I've just been reading through the "chav--explain to a confused expatriate please" thread over on Politics. As an ex-pat I was similarly bemused when I first heard the term but after reading through the ‘chav’ thread I am mostly reminded that I remain mystified by people’s desire to want to be like others and be part of a group at all.
Born in 1955 I was 13 or so when Hippies became the group to join. Before that I was aware of Mods, Rockers/Greasers and before that, just dimly, Teddy Boys. After Hippies came Skinheads, Disco and then Punk… at least, that’s as far as I noticed. These groups, of course, all had a musical aspect to them but at school, too, most people would hang around in groups, or gangs. Then later, in my late teens, I noticed people gravitated to political groups, too, and religious groups. It wasn’t long before it struck me that national groups were in fact nothing more than a larger version of Teddy Boys or Hippies or Punks or the gangs at school.
I seem to be missing a gene. At school the biggest group I was ever a member of numbered 3. I was aware of Hippies from 1967 and knew a few… I liked their drugs and their friendliness. I wore bell-bottoms and embroidered my Levi’s jacket but I never thought of myself as one of them. When I was 16 I found myself alone in Morocco without any money (long story) and spent 3 days traveling there entirely dependent on the kindness of the locals. That was a real eye-opener! I’d gone there suspicious of every offer of kindness… I mean, hey, Arabs would sell their own grandmothers, introduced syphilis to mankind by fucking camels and bought and sold white women and all that racist shit that I’d sublimated while growing up in the UK. What I actually found was that everyone I met was far kinder to me, a complete stranger, than a whole bunch of people in the Devon village I’d grown up in. My village was 7 miles from the nearest town with an infrequent bus service so hitchhiking was often the only option. I was amazed one day when someone who’d known me since I was a toddler passed me by. When I saw him a couple of days later and asked him why he hadn’t given me a lift he said, “Get your own furkin’ car!” Or the people who wouldn’t let you have the ball you’d accidentally kicked into their garden back ‘… until they’d spoken to your parents’. My experiences in Morocco made me think and have led me to conclude that racism and nationalism are deeply stupid.
What I noticed most about Hippies and Punks was the creeping exclusivity of their groups. They started out rejecting social pressures to conform but in no time at all replaced those with their own. Hippies grew their hair as a rejection of the norm that required men to have short hair but it wasn’t long before having short hair made you uncool. I see this tendency in the British class system and in all nationalist rhetoric. I see it in Bush’s claim that in the ‘war on terrorism’ ‘You’re either with us or against us’ and in Blair’s acceptance of the deaths of thousands of civilians in Iraq as if their lives are somehow less valuable than those of British people. For what makes all that possible is the idea that there’s your group and those not in your group.
It seems to me that at root is a lack of creativity with a major function of a group being to stamp out creativity unless it is channeled into an acceptable direction. Looking back at my formal education I see clearly that while we were told that we were being taught to think for ourselves we were in fact being taught to think like everyone else – for if thinking for yourself led you to question the system then you were in for a hard time.
Each one of us is a unique mixture of genes with no 2 people being exactly the same, not even identical twins. This is our starting point in life and it seems to me that the most creative thing anyone can do is to be themselves rather than be a good English person, or Hippy, or Christian, or Muslim, or socialist or heterosexual or whatever. But people still desire to be a member of a group… why is that? Safety in numbers? ‘I must be right if a million others agree’?
I shall end this with a story from my childhood – my mother was a painter, well trained at the Slade and Royal College in the 1930s and impoverished for most of her life. Certainly from when I was 18 months old and my father died leaving my mother with debts and 6 school-age children to raise. Birthday and Xmas presents were mostly clothes she’d made for us, or socks and stuff. When I was 5 she made me a winter coat. The first time I wore it I came home from the village school that day declaring that I hated it and wouldn’t wear it again. My mother asked me why not. When I told her that it was because all the other children were wearing ‘bought’ coats she flew into a rage, the likes of which I’d never before seen. She said, ‘I can’t believe you are my son! How dare you compare yourself to other people!?’ I might conclude that this start in life, and my mother’s constant advice to do whatever I wanted to do, had the effect of making me non-group material except that my 3 closest friends are similarly non-aligned and but had very different upbringings. I’m mystified.
Born in 1955 I was 13 or so when Hippies became the group to join. Before that I was aware of Mods, Rockers/Greasers and before that, just dimly, Teddy Boys. After Hippies came Skinheads, Disco and then Punk… at least, that’s as far as I noticed. These groups, of course, all had a musical aspect to them but at school, too, most people would hang around in groups, or gangs. Then later, in my late teens, I noticed people gravitated to political groups, too, and religious groups. It wasn’t long before it struck me that national groups were in fact nothing more than a larger version of Teddy Boys or Hippies or Punks or the gangs at school.
I seem to be missing a gene. At school the biggest group I was ever a member of numbered 3. I was aware of Hippies from 1967 and knew a few… I liked their drugs and their friendliness. I wore bell-bottoms and embroidered my Levi’s jacket but I never thought of myself as one of them. When I was 16 I found myself alone in Morocco without any money (long story) and spent 3 days traveling there entirely dependent on the kindness of the locals. That was a real eye-opener! I’d gone there suspicious of every offer of kindness… I mean, hey, Arabs would sell their own grandmothers, introduced syphilis to mankind by fucking camels and bought and sold white women and all that racist shit that I’d sublimated while growing up in the UK. What I actually found was that everyone I met was far kinder to me, a complete stranger, than a whole bunch of people in the Devon village I’d grown up in. My village was 7 miles from the nearest town with an infrequent bus service so hitchhiking was often the only option. I was amazed one day when someone who’d known me since I was a toddler passed me by. When I saw him a couple of days later and asked him why he hadn’t given me a lift he said, “Get your own furkin’ car!” Or the people who wouldn’t let you have the ball you’d accidentally kicked into their garden back ‘… until they’d spoken to your parents’. My experiences in Morocco made me think and have led me to conclude that racism and nationalism are deeply stupid.
What I noticed most about Hippies and Punks was the creeping exclusivity of their groups. They started out rejecting social pressures to conform but in no time at all replaced those with their own. Hippies grew their hair as a rejection of the norm that required men to have short hair but it wasn’t long before having short hair made you uncool. I see this tendency in the British class system and in all nationalist rhetoric. I see it in Bush’s claim that in the ‘war on terrorism’ ‘You’re either with us or against us’ and in Blair’s acceptance of the deaths of thousands of civilians in Iraq as if their lives are somehow less valuable than those of British people. For what makes all that possible is the idea that there’s your group and those not in your group.
It seems to me that at root is a lack of creativity with a major function of a group being to stamp out creativity unless it is channeled into an acceptable direction. Looking back at my formal education I see clearly that while we were told that we were being taught to think for ourselves we were in fact being taught to think like everyone else – for if thinking for yourself led you to question the system then you were in for a hard time.
Each one of us is a unique mixture of genes with no 2 people being exactly the same, not even identical twins. This is our starting point in life and it seems to me that the most creative thing anyone can do is to be themselves rather than be a good English person, or Hippy, or Christian, or Muslim, or socialist or heterosexual or whatever. But people still desire to be a member of a group… why is that? Safety in numbers? ‘I must be right if a million others agree’?
I shall end this with a story from my childhood – my mother was a painter, well trained at the Slade and Royal College in the 1930s and impoverished for most of her life. Certainly from when I was 18 months old and my father died leaving my mother with debts and 6 school-age children to raise. Birthday and Xmas presents were mostly clothes she’d made for us, or socks and stuff. When I was 5 she made me a winter coat. The first time I wore it I came home from the village school that day declaring that I hated it and wouldn’t wear it again. My mother asked me why not. When I told her that it was because all the other children were wearing ‘bought’ coats she flew into a rage, the likes of which I’d never before seen. She said, ‘I can’t believe you are my son! How dare you compare yourself to other people!?’ I might conclude that this start in life, and my mother’s constant advice to do whatever I wanted to do, had the effect of making me non-group material except that my 3 closest friends are similarly non-aligned and but had very different upbringings. I’m mystified.