THE SYMPHONY OF SEX, HATE AND DEATH IN THE SAVAGE EUROPEAN WEST.
THE SYMPHONY OF SEX, HATE AND DEATH IN THE SAVAGE EUROPEAN WEST!
WESTERN CIVILISATION
(SAVAGERY) AT ITS BEST!
Chopin Piano Concerto No. 1 Op.11
Evgeny Kissin
The Occupied
Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra Conductor: Zubin Mehta 75th
anniversary gala concert which took place in Tel Aviv (Occupied
Palestine) 24 December 2011.
My blessed and loving Mother gave
birth to me on the 23rd day of December 1945. Being illiterate, she was not aware that I was born in slavery. She was oblivious of the politics of the time
and even did not understand that barbaric European concept of governance and
democracy. All she knew was that she was
a human being born to serve others, to love and dedicate her life to her
children, husband, neighbours, family and society, and that she was a Muslimah,
then the Devil took over our household.
She accomplished her job to the perfection at least until we were no
more teenagers. She provided us with the
best of care, love, protection, education and comfort made possible by my
respected and caring father.
Although I
was born in a Muslim family, we practiced Islam only from what the British
imperialists left intact and allowed us to practice and which they regarded as
harmless to their hegemonic rule as we were their slaves and their possession,
and they had claimed ownership of the whole world. They would wage war after war to conquer as
much land as they can, destroy as many civilisations and people they can that
stand in their way. Their Christianity
was false as well as their Jesus Christ and God because they worshipped another
God in secret, in History’s most evil secret societies bearing various names:
Jewish Freemasonry, Illuminati, etc.
Under such
diabolical rule, I grew up and was indoctrinated in the British school system, in
one of the best schools of the island, the Royal College,
but almost totally deprived of my own Islamic heritage and education. My way of life was always and naturally
Islamic well before I encountered Islam.
I started to love well before I knew God. This meant to me that if Islam was the true
religion, it had to be the most natural and universal way of life for humankind
and that if there was God, One God, He had to be All-Loving, neither male nor
female, not roaming the world and the ages in human or animal forms. Then, I studied Islam and everything suddenly
made sense to me. I saw the Devil for
what he really was and who he was as well as his disciples, those two-legged
beasts living amongst us and ruling over us.
I learned to distinguish more clearly between good and evil, truth and
falsehood, sincerity and hypocrisy, love and hate.
I wrote in
the title LOVE first and GOD second (Silly me, I must have changed the title!).
This was deliberate because I knew love well before I encountered God
although now I understood that God has always been with and inside me. This is what I teach my two grand
daughters. I was living a natural way of
life of good against evil well before I encountered Islam. When, I found out that Islam was the natural
way par excellence, I knew it is the true religion of humankind as it is
universal and englobes all the world’s existing religions in their uncorrupted
form, which no other religion does. And,
the Islamic concept of God was the best to have been thought of or revealed by
inspired men and women. I tried to
examine the claims that many great minds of past and current history made
against the existence of God, against the relevance of Islam, and even of
Christianity, and found too many flaws in them.
How can they be right when they make so many wrong statements?
Then, in
the early sixties it was time for my elder brother to go abroad for higher
studies with our father not realising that he was going to spend his hard
earned money to send his eldest son to hell!
Then, he sent the second elder son to the same hell that is the Jewish
Freemasonic United Kingdom of Jehovah, and then he sent my second elder sister
to join them. The little Islam they had
was lost for good, and my three elders joined the Army of Satan that would
later take the life of our eldest sister (I was not told when) who had kept a
semblance of Islam. Then, in 1964, at
18, it was my turn, and I trod on the same path without much of Islam in me,
but I always resisted evil as this was in my nature. My university friends were sleeping out with
girls when I would not touch any one of them although they were so easy and
vulnerable. Today, I am 66 and still a
rebel, a staunch believer in good and an enemy of evil, a combatant for truth
and against falsehood.
Many people
are paid to show goodness or to be evil, but both love and goodness are
ingrained in me, and they are both free.
I dispensed them for free all my life at great material costs, but also at
great spiritual gains. I found thus inner
peace and happiness in a world where every five seconds the Freemasonic Hegemonists
and their Satanic United Nations Organisation murder one child by starvation
(orchestrated famine) and many others by wars and various other means like
drugs, poison in their food, drinks, medicine and even in the air we breathe,
and the world stands by and does almost nothing about it. And, I had to be very strong to have been
able to survive the Jewish Freemasonic onslaught and the ingratitude and
inhumanity of selfish and cowardly humans.
What is
real love? It is when you are hungry and
have a loaf of bread and see another human a lot hungrier than you, and you
give him or her the whole loaf of bread with love and no regret. I do that constantly. It is then that we finally understand that
God provides us all with our sustenance like He does with all the other living
creatures and that if some of us starve to death it is only because we live in
a land where stealing and murder are the religion of the rulers. Western economics thrive on murder and
death. The Freemasonic God takes away
our food, economically, bio-genetically, by polluting our lands with their
weapons of mass destruction, and otherwise, invades and steals our lands,
pollute them, massacre our men, women and children, pervert our ways of life,
degenerate our very species, lies to us, oppresses us, enslaves us, and whose
God is it? That of the criminal Jews,
the Jews of the Qabbalah, and of what has gone outside of European Christendom,
the apostates, renegades, and the Godless who call themselves Secularists
(“laïques”).
The same
Europeans who have given the world many (most) of our greatest musicians,
painters, writers, builders, teachers, and enough advanced technology (most of which is actually hidden to the
public, probably like the one used by the US military during the 11 September
2001 explosions) to provide for the entire world, make us happy and live in
peace, have at the same time involved themselves in human sacrifice to such a
scale that they cannot be qualified as humans, but some kind of aliens to our
humanity. Islam cannot and will never
reconcile itself with such monstrosity and perversity.
I am
listening and watching at the same time Ludwig van Beethoven’s Coriolan
Overture Op 62 and Symphony No 9 in D minor Op 125 Choral (of the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Christian Thielemann), and I cannot see or
smell the stench of European wars, mendacity, the blood, the mass killings, torture,
mass rape, racism, death camps, Apartheid Walls, Ethnic Cleanings, orchestrated
famine and so-called natural climatic catastrophes, and other abominations, but
only greatness, a great music appealing even to the soul, the best that humans
have ever devised. But, is all this
real?
We owe a
great debt to Herr Adolph Hitler for not destroying western civilisation when
he had the opportunity to do so, and for not having destroyed Vienna
and Paris when his armies occupied those towns
like others have destroyed Kabul, Groznyy, Beirut, Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Tripoli and intend to do with Teheran and Istanbul.
Yet, he is described by Jews, Zionists and their friends as the worst
monster the world has ever produced. However,
the truth is that the accusers are the ones who have never stopped enslaving
us, mass murdering millions of innocent people throughout the centuries and
bombing our towns and villages to rubbles.
They have decimated nearly half a billion people in their recent wars of
conquests and plunder since the infamous Christopher Colombus and at least 150
million Muslims. They have even almost destroyed
what was left of Islamic civilisation.
But, what are Mozart, Wagner or Beethoven to the children the Europeans,
Americans, Canadians, Australians, Jews (and their United Nations and other
Friends) have murdered and are murdering in Africa, Palestine, Kashmir,
Lebanon, Chechnya, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Algeria, Rwanda,
Cambodia, Laos, Russia, South America, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
Egypt, etc.?
I read once
that our great classical composers had God in mind when they wrote their music,
but I am now asking which God? The
Freemasonic God Jahbulon, ‘Jehovah’, Lucifer?
All this grandeur is only make-believe!
To hell with their Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Beauty Contests,
Freemasonic Olympics, and their entire European aristocracy and monarchy, those
blood suckers and cannibals, and their civilisation and technology! The GOD of Islam gave birds their sustenance
and even to microbes, but the European racists and warmongers are killing our
children every second or every 5 seconds and with a smile, the smile of the
Devil! Watching that Beethoven Symphony,
I am trying to find out a single human being among the audience and even among
the players! Is there a single one? If there were one, he or she would be on the
killing fields and feeding the starving people of the lands his or her
government is currently bombing and not playing for those bloodthirsty
aristocrats or for the Lizard Queen of Judah and Greater Israel!
The God of
the world is currently the Racist Freemasonic God of hate, human sacrifice and
sexual perversion and nothing good can come out of it unless enough of us wake
up and rise up against tyranny and stop the killing and lie-fabricating
machines. France is ordering the Muslims to
accept the totalitarian freemasonic dictatorship they call democracy, the killing,
plundering and perversion as part of western civilisation and culture or be
branded as terrorists, fundamentalists, archaic, and undeserving to live either
in the West or anywhere on the planet!
It does not matter where they live as their bombs will always reach the
Muslims! This is why as cowards they
want to see all Muslims unarmed or disarmed!
It is thus easier for the cowards to shoot down defenceless people! They are playing the Symphony of Hate and Death
and there is nothing that I despise the most!
Those warmongers, perverts and racists are driving our children and
grand children mad, even those living and born in the West, and all this with a
Satanic smile and dressed up in their aristocratic ‘smoking’ (smokescreen!) and
brandishing their Godless totalitarian democratic dictatorship on each and
every one of us as Thor’s hammer! I call
it the Jewish Freemasonic Novus Ordo Seclorum whose aim is to establish the
Israel United Kingdom of Jahbulon or ‘Jehovah’ of the Qabbalah!
WESTERN CIVILISATION AT ITS BEST!
BAFS
Monday 11th
of June 2012
Jew Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.
I have a confession to make:
I don't have a Facebook
page. A few years ago I was encouraged to sign up by friends and
colleagues when Facebook was primarily used by university students and
lecturers. I resisted on the grounds that I was busy enough. I also
reckoned that I knew enough people.
In any case, if I wanted new
friends and acquaintances it was best to meet them face-to-face.
AND TAX PAYERS WILL PAY TO MAINTAIN MURDERERS IN PRISON FOR LIFE!
Serial killer took grinning selfie
Press Association – Tuesday 21st January 2014 - 4 hours ago
View PhotoPress
Association - Serial killer Joanna Dennehy smiling and posing with a
knife (not used in any of her crimes). It was shown to jurors as
evidence at the trial of Gary Richards, also known as Gary Stretch,at Cambridge Crown Court.
Serial killer Joanna Dennehy took a grinning photograph of herself as she searched out further victims.
The
picture, shown to jurors in the trial of her two alleged accomplices,
shows the 31-year-old murderer posing and sticking out her tongue in the
back of a Vauxhall Astra moments before she selected and stabbed her
fourth and fifth victims.
Dennehy had already killed three men in
Cambridgeshire when she randomly targeted the two dog walkers in
Hereford. Both men suffered multiple injuries but survived.
Mark
Lloyd, who was in the same car as Dennehy and her alleged accomplice
Gary Stretch, told Cambridge Crown Court that Dennehy had been driven by
a thirst for blood.
Describing the attack on the first man, Robin Bereza, he said: "I thought she was going to mug him but then it twigged on me.
"I thought 'You just want blood'."
Jurors were also shown CCTV footage of Dennehy taken in Green Lane Stores, Hereford, moments before the April 2 attacks.
In it she is seen laughing and joking with Mr Lloyd.
Mr
Lloyd said he had considered telling the shop assistant to call the
police and raise the alarm about her plans to carry on the killing
spree.
"I wanted to say something but there wasn't the time," he said.
A
wanted appeal had been issued to trace Dennehy and Stretch following
the murders of Lukasz Slaboszewski, 31, John Chapman, 56, and Kevin Lee,
48, who were found dumped in ditches near Peterborough in March and
April last year.
She had bragged to friends that she and Stretch were like Bonnie and Clyde, the court has heard.
Cross-examined
by Stretch's counsel Karim Khalil QC today, Mr Lloyd said he was scared
of Dennehy and had no choice but to join the pair on the journey to
Hereford.
He added: "If she had told me to put my head through the windscreen, I would have done."
Dennehy,
of Orton Goldhay, Peterborough, has admitted murder. She has also
admitted the attempted murders of Mr Bereza and John Rogers and
preventing the lawful and decent burial of all three murder victims.
Stretch
and another man, Leslie Layton, are standing trial accused of helping
her dispose of the bodies and covering up her crimes.
Jurors have been shown pictures of Dennehy smiling and posing with a knife shortly after murdering the men.
In another picture she flashes her bra and shows off self-harming scars.
Stretch is photographed mimicking her pose and making an obscene gesture to the camera.
Describing
the moment he found out the pair were wanted by police, Mr Lloyd said:
"I thought it was Gary who done the murders because he's 7ft 2in and
looks like Herman off The Munsters.
"She looks like butter wouldn't melt until she opens her bloody mouth."
Mr Lloyd told the court that, as they made their way to Hereford, Dennehy said: "I want to have my fun."
Dennehy had made clear she wanted "a man with a dog" and Stretch helped with this search, he said.
After the second attack, on dog-walker Mr Rogers, Dennehy climbed back into the car driven by Stretch.
She was carrying Mr Rogers' whippet and told the pair: "It's me only friend."
Mr Lloyd went on: "Afterwards, Gary drove off very, very calmly. It was as if they'd just stopped for McDonald's."
Stretch,
real name Gary Richards, 47, of Riseholme, Orton Goldhay, Peterborough,
denies three charges of preventing the lawful burial of all three men
and two counts of attempted murder.
Layton, 36, of Bifield, Orton
Goldhay, denies perverting the course of justice and two counts of
preventing the lawful burial of the bodies of Mr Chapman and Mr Lee.
A third man, Robert Moore, 55, of Belvoir Way, Peterborough, has admitted assisting an offender and is awaiting sentence.
Zionism, Jewish extremism and a few other nasty items making our world uninhabitable today
Russia is preparing to send
Marines to defend its naval base in Syria (NOT THE SYRIANS!) amid continued unrest in the
Arab state, Interfax reported Monday, citing a Navy source.
The information confirms reports in Russian and Western media Friday.
Two large troop transport vessels
and a rescue tugboat will defend Russian citizens and infrastructure in
the port city of Tartus and also evacuate equipment if necessary, the
source said.
Tartus is home to Russia’s only naval base outside the former Soviet Union.
The report did not say when the ships would arrive or how many Marines would accompany them.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has accused Russia of sending attack helicopters to Syria,
warning that the shipment “will escalate the conflict quite
dramatically.”
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov rejected Clinton’s claim, saying that Russia is only shipping air
defense systems under previously signed contracts.
Some experts alleged that the
helicopters Clinton said were en route to Syria could be old ones that
underwent maintenance in Russia.
Russia has shipped billions of
dollars worth of missiles, combat jets, tanks, artillery and other
military gear to Syria over more than four decades. Moscow says that
it’s currently providing Assad with weapons intended to protect Syria
from a foreign invasion and that it is not delivering the kinds of
weapons needed to fight lightly armed insurgents in cities.
Here is a brief look at some of
the weapons systems Russia has recently shipped to Syria or pledged to
deliver in the future, according to official statements and Russian
media reports. Russian government officials have remained secretive
about the arms trade, so a complete list of Russian weapons and other
military gear sent to Syria is unavailable:
Pantsyr-S1 air defense system.
The truck-mounted short- and medium-range system combines air-defense
missiles and anti-aircraft artillery with sophisticated radar to hit
aerial targets with deadly precision at ranges of up to 20 kilometers
and an altitude of 15 kilometers. It has further strengthened Syria’s
air defense system, which has been developed with Moscow’s help since
the Cold War.
Igor Sevastyanov, a deputy head
of the Rosoboronexport state arms trader, said last week that the
Pantsyr contract is still being implemented. Sevastyanov didn’t offer
specifics, but Russian media reports have said that the contract
envisaged the delivery of 36 such units, which include a truck mounted
with guns and missiles together with a radar.
Buk-M2 air defense system. The
medium-range missile system is capable of hitting enemy aircraft and
cruise missiles at ranges of up to 50 kilometers and an altitude of up
to 25 kilometers. It is a sophisticated weapon that is capable of
inflicting heavy losses to enemy aircraft if Syria comes under attack.
Bastion anti-ship missile system.
Armed with supersonic Yakhont cruise missiles that have a range of up
to 300 kilometers, it provides a strong deterrent against an attack from
the sea. Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said last fall that Moscow
would fully honor the Bastion contract. Russian media reports said that
Russia has already fulfilled the Bastion deal, which was worth $300
million and included the delivery of more than 70 Yakhont missiles.
Yak-130 combat jets. Russian
media reports said early this year that Syria had ordered a batch of 36
Yak-130 combat jets worth $550 million. Officials wouldn’t confirm or
deny the deal, which would significantly bolster the Syrian air force’s
capabilities. The Yak-130 is a combat training jet that can also carry
modern weapons for ground attack missions.
The Kremlin insists that the
continuing Russian arms sales don’t violate international agreements,
and it has scoffed at Western demands to halt the trade.
A Russian ship carrying a load of
weapons arrived in Syria just a few weeks ago amid international anger
over Assad’s refusal to honor a UN-sponsored peace plan.
The new Russian weapons supplies
add to Syria’s massive arsenal of hundreds of Soviet-built combat jets,
attack helicopters and missiles and thousands of tanks, other armored
vehicles and artillery systems. Russia said it also has military
advisers in Syria training the Syrians to use the Russian weapons, and
it has helped repair and maintain Syrian weapons.
ONLY PREPARING?
But, it is better than talking or doing nothing!
And, this is the only kind of language I understand and talk as well!
BAFS
Hi
Please feel free to publish/circulate my latest article.
If you wish to unsubscribe please reply with the word "unsubscribe" in the
subject.
Regards
Yamin Zakaria
-------------------------
Nudity is liberation and
covering up is oppression from the secular faction!
From
the arguments that rage over the Islamic veil and the bikini, a battle between
the conservatives and liberal secular forces, you would think it can be summed
up as:nudity is liberation and
covering up is oppression from the secular faction. A Tunisian woman took the bait,
and from the birth place of the Arab-Spring she displayed her breasts, with"My body is mine, not somebody's
honour"written across it,
clearly aimed at the conservative faction of society. This is supposed to
contribute towards the advancement for women’s rights, because the argument
goes, it shows that she has control over her body, nobody (men in particular) is
forcing her to cover up. One would assume the protest in a different form would
take place, if the women were forced to walk around topless in Tunisia in the
first place.
On
that note, women who chose to wear the Hijab (head scarf) under the previous
regime were treated awfully, and in countries like Turkey the HIjab was banned
in public life. The same argument of women having control over their bodies and
having the ability to exercise their choice is applicable here, but it did not
lead to the feminists screaming; hence, why the selectivity? Ironically, it
seems the feminists are pandering to the male urges through the back door, as
they are only intervening when women want to strip!
In
any case, the argument that women are empowered by giving them a choice to strip
because it shows they have control over their bodies is fundamentally flawed. In
any society, no individual, man or woman, has absolute right and choice over
their body. Otherwise suicide, various forms of self-harm, abortion and public
nudity would be legal across the board. In fact, women and men in all societies
are forced to cover up to some extent, as public nudity is illegal in almost all
the societies in the world. Then, why does it mark progression for one to appear
as nude as possible?
Historically,
for centuries European colonisers have criticised the natives in Africa, Central
and Latin America and elsewhere for not adequately covering their bodies, driven
by Christian values and missionaries; today bearing all seems to be a mark of
progress and civilisation. This reflects the transition to a secular liberal
society from a conservative Christian society. It is not just the monotheistic
Abrahamic faiths of Christianity, Judaism and Islam that upholds the values of
dressing modestly to help maintain decency and harmony between the genders; most
societies across the world have similar values, even in the godless Communist
societies, men and women do not walk around nude or topless in general.
Therefore,
it is not the dictates of religion but a basic human trait that tells us to
cover up our bodies, hence it is so widespread. A trait that distinguishes us
from the animals; we understand the notion of shame, privacy and draw
distinction between public and private life; accordingly we are intimate with
our spouses in private. I am told even most animals to some extent exhibit this
trait with the exception of the Pig. Of course, secular forces to some extent
work against these conservative values, as secularism often defines itself in
this way.
For
sure, displaying ones private parts will not result in furthering women’s rights
- it is a primitive expression like that exhibited by animals and does not
elevate anyone; it simply sends the punk like message that I am a rebel and not
conforming to the social and legal conventions. The Tunisian woman is at a loss,
and such acts will only reinforce the conservative notion that we need to
maintain modesty which contributes towards keeping harmony between the
genders.
Rather,
women’s rights should be viewed in the context of how they are treated by law
with respect to the opposite gender in the same level, meaning compare brother
and sister, mother and father. For example, equal pay, equal access to certain
facilities, and protection from domestic violence. There are deeper theological
issues that are connected with the differences between the genders, which often
get ignored during the discourse on gender equality and rights. Hence, there are
many areas differential treatments are required. Even in the West, it is
recognised that a man walking around topless is not the same as a woman. A woman
with child should be given preferential treatment. You hear women say they would
like to be treated like a woman or a lady, meaning not like your best male pal.
These conventions display the inherent gender differences and how they are
treated is partially subjective as different societies have different social
conventions and its only arrogance that lead some of us to look down on the
social conventions in other societies.
In
addition, the gender relationship is complex with many levels. A male can be a
child and the female can be a grandmother or an aunty or a cousin or an elder
sister or a spouse. Often this complexity also gets overlooked, partly due to
the breakdown of the traditional family unit, and the focus is always on the
adult woman in relation to her opposite peer.
Yamin
Zakaria (yamin@radicalviews.org,
#yaminzakaria)
Published on
1/04/2013
London, UK
www.radicalvewis.org
http://yaminzakaria.blogspot.com
Emily Ratajkowski in Sports Illustrated is probably the most perfect sight we have ever seen
She
caught the attention of the whole blimmin’ world in Robin Thicke’s
Blurred Lines video and now we suspect she is about to grab it all over
again!
Emily Rajakowski is female perfection if you ask us. Copyright: [SPorts Illustrated]
Emily
Ratajkowski really is one of life’s genetically blessed types and this
has been further proved today with the release of her Sports Illustrated
shoot.
Wow-zers! We have a major girl crush going on right now.
The 22-year-old looks incredibly hot posing for the iconic mag wearing not very much at all.
Stop it Emily Rajakowski, you're making the rest of us look bad! Copyright: [Sports Illustrated]
However,
if we had a bod half as cracking as hers we think we would just boycott
clothes for life – because, frankly, who needs clothes when you look
this amaze without them.
*runs to gym crying*
And by the sounds of things, Emily was as excited about her shoot hitting the stands as we (and our boyfriends) were to see it.
Now that is one perfect bum. Copyright: [Sports Illustrated]
“So
excited and honored to be a rookie in @SI_swimsuit 50th anniversary
issue!' the Blurred Lines babe wrote on Twitter earlier this month.
“Can't wait for Feb 18 when the issue will hit stands!”
And now we can certainly see what she was so excited about! It’s. Just. Not. Fair!
'I want people to treat me like a plastic
sex doll':
Woman has
hypnotherapy to make her
'brainless like Barbie' after spending £25,000
on breast enhancements
Blondie Bennett, 38, from California, has sessions once a week
Hypnotherapy trains her to be more easily confused and vacant
'It's working': She recently got lost for three hours driving to her mum's
Sugar daddies pay for transformation and rent in exchange for sexy photos
By
Deni Kirkova PUBLISHED:
11:56, 19 February 2014
| UPDATED:
12:53, 19 February 2014
A woman who has dedicated her
life to transforming herself into Barbie is taking her obsession with
becoming a doll to extreme lengths - by having hypnotherapy to make her
'brainless'. Blondie Bennett, 38, from California, has sessions once a week to make her more easily confused and vacant. The
former model, who changed her name to Blondie a year and a half ago,
has also spent £25,000 on five breast enlargements taking her to a size
32JJ. Scroll down for video
+6
Blondie Bennett is taking her quest to become a doll to the extreme by having hypnotherapy to make her 'brainless'
She is now unemployed and earns a living by taking money from online sugar daddies who support her in
exchange for sexy pictures of her dressed as Barbie. Blondie
regularly has spray tans, Botox and lip fillers to give her a more
artificial appearance. But to make the transformation into the plastic
toy complete, she is actively trying to become more stupid. She said: 'When people ask why I want to be Barbie I think "who wouldn't want to be?"
'She has the best life. All she does is shop and make herself look pretty - she doesn't worry about anything. 'I've had 20 session and I'm already starting to feel ditzy and confused all the time. 'Recently
I went to pick a friend up at the airport and couldn't remember if I
needed to go to departures or arrivals. I also got lost for three hours
driving to my mum's house - the house where I grew up.'
Blondie Bennett, pictured left and right aged
18; in her teens she dressed like Barbie, bleached her hair and even had
drove a Corvette like her hero
Blondie says her obsession with Barbie began at a young age, when she played with the children's favourite. In her teens she dressed like Barbie, bleached her hair and even had drove a Corvette like her hero. Then, at 18, she began to take on promotional jobs at toy stores pretending to be Barbie.
'Recently
I went to pick a friend up at the airport and couldn't remember if I
needed to go to departures or arrivals. I also got lost for three hours
driving to my mum's house - the house where I grew up'
Blondie said: 'People thought it was
just a phase but I thought to myself as soon as I move out of home I'm
going to turn myself into Barbie. 'My friends hated the attention I got from guys because of how I dressed. The told me to tone it down when I went out with them. 'I
was forced to live a double life until about eight years ago when I
decided to become Barbie for real and ignore what other people said.' Last August, Blondie had her H cup implants increased to a JJ with 1700cc saline implants. And in December she had chin liposuction to contour her face so she looked more like Barbie.
+6
Blondie, 38, regularly uses Botox and lip fillers and is training herself to become 'dumb' like the doll she idolises
She said: 'Some other women pretend they are human Barbie dolls but I take it to the next level. 'I want people to see me as a plastic sex doll and being brainless is a big part of that. 'People can criticise me but this is who I am: I want my transformation to be head to toe, inside and out.'
+6
After 20 sessions of hynotherapy Blondie is already starting to feel ditzy and confused all the time
+6
Blondie has had five breast enlargement operations, costing £25,000 in total, taking her to a 32JJ
Hundreds of people stripped naked
and flocked to the Tasman Sea in what has been billed as the largest
nude ocean swim on record. More
than 700 people turned out to protest against body image conformity on
Sunday - and to enjoy a good swim in the baking heat in Sydney,
Australia. It was the second Sydney Skinny, which was attended by 750 people last year and raises money for Australia's National Parks.
+6
More than 700 people took to the Tasman Sea in Sydney, Australia, in possibly the largest ever mass skinny dip
+6
Proud: One reveller strides out of the water after a 900m swim to grab his towel and head to the live music
Starting at 8am, the
revellers deposited their clothes on the beach before swimming 900
metres around the diamond-shaped Middle Head island by Sydney's coast.
Some took to the waves
excitedly with messages painted on their behinds, while some slipped out
of their towels at the very last minute.
+6
Three competitors with 'Skinny' written on the bottoms enter the water at the start of the event
+6
It is the second annual Sydney Skinny event, raising money for Australia's National Parks
+6
The crowds handed their clothes to people on the beach before standing nude in the summer sun
Speaking ahead of the
event, one skinny dipper said: 'We are born naked. who cares who sees
your body – be naked with nature for a great cause. The more the
merrier...' Another
wrote on the online event page: 'I'm quite shy and I have never swam
naked before. But there is no embarrassment - it will be great fun.' After
the event, the bathers donned their clothes and headed to a festival
arena, where there was live music to celebrate their feat.
+6
Three competitors wait for the start of the swim clad in nothing but swimming caps
The Syrian rebel commander filmed biting into a dead soldier’s lung has insisted he has no regrets.
The clip, which was verified by Human Rights Watch
(HRW), showed Khalid al-Hamad (who is also known as Abu Sakkar) hacking
into the man’s body and removing organs before raising the lung to his
lips.
He is heard saying: “I swear to God* we will eat your hearts and your
livers, you soldiers of Bashar the dog,” to offscreen cheering.
Scroll down to see pixellated video (WARNING, GRAPHIC CONTENT)
Rebel leader Abu Sakkar takes a
bite out of the soldier's lung
HRW described the act as a “war crime” but al-Hamad is unrepentant – and has promised more slaughter.
In an exclusive Skype interview with TIME magazine,
he explains his actions: “We opened his cell phone, and I found a clip
of a woman and her two daughters fully naked and he was humiliating
them, and sticking a stick here and there.”
The magazine also claims al-Hamad was biting into a lung and not, as
initially reported, a heart. It says a surgeon has confirmed this.
Sunni al-Hamad revealed he has a further grisly video of himself
killing a soldier from the Alawaite faith (which President Bashar Assad
follows).
'I swear to (Lucifer) God
we will eat your hearts
and your livers, you soldiers
of (Sir) Bashar the (CIA) dog'
He said: “Hopefully we will slaughter all of them [Alawites]. I have
another video clip that I will send to them. In the clip, I am sawing
another shabiha [pro-government militiaman] with a saw. The saw we use
to cut trees. I sawed him into small pieces and large ones.”
The video comes to light as David Cameron announced Britain is to double military support for Syrian rebels to help them withstand the “onslaught” from Bashar Assad’s regime.
He also suggested Russia could be ready to participate in a peace
process, saying there was "real political will" to find a solution.
Cameron was speaking at a White House press conference with Barack Obama on Monday.
The British Prime Minister earlier confirmed nerve agent Sarin appeared to have been used during the two-year civil war.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
recorded March as the bloodiest month of the conflict so far, with more
than 6,000 people killed, including more than 500 women and children.
So far the Observatory has recorded more than 80,000 deaths but
believes the real number of those killed to be much higher. The UN says
more than 70,000 people have died since the uprising began in March
2011.
* I swear to God* ...??? TO WHICH GOD?
The Secular, Jewish, Christian God or to
SATAN? Muslims do not talk like that!
Noam
Chomsky: U.S. Politics Are Now 'Pure Savagery' By Zach Carter and Ryan Grim
January 09,
2014 "Information
Clearing House - "Huffington
Post" - Author and activist Noam Chomsky said
that the congressional controversy over extending unemployment
benefits is evidence that American politics has descended into
madness.
"The refusal to provide very minimal living standards to people
who are caught in this monstrosity -- that's just pure
savagery," Chomsky said during an interview with HuffPost Live.
"There's no other word for it."
Chomsky is
a leading American intellectual known at first for his academic
work in the field of linguistics. He has since become an
influential activist and progressive political thinker. HuffPost
will be publishing excerpts from its interview with Chomsky over
the next week.
Republicans pursued food-stamp cuts last year, and blocked a
deal to extend unemployment benefits during budget negotiations
in December. On Tuesday, a handful of Republicans joined Senate
Democrats to advance a bill reinstating the benefits for three
months, but the agreement faces an uphill battle in the
GOP-controlled House. There are currently about three people
seeking a job for every job opening in the United States.
Chomsky said that recent economic doldrums, however, are not
isolated phenomena, but rather the product of decades of
economic policies pursued by American elites. Some of the major
changes included the signing of World Trade Organization
treaties, the North American Free Trade Agreement and the
deregulation of major industries, he said.
"The general and very severe problem of the economy that's
staring us in the face … that has nothing to do with bad apples
in Congress," Chomsky said. "These are deep structural problems
having to do with, in effect, the neoliberal assault on the
population, not just of the United States but of the world,
that's taken place in the past generation. There are areas that
have escaped, but it's pretty broad."
Chomsky told HuffPost that corporate interests dominate the
policy agenda of the Democratic Party, and cited conservative
scholar Norm Ornstein's observation that the Republican Party
has "drifted off the spectrum" and no longer functions as a
serious parliamentary entity.
"It used to be said years ago that the United States is a
one-party state -- the business party -- with two factions,
Democrats and Republicans," Chomsky said. "That's no longer
true. It's still a one-party state -- the business party -- but
now it has only one faction. And it's not Democrats, it's
moderate Republicans. The so-called New Democrats, who are the
dominant force in the Democratic Party, are pretty much what
used to be moderate Republicans a couple of decades ago. And the
rest of the Republican Party has just drifted off the spectrum."
What's your response?
- Scroll down to add / read comments
WESTERN SAVAGERY
IRAQI HIROSHIMA HOLOCAUST
MY FIRST ACCIDENTAL VISIT ON "THE UGLY TRUTH" SINCE I LEFT LAST YEAR
The
values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the
birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something
called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention
Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went
abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions.
Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the
resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the
New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his
travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican
countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos.
Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense
ancient population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm
for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for
the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.
Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,
a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold,
culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to
know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been
thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as
narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and
aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music
and philosophy.
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But
Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and
in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For
Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at
Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of
anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the
idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”,
which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold
understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.
Nowadays,
when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or
Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are,
in some respects, antagonistic. Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture”
and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron. Tylor
thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. Yet these
contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of
western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern
western people. So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about
the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call
the west.
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Someone
asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation, and he
replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.” Like many of the best
stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but also like many of
the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavour of truth.
But my own response would have been very different: I think you should
give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the source
of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the
great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with
even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is not at
all a good idea, and western culture is no improvement.
One
reason for the confusions “western culture” spawns comes from
confusions about the west. We have used the expression “the west” to do
very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet of empire, wrote,
“Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”,
contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the
cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain; “the east” its
opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the
world. Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic:
Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a
non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed “the
global south” – though many people in Latin America will claim a western
inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but
lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while
delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South
Africans, so that “western” here can look simply like a euphemism for
white.
Of
course, we often also talk today of the western world to contrast it
not with the south but with the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers
sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr,
the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition further.
Because European and American debates today about whether western
culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which
Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.
This
civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years, then.
But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier.
For
the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the
world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south
was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that
people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents:
he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of
the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia.
Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to “why the earth,
which is one, has three names, all women’s”. Still, despite his
puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs
the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.
But
here’s the important point: it would not have occurred to Herodotus to
think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people:
Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus – Bodrum in
modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn’t make him an Asian;
it left him a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much
stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew
rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an adjective,
never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of
Europeans as a people, either.
Then
the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of
Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with
astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the prophet’s death
in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere 30 years to defeat the Persian
empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest
provinces from Rome’s residue in Byzantium.
The Umayyad dynasty,
which began in 661, pushed on west into north Africa and east into
central Asia. In early 711, it sent an army across the straits of
Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it
attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of
Hispania for two centuries. Within seven years, most of the Iberian
Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly 800 years later,
was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.
The
Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and
they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north.
But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus,
and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the
conquest of Frankish Europe. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon,
overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they
could have sailed up the Thames. “Perhaps,” he added, “the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of
Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the
sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
The world according to Herodotus. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy/Alamy
What
matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for
Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this
history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the
author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses”,
Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used
to contrast Christians and Muslims. (Even this, however, is a bit of a
simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was
not yet Christian.)
Now,
nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “western” for that
job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches
west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian
Peninsula – part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe – until
nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between Islam and
the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.
Starting
in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman empire
gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece,
the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent’s
army at Vienna, did the reconquest of eastern Europe begin. It was a
slow process. It wasn’t until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their
Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early 19th
century, Bulgaria even later.
Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer
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We
have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe – Christendom – defining
itself through opposition. And yet the move from “Christendom” to
“western culture” isn’t straightforward.
For
one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their
ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of the
12th century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred kilometres
south-west of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: “Greece once had
the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning,” he wrote. “Then
chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has come to
France.”
The
idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome
into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace.
In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he
ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain
Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.”
So
from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in
the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed
on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks,
transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned
between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in
the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon,
Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally
reunited – pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn – in
the academies of Europe and the United States.
There
are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they
all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the
golden nugget the core of a civilisation opposed to Islam. Because the
classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In
Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library
featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid,
translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark
Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of
Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works
were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of
classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those
texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the
Arabs.
In
the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of Tours
pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of al-Andalus, bellicose
as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you
could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of
the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews,
Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless
others.
There
were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of
Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and
synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s
ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut,
leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century,
was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the
Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium
sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up
Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba
became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The
translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the
12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known
in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The
Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical
traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the
inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.
The term 'western culture' is surprisingly modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph
But
the golden-nugget story was bound to be beset by difficulties. It
imagines western culture as the expression of an essence – a something –
which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. The
pitfalls of this sort of essentialism are evident in a wide range of
cases. Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or
culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through
time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that
is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer,
father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take
whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of
customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically
English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it
isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation
inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the
label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for
other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so, when some of those
in one generation move from the territory to which English identity was
once tied – move, for example, to a New England – the label can
even travel beyond the territory. Identities can be held together by
narratives, in short, without essences. You don’t get to be called
“English” because there’s an essence that this label follows; you’re
English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label
by being somehow connected with a place called England.
So
how did the people of the north Atlantic, and some of their kin around
the world, get connected to a realm we call the west, and gain an
identity as participants in something called western culture?
James
Gillray’s 1805 cartoon, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, depicts prime
minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world
Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
It
will help to recognise that the term “western culture” is surprisingly
modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of
it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of
the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he
reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a
pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney.
“One,” Tylor wrote, “had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine,
whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred
... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and
roasting an onion representing him.” Primitive culture, indeed.
So
the very idea of the “west,” to name a heritage and object of study,
doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of
imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century. When,
around the time of the first world war, Oswald Spengler wrote the
influential book translated as The Decline of the West – a book that
introduced many readers to the concept – he scoffed at the notion that
there were continuities between western culture and the classical world.
During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, the writer and
journalist Rebecca West recounted a visitor’s sense that “it’s
uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our
western culture”. The “recent blow” in question was the Turkish siege of
Vienna in 1683.
To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up
If
the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military
struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture
largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of
battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna
Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture
was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and
tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that
pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past
century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few
stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea
that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture
would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been
barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if
western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.
Of
course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was bound to
become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture, producing a
photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and
genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they
see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.
Talk
of “western culture” has had a larger implausibility to overcome. It
places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted intellectual and
artistic achievements – philosophy, literature, art, music; the things
Arnold prized and humanists study. But if western culture was there in
Troyes in the late 12th century when Chrétien was alive, it had little
to do with the lives of most of his fellow citizens, who did not know
Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato. Today the classical
heritage plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans
or Britons. Are these Arnoldian achievements that hold us together? Of
course not. What holds us together, surely, is Tylor’s broad sense of
culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behaviour that
shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and
civilians, shop assistants and consumers. Intellectuals like me have a
tendency to suppose that the things we care about are the most important
things. I don’t say they don’t matter. But they matter less than the
story of the golden nugget suggests.
So
how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to tell
ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant,
when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? Well,
by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the
everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something
that was already present in Tylor’s work. Remember his famous
definition: it began with culture as “that complex whole”. What you’re
hearing is something we can call organicism. A vision of culture
not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an organic
unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully adapted to
occupy a particular place, each part essential to the functioning of the
whole. The Eurovision song contest, the cutouts of Matisse, the
dialogues of Plato are all parts of a larger whole. As such, each is a
holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if you have never
personally checked it out. Even if it isn’t your jam, it is still your
heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our everyday selves
could be dusted with gold.
Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s
Now,
there are organic wholes in our cultural life: the music, the words,
the set-design, the dance of an opera fit and are meant to fit together.
It is, in the word Wagner invented, a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a total work of art. But there isn’t one great big whole called culture
that organically unites all these parts. Spain, in the heart of “the
west,” resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off
in India and Japan in “the east,” the home of Oriental despotism.
Jefferson’s cultural inheritance – Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom
– did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At
the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily –
perhaps even more easily – than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian
Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. The same
is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for
chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky
Nando’s.
Once
we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan picture in
which every element of culture, from philosophy or cuisine to the style
of bodily movement, is separable in principle from all the others – you
really can walk and talk like an African-American and think with Matthew
Arnold and Immanuel Kant, as well as with Martin Luther King and Miles
Davis. No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from
taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or
democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any
ancestry taking up Islam.
The
stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint
Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some
truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of
scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices
that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify
playlist we have never quite listened to. If these thinkers are part of
our Arnoldian culture, there is no guarantee that what is best in them
will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look
back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim
thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in
modern Muslim cultures.
Values
aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the
west, however you define it, being western, provides no guarantee that
you will care about western civilisation. The values European humanists
like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who
takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of
course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble
to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is true in the other
direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests that we cannot help
caring about the traditions of “the west” because they are ours: in
fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A
culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a
good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid
down by a western destiny.
In
the year of Edward Burnett Tylor’s death, what we have been taught to
call western civilisation stumbled into a death match with itself: the
Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other,
marching young men to their deaths in order to “defend civilisation”.
The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked
Tylor’s evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold’s worst
fears about what civilisation really meant. Arnold and Tylor would have
agreed, at least, on this: culture isn’t a box to check on the
questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with
others.
Culture
– like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for
contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of
confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of
them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect
the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with
larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world
intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to
communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives
must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in
which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of
technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the
compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too
broad a horizon.
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We
live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The
cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a
luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I can
draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation, because
I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist
Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek
comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the
African. He once wrote, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” Now there’s an identity worth holding on to.
• This is an edited version of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s BBC Reith lecture, Culture, the fourth part of the series Mistaken Identities, which is available on the Radio 4 website
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
The
values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the
birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something
called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention
Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor went
abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions.
Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the
resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the
New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his
travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican
countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos.
Tylor was impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense
ancient population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm
for the study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for
the rest of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.
Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,
a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold,
culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to
know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been
thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as
narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and
aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music
and philosophy.
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But
Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different, and
in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did. For
Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at
Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of
anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the
idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”,
which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold
understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.
Nowadays,
when people speak about culture, it is usually either Tylor’s or
Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of culture are,
in some respects, antagonistic. Arnold’s ideal was “the man of culture”
and he would have considered “primitive culture” an oxymoron. Tylor
thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack culture. Yet these
contrasting notions of culture are locked together in our concept of
western culture, which many people think defines the identity of modern
western people. So let me try to untangle some of our confusions about
the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we have come to call
the west.
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Someone
asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation, and he
replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.” Like many of the best
stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but also like many of
the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavour of truth.
But my own response would have been very different: I think you should
give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the source
of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some of the
great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree with
even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is not at
all a good idea, and western culture is no improvement.
One
reason for the confusions “western culture” spawns comes from
confusions about the west. We have used the expression “the west” to do
very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet of empire, wrote,
“Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”,
contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the
cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain; “the east” its
opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the
world. Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic:
Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a
non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed “the
global south” – though many people in Latin America will claim a western
inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but
lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while
delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South
Africans, so that “western” here can look simply like a euphemism for
white.
Of
course, we often also talk today of the western world to contrast it
not with the south but with the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers
sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr,
the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition further.
Because European and American debates today about whether western
culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which
Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.
This
civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years, then.
But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier.
For
the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the
world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south
was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that
people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents:
he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of
the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia.
Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to “why the earth,
which is one, has three names, all women’s”. Still, despite his
puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs
the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.
But
here’s the important point: it would not have occurred to Herodotus to
think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of people:
Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus – Bodrum in
modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn’t make him an Asian;
it left him a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe, were much
stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom he knew
rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an adjective,
never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else spoke of
Europeans as a people, either.
Then
the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise of
Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading with
astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the prophet’s death
in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere 30 years to defeat the Persian
empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest
provinces from Rome’s residue in Byzantium.
The Umayyad dynasty,
which began in 661, pushed on west into north Africa and east into
central Asia. In early 711, it sent an army across the straits of
Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it
attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of
Hispania for two centuries. Within seven years, most of the Iberian
Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly 800 years later,
was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.
The
Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the Pyrenees, and
they made regular attempts in the early years to move further north.
But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus,
and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the
conquest of Frankish Europe. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon,
overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they
could have sailed up the Thames. “Perhaps,” he added, “the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of
Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the
sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”
The world according to Herodotus. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy/Alamy
What
matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a word for
Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of this
history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain, the
author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses”,
Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used
to contrast Christians and Muslims. (Even this, however, is a bit of a
simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was
not yet Christian.)
Now,
nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “western” for that
job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors, stretches
west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the Iberian
Peninsula – part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe – until
nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between Islam and
the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.
Starting
in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman empire
gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria, Greece,
the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent’s
army at Vienna, did the reconquest of eastern Europe begin. It was a
slow process. It wasn’t until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their
Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early 19th
century, Bulgaria even later.
Racial identity is a biological nonsense, says Reith lecturer
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We
have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe – Christendom – defining
itself through opposition. And yet the move from “Christendom” to
“western culture” isn’t straightforward.
For
one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of their
ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of the
12th century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred kilometres
south-west of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: “Greece once had
the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning,” he wrote. “Then
chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has come to
France.”
The
idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of Rome
into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a commonplace.
In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he
ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain
Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.”
So
from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the best in
the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance, passed
on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the Greeks,
transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome. Partitioned
between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian Republic in
the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as Avignon,
Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were finally
reunited – pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian urn – in
the academies of Europe and the United States.
There
are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they
all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the
golden nugget the core of a civilisation opposed to Islam. Because the
classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In
Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library
featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid,
translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark
Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of
Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works
were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of
classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those
texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the
Arabs.
In
the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of Tours
pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of al-Andalus, bellicose
as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant that you
could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the cities of
the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of Jews,
Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and countless
others.
There
were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of
Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and
synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s
ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut,
leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century,
was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the
Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium
sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up
Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba
became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The
translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the
12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known
in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The
Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical
traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the
inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.
The term 'western culture' is surprisingly modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph
But
the golden-nugget story was bound to be beset by difficulties. It
imagines western culture as the expression of an essence – a something –
which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. The
pitfalls of this sort of essentialism are evident in a wide range of
cases. Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or
culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through
time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that
is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer,
father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take
whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of
customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically
English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it
isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each generation
inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each generation, the
label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost or exchanged for
other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so, when some of those
in one generation move from the territory to which English identity was
once tied – move, for example, to a New England – the label can
even travel beyond the territory. Identities can be held together by
narratives, in short, without essences. You don’t get to be called
“English” because there’s an essence that this label follows; you’re
English because our rules determine that you are entitled to the label
by being somehow connected with a place called England.
So
how did the people of the north Atlantic, and some of their kin around
the world, get connected to a realm we call the west, and gain an
identity as participants in something called western culture?
James
Gillray’s 1805 cartoon, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, depicts prime
minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world
Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
It
will help to recognise that the term “western culture” is surprisingly
modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of
it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of
the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he
reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a
pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney.
“One,” Tylor wrote, “had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine,
whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred
... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and
roasting an onion representing him.” Primitive culture, indeed.
So
the very idea of the “west,” to name a heritage and object of study,
doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of
imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century. When,
around the time of the first world war, Oswald Spengler wrote the
influential book translated as The Decline of the West – a book that
introduced many readers to the concept – he scoffed at the notion that
there were continuities between western culture and the classical world.
During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, the writer and
journalist Rebecca West recounted a visitor’s sense that “it’s
uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our
western culture”. The “recent blow” in question was the Turkish siege of
Vienna in 1683.
To be blunt: if western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up
If
the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military
struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture
largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of
battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna
Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture
was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and
tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that
pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past
century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few
stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea
that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture
would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been
barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if
western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.
Of
course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was bound to
become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture, producing a
photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism, militarism, and
genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism, even if they
see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.
Talk
of “western culture” has had a larger implausibility to overcome. It
places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted intellectual and
artistic achievements – philosophy, literature, art, music; the things
Arnold prized and humanists study. But if western culture was there in
Troyes in the late 12th century when Chrétien was alive, it had little
to do with the lives of most of his fellow citizens, who did not know
Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato. Today the classical
heritage plays no greater role in the everyday lives of most Americans
or Britons. Are these Arnoldian achievements that hold us together? Of
course not. What holds us together, surely, is Tylor’s broad sense of
culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the habits of behaviour that
shape relations between men and women, parents and children, cops and
civilians, shop assistants and consumers. Intellectuals like me have a
tendency to suppose that the things we care about are the most important
things. I don’t say they don’t matter. But they matter less than the
story of the golden nugget suggests.
So
how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to tell
ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant,
when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? Well,
by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the
everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something
that was already present in Tylor’s work. Remember his famous
definition: it began with culture as “that complex whole”. What you’re
hearing is something we can call organicism. A vision of culture
not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an organic
unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully adapted to
occupy a particular place, each part essential to the functioning of the
whole. The Eurovision song contest, the cutouts of Matisse, the
dialogues of Plato are all parts of a larger whole. As such, each is a
holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if you have never
personally checked it out. Even if it isn’t your jam, it is still your
heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our everyday selves
could be dusted with gold.
Britons once swapped their fish and chips for chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky Nando’s
Now,
there are organic wholes in our cultural life: the music, the words,
the set-design, the dance of an opera fit and are meant to fit together.
It is, in the word Wagner invented, a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a total work of art. But there isn’t one great big whole called culture
that organically unites all these parts. Spain, in the heart of “the
west,” resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off
in India and Japan in “the east,” the home of Oriental despotism.
Jefferson’s cultural inheritance – Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom
– did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At
the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily –
perhaps even more easily – than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian
Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. The same
is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for
chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky
Nando’s.
Once
we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan picture in
which every element of culture, from philosophy or cuisine to the style
of bodily movement, is separable in principle from all the others – you
really can walk and talk like an African-American and think with Matthew
Arnold and Immanuel Kant, as well as with Martin Luther King and Miles
Davis. No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from
taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or
democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New Yorker of any
ancestry taking up Islam.
The
stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint
Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some
truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of
scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices
that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify
playlist we have never quite listened to. If these thinkers are part of
our Arnoldian culture, there is no guarantee that what is best in them
will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look
back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim
thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in
modern Muslim cultures.
Values
aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the
west, however you define it, being western, provides no guarantee that
you will care about western civilisation. The values European humanists
like to espouse belong just as easily to an African or an Asian who
takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, of
course, they do not belong to a European who has not taken the trouble
to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is true in the other
direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests that we cannot help
caring about the traditions of “the west” because they are ours: in
fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we care about them. A
culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a
good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid
down by a western destiny.
In
the year of Edward Burnett Tylor’s death, what we have been taught to
call western civilisation stumbled into a death match with itself: the
Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other,
marching young men to their deaths in order to “defend civilisation”.
The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked
Tylor’s evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold’s worst
fears about what civilisation really meant. Arnold and Tylor would have
agreed, at least, on this: culture isn’t a box to check on the
questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with
others.
Culture
– like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for
contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of
confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of
them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect
the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with
larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world
intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to
communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives
must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in
which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of
technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the
compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too
broad a horizon.
Advertisement
We
live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet. The
cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a
luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I can
draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation, because
I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist
Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek
comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the
African. He once wrote, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” Now there’s an identity worth holding on to.
• This is an edited version of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s BBC Reith lecture, Culture, the fourth part of the series Mistaken Identities, which is available on the Radio 4 website
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
The values of liberty, tolerance and rational inquiry are not the
birthright of a single culture. In fact, the very notion of something
called ‘western culture’ is a modern invention
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Like many Englishmen who suffered from tuberculosis in the 19th century, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
went abroad on medical advice, seeking the drier air of warmer regions.
Tylor came from a prosperous Quaker business family, so he had the
resources for a long trip. In 1855, in his early 20s, he left for the
New World, and, after befriending a Quaker archeologist he met on his
travels, he ended up riding on horseback through the Mexican
countryside, visiting Aztec ruins and dusty pueblos. Tylor was
impressed by what he called “the evidence of an immense ancient
population”. And his Mexican sojourn fired in him an enthusiasm for the
study of faraway societies, ancient and modern, that lasted for the rest
of his life. In 1871, he published his masterwork, Primitive Culture, which can lay claim to being the first work of modern anthropology.
Primitive Culture was, in some respects, a quarrel with another book that had “culture” in the title: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,
a collection that had appeared just two years earlier. For Arnold,
culture was the “pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to
know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been
thought and said in the world”. Arnold wasn’t interested in anything as
narrow as class-bound connoisseurship: he had in mind a moral and
aesthetic ideal, which found expression in art and literature and music
and philosophy.
But Tylor thought that the word could mean something quite different,
and in part for institutional reasons, he was able to see that it did.
For Tylor was eventually appointed to direct the University Museum at
Oxford, and then, in 1896, he was appointed to the first chair of
anthropology there. It is to Tylor more than anyone else that we owe the
idea that anthropology is the study of something called “culture”,
which he defined as “that complex whole which includes knowledge,
belief, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Civilisation, as Arnold
understood it, was merely one of culture’s many modes.
Nowadays, when people speak about culture, it is usually either
Tylor’s or Arnold’s notion that they have in mind. The two concepts of
culture are, in some respects, antagonistic. Arnold’s ideal was “the man
of culture” and he would have considered “primitive culture” an
oxymoron. Tylor thought it absurd to propose that a person could lack
culture. Yet these contrasting notions of culture are locked together in
our concept of western culture, which many people think defines the
identity of modern western people. So let me try to untangle some of our
confusions about the culture, both Tylorian and Arnoldian, of what we
have come to call the west.
Someone asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of western civilisation,
and he replied: “I think it would be a very good idea.” Like many of
the best stories, alas, this one is probably apocryphal; but also like
many of the best stories, it has survived because it has the flavour of
truth. But my own response would have been very different: I think you
should give up the very idea of western civilisation. It is at best the
source of a great deal of confusion, at worst an obstacle to facing some
of the great political challenges of our time. I hesitate to disagree
with even the Gandhi of legend, but I believe western civilisation is
not at all a good idea, and western culture is no improvement.
One reason for the confusions “western culture” spawns comes from
confusions about the west. We have used the expression “the west” to do
very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet of empire, wrote,
“Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet”,
contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else. During the
cold war, “the west” was one side of the iron curtain; “the east” its
opposite and enemy. This usage, too, effectively disregarded most of the
world. Often, in recent years, “the west” means the north Atlantic:
Europe and her former colonies in North America. The opposite here is a
non-western world in Africa, Asia and Latin America – now dubbed “the
global south” – though many people in Latin America will claim a western
inheritance, too. This way of talking notices the whole world, but
lumps a whole lot of extremely different societies together, while
delicately carving around Australians and New Zealanders and white South
Africans, so that “western” here can look simply like a euphemism for
white.
Of course, we often also talk today of the western world to contrast
it not with the south but with the Muslim world. And Muslim thinkers
sometimes speak in a parallel way, distinguishing between Dar al-Islam, the home of Islam, and Dar al-Kufr,
the home of unbelief. I would like to explore this opposition further.
Because European and American debates today about whether western
culture is fundamentally Christian inherit a genealogy in which
Christendom is replaced by Europe and then by the idea of the west.
This civilisational identity has roots going back nearly 1,300 years,
then. But to tell the full story, we need to begin even earlier. For
the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the
world was divided into three parts. To the east was Asia, to the south
was a continent he called Libya, and the rest was Europe. He knew that
people and goods and ideas could travel easily between the continents:
he himself travelled up the Nile as far as Aswan, and on both sides of
the Hellespont, the traditional boundary between Europe and Asia.
Herodotus admitted to being puzzled, in fact, as to “why the earth,
which is one, has three names, all women’s”. Still, despite his
puzzlement, these continents were for the Greeks and their Roman heirs
the largest significant geographical divisions of the world.
But here’s the important point: it would not have occurred to
Herodotus to think that these three names corresponded to three kinds of
people: Europeans, Asians, and Africans. He was born at Halicarnasus –
Bodrum in modern Turkey. Yet being born in Asia Minor didn’t make him an
Asian; it left him a Greek. And the Celts, in the far west of Europe,
were much stranger to him than the Persians or the Egyptians, about whom
he knew rather a lot. Herodotus only uses the word “European” as an
adjective, never as a noun. For a millennium after his day, no one else
spoke of Europeans as a people, either.
Then the geography Herodotus knew was radically reshaped by the rise
of Islam, which burst out of Arabia in the seventh century, spreading
with astonishing rapidity north and east and west. After the prophet’s
death in 632, the Arabs managed in a mere 30 years to defeat the Persian
empire that reached through central Asia as far as India, and to wrest
provinces from Rome’s residue in Byzantium.
The Umayyad dynasty,
which began in 661, pushed on west into north Africa and east into
central Asia. In early 711, it sent an army across the straits of
Gibraltar into Spain, which the Arabs called al-Andalus, where it
attacked the Visigoths who had ruled much of the Roman province of
Hispania for two centuries. Within seven years, most of the Iberian
Peninsula was under Muslim rule; not until 1492, nearly 800 years later,
was the whole peninsula under Christian sovereignty again.
The Muslim conquerors of Spain had not planned to stop at the
Pyrenees, and they made regular attempts in the early years to move
further north. But near Tours, in 732CE, Charles Martel, Charlemagne’s
grandfather, defeated the forces of al-Andalus (INCORRECT),
and this decisive battle effectively ended the Arab attempts at the
conquest of Frankish Europe. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon,
overstating somewhat, observed that if the Arabs had won at Tours, they
could have sailed up the Thames. “Perhaps,” he added, “the
interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of
Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the
sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet (MUHAMMAD).”
The world according to Herodotus. Photograph: Interfoto/Alamy/Alamy
What matters for our purposes is that the first recorded use of a
word for Europeans as a kind of person, so far as I know, comes out of
this history of conflict. In a Latin chronicle, written in 754 in Spain,
the author refers to the victors of the Battle of Tours as “Europenses”,
Europeans. So, simply put, the very idea of a “European” was first used
to contrast Christians and Muslims. (Even this, however, is a bit of a
simplification. In the middle of the eighth century much of Europe was
not yet Christian.)
Now, nobody in medieval Europe would have used the word “western” for
that job. For one thing, the coast of Morocco, home of the Moors,
stretches west of Ireland. For another, there were Muslim rulers in the
Iberian Peninsula – part of the continent that Herodotus called Europe –
until nearly the 16th century. The natural contrast was not between
Islam and the west, but between Christendom and Dar al‑Islam, each of which regarded the other as infidels, defined by their unbelief.
Starting in the late 14th century, the Turks who created the Ottoman
empire gradually extended their rule into parts of Europe: Bulgaria,
Greece, the Balkans, and Hungary. Only in 1529, with the defeat of Suleiman the Magnificent’s
army at Vienna, did the reconquest of eastern Europe begin. It was a
slow process. It wasn’t until 1699 that the Ottomans finally lost their
Hungarian possessions; Greece became independent only in the early 19th
century, Bulgaria even later.
We have, then, a clear sense of Christian Europe – Christendom –
defining itself through opposition. And yet the move from “Christendom”
to “western culture” isn’t straightforward.
For one thing, the educated classes of Christian Europe took many of
their ideas from the pagan societies that preceded them. At the end of
the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes, born a couple of hundred
kilometres south-west of Paris, celebrated these earlier roots: “Greece
once had the greatest reputation for chivalry and learning,” he wrote.
“Then chivalry went to Rome, and so did all of learning, which now has
come to France.”
The idea that the best of the culture of Greece was passed by way of
Rome into western Europe gradually became, in the middle ages, a
commonplace. In fact this process had a name. It was called the “translatio studii”: the transfer of learning. And it was an astonishingly persistent idea. More than six centuries later, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
the great German philosopher, told the students of the high school he
ran in Nuremberg: “The foundation of higher study must be and remain
Greek literature in the first place, Roman in the second.”
So from the late middle ages until now, people have thought of the
best in the culture of Greece and Rome as a civilisational inheritance,
passed on like a precious golden nugget, dug out of the earth by the
Greeks, transferred, when the Roman empire conquered them, to Rome.
Partitioned between the Flemish and Florentine courts and the Venetian
Republic in the Renaissance, its fragments passed through cities such as
Avignon, Paris, Amsterdam, Weimar, Edinburgh and London, and were
finally reunited – pieced together like the broken shards of a Grecian
urn – in the academies of Europe and the United States. There
are many ways of embellishing the story of the golden nugget. But they
all face a historical difficulty; if, that is, you want to make the
golden nugget the core of a civilisation opposed to Islam. Because the
classical inheritance it identifies was shared with Muslim learning. In
Baghdad of the ninth century Abbasid caliphate, the palace library
featured the works of Plato and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid,
translated into Arabic. In the centuries that Petrarch called the Dark
Ages, when Christian Europe made little contribution to the study of
Greek classical philosophy, and many of the texts were lost, these works
were preserved by Muslim scholars. Much of our modern understanding of
classical philosophy among the ancient Greeks we have only because those
texts were recovered by European scholars in the Renaissance from the
Arabs.
In the mind of its Christian chronicler, as we saw, the battle of
Tours pitted Europeans against Islam; but the Muslims of al-Andalus,
bellicose as they were, did not think that fighting for territory meant
that you could not share ideas. By the end of the first millennium, the
cities of the Caliphate of Cordoba were marked by the cohabitation of
Jews, Christians, and Muslims, of Berbers, Visigoths, Slavs and
countless others.
There were no recognised rabbis or Muslim scholars at the court of
Charlemagne; in the cities of al-Andalus there were bishops and
synagogues. Racemondo, Catholic bishop of Elvira, was Cordoba’s
ambassador to the courts of the Byzantine and the Holy Roman empires. Hasdai ibn Shaprut,
leader of Cordoba’s Jewish community in the middle of the 10th century,
was not only a great medical scholar, he was the chairman of the
Caliph’s medical council; and when the Emperor Constantine in Byzantium
sent the Caliph a copy of Dioscorides’s De Materia Medica, he took up
Ibn Shaprut’s suggestion to have it translated into Arabic, and Cordoba
became one of the great centres of medical knowledge in Europe. The
translation into Latin of the works of Ibn Rushd, born in Cordoba in the
12th century, began the European rediscovery of Aristotle. He was known
in Latin as Averroes, or more commonly just as “The
Commentator”, because of his commentaries on Aristotle. So the classical
traditions that are meant to distinguish western civilisation from the
inheritors of the caliphates are actually a point of kinship with them.
But the golden-nugget story was bound to be beset by difficulties. It
imagines western culture as the expression of an essence – a something –
which has been passed from hand to hand on its historic journey. The
pitfalls of this sort of essentialism are evident in a wide range of
cases. Whether you are discussing religion, nationality, race or
culture, people have supposed that an identity that survives through
time and space must be propelled by some potent common essence. But that
is simply a mistake. What was England like in the days of Chaucer,
father of English literature, who died more than 600 years ago? Take
whatever you think was distinctive of it, whatever combination of
customs, ideas, and material things that made England characteristically
English then. Whatever you choose to distinguish Englishness now, it
isn’t going to be that. Rather, as time rolls on, each
generation inherits the label from an earlier one; and, in each
generation, the label comes with a legacy. But as the legacies are lost
or exchanged for other treasures, the label keeps moving on. And so,
when some of those in one generation move from the territory to which
English identity was once tied – move, for example, to a New
England – the label can even travel beyond the territory. Identities can
be held together by narratives, in short, without essences. You don’t
get to be called “English” because there’s an essence that this label
follows; you’re English because our rules determine that you are
entitled to the label by being somehow connected with a place called
England.
So how did the people of the north Atlantic, and some of their kin
around the world, get connected to a realm we call the west, and gain an
identity as participants in something called western culture?
James Gillray’s 1805 cartoon, The Plumb Pudding in Danger, depicts prime
minister William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world
Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
It
will help to recognise that the term “western culture” is surprisingly
modern – more recent certainly than the phonograph. Tylor never spoke of
it. And indeed he had no reason to, since he was profoundly aware of
the internal cultural diversity even of his own country. In 1871 he
reported evidence of witchcraft in rural Somerset. A blast of wind in a
pub had blown some roasted onions stabbed with pins out of the chimney.
“One,” Tylor wrote, “had on it the name of a brother magistrate of mine,
whom the wizard, who was the alehouse-keeper, held in particular hatred
... and whom apparently he designed to get rid of by stabbing and
roasting an onion representing him.” Primitive culture, indeed.
So the very idea of the “west,” to name a heritage and object of
study, doesn’t really emerge until the 1890s, during a heated era of
imperialism, and gains broader currency only in the 20th century. When,
around the time of the first world war, Oswald Spengler wrote the
influential book translated as The Decline of the West – a book that
introduced many readers to the concept – he scoffed at the notion that
there were continuities between western culture and the classical world.
During a visit to the Balkans in the late 1930s, the writer and
journalist Rebecca West recounted a visitor’s sense that “it’s
uncomfortably recent, the blow that would have smashed the whole of our
western culture”. The “recent blow” in question was the Turkish siege of
Vienna in 1683.
If the notion of Christendom was an artefact of a prolonged military
struggle against Muslim forces, our modern concept of western culture
largely took its present shape during the cold war. In the chill of
battle, we forged a grand narrative about Athenian democracy, the Magna
Carta, Copernican revolution, and so on. Plato to Nato. Western culture
was, at its core, individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and
tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific. Never mind that
pre-modern Europe was none of these things, and that until the past
century democracy was the exception in Europe – something that few
stalwarts of western thought had anything good to say about. The idea
that tolerance was constitutive of something called western culture
would have surprised Edward Burnett Tylor, who, as a Quaker, had been
barred from attending England’s great universities. To be blunt: if
western culture were real, we wouldn’t spend so much time talking it up.
Of course, once western culture could be a term of praise, it was
bound to become a term of dispraise, too. Critics of western culture,
producing a photonegative emphasising slavery, subjugation, racism,
militarism, and genocide, were committed to the very same essentialism,
even if they see a nugget not of gold but of arsenic.
Talk of “western culture” has had a larger implausibility to
overcome. It places, at the heart of identity, all manner of exalted
intellectual and artistic achievements – philosophy, literature, art,
music; the things Arnold prized and humanists study. But if western
culture was there in Troyes in the late 12th century when Chrétien was
alive, it had little to do with the lives of most of his fellow
citizens, who did not know Latin or Greek, and had never heard of Plato.
Today the classical heritage plays no greater role in the everyday
lives of most Americans or Britons. Are these Arnoldian achievements
that hold us together? Of course not. What holds us together, surely, is
Tylor’s broad sense of culture: our customs of dress and greeting, the
habits of behaviour that shape relations between men and women, parents
and children, cops and civilians, shop assistants and consumers.
Intellectuals like me have a tendency to suppose that the things we care
about are the most important things. I don’t say they don’t matter. But
they matter less than the story of the golden nugget suggests.
So how have we bridged the chasm here? How have we managed to tell
ourselves that we are rightful inheritors of Plato, Aquinas, and Kant,
when the stuff of our existence is more Beyoncé and Burger King? Well,
by fusing the Tylorian picture and the Arnoldian one, the realm of the
everyday and the realm of the ideal. And the key to this was something
that was already present in Tylor’s work. Remember his famous
definition: it began with culture as “that complex whole”. What you’re
hearing is something we can call organicism. A vision of
culture not as a loose assemblage of disparate fragments but as an
organic unity, each component, like the organs in a body, carefully
adapted to occupy a particular place, each part essential to the
functioning of the whole. The Eurovision song contest, the cutouts of
Matisse, the dialogues of Plato are all parts of a larger whole. As
such, each is a holding in your cultural library, so to speak, even if
you have never personally checked it out. Even if it isn’t your jam, it
is still your heritage and possession. Organicism explained how our
everyday selves could be dusted with gold.
Now, there are organic wholes in our cultural life: the music, the
words, the set-design, the dance of an opera fit and are meant to fit
together. It is, in the word Wagner invented, a Gesamtkunstwerk,
a total work of art. But there isn’t one great big whole called culture
that organically unites all these parts. Spain, in the heart of “the
west,” resisted liberal democracy for two generations after it took off
in India and Japan in “the east,” the home of Oriental despotism.
Jefferson’s cultural inheritance – Athenian liberty, Anglo-Saxon freedom
– did not preserve the United States from creating a slave republic. At
the same time, Franz Kafka and Miles Davis can live together as easily –
perhaps even more easily – than Kafka and his fellow Austro-Hungarian
Johann Strauss. You will find hip-hop in the streets of Tokyo. The same
is true in cuisine: Britons once swapped their fish and chips for
chicken tikka masala, now, I gather, they’re all having a cheeky
Nando’s.
Once we abandon organicism, we can take up the more cosmopolitan
picture in which every element of culture, from philosophy or cuisine to
the style of bodily movement, is separable in principle from all the
others – you really can walk and talk like an African-American and think
with Matthew Arnold and Immanuel Kant, as well as with Martin Luther
King and Miles Davis. No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam
from taking up anything from western civilisation, including
Christianity or democracy. No western essence is there to stop a New
Yorker of any ancestry taking up Islam.
The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or
Saint Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have
some truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of
scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices
that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify
playlist we have never quite listened to. If these thinkers are part of
our Arnoldian culture, there is no guarantee that what is best in them
will continue to mean something to the children of those who now look
back to them, any more than the centrality of Aristotle to Muslim
thought for hundreds of years guarantees him an important place in
modern Muslim cultures.
Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them.
Living in the west, however you define it, being western, provides no
guarantee that you will care about western civilisation. The values
European humanists like to espouse belong just as easily to an African
or an Asian who takes them up with enthusiasm as to a European. By that
very logic, of course, they do not belong to a European who has not
taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same, of course, is
true in the other direction. The story of the golden nugget suggests
that we cannot help caring about the traditions of “the west” because
they are ours: in fact, the opposite is true. They are only ours if we
care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry:
that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make,
not tracks laid down by a western destiny.
In the year of Edward Burnett Tylor’s death, what we have been taught
to call western civilisation stumbled into a death match with itself:
the Allies and the Great Central Powers hurled bodies at each other,
marching young men to their deaths in order to “defend civilisation”.
The blood-soaked fields and gas-poisoned trenches would have shocked
Tylor’s evolutionist, progressivist hopes, and confirmed Arnold’s worst
fears about what civilisation really meant. Arnold and Tylor would have
agreed, at least, on this: culture isn’t a box to check on the
questionnaire of humanity; it is a process you join, a life lived with
others.
Culture – like religion and nation and race – provides a source of
identity for contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can
become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral
ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom. Social
identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our
kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make
a wider world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our
horizons to communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But
our lives must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in
an era in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm
of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the
compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too
broad a horizon.
We live with seven billion fellow humans on a small, warming planet.
The cosmopolitan impulse that draws on our common humanity is no longer a
luxury; it has become a necessity. And in encapsulating that creed I
can draw on a frequent presence in courses in western civilisation,
because I don’t think I can improve on the formulation of the dramatist
Terence: a former slave from Roman Africa, a Latin interpreter of Greek
comedies, a writer from classical Europe who called himself Terence the
African. He once wrote, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” “I am human, I think nothing human alien to me.” Now there’s an identity worth holding on to. • This is an edited version of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s BBC Reith lecture, Culture, the fourth part of the series Mistaken Identities, which is available on the Radio 4 website • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.
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Most Europeans have always been rich.Here
a suggestion for some very interesting reading: ' Jared Diamond
Guns,Germs and Steel'. I thought this was an eye opener.
Most Europeans have always been rich. Right.
All those starving peasants and urban proles are just fabrications.
Dickens and his ilk made it all up, as did Marx. And the misery and mass
starvation of events like the 30 Years' War were just propaganda, no
doubt.
WESTERN CIVILISATION
Press Association – Tuesday 21st January 2014 - 4 hours ago
Emily Rajakowski is female perfection if you ask us. Copyright: [SPorts Illustrated]
Stop it Emily Rajakowski, you're making the rest of us look bad! Copyright: [Sports Illustrated]
Now that is one perfect bum. Copyright: [Sports Illustrated]
Sky News – 9 hours ago
View PhotoDad Who Beat Son's 'Sex Attacker' Not Charged
https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/ad1983bd9022b6a2a0d1f538f5610bf75cb6d719/261_121_2555_1533/master/2555.jpg?w=1900&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=9f6df0065bd29074d06be685dcc75ded
Culture
– like religion and nation and race – provides a source of identity for
contemporary human beings. And, like all three, it can become a form of
confinement, conceptual mistakes underwriting moral ones. Yet all of
them can also give contours to our freedom. Social identities connect
the small scale where we live our lives alongside our kith and kin with
larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider world
intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to
communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives
must make sense, too, at the largest of all scales. We live in an era in
which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of
technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the
compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too
broad a horizon.
