When Siblings Get Religious

Not too long ago a CBC announcer spoke of an upcoming a radio commentary on what can happen in a family when one of the children becomes very religious. What kind of stresses will enter the family? How will people cope.

The on-air promotions only mentioned how one sibling would deal with another sibling who had become “super religious”.
I decided to get this podcast and listen to it. In light of the recent news reports of brothers (and sometimes sisters) leaving their secular Western families to run off and join the worldwide Jihad against Christianity by going to Syrian and participating in ISIS the topic seemed entirely in keeping with one of the dominant questions being asked: has the West somehow failed to be nice enough to these young people? This is the allegation made in the Washington Post by Masha Gessen regarding the reasons for the Boston Marathon Bombers engaging in terrorism. How Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s immigrant path explains his guilty verdict

				How Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s immigrant path explains his gu…Masha Gessen explores what shaped Boston Marathon bombers.
				View on www.washingtonpost…	Preview by Yahoo

I was naturally interested, too, in the problems of identity which arise when people leave their homeland and enter into some kind of diaspora community. What is “identity” and how does it enter into the lives of people in our ever more mobile world. How does the ideology of “multiculturalism” which seems to demand simultaneously that we should all maintain our “authentic” cultural roots as well as being completely tolerant of all other cultures regardless of their fundamental differences with our own.

The CBC broadcast I finally heard was about secular Jewish woman from Vancouver whose previously secular brother had become an Orthodox Jew and insisted on obeying all the kosher laws when he visited other members of his family.
Peace in the House: A not-so-religious Jew and her Orthodox siblings

				Peace in the House: A not-so-religious Jew and her Ortho…Danielle Nerman grew up in a secular Jewish household, with two secular Jewish siblings. Then something happened when they became adults. Her siblings got religio…
				View on www.cbc.ca	Preview by Yahoo

As I listened I learned of the compromises which involved using paper plates, the purchase of a barbeque which would only be used to cook kosher meat, and how Danielle’s brother prayed every day. I heard about his wearing a ball cap to keep his head covered while at the beach. I heard about his concerns about how some “kosher” products were not really “kosher enough” and so on.
What I did not hear was any hint of a discussion between the secular sister and the “SuperJew” brother about such things as abortion, same-sex marriage, the political tensions in the Middle East, or really anything at all which related to “religious differences” other than the need to keep meat and dairy separate and observe the sabbath.

Nothing about siblings heading off to distant lands to engage in acts brutal aggression or die almost immediately. Nothing about differences of worldview and belief so thoroughgoing that the only shared emotions left were contempt, disappointment, and loss. Minor inconveniences, not broken hearts, were all which were likely to arise.

My memory wandered back to some people I met a few years ago. Their nice secular Jewish daughter had spontaneously (i.e. no “love interest” was involved) converted to Islam. She had begun learning Arabic. She had cut herself off from them. She had taken herself out of their lives completely. And they said they did not know why. They could not imagine why.

I wondered what they and their other children would have to say about this broadcast.

If religious fundamentalism were about nothing more than dietary laws, head coverings, not missing the daily prayers — the content of which is not to be discussed in any case — if religious fundamentalism were understood by everyone as nothing more than personal lifestyle choices which in no way required anyone else in the world to change their own behaviour for any reason other than keeping “peace in the house”, then we would not be living in the world of today. We would not be gazing helplessly at pictures of the Chibok girls abducted by Boko Haram, at the mass beheadings of Christians on beaches by ISIS forces, of the wanton destruction of Nimrud and other world heritage sites because of their being somehow “unislamic”, the destruction of the Timbuktu libraries because infidel books are haram, the multiplying of no-go zones in the cities of Europe, and so on.

We would not be wondering why thousands of people born and raised in Western countries would be inspired to embrace these religious teachings, run away, and join their communities either to be “fighters” or “brides”.

Keeping “peace in the house” is one thing.

Not noticing the gorilla in the living room is another.

Do You Want To Walk On That Crappy Artificial Grass?

Earlier today I watched a father and daughter walk past a playing field covered in artificial turf. The field is surrounded by a decorative iron fence about four feet high. The little girl was not as tall as the fence. Both she and her father wore their hair with pony tails. She was wearing a pink skirt and a t-shirt. He was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt.

As I got nearer I heard him say in a soft and quizzical voice to her: “Do you want to walk on that crappy artificial grass?”

Immediately I thought “daddy’s probably one of those environmentalists and he’s brainwashing you already!”

“Yes” came her cheerful and non-confrontational answer.

With that, he gently picked her up and placed her over the fence on the artificial grass. They continued their slow stroll until they came to a gate in the fence. At that point he entered the playing field and they walked straight across it to the gate on the other side.

She’s probably no older than five. Already she is part of a culture in which children are shown respect for the right to make certain kinds of decisions even when their parents don’t necessarily agree with them. For her part she probably knows the limits of her “rights”.

Perhaps “culturally embedded privileges” is a better term.

I wondered how this vignette would have played itself out in a range of different cultures. Would a child of that age have asked at all? Would the father (or mother) have responded with a question — biased or otherwise? How would the response — clearly a rejection of the implied parental viewpoint — have been treated? In which cultures would a parent have considered the “natural” reaction that of entering into a negotiation? And then losing?

For them this incident may already be forgotten. It will be recalled only as a leisurely walk on a pleasant Sunday afternoon on a beautiful spring day.

It probably won’t be recalled as an instance of the microtransmission of cultural values in the broader context of parent-child relations.

It is only when we can take a context for granted that we can work inside that context to imagine something more. Only after we can ride a bicycle without being consciously aware of what we are doing can we tour through the countryside and imagine coming back to make paintings or perhaps to compose a poem or a song.

The high art of a culture is always built on the foundation of the social and environmental contexts which can be taken for granted.

All high culture is metastable.

Those who are to build the culture to greater heights can only do so on firm foundations. On the foundations of their “taken for granted world”.

To attack those foundations is to lower the intricacies and embedded information in the highest forms of the culture’s expressions.

And to embed the stability is, like riding bicycles, often done with little or no conscious awareness and is done continuously.

Cultures do not “exist” in any static sense. They are renewed and strengthened from microsecond to microsecond, they are transmitted from father to daughter with no more than a fleeting awareness of any of the myriad alternatives which are summarily ignored.

“What did you and daddy do today?”

“We went for a walk. We saw birds and people playing football. It was fun.”

“It’s time for you to practice your piano lessons. Then we’ll have dinner.”

“OK.”

Norbert Elias, in his book “The Process of Civilization”, made the following comment.

“The behaviour patterns of our society, imprinted on individuals from early childhood as a kind of second nature and kept alert in them by a powerful and increasingly strictly organized social control, are to be explained, it has been shown, not in terms of general, ahistorical human purposes, but as something which has evolved from the totality of Western history, from the specific forms of behavior that developed in its course and the forces of integration which transformed and propagated them.” (page 441)

Those who study history carefully — a group which does not appear to include any of the world leaders with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin — treat Western nations today with a cavalier disregard that was characteristic of how 19th Century Industrialists treated the environment.

How does a father who dislikes artificial grass feel about social engineering in the name of multiculturalism?

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Elias, Norbert. 1968 (1939). The Civlizing Process: Sociogenic and Psychogenic Investigations. Revised edition. (translated from the German Über den Prozess der Zivilisation by Edmund Jephcott). Oxford: Blackwell