Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

If you are planning to write a book about something or someone falling from the sky be aware that the landscape is already littered with fallen objects and you might have a copyright problem.

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Fenster writes:

Swedes are different from Norwegians and Lord knows they are both different from those crazy Finns originally from some place way far to the East.  But Danes are distinctive too.

The manner by which the Danes have chosen to deal with the migrant issue is quite different from the Swedes, and telling in terms of cultural difference.  The Danes are trying to square a difficult circle, looking to hold onto a tolerant way of life while limiting the impact of cultural values that may be uncongenial to its conduct.

That process requires them to actually stand for something, to define a way of life worth defending.  Compared with the indulgent and sometime tongue-tied Swedes the Danish can come across as harsh in limiting new arrivals and for insisting on assimilation for those already arrived.  But you can’t always beat intolerance with the same brand of tolerance that you like about your own culture.

I am sure the Danish way is no easy thing.  Coming to grips with what you wish to preserve about your own culture runs against the consensus view that universal values are bound to prevail if we just stick with them.

But there must be another level, too.  It would be one thing if a nation simply woke up one day to find many others with different cultural values had suddenly arrived unannounced in the middle of the night.  That would pose a set of challenges but at least the host nation would have not been complicit in its new predicament.

But what is it about Scandinavia–indeed all of Western Europe west of the Hajnal Line that we most associate with high trust civilizations–that seems to have invited the new values in?  What is it about those new values that appealed?  What is it about the old ways, as they were experienced, that made the new values attractive?

Again, let’s go to the videotape!

Department Q is a Danish crime mini-series–a trilogy, really, short but not so sweet. It concerns a pair of apparently mismatched detectives: your by-now clichéd world weary detective–the Dane–required by circumstances to partner with a Muslim from abroad.

One might think that since Sweden touts its virtues on immigration so loudly that you would find Muslims proudly showcased in Swedish noir more than you would find them in Danish noir.  But that is not the case.  Most Swedish crime films and mini-series simply ignore Muslims, as though they do not exist.  One way to do that is to shift the venue so that Muslims are not present, the better to find villainy among the deplorables of one’s own kind.  Here’s the description of the Swedish mini-series Saknad:

Police superintendent Maja Silver goes back to her old hometown in the Swedish Bible belt to see her daughter, when a terrible discovery paralyzes the small community.

To cut to the chase, so to speak: yes, the local pastor is the bad guy.

By contrast Department Q brings a Muslim right into a lead role.  The manner by which this is handled, though, is interesting and perhaps instructive to those of us on the other side of the ocean trying to guess at what is actually going on in Europe.

Here is a scene that gets to the nub of it.  Our Danish detective is not just world-weary in the conventional Sam Spade sense.  He is world weary in the Kierkegaardian sense as well.  He’s got that darned sickness-unto-death thing going on.

Consider this exchange in which the Muslim partner describes his faith while the Danish detective reveals his lack of it.

The Dane’s lack of faith is clearly killing him.  And though he resolutely defends his barren ways you see him circle his partner’s beliefs warily, obviously interested at some level.  He has lost God and faintly sees his partner as offering a path back.

His partner in turn is nothing but warm, sincere and non-dogmatic.

Carl, I don’t believe that I am going to Paradise, or up to meet my family when I die.  But I believe in something larger than us, and it makes me happy.

But he will have none of his partner’s bleakness.

You believe in a black hole.   That nothing means anything.  No thanks.

The Muslim partner, as it turns out, is more or less Danish–that is to say an ideal Dane who has retained the decency and values of our modern age but has found his way back somehow to belief.  He is, in effect, the Danish version of the Magical Negro in American narratives.

So one one level Department Q portrays Muslims in an intentionally naive way.  The Muslim partner is hardly threatening.  Yet Denmark would not be pushing back against Islamic values if it didn’t see them as a threat.

The message I see under the surface:

“OK, our culture has become enervated and we have turned to believers to help us reclaim belief.  But there must be some way for us to grow a spine while still holding on to the Danish ways we cherish.

We recognize now that there is a risk to accepting unlimited amounts of a harder-edged culture.  Bathwater comes with the babies.  Perhaps we should put a brake on the demand for more and deal squarely with the world that we have been complicit in making.  If we take active control of it, it is quite possible that the Muslims in our culture will not overwhelm our Danish ways, and that we can benefit from what they offer us.”

It’s not a perfect solution but the perfect is the enemy of the good.  Assimilation, despite the gauzy mythology that has developed around it, has a hard edge to it.  But is it too late for the Danes?  For Western Europe?  For the United States?

Fenster writes:

Why do so many things come at us in threes?

Perhaps I should not put it that way.  To me it is less that the world is ordered into threes than it is that our minds may be comfortable reading three-way divisions into an otherwise messy reality.  It is tempting to think that the world tends to break out, like all Gaul, into three parts, but perhaps there may be something about our cognitive structure that prompts us to think in terms of three. Do our brains trick us into seeing three when it is not there, or is there some underlying three-ness to things?

My daughter is attending a Jesuit college in the fall.  I am not Catholic but listened with devout attention to a theology professor explain to parents at summer orientation what it means to be a Jesuit institution.  Over and over again he came to a situation or phenomenon that he placed into a three-way vessel for discussion.  It was so pronounced that I thought it was subtly intentional, and perhaps a reference of some sort to the Trinity, and I asked him a question along those lines in the Q&A.

He took the question in, paused, and then acknowledged that while he had not thought of it that way relative to the Trinity he was aware of how common it was to think in threes. Since a good deal of his talk involved the dialectics of conversation his answer was along those lines.  Perhaps, he said, there is a conventional way of thinking about something and then two other ways of thinking about it, one on each side.  He seemed to be saying that if there is a three-ness to the way we think it has to do with the give and take of conversation, as a part of learning.

I agree with that.  I wrote here that learning is a three way thing, citing the old Buddhist wisdom . . .

When I had not yet begun to study Zen thirty years ago, I thought that mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Later when I studied personally with my master, I entered realization and understood that mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. Now that I abide in the way of no-seeking, I see as before that mountains are just mountains, waters are just waters.

. . . later recycled by Donovan into:

First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is.

Our Jesuit teacher at orientation reminded us that all learning is a conversation.  My idea meets another idea and out of that comes something else.   One, two, three.  A dialectic.  Thesis antithesis synthesis.

Learning is not primarily a matter of the accretion of new facts on top of the old. It’s more a process of disruption, in which a former settled view becomes unsettled, then becomes settled again in a new way. First you know you know. Then you are made unstable by knowing that what you know may not be true. Then you once again know you know. That’s called learning–the disruptive accretion of falsehoods providing useful new perspectives.

So there is some truth to education being a three way thing as it involves conversation and disruption.  But is that it? I wonder if it isn’t more than that.

Consider the wide range of things that are captured in threes.  Consider as well the resemblances between three-way groupings of different phenomenon.

You can start with Freud’s division of mind into ego, superego and id.  This conception is no longer considered scientifically justified.  But there is something going on with it.  What?  Why is it compelling to think of ourselves as embodying energies related to will and passion, then reflection and conscience, then identity and action?

In the 1930s the political scientist Harold Laswell remarked that Freudian conceptions of ego, superego, and id coincide quite well with the three branches of government proposed by the framers (executive, judicial, and legislative, respectively). It is as though Madison recognized that humans are composed of warring impulses, that human institutions reflect human imperfections and that each impulse ought to be separately named and housed in order to maximize the chances of healthy governance.

I wrote an academic paper once on the field of what is called public service motivation.  This area of inquiry involves defining and measuring the reasons people are motivated to enter public service.  A key methodological distinction accepted by many in the field is itself a three-way thing.  People might be motivated toward public service for rational reasons, norm-based reasons or affective reasons.   Rational (I reason my way to my goal) maps to ego and executive.  Norm-based (I should do these things) maps to supergo and judicial.  Affective (I am driven to do these things) maps to id and legislative.

Why?  Evolutionary scientist Paul MacLean has posited the idea of a “triune brain”. Under this view, the brain can be functionally divided into “a part related to habits and instinctive behavior, a part related to emotional and social behavior, and a part related to higher cognitive and semantic processing” with each part having developed through the evolution of the species.

There are many other “rule of three” candidates for mapping, such as Aristotle’s three types of argument.  Ethos, or appeal to ethics, maps to norm-based.  Pagos, or appeal to emotions, maps to affective.  Logos, or appeal to logic, maps to rational.

To say nothing of the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow and the Three Stooges.

Or just consider BC’s motto:

Be Attentive

Be Reflective

Be Loving