’, dedicated to undermining the national way of life through religious fanaticism and rapid breeding. On Question Time last week Nick Griffin referred to some passages in the Koran which prove this beyond all reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, throughout the blogosphere spread theoretical assertions beginning: “Of course, 95% of them just want to get on with their lives, but… (insert some concern based on the idea that British Muslims fundamentally see things differently to the rest of us.)”
These latter theories are not the ravings of racists or bigots, just people who’ve read grand sweeping books about clashes of civilisations and news stories about rioting brown Frenchmen and, of course, lurid highlights from the Koran. It’s easy to slip into it, we all do it all the time. But the problematic words in these theories are “them” and “us”, which are meant to refer to British Muslims and “Westerners” respectively. I don’t mean ‘problematic’ in some drippy we-are-the-world sense; rather, that when it comes to practically applying these categories to actual people it turns out to be devilish difficult to work out who should go into which.
Yesterday I had Sunday lunch with Mrs Brit and a coven of her pals who enjoy cooing over our baby. One of this coven has brown skin and the surname Mohammed. She would naturally, under Nick Griffin’s definition, be a secret menace to the rest of us at the table, who have pale or pale-ish skin and surnames like Nixon, Bishop and Whelan. But given that Ms Mohammed wears jeans and drinks booze and has never in her life left the shores of Britain except on holiday and, as far I’m aware, has never set foot in a mosque during our acquaintance except for the same reasons that I’ve set foot in churches (marriages and deaths basically), then one of our non-bigoted Theorists above would, I guess, classify her as a “westernised Muslim”; one of the 95% who “just want to get on with their lives.”
At which point the full arbitrariness – and indeed, strangeness – of placing Ms Mohammed in the category “British Muslim” becomes vividly clear. To plonk her on a continuum of British Muslims, with 'westernised' moderates at the one end and Abu 'Hook' Hamza at the other, seems about as useful and meaningful as putting me in a category of British Roman Catholics – a continuum with the Great Lapsed (like me) at one end and Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor at the other – and then, while allowing that I am a greatly “westernised” or “Anglicised” Catholic, attempting to make broad assumptions about my views and behaviour by quoting from the Nicene Creed.*
We have a glaring category error on our hands here. Putting Ms Mohammed in a bundle with Abu Hamza - however vast we allow the gap on the continuum - makes as much sense as placing her Sunday lunch pals in a category with Timothy McVeigh. A more meaningful categorisation would of course put McVeigh and Hamza together in the section “Inadequate Male Nutjob”, and while no doubt Al Qaeda will turn to Inadequate Male Nutjobs with brown skin and surnames like Mohammed as the first port of call for recruitment, the crucial thing is that they be Inadequate Male Nutjobs, even if they have white skin and a name like Nicky Reilly.
And what about if Ms Mohammed hooks up with a man with a surname like Smith and they have a light-brown coloured baby? Will this sprog be a Muslimised Westerner or a Very Westernised Muslim? Or perhaps just another mongrel Briton, there’s an awful lot of us about.
The upshot of all this is to expose the futile and arbitrary business of attempting to impose large, simplistic categories onto what is, in reality, a chaotic mass of British humanity. It’s not dissimilar to the Family Tree Problem; not completely invalid or untrue, just a vanishingly narrow way of looking at complexity; presenting a version of reality simplified to the point of utter meaninglessness. In fact, the "British Muslim" categorisation is even more irrelevant in identifying real people than is calling yourself “Scottish” on the basis that one out of your thousand great-great-etc-grandfathers was called McDougall, since identity is such a malleable and subjective concept, whereas at least it is objectively true that he was called McDougall. If, for example, you think that being a Manchester United or Liverpool fan is a relatively trivial element in dividing up identities compared to nominal religion, then you really don’t know anything about actual Britons.
Beware grand sweeping theories about clashes of civilizations or anything else: they’re all, ultimately, wrong. Demographics is a game for computer nerds.
“Anti-human” is another overused pejorative, but I reckon that starting with a category and then attempting to force people into it is a pretty good example of anti-humanness. Mind you, we can’t help categorising, mostly benignly. I was thinking back to my university days. Of course we were right-on students so we shunned skin colour as an identifier, but we still divvied people up by musical taste, clothes etc, or by Arts (trendy), Science (geeks) or Medical students (tossers). Naturally some of those trendies, geeks and tossers were brown-skinned, but remember, this was before 2001 so none of them were British Muslims. That lot hadn’t been invented yet.
*In fact, since “Muslim” covers so many different groups and sects, you could equally substitute Murphy-O’Connor for any bugger who's been baptised, from the craziest creationist Christian to virtual agnostics like Dr Rowan Williams, and the analogy stands.
Meanwhile, throughout the blogosphere spread theoretical assertions beginning: “Of course, 95% of them just want to get on with their lives, but… (insert some concern based on the idea that British Muslims fundamentally see things differently to the rest of us.)”
These latter theories are not the ravings of racists or bigots, just people who’ve read grand sweeping books about clashes of civilisations and news stories about rioting brown Frenchmen and, of course, lurid highlights from the Koran. It’s easy to slip into it, we all do it all the time. But the problematic words in these theories are “them” and “us”, which are meant to refer to British Muslims and “Westerners” respectively. I don’t mean ‘problematic’ in some drippy we-are-the-world sense; rather, that when it comes to practically applying these categories to actual people it turns out to be devilish difficult to work out who should go into which.
Yesterday I had Sunday lunch with Mrs Brit and a coven of her pals who enjoy cooing over our baby. One of this coven has brown skin and the surname Mohammed. She would naturally, under Nick Griffin’s definition, be a secret menace to the rest of us at the table, who have pale or pale-ish skin and surnames like Nixon, Bishop and Whelan. But given that Ms Mohammed wears jeans and drinks booze and has never in her life left the shores of Britain except on holiday and, as far I’m aware, has never set foot in a mosque during our acquaintance except for the same reasons that I’ve set foot in churches (marriages and deaths basically), then one of our non-bigoted Theorists above would, I guess, classify her as a “westernised Muslim”; one of the 95% who “just want to get on with their lives.”
At which point the full arbitrariness – and indeed, strangeness – of placing Ms Mohammed in the category “British Muslim” becomes vividly clear. To plonk her on a continuum of British Muslims, with 'westernised' moderates at the one end and Abu 'Hook' Hamza at the other, seems about as useful and meaningful as putting me in a category of British Roman Catholics – a continuum with the Great Lapsed (like me) at one end and Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor at the other – and then, while allowing that I am a greatly “westernised” or “Anglicised” Catholic, attempting to make broad assumptions about my views and behaviour by quoting from the Nicene Creed.*
We have a glaring category error on our hands here. Putting Ms Mohammed in a bundle with Abu Hamza - however vast we allow the gap on the continuum - makes as much sense as placing her Sunday lunch pals in a category with Timothy McVeigh. A more meaningful categorisation would of course put McVeigh and Hamza together in the section “Inadequate Male Nutjob”, and while no doubt Al Qaeda will turn to Inadequate Male Nutjobs with brown skin and surnames like Mohammed as the first port of call for recruitment, the crucial thing is that they be Inadequate Male Nutjobs, even if they have white skin and a name like Nicky Reilly.
And what about if Ms Mohammed hooks up with a man with a surname like Smith and they have a light-brown coloured baby? Will this sprog be a Muslimised Westerner or a Very Westernised Muslim? Or perhaps just another mongrel Briton, there’s an awful lot of us about.
The upshot of all this is to expose the futile and arbitrary business of attempting to impose large, simplistic categories onto what is, in reality, a chaotic mass of British humanity. It’s not dissimilar to the Family Tree Problem; not completely invalid or untrue, just a vanishingly narrow way of looking at complexity; presenting a version of reality simplified to the point of utter meaninglessness. In fact, the "British Muslim" categorisation is even more irrelevant in identifying real people than is calling yourself “Scottish” on the basis that one out of your thousand great-great-etc-grandfathers was called McDougall, since identity is such a malleable and subjective concept, whereas at least it is objectively true that he was called McDougall. If, for example, you think that being a Manchester United or Liverpool fan is a relatively trivial element in dividing up identities compared to nominal religion, then you really don’t know anything about actual Britons.
Beware grand sweeping theories about clashes of civilizations or anything else: they’re all, ultimately, wrong. Demographics is a game for computer nerds.
“Anti-human” is another overused pejorative, but I reckon that starting with a category and then attempting to force people into it is a pretty good example of anti-humanness. Mind you, we can’t help categorising, mostly benignly. I was thinking back to my university days. Of course we were right-on students so we shunned skin colour as an identifier, but we still divvied people up by musical taste, clothes etc, or by Arts (trendy), Science (geeks) or Medical students (tossers). Naturally some of those trendies, geeks and tossers were brown-skinned, but remember, this was before 2001 so none of them were British Muslims. That lot hadn’t been invented yet.
*In fact, since “Muslim” covers so many different groups and sects, you could equally substitute Murphy-O’Connor for any bugger who's been baptised, from the craziest creationist Christian to virtual agnostics like Dr Rowan Williams, and the analogy stands.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Ancestry is largely a matter of personal choice
Over here, Quiet Reckoning responds thoughtfully and fully to a comment I made in my post about Rabid Scottish Nationalists. Amongst other things, he says:
Look at the numbers: Four and a half million Scots in Scotland, twenty million Scots in America, and twenty five million Scots spread across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a smattering of other former British Colonies. Only ten percent of Scottish people live in Scotland
Which I suppose is arguable, but relies on a pretty generous definition of ‘Scottish’ (far more generous, for example, than the definition of ‘Irish’ which Eire relies on for stuffing its team with mediocre English footballers.)
Genealogy, particularly as it exists for Britons and Americans, is a strange old business. I use the word ‘business’ advisedly, since selling tourists their family trees, tartans etc is a pretty sizeable industry. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘scam’ because by and large it is literally true that the average American tourist can trace a line back to some Jock or other. But it does depend on a very selective way of looking at things.
I’ve discussed this before on blogs somewhere: let’s call it the 'Multiplying Ancestor Problem'. People who are interested in their genealogy tend to think of their line of descent as being much narrower than is actually the case; they have no notion of just how ‘bushy’ family trees are. Consider the exponential multiplication of great-grandparents as you go back through the generations. You have four grandparents and 8 great-grandparents and 16 great-great-grandparents and so on. This doubling builds things up alarmingly: you only need to go back a couple of hundred years and there are 1,024 of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents pottering about the four corners of the planet. All of them are equal genetic contributors to you (though some are the same person, which is why this growth doesn’t go back forever but instead all human beings share a Most Recent Common Ancestor), but of course when studying genealogy people tend to focus on just the one with the surname they happened to inherit (or, if something interesting like minor royalty can be readily found a few generations back, on that one instead), as if he or she was more ‘significant’ to the 'making of you' than were the others.
Given the sheer volume of ‘direct’ ancestors, it is no wonder that genealogy-sellers can always come up with an interesting/famous/Royal/Scottish person in your family history. They’re not lying: it’s just that every other Tom, Dick and Harry has him in their family history too. All humans are far more complicatedly interconnected than is generally realised (I remember some supremacist plonker on TV claiming that he ‘only had white Anglo-Saxon ancestors’. Of course it turned out on examination that just a couple of generations back there were all sorts of gypsies and other undesirables in his blood, and indeed, that if we were to expel from Britain everyone except those who ‘only had white Anglo-Saxon ancestors’ the population of these Isles would be reduced to precisely zero.)
I don’t dismiss identity-by-genealogy as complete nonsense. If being historically ‘Scottish’ is important to you and your sense of identity, sure, why not choose it? But it is a choice.
There’s a pertinent example of this in my own family. My paternal uncle and his wife, both English, moved to Edinburgh when my cousin was an infant. My cousin, now in his thirties, therefore has a strong Scottish accent, supports the Scottish rugby team, wore a kilt for his wedding etc. Despite being precisely as ‘English’ as me from an immediate genetic perspective, he feels patriotically Scottish. He wants to be, and is, Scottish. Which is fine. But it has led him deep into the confused web of wishful genealogy. He and I are Nixons, and there was, according to some old historical documents or other, a bunch of notorious Nixons back in the legendary/mythical clan-days (border-raiding cattle-thieves or some such). It has therefore become his life’s work to try and connect himself, via an unbroken ancestral line, with these notorious Nixons and therefore to prove that he is, by genetics as well as upbringing, a bona fide Scot.
He hasn’t managed to do it yet (which doesn’t stop him claiming them of course). But there is no doubt whatsoever that, if he followed any line in his hugely bushy ancestry, he could get to Scotland – perhaps a Campbell or McDonald or both – somehow and soonish. All of us Britons, Aussies and most Yanks could, since if you define it generously enough, we’re all ‘Scottish’. We’re also all English, Norman, Roman and ultimately (and this last applies to literally everyone on the planet, even Norwegians and the Welsh) we’re all ‘African’.
So anyway, going back to Quiet Reckoning: of course it’s his right to choose to identify himself as a particular kind of Jock, to feel pride in that and so on. No problem there at all, it’s a valid option. But, for myself, I can’t see the point in getting angry about any of this genealogical Anglo-Scottish stuff, when the ‘side’ you’re on is such an arbitrary matter.
Look at the numbers: Four and a half million Scots in Scotland, twenty million Scots in America, and twenty five million Scots spread across Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and a smattering of other former British Colonies. Only ten percent of Scottish people live in Scotland
Which I suppose is arguable, but relies on a pretty generous definition of ‘Scottish’ (far more generous, for example, than the definition of ‘Irish’ which Eire relies on for stuffing its team with mediocre English footballers.)
Genealogy, particularly as it exists for Britons and Americans, is a strange old business. I use the word ‘business’ advisedly, since selling tourists their family trees, tartans etc is a pretty sizeable industry. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘scam’ because by and large it is literally true that the average American tourist can trace a line back to some Jock or other. But it does depend on a very selective way of looking at things.
I’ve discussed this before on blogs somewhere: let’s call it the 'Multiplying Ancestor Problem'. People who are interested in their genealogy tend to think of their line of descent as being much narrower than is actually the case; they have no notion of just how ‘bushy’ family trees are. Consider the exponential multiplication of great-grandparents as you go back through the generations. You have four grandparents and 8 great-grandparents and 16 great-great-grandparents and so on. This doubling builds things up alarmingly: you only need to go back a couple of hundred years and there are 1,024 of your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents pottering about the four corners of the planet. All of them are equal genetic contributors to you (though some are the same person, which is why this growth doesn’t go back forever but instead all human beings share a Most Recent Common Ancestor), but of course when studying genealogy people tend to focus on just the one with the surname they happened to inherit (or, if something interesting like minor royalty can be readily found a few generations back, on that one instead), as if he or she was more ‘significant’ to the 'making of you' than were the others.
Given the sheer volume of ‘direct’ ancestors, it is no wonder that genealogy-sellers can always come up with an interesting/famous/Royal/Scottish person in your family history. They’re not lying: it’s just that every other Tom, Dick and Harry has him in their family history too. All humans are far more complicatedly interconnected than is generally realised (I remember some supremacist plonker on TV claiming that he ‘only had white Anglo-Saxon ancestors’. Of course it turned out on examination that just a couple of generations back there were all sorts of gypsies and other undesirables in his blood, and indeed, that if we were to expel from Britain everyone except those who ‘only had white Anglo-Saxon ancestors’ the population of these Isles would be reduced to precisely zero.)
I don’t dismiss identity-by-genealogy as complete nonsense. If being historically ‘Scottish’ is important to you and your sense of identity, sure, why not choose it? But it is a choice.
There’s a pertinent example of this in my own family. My paternal uncle and his wife, both English, moved to Edinburgh when my cousin was an infant. My cousin, now in his thirties, therefore has a strong Scottish accent, supports the Scottish rugby team, wore a kilt for his wedding etc. Despite being precisely as ‘English’ as me from an immediate genetic perspective, he feels patriotically Scottish. He wants to be, and is, Scottish. Which is fine. But it has led him deep into the confused web of wishful genealogy. He and I are Nixons, and there was, according to some old historical documents or other, a bunch of notorious Nixons back in the legendary/mythical clan-days (border-raiding cattle-thieves or some such). It has therefore become his life’s work to try and connect himself, via an unbroken ancestral line, with these notorious Nixons and therefore to prove that he is, by genetics as well as upbringing, a bona fide Scot.
He hasn’t managed to do it yet (which doesn’t stop him claiming them of course). But there is no doubt whatsoever that, if he followed any line in his hugely bushy ancestry, he could get to Scotland – perhaps a Campbell or McDonald or both – somehow and soonish. All of us Britons, Aussies and most Yanks could, since if you define it generously enough, we’re all ‘Scottish’. We’re also all English, Norman, Roman and ultimately (and this last applies to literally everyone on the planet, even Norwegians and the Welsh) we’re all ‘African’.
So anyway, going back to Quiet Reckoning: of course it’s his right to choose to identify himself as a particular kind of Jock, to feel pride in that and so on. No problem there at all, it’s a valid option. But, for myself, I can’t see the point in getting angry about any of this genealogical Anglo-Scottish stuff, when the ‘side’ you’re on is such an arbitrary matter.
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