Stalking authors

My new obsession with Laila Lalami continues with this video. She is speaking at Google about her last book, but the entire talk is very worth listening to. She spends ten minutes giving one of the most nuanced discussions of the headscarf and the symbolism it has taken on I have heard and she totally slams Thomas Friedman's high opinion of his own knowledge of the Arab Street.

Also, TNR has an article about one of my older author-obsessions claiming that Jhumpa Lahiri is as much an artist depicting my generation, especially among the upper-middle class, as she is an author charting the immigrant experience. While I think saying that she is more the former than the later would be a great disservice to her viewpoint, the article makes some very interesting points that starting me thinking again about Judith Rich Harris's work in The Nurture Assumption.

Harris has long been crying out that the culture children grow up in has far more to do with who they become than who their parents are (culture in this case very much includes things like economic standing) and the article in TNR seems to be imbibing this viewpoint, even though it isn't dealt with explicitly, and I think there is a point to me made that, in this day and age, I have found it very difficult to grow up in the US without constantly being forced to try to come to terms with other cultural outlooks. Clearly, this is not true for everyone, but I think both education and living in urban areas increase the chance that this is true for any particular person and I think, I hope, that is only going to become more true of the US, despite how easy it is to look at the prevalence of complete cultural indifference in this country and despair.

Yet, I have actually found some sort of hope in the writings of Said that I have been using as part of the framing for my thesis. Eventually, the genius who defined Orientalism came to see the piece-meal nature of identity and cultural identification in the US as a great strength if we don't turn away from it and there is a study out by one of the authors on The Monkey Cage that seems to quantify some of these attitudes. The paper attempts to chart how citizens in different countries imagine their national communities and how that effects attitudes towards immigration. The US is a clear outlier for two questions:

It is better for a country if almost everyone shares the same customs and traditions.

It is better for a country if there are a variety of religions among its people.

Only about 30% of Americans think it is better for people to share customs and traditions and somewhere around 20% are positive on the second question. (Interestingly, France is quite close to the US on its views of religious diversity, but not cultural.) One of things the study doesn't cover, but that I would love to know is how these views are correlated to age. If the author if the TNR article is right about the character of my generation, these views should be even lower in the young and I cannot deny that would make me happy. Of course, this world view I have that leads me to see this as a strength of the US has often been derided as one that eventually leads to the loss of culture and its replacement by the hegemonic stream-roller that is American/European culture and it is all too often true that the US is sadly prone to a tendency to not see the rest of the world as relevant and not work to understand the world. This paper is also mostly dealing with the US and Europe, so it doesn't take the space to deal with a more nuanced view of immigration and national/cultural identifications around the world, but I just found the subject fascinating.