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Sep. 19th, 2003 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liadnanSteven Runciman's account of the schism between what are these days colloquially termed the (Roman) Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, The Eastern Schism, is an admirably lucid piece of serious history, and radically changed academic understanding of the breach by re-evaluating the way in which contemporaries understood what was happening when it was first published in 1955. But Runciman, as in all his work, cannot resist some dry asides. Writing of the arrival of the First Crusade at the walls of Constantinopole he observes: "There are idealists who fondly believe that if only the peoples of the world could get to know each other there would be peace and goodwill forever. This is a tragic delusion." Later, writing of the intellectual debates of the time over the nature of the Trinity and hence whether the filioque clause was an appropriate addition to the creed, he makes a similar comment: "Among the unhappy delusions of mankind is the notion that a dispute can be settled by a debate. The contrary is true; for neither side will admit defeat but instead will assemble more and more arguments to confound its opponents." Sadly, I suspect he is largely correct on both points. Leaving the second aside for another day, I find myself thinking of the human desire to belong to small, closed off groups.
When Constantinopole fell to the Turks in May 1453 and began the long stage of its history which would end with it becoming Istanbul, it is generally believed, by those whose business it is to have beliefs about such things, that its decline from the days when it was perhaps the largest city in the world, certainly far and away by an order of magnitude the largest city known to medieval Europeans, had been so great that it had become quite literally a collection of villages, separated by quite large areas of, probably, ruins. It's for this reason that, it is argued, large areas of the City survived unscathed.
The last two hundred years of Byzantium are, viewed with the romantic vision of six hundred years hindsight, a tragic sight: imagining the remnants of one of the world's great civilisations hiding out in the ruins the Venetians had left them in 1204. This is almost certainly a mistaken, or at least one-sided view, for those last two hundred years saw something of a glorious renaissance, which is, indeed thought to have fuelled The Renaissance after the fall of Constantinopole and the flight west. But the question is, is that image of a great city turning out to be nothing more, really, than a collection of villages, something unique to a civilisation in decline? Don't we really do the same all the time in our great metropolises (metropoli, surely?)
My friend Alan, a man with a few blind spots in that he believes Karl Marx was a wise man and is proud to call himself a south Londoner but nevertheless frequently a wise man, has often argued that the London in which we both live is nothing more than a collection of villages, and in this I agree with him wholeheartedly. Not simply in the strict legal sense, though it is true that "London" doesn't really exist: the greater London conurbation is nothing more than a number of boroughs and two cities, Westminster and the City of London itself, that happen to be next to one another, notwithstanding the various ties that bind them together like the M25, the Metropolitan Police District, the Greater London Authority and London Transport. Admittedly those sound like a lot but in truth none of them have a great deal of power.
But far more important than things like the boroughs is the sense of more local community, or rather, identity, within London. First, one has the great divide of the quarters and, most important of all, the river. North London, obviously, is the true London. Unless you're an Eastender. And those strange people south of the river have some odd delusions about their importance. People even claim that there is life west of the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, though I've yet to be convinced.
But that's only the start. It's one thing to be a North Londoner, but you'll cut little ice with someone with a low N or NW postcode if you live in N17. W1 and WC1 are their own little worlds of people strange enough to want to live right in the centre. There are those who live in the City itself, a tiny group but it matters to them that they live in the City. Docklands is a very different place from Whitechapel. And then those who live in SW1-3 are obviously far too rich for their own good and can be safely ignored. And all of that's just the tip of the iceberg. Islington is different from (and vastly inferior to, obviously,) Primrose Hill, for instance.
I exaggerate enormously, of course. But local awareness is very much there, and I haven't even started on the ethnic minority communities: the Jewish areas, of varying degrees of orthodoxy, and the various enclaves of Greeks in North London, the Bangladeshi communities of East London, and so on and so forth.
It's often said that no one knows their neighbour in London, and to a degree this is true. Less so where I live, in Primrose Hill, but this is a residential area with Local Shops for Local People and unusually clearly defined boundaries (railway, park, main road). But you don't need to actually know people to identify with the area.
I don't know if this is true of other major cities but I suspect so. New York isn't just New York, it's Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the other bits which I forget at present, but beyond that, there's a difference, so far as I can tell from two visits and vast amounts of television, between living, say, in the Village and in the Upper East Side.
Some years ago, the BBC tried to launch a new soap opera. Like the much-maligned but, in my view rather good El Dorado it seems, so far as I know, to have sunk without trace, though a suspiciously similar soap appears, I vaguely noticed, to run on Channel Five in the afternoons. The different thing about it was that instead of focusing on a geographical area it concentrated on an extended and geographically dispersed family. The idea was, I presume, that for many people geography is irrelevant within certain limits these days, and that blood remains the tie that binds. There's a certain amount of truth in that, but speaking for myself, and love my fairly close family as I do, they aren't a daily part of my life. Incidentally, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that DNA research seemed to be indicating that at least to the last generation people in various parts of the British Isles moved around even less than had been assumed.. something about 95 percent or so of local residents showing descent from people buried in the area well over 1500 years before.. but I may have got that slightly confused, the evidence is presumably limited at present and frankly I can't be arsed to google, so I shall leave that thought where it lies.
Again, I remember reading something about sociological research on modern urban "tribes". That is certainly true. The clique, my closest friends, live all over London and various other parts of England, but are a very defined group (born from university but still surviving as a group many years later) who socialise together all the time. The culture mailing list, or at least its London arm, has emerged from the confines of existing purely on the internet to become another group that socialises regularly. And, there are other things I'm vaguely a part of, as a friend of many of the DrunkBisexuals for instance.
I mentioned the Culture list above, and if this long and incoherently rambling post is headed anywhere it's there. In the short time since the internet became a major social phenomenon it has spawned a quite ridiculous number of usenet groups, email lists, IRC channels and all the rest. Something I have noticed about this is the number of people who, as they've grown older and busier and more new people have piled into the places that used to be theirs have moved to smaller, tighter places where they can spend their limited time with the old inhabitants of those places. I'm not sure but I suspect that this is not purely a result of the great expansion of the internet and the opening up of those old forums (fora, surely?), but that it's something that would have happened anyway and will continue to happen as each mini-generation of university students suddenly realises that in their shiny new job they can't spend all their time reading alt.fan.whatever, and they don't really want to meet all these new people anyway, they want to continue to talk to the people they got to know in the previous three years.
Livejournal, and blogs (can we please think up a more elegant term?) in general are somwhat different of course. Certainly, already defined groups of people have all set themselves up with journals, and all read each others (and there's the communities thing, but I'm not getting into that, largely because I haven't got into that and find that in general they don't work wildly well as discussion fora). Some of the clique have livejournals and we're all listed as each others friends, similarly with a fair chunk of the Culture. But in fact that isn't really the way it works, because those groups blur as people who don't know one another at all find themselves reading and commenting on the same entry in a third friend's journal. Will that last? Well, speaking for myself, I'm much less likely to add people who have added me, and to add new people, than I was when I started here a year or so ago. For one thing, 70 odd journals (including Calvin and Hobbes, Snoopy, and Sam Pepys, to be fair) are more than enough to occupy the time I have. From where I sit, I have my community here, my listed friends, and I'm happy with that.
At the same time, livejournal has become something of a substitute for other things. I don't have the time any longer to be sending emails to the Culture every five minutes on every subject under the sun, not as a self-emplyed lawyer, and writing one post a day here means that at least those who became my friends there can keep an eye on what's become of me with far less effort on my part, the more so if they have journals of their own.
If there's any point to this long and shambolic post, it's probably this. Humans are indeed social animals (which is closer to what the man meant than the usual translation of "political animals"). But they will always, in the main, seek to limit the size of their total group. Partly because of time constaints, there's little to be said for having 946 friends if you don't have time to do more than send each of them an email every year. But also, I think, because it's human to want to keep the size of your universe to something you can comprehend. Again, I think people want to belong to things, and it's no good belonging unless there are other people who don't belong (in this respect it doesn't matter whether the Thing is the Catholic church, the bridge club, the London Symphony Chorus or the local branch of the KKK). I don't know that this is a good thing or a bad thing, I suspect it's just a Thing. And that, to try desparately to take myself back to somewhere near where I began, is why London gets factionalised. The faceless hordes of some 8 million people one sees pouring through the interchange between the Piccadilly and Northen Lines at King's Cross, or the Victoria and Circle lines at Victoria, are just too many to deal with, think on it too long and most minds will start to bend under the strain. London's too big. Better to say, and think, that you live in Primrose Hill. Or even Lambeth.
(Also, no one really knows how London fits together unless they've been so poor they had to do without public transport and walk everywhere, as I was for a while: otherwise I find people think of London as a series of concentric circles around tube stations, with little idea of what happens in the gaps save in their own locality, but that's another story and this digression has spoiled the End I so desparately sought for this post...)
When Constantinopole fell to the Turks in May 1453 and began the long stage of its history which would end with it becoming Istanbul, it is generally believed, by those whose business it is to have beliefs about such things, that its decline from the days when it was perhaps the largest city in the world, certainly far and away by an order of magnitude the largest city known to medieval Europeans, had been so great that it had become quite literally a collection of villages, separated by quite large areas of, probably, ruins. It's for this reason that, it is argued, large areas of the City survived unscathed.
The last two hundred years of Byzantium are, viewed with the romantic vision of six hundred years hindsight, a tragic sight: imagining the remnants of one of the world's great civilisations hiding out in the ruins the Venetians had left them in 1204. This is almost certainly a mistaken, or at least one-sided view, for those last two hundred years saw something of a glorious renaissance, which is, indeed thought to have fuelled The Renaissance after the fall of Constantinopole and the flight west. But the question is, is that image of a great city turning out to be nothing more, really, than a collection of villages, something unique to a civilisation in decline? Don't we really do the same all the time in our great metropolises (metropoli, surely?)
My friend Alan, a man with a few blind spots in that he believes Karl Marx was a wise man and is proud to call himself a south Londoner but nevertheless frequently a wise man, has often argued that the London in which we both live is nothing more than a collection of villages, and in this I agree with him wholeheartedly. Not simply in the strict legal sense, though it is true that "London" doesn't really exist: the greater London conurbation is nothing more than a number of boroughs and two cities, Westminster and the City of London itself, that happen to be next to one another, notwithstanding the various ties that bind them together like the M25, the Metropolitan Police District, the Greater London Authority and London Transport. Admittedly those sound like a lot but in truth none of them have a great deal of power.
But far more important than things like the boroughs is the sense of more local community, or rather, identity, within London. First, one has the great divide of the quarters and, most important of all, the river. North London, obviously, is the true London. Unless you're an Eastender. And those strange people south of the river have some odd delusions about their importance. People even claim that there is life west of the Shepherd's Bush roundabout, though I've yet to be convinced.
But that's only the start. It's one thing to be a North Londoner, but you'll cut little ice with someone with a low N or NW postcode if you live in N17. W1 and WC1 are their own little worlds of people strange enough to want to live right in the centre. There are those who live in the City itself, a tiny group but it matters to them that they live in the City. Docklands is a very different place from Whitechapel. And then those who live in SW1-3 are obviously far too rich for their own good and can be safely ignored. And all of that's just the tip of the iceberg. Islington is different from (and vastly inferior to, obviously,) Primrose Hill, for instance.
I exaggerate enormously, of course. But local awareness is very much there, and I haven't even started on the ethnic minority communities: the Jewish areas, of varying degrees of orthodoxy, and the various enclaves of Greeks in North London, the Bangladeshi communities of East London, and so on and so forth.
It's often said that no one knows their neighbour in London, and to a degree this is true. Less so where I live, in Primrose Hill, but this is a residential area with Local Shops for Local People and unusually clearly defined boundaries (railway, park, main road). But you don't need to actually know people to identify with the area.
I don't know if this is true of other major cities but I suspect so. New York isn't just New York, it's Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the other bits which I forget at present, but beyond that, there's a difference, so far as I can tell from two visits and vast amounts of television, between living, say, in the Village and in the Upper East Side.
Some years ago, the BBC tried to launch a new soap opera. Like the much-maligned but, in my view rather good El Dorado it seems, so far as I know, to have sunk without trace, though a suspiciously similar soap appears, I vaguely noticed, to run on Channel Five in the afternoons. The different thing about it was that instead of focusing on a geographical area it concentrated on an extended and geographically dispersed family. The idea was, I presume, that for many people geography is irrelevant within certain limits these days, and that blood remains the tie that binds. There's a certain amount of truth in that, but speaking for myself, and love my fairly close family as I do, they aren't a daily part of my life. Incidentally, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that DNA research seemed to be indicating that at least to the last generation people in various parts of the British Isles moved around even less than had been assumed.. something about 95 percent or so of local residents showing descent from people buried in the area well over 1500 years before.. but I may have got that slightly confused, the evidence is presumably limited at present and frankly I can't be arsed to google, so I shall leave that thought where it lies.
Again, I remember reading something about sociological research on modern urban "tribes". That is certainly true. The clique, my closest friends, live all over London and various other parts of England, but are a very defined group (born from university but still surviving as a group many years later) who socialise together all the time. The culture mailing list, or at least its London arm, has emerged from the confines of existing purely on the internet to become another group that socialises regularly. And, there are other things I'm vaguely a part of, as a friend of many of the DrunkBisexuals for instance.
I mentioned the Culture list above, and if this long and incoherently rambling post is headed anywhere it's there. In the short time since the internet became a major social phenomenon it has spawned a quite ridiculous number of usenet groups, email lists, IRC channels and all the rest. Something I have noticed about this is the number of people who, as they've grown older and busier and more new people have piled into the places that used to be theirs have moved to smaller, tighter places where they can spend their limited time with the old inhabitants of those places. I'm not sure but I suspect that this is not purely a result of the great expansion of the internet and the opening up of those old forums (fora, surely?), but that it's something that would have happened anyway and will continue to happen as each mini-generation of university students suddenly realises that in their shiny new job they can't spend all their time reading alt.fan.whatever, and they don't really want to meet all these new people anyway, they want to continue to talk to the people they got to know in the previous three years.
Livejournal, and blogs (can we please think up a more elegant term?) in general are somwhat different of course. Certainly, already defined groups of people have all set themselves up with journals, and all read each others (and there's the communities thing, but I'm not getting into that, largely because I haven't got into that and find that in general they don't work wildly well as discussion fora). Some of the clique have livejournals and we're all listed as each others friends, similarly with a fair chunk of the Culture. But in fact that isn't really the way it works, because those groups blur as people who don't know one another at all find themselves reading and commenting on the same entry in a third friend's journal. Will that last? Well, speaking for myself, I'm much less likely to add people who have added me, and to add new people, than I was when I started here a year or so ago. For one thing, 70 odd journals (including Calvin and Hobbes, Snoopy, and Sam Pepys, to be fair) are more than enough to occupy the time I have. From where I sit, I have my community here, my listed friends, and I'm happy with that.
At the same time, livejournal has become something of a substitute for other things. I don't have the time any longer to be sending emails to the Culture every five minutes on every subject under the sun, not as a self-emplyed lawyer, and writing one post a day here means that at least those who became my friends there can keep an eye on what's become of me with far less effort on my part, the more so if they have journals of their own.
If there's any point to this long and shambolic post, it's probably this. Humans are indeed social animals (which is closer to what the man meant than the usual translation of "political animals"). But they will always, in the main, seek to limit the size of their total group. Partly because of time constaints, there's little to be said for having 946 friends if you don't have time to do more than send each of them an email every year. But also, I think, because it's human to want to keep the size of your universe to something you can comprehend. Again, I think people want to belong to things, and it's no good belonging unless there are other people who don't belong (in this respect it doesn't matter whether the Thing is the Catholic church, the bridge club, the London Symphony Chorus or the local branch of the KKK). I don't know that this is a good thing or a bad thing, I suspect it's just a Thing. And that, to try desparately to take myself back to somewhere near where I began, is why London gets factionalised. The faceless hordes of some 8 million people one sees pouring through the interchange between the Piccadilly and Northen Lines at King's Cross, or the Victoria and Circle lines at Victoria, are just too many to deal with, think on it too long and most minds will start to bend under the strain. London's too big. Better to say, and think, that you live in Primrose Hill. Or even Lambeth.
(Also, no one really knows how London fits together unless they've been so poor they had to do without public transport and walk everywhere, as I was for a while: otherwise I find people think of London as a series of concentric circles around tube stations, with little idea of what happens in the gaps save in their own locality, but that's another story and this digression has spoiled the End I so desparately sought for this post...)
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 02:08 am (UTC)We've been having some discussions recently about cliquiness (sp?) and what it consists of. Not wanting to add too many new people to one's social group is often seen as cliquey and elitist, when in fact it is - as you point out - simply a need to limit one's friends to a manageable amount.
On another point, I definitely do feel London as a community, even if I don't know any of my neighbours. I'm unusual in that I live within a community (prison warders) that I'm not part of, which is fine with me because I have three other major communities I have created myself (partners; drunkbisexuals; clique) which take up all my time. I suppose I have to count my LJ friends as a fourth community with overlaps to the other three.
I can't seem to get my thoughts coherently down on screen atthe moment, may pick this up again later when my thinking processes have improved.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 02:54 am (UTC)Much of what you say chimes precisely with my experience and supposition; from the partial sublimation from the culture towards LJ (which suits me a lot better for precisely the reasons you outline) to the need for belonging. What you say about Primrose Hill/London also translates directly to The Park/Nottingham as well (though on a smaller scale obviously).
Which really leaves only one question; who are the DrunkBisexuals, and how does one gain access to this group? I want in, dammit ;-)
no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 05:15 am (UTC)the human desire to belong to small, closed off groups....
Date: 2003-09-19 03:16 am (UTC)For that matter, I don't quite understand this notion of it being no good belonging unless there are other people who don't belong. As far as I can make out, what matters is that you feel like you belong somewhere [that is a rare enough feeling as it is]. How do the others enter the equation? About the only area in which I can see the 'not belonging' of others being pertinent is the intensely personal romantic/sexual relationship. Provided one believes in monogamy, of course.
As far as identification with a place is concerned, I always get claustrophobic if I think in terms smaller than a subcontinent [forget DLF instead of Gurgaon, I tend to just say 'India' when people ask me where I am from, even here in India]. However I have long been aware that this is an unusual reaction. :)
Of course, I agree with the bits about sublimation from culture to lj, for basically the same reasons. Even if one overlooks the fact that friends don't come by easily, there are only so many people one can share oneself with. At least on any meaningful level. Otherwise, one might as well take out daily ads in the newspaper....
Moving on to Runicman's observation on the tragic delusions of idealists, I don't quite agree. I do think that more knowledge *would* help in establishing peace. Not so much because of a magical flowering of good will but simply because groups would know more about the 'no trespassing' areas of other groups. As individuals, we are vey used to discovering and treading carefully around the sensitive issues for our friends and family. As groups, we haven't quite learnt how to do that.
Re: the human desire to belong to small, closed off groups....
Date: 2003-09-19 05:16 am (UTC)Unfortunately I don't have time to defend my own substantial arguments right now but I shall send a proper response Sunday.
Re: the human desire to belong to small, closed off groups....
Date: 2003-09-24 05:55 am (UTC)I do think the notion of "not-belonging" is important to the identity of any group... I can't quite put into words why. I think Matt has written something about this but I can't find it.
As for the other, I think in academic discourse and political debate he's dead right: I've seen it happen. Entrenched positions rarely change, and axioms are almost never abandoned (which is for instance why resolution of an abortion debate is almost impossible because at root people have irreconcilable ideas about what a fetus is).
Re: the human desire to belong to small, closed off groups....
Date: 2003-09-26 05:58 am (UTC)About Runciman's statement: I wasn't disagreeing from that perspective. I have seen positions entrenching, wrt Kashmir, for instance. However, I think that there *is* a manoeuvring space between opposing camps and the same is usually hard to discover until the positions get entrenched.
First, one has to let people be pig-headed about their differences and then, when the fatigue levels get high, one just need to look for a way to negotiate between the groups. Works much better than expecting people to like, respect and care for each other. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 03:40 am (UTC)And one of history's great tragic Might-Have-Beens - the possible wedding of Imperial Princess Eirene to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto, in the 11th century. But then he died.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 05:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 06:23 am (UTC)To take your example of the Culture list London faction, Lal started socialising within a couple of weeks of subscribing to the list, and that wasn't resented, and he quickly became one of the core. My sister has been along to a couple of nights out, admittedly always with me, and she didn't feel unwelcome or excluded. What would be unwelcome to the London faction, I imagine, would be if I brought along my sister and she brought along 25 of her friends who all wanted in to the London faction without joining the list, say. Basically, we don't want to be invaded, and we would like to have some kind of veto power - neither of them is necessarily the same as being "closed". Sure, a group could exercise its veto power to such an extent that they are "closed", but I suspect that that is rare.
Anyway, you're spot on with the reasons why we like small groups, I think. I might put a more charitable explanation on it than a desire to separate ourselves from those who don't belong: we only feel comfortable being ourselves in small groups who know us well, we are less likely to inadvertently offend or hurt people if we know them well, etc etc. But I'm blathering.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 06:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-19 12:34 pm (UTC)people on the busstop (the physical busstop, not the Culture server)
almost every day, and yet none of us ever talks to any of the
others...