children and culture

Two thoughts about children and culture, prompted by a re-reading — or rather, if I’m honest, my first really thorough reading — of Iona and Peter Opie’s classic The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (hereafter LLS):

1) A few days ago I experienced a wonderfully bizarre moment of readerly serendipity: I was reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, in which a character hears, from a distance, children singing “Hark the herald angels sing, / Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king” — and then a couple of hours later I picked up LLS (p. 6), where that very verse is cited as an example of “the efficiency of oral transmission” “by the schoolchild grapevine,” a channel of communication whose speed “seems to be little short of miraculous.” The Opies point out that word of King Edward’s dilemma — to keep the throne and reject Mrs Simpson or marry Mrs Simpson and abdicate the throne — only began to reach the public in the last week of November; and Edward formally abdicated on 10 December. Yet when the carol “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” was played at an end-of-term festivity in Swansea, “a mistress found herself having to restrain her small children from singing this lyric, known to all of them, which cannot have been composed much more than three weeks previously.” You don’t need the internet to have the rapid spread of memes.

But when you do have the internet, what becomes of “the lore and language of schoolchildren”? One answer will be that they’ll be just as creative and imaginative and intellectually acquisitive as ever, and will simply use internet-connected devices as their instruments for deployment and dispersal. But I suspect that that’s too glib an answer — as would be its opposite, the one that says that in the age of the internet children’s creativity is dead. But it’s hard for me to see how, in a universally connected age, children can continue to make their own culture wholly apart from the prying eyes and alert ears of adults, many of whom want to find ways to monetize children’s attention. I hope some smart people are studying these matters with care.

2) In chapter 10 of LLS, “Jeers and Torments: Unpopular Children,” the Opies write of hair-pulling and ear-pulling games, citing sources from Blackburn, Swansea, Newcastle, East Texas, and African-American culture as a whole, the last via T. W. Talley’s 1922 book Negro Folk Rhymes. They then comment, “it seems certain that somewhere, sometime, this game played in the nineteenth century by coloured folk in the United States, and the ordeal which little girls undergo in Britain today, must have had a common ancestor.” They suspect a Scottish origin, but of course can only speculate.

And this ought to remind us how completely misbegotten it is to rail against “cultural appropriation”: culture is appropriation. Culture is hearing and borrowing and transforming. Culture is giving and taking and giving again. You can’t legislate against it, and it would be foolish (indeed, a truly tragic error) to try.

Not long ago I saw someone on Twitter declaring that white people shouldn’t clap their hands between words — IRL or via emoji on Twitter — because that’s unjust appropriation of black culture. But, I thought immediately, my grandmother did that — a white woman born in 1906. Was she appropriating? Where did she get that gesture? It’s perfectly possible that she did get it from black people, since, despite the vicious cruelty of the Jim Crow era, many white people in the Deep South, especially poor-ish white people like my grandparents, spent a good deal of time around black people. But maybe the influence went in the other direction. Probably, like the rhymes and taunts shared by people in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and people in East Texas and black people throughout the South, it’s a gesture that has some ancestor we’ll never know. Such uncertainty makes claiming ownership over gestures or styles or memes impossible, even if it were desirable. But it’s not desirable; it’s anything but.

vicious circles: identity and anxiety

Last year I published an essay here at The New Atlantis called “Miss Marple and the Problem of Modern Identity.” Would you be so kind as to click that link and read the first few paragraphs? Feel free to stop at this sentence: “All you know about them is what they say of themselves — this is, in a nutshell, one of the core problems of modernity.”

In that essay my emphasis was on how we think of the people around us: how, if all we know about people is what they say of themselves, if there are not communal bonds that help us to situate those among whom we live, we can struggle to perceive them as neighbors and instead are tempted to consign them to the category of other. But let’s turn around and look at this another way: in the absence of those strong communal bonds, how do I know who I am? In such a context, identity becomes performative in multiple ways. I perform my self-understanding before others through a variety of display behaviors: how I dress, how I speak, the jobs I take, etc. And much of this performative work today is done through social media: what music or literature or television or movies I talk about and link to, what political causes I support.

In the aftermath of the Presidential election, a handful of explanatory matrices have come to dominate, and one of the primary ones involves decrying the influence of identity politics. This is basically what I’ve said, once, twice, who knows how many times. I’ve seen two further articulations of the same stance just today, both in the New York Times, one from David Brooks and one from Mark Lilla. Most versions of this case, including my own, tend to emphasize the uncomprehending hostility that people in one ideological camp for people in any other, and the hostility is certainly there, but I wonder if I haven’t missed something — something that underlies the hostility: anxiety.

Think about those people in your Twitter or Facebook feed who post and repost the same beliefs, the same talking points, over and over and over again. Why? What’s the point in this seemingly mindless repetition of the same damned ideas? I am coming to suspect that I have not taken seriously enough the felt limitations of social media as venues for display behavior.

Sorry for the ugliness of the phrase, but that’s as concisely and clearly as I can put the point. Think about it this way: if you spend your days fully embodied in the life of a community, people know who you are. They may like you, they may dislike you, but they know. Embodied community has a lot of bandwidth; communication is enabled through multiple information streams. Consider, in comparison, how thin and weak the interpersonal bandwidth of social media is. You can’t even shout to be heard; every tweet is as loud as every other tweet, and as for Facebook posts, you don't even know whether they’re showing up in your friends’ timelines. And as Information Theory 101 teaches us, when there’s some doubt about whether a message is getting through, we employ redundancy.

So I’m looking at a causal chain like this:

(a) weak social embodiment leads to

(b) a compensatory investment in social media as a way of establishing and maintaining identity — proving to people that you are indeed who you say you are — but

(c) the intrinsic bandwidth problems of social media lead to anxiety that those media aren’t doing their identity-proclaiming work,

(d) which in turn leads to ceaseless and repetitious performances of identity-marking,

(e) which reads to others as mindless, head-butting-against-the-wall hostility towards any deviation from The Approved Positions, and

(f) which can over time, thanks to the mind-coarsening effects of such repetition even on people who are originally repeating themselves not out of anger but out of anxiety, produce the very hostility it was perceived to be, leading finally to

(g) a fractured republic.

So read Yuval Levin’s book, friends, and face the simple but daunting fact that if we don't work hard to repair the mediating institutions that give people a sense of security and belonging, people will turn instead to social media to do work that those technologies just aren’t equipped to do.

holes in the fabric

One of the oddest moments of my youth came soon after I bought the LP pictured above. I ran out to get it after I heard on the radio a song from it, called "Vincent," which struck my fourteen-year-old self as the most profound and artful and insightful and poetic thing I had ever encountered. And then, listening to the whole record, I was blown away by the title song and wanted to tell everyone about it ... only to discover that everyone already knew about it and had been listening to it on every pop radio station in town over and over and over again so that they had been sick of it for some months already. But I had never heard it until I put the LP on my turntable.

I could not account for this then and cannot now. I listened to the radio as much as any kid my age: I pleaded with my grandmother to let me control the car radio whenever we were out and about; I had a small transistor radio I kept by my bed to listen to every night; I even strapped that transistor to the handlebars of my bike so I could listen as I rode around the neighborhood. And yet, somehow, in utter defiance of probability, I had never managed to have the radio on when "American Pie" was playing.

I experienced something slightly similar today when someone on Twitter linked to this post on a sportswriter named Gary Smith, who is evidently Kind of a Big Deal. I mean, just read the post. The guy has won every journalistic award a person could win. He's every sportswriter's writerly hero (well, almost). But I have never heard his name and as far as I know have never read a word he's written. And yet I'm a reasonably serious sports fan and read a good deal about sports. How could I have altogether missed Gary Smith?

I find these gaps in experience, holes in the fabric of knowledge and cultural connection, oddly fascinating. The other big one I can think of involves Joni Mitchell's song "River," which, despite its being one of her most-covered songs, and despite my having owned several Joni Mitchell albums when I was young, I had never heard until about five years ago — almost forty years after its release. But of course, these gaps I have mentioned here I can mention only because they've been closed. Who knows how many other songs or writers or poems or whatever I've missed, what essential elements of the experience of my generation have passed me by and left me unwittingly denied some bond, some link?

And what about you, my friend? What about you?