Cultural Chauvinism-- Theirs, Ours
Jeff Jarvis saw the same BBC Newsnight that I did, and was not amused quite as much as I was. He has fisked the docu-clip, but didn't comment on the discussion afterward, which was where most of the laughs were to be found.
Ted Hinchman (in a swell new blog called Diachronic Agency) comments on the BBC's "absurd piece of hermeneutics," noting that evil has a "perfectly coherent secular meaning." Then he backs it up by posting a lengthy, stimulating, blessedly jargon-free treatise on the subject written in Nov. 2001. Well worth reading, and mulling over.
As to the BBC, the condescension towards America with regard to matters of morality, religion or culture is a continual feature. It only bothers you if you let it. People often refer to this as "bias," and I suppose it literally is, but it also reflects a British cultural reality that has not been entirely "constructed" by media. The British have never been a particularly religious nation. They tend to recoil from overt expressions of faith, from any indication of passion or conviction, or indeed it often seems, of sincerity, in religious contexts. (If you blink during a Church of England service, you can often miss the religious content entirely: they rush through the liturgy, and linger over the church business. It can be like watching a city council meeting on public access TV. With hymns.)
In fact, the Brits tend to recoil from overt, impassioned expressions of just about anything. In person anyway; in print or on TV they often allow themselves to go nuts, relatively speaking. But in day to day life, the chief goal of a typical Briton is to avoid being embarrassed at all costs. And as nothing is more embarrassing than to be seen as having caused the embarrassment of another, society has developed a complex system of unspoken, oblique disclaimers that is built in to every social interaction, a constant undercurrent largely imperceptible to the uninitiated, which ensures that no one ever need be the knowing focus of unwanted attention. A Brit will often inform you that he has "very strong views," but decline to state what they are. Through a series of pained expressions and vague gestures, his partner in conversation will make clear that he feels his views are rather strong as well. A raised eyebrow. A cough. An eye turned roof-ward; a sudden examination of the floor. Finally, as though following some shared yet invisible timetable, both will sigh and say the word "right" simultaneously. Next topic. To be a "good conversationalist" in Britain is to have mastered the art of changing the subject in precisely the right manner at precisely the right moment. And I'll hand it them: it can make day to day life quite a bit more pleasant, once you figure out what's going on.
Hence, perhaps, the discomfort with Good and Evil. In a sense, relativism is their quintessential habit, the credo of an embarrassment-averse people. Lord knows what they did before it was invented. British politicians who stray from it (Churchill, Blair) are hailed as heroes in America, while they tend to be vilified as unstable, dangerous lunatics at home; Americans find this astonishing, while the Brits are astonished at our astonishment, and so on, endlessly. (It is a rare week that goes by without some British newspaper columnist wondering whether Tony Blair ought to be "sectioned.") It's an over-simplification perhaps, but the Brits seem to have decided that, as a rule, things go more smoothly if everyone agrees, though tries to avoid mentioning, that everyone is a bit wrong about everything. That is unquestionably the case in most situations. But the habit seems to have made it difficult to deal with the situations where it may not be the case.
UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh comments on the same program, which has got so much attention because it was re-broadcast on C-SPAN. They should really do more of this sort of thing-- rebroadcasting, I mean. Pace Sullivan, it's not just a "bias," but a window into another culture's collective soul. Both Pejman's and Jarvis's comments were linked by Instantman, though I missed it at the time. (via Biased BBC, c/o Natalie Solent.)
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 7, 2003 09:14 AM | TrackBack