Dawn

Dawn

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

Thoughts from Galicia, Spain: 19.6.19

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable. 
                  Christopher Howse: A Pilgrim in Spain
Spain 
  • The Times reports that this summer might just see the opening to the public of the wonderful Roman palace discovered by a tractor driver outside the village of Villar de Domingo García in  Castilla-La Mancha. Let's hope so.
  • Given Spain's famous regionalism/localism, it'd be too much to expect a standardised university entrance exam. But students are, unsurprisingly, demanding this. As of now, there are 17 different exams and regional differences can mean qualifying for a higher education place and for grants to cover tuition fees and towards the cost of living becomes a postcode lottery. I can't see it happening myself.
  • As readers will know, RENFE's site can be a trial.  Here's everything else you need to know about travelling by train in Spain, courtesy of The Local.
  • And here's what you need to know about the risk of being considered a reckless driver by some officious policeman. Also from The (prolific) Local.
  • If this is true, why do Spaniards - the nosiest folk on the planet - live longer than almost anyone else? . . . Noise pollution isn’t just annoying. It affects your health and takes years off your life. Perhaps it depends on the nature of the pollution. Shouting at each other isn't necessarily bad for you. Could be a useful vent . . .
  • I did know that only a few decades ago there there few people walking the Camino de Santiago but I didn't know that: Few modern pilgrimages antedate the 1957 publication of Irish Hispanist and traveler Walter Starkie's 'The Road to Santiago'.
  • The Madrid Pride festival is coming up. Inevitably, The Local tells you all about it here.
UK Politics/Brexit
  • Gurinder Chadha: British schoolchildren aren't even told there was an Empire, because well-meaning educationalists are frightened of discussing the subject. This is a point I've made more than once, in response to daft claims that Remainers are obsessed with recreating the British empire. See a relevant article below.
The EU
  • Ahead of last month’s European Parliament election, the Continent’s leaders and top-job candidates lamented at length the small number of women in high-ranking EU positions and promised to do better, pledging to work toward gender parity in the next Commission. Yet none of them even mentioned an equally great — if not worse — failure of representation: the dearth of people of color in Brussels’ corridors of power. More here.
Social Media 
  • The boss of Apple - Tim Cook - accuses tech giants like Facebook of creating a‘chaos factory’. He might be right.
The Way of the World 
  • A3-year-old girl has broken a $50,000 sculpture of an outsized fly at one of the world’s most famous contemporary art fairs. The work by Katharina Fritsch, a German artist best known in Britain for putting a giant blue rooster on a plinth in Trafalgar Square, appears to have been irreparably damaged by the child passing by it in a pram. I understand she's been offered the job of art critic for a prestigious magazine.
  • Insanity on steroids: Manchester United will offer Pogba up to £500,000-a-week in an attempt to keep him after an £90m opening bid from Real Madrid
Spanish
  • Word of the Day: Marco.
English
  • A news presenter on Sky TV last night spoke of a 'general consensus'. I wonder what a particular consensus is. One or two people, I guess.
Finally . . .
  1. I recall listening to a podcast a few years ao about refugees in Afghanistan aspiring to play in the cricket World Cup. It was heart-warming. And now they've made it. Albeit only to lose all 4 matches and to be thrashed by England yesterday. As you'd expect. But hats off to them. Afghanistan, I mean. Not England.
  2. Four common ways our brains trick us into making false assumptions:_
  1. 1. Stereotyping: oversimplified and misleading beliefs about the habits or characteristics of a certain group of people. ‘Only males play video games’ is a commonly encountered stereotype, but in fact nearly half of video gamers are women.

    2. Confirmation bias: favouring information that confirms preconceived beliefs. If someone believes that left-handed people are more creative, for example, every creative left-hander they encounter is proof, whereas they are likely to regard creative right-handers as exceptions that can be ignored.

    3. Halo effect: using a single physical or personality trait to form an overall judgment of that individual. So an attractive or well-dressed person is more likely to be perceived as honest, hardworking and trustworthy than someon¡'e less attractive or untidily dressed.

    4. Like me effect: the tendency to favour people who are most like us. So when recruiting we may prefer candidates with similar — rather than different — backgrounds, interests or education to our own.
THE ARTICLE

A mind blank about Empire leaves us bereft of a crucial part of our national story: Robert Tombs, author of The English and their History. [Cited here a few times].

We impoverish our children by failing to teach the history of the British Empire.

Our culture and society will be incomprehensible to those who know little about our imperial past

In two or three centuries time, if there are people on Earth who have not been washed away by the rising ocean, obliterated by a comet or reduced to a new stone age by volcanic eruptions, what might they remember about us, the peoples of these islands? It would be nice to think that they will still read Shakespeare. That at least as much of the world as today will have embraced a version of democratic government spawned by the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Surely one thing they will remember is that, roughly between 1700 and 1950, there was a system called the British Empire. It was short-lived by the standards of other empires such as the Chinese or the Roman. It was run on a shoestring, and was always a lot more ramshackle than it looked. Much of its functioning was based on bluff, plus more or less willing cooperation from those it rather nominally ruled.

Nevertheless, it ushered in, for better and worse, enormous social, political and economic change. It transformed the ways in which much of the planet was organised, creating eventually a host of independent states. Above all – in the words of one of its most acerbic critics, Edward Said – it “made the world one”. It engendered the first world language, upon which modernity is founded. In short, an immense episode that cannot be forgotten.

And yet we ourselves, barely a generation after the last major colony was relinquished, are seemingly forgetting it already. The film director Gurinder Chadha has complained that British children learn nothing about the empire at school. What is arguably the most important thing about us, which future ages will recall, and which has shaped what we are today, has become increasingly opaque to us. Instead of knowledge, we have only a few tawdry images and tendentious clichés.


Queen Victoria takes care of the correspondence along with her Indian servant, the Munshi, 1890
Does it matter? I think it does, just as it matters if an individual loses memory. It makes fundamental things about our culture and society incomprehensible. Ignorance does not free us from the burdens of the history: on the contrary, it makes it impossible for us to escape from them, because we are not conscious of what they are. Cultures, like individuals, have to live with and make sense of their past – the good, the bad and the indifferent.

The school system finds all this difficult. Though some history of the empire is taught, it is tiny – partly because very little history at all is allowed by the timetable, and Britain has an awful lot of history to cram in. Compared with staples like the Tudors and the Third Reich – manageable topics – the empire is a monster. Moreover, it is potentially controversial.

So saying that children should be taught more about the empire invites the questions how and what? To be honest, I hesitate. We should teach a basic chronological, geographical and factual outline – the sort of thing that some teachers and educationalists decry, but which children often like.

At a more advanced level – but which most children don’t do at all because they drop history at 14 – the cornucopia of themes is vast. Think of the experiences of women, of slaves, of tribal societies, of migrants, of colonial officials, of convicts, maharajas, sailors, soldiers, merchants, missionaries and farmers – people of a rainbow of ethnicities and creeds. The extraordinary lives led by so many are told in a library full of memoirs and letters. Then there is the art, the literature, the material culture.

When such a kaleidoscopic subject is too vast and complex to be taught in its entirety, it is liberating: teachers and pupils can pick and mix. The aim should be to whet their appetites for more: history can be a lifelong passion. What they must not do is ignore and forget.

I remember once that, after I’d given a talk on British history, a young woman came and told me wistfully that she did not see how she and her family of Kenyan-Asian origin could feel part of that history; to which I replied that their story was a crucial part of it. We celebrate our “diversity”. We are proud of our unique global connections. Both are legacies of the empire, which we need to remember, and parts of it even celebrate.

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