Ties That Bind

Slowly but surely, Britain is disowning her children and grandchildren. It is a sad, sad day when ties of blood, culture, and history become meaningless.

A recent article in the Times (shared with me by my Australian friend Peter) notes that the British government is proposing to end the scheme under which Commonwealth citizens with a British grandparent are allowed to enter and settle in Britain.

This is the latest move in a long sequence where Britain has turned her back on those countries she created and bequeathed her rich legacy and culture too. The dominions (Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand) would not exist without Britain. Neither would many African states, nor the states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, nor many island states, Singapore included. That's over a third- maybe almost half- of the world's population who live in a country created by the British Empire. We are the children and grandchildren of the British Empire. Just because we have grown up and left to seek our own fortunes doesn't mean she should lock us out of the house- and worse, in favour of the neighbours that she has long fought with and hated: the rest of Europe.

The fact is, Britain owes as much to her colonies as we owe to Britain. Britain became the world's biggest economy and is still the capital of finance, because of her Empire- the imperialism of free trade, as us historians refer to it. Her wars were fought with Gurkhas and Sepoys; her ships built with Canadian lumber; her dining tables laden with curry and tea from India, spices from the East Indies, fruit and sugar from the Caribbean; her people dressed with Antipodean wool; her goods built with Malayan tin and rubber. English is riddled with words from the colonies ("jungle", "pyjamas', "loot", "shampoo", "amok", "junk", caddy", "scoff", "slim", "trek", "commando" and "rogue", just to name a few off the top of my head). If it weren't for the heroics of the citizens of the Empire, Britain would have lost both World Wars.

One reason for the Empire, interestingly, was to contain Europe. Countries such as Gibraltar, Cyprus and South Africa were added to the Empire for largely strategic reasons. How ironic, then, that we are now being jettisoned in favour of the very people we were brought in to defend against- people with whom Britain has waged war upon for hundreds of years.

We are called the Commonwealth for a reason. We are supposed to be in this together. We were given the vote in Britain for a reason, after all- we were British. I decry this sad state of affairs where we are neglected and treated like foreigners in the very country who created us, and the day that the Commonwealth loses its meaning in Britain is a dark, sad day for those of us who cherish our history and appreciate the ties that bind Britain and her former Empire together.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

2002: Fresher at Hertford College MCR, student at the University of Oxford, studying History
2005: Fresher at Hertford College MCR, student at the University of Oxford, studying History

2002: Hang out frequently with friends Rich and Mindy, two Americans from opposite sides of the USA (North and South). Rich is a boisterous chap with two BAs (and counting); Mindy is pretty, a quiet, gentle soul with great spirit.
2005: Hang out frequently with friends Steve and Elizabeth, two Americans from opposite sides of the USA (West and East). Steve is a boisterous chap with two BAs (and counting); Elizabeth is pretty, a quiet, gentle soul with great spirit.

2002: Laugh at antics of Chief, a pear-shaped, be-spectacled, rambunctious, Brit who is the life of the party with his jokes, comments and physical humour.
2005: Laugh at antics of Paul, a pear-shaped, be-spectacled, rambunctious, Brit who is the life of the party with his jokes, comments and physical humour.

2002: Listen respectfully to Steve Ward, President of the MCR.
2005: Listen not-so-respectfully to Steve Ward, Junior Dean.

2002: Get together with perfect girl; break up later on discovering that she is perfect- perfectly wrong for me.
2005: Get together with perfect girl; break up later on discovering that she is perfect- perfectly wrong for me. Twice.

2002: Drink excessive amounts of beer at College bar.
2005: Drink excessive amounts of wine at College dinners.

2002: Armed with A.B. from prestigious university (Harvard); discover I have no idea what I'm reading and that everyone seems to be smarter than me.
2005: Armed with A.B. and B.A. from prestigious univiersities (Harvard and Oxford); discover I still have no idea what I'm reading and that everyone still seems to be smarter than me.

2002: Retire from Swimming. Come out of retirement to lead Oxford Swim team.
2005: Retire from Swimming. Refuse to come out of retirement to lead Oxford swim team, despite annoying entreaties from team members and coach.

2002: Perpetually broke.
2005: Still perpetually broke.

Lesson: Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them.

Three Way Dialogue

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Subaltern Studies- Deconstructing Historiography:

... Indeed a general sobriety of time will not allow them to emphasize sufficiently that they are themselves bringing hegemonic historiography to crisis. This leads them to describe the clandestine operation of supplementarity as the inexorable speculative logic of the dialectic....
... this is the always asymmetrical relationship between the interpretation and transformation of the world which Marx marks in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. There the contrast is between the words haben interpretiert and zu ver-ändern. The latter expression matches haben interpretiert neither in its Latinate philosophical weight nor in its signification of propriety and completion, as transformieren would have done. Although not an unusual word, it is not the most common word for 'change' in German- verandeln. In the open-ended 'making-other'- ver-änderung- of the properly self-identical- adequately interpretiert- lies an allegory of the theorist's relationship to his subject matter...

P.J. Thum:

Spivak's Deconstructing Historiography has the singular effect of producing an inexorable feeling of immeasurable inadequacy in the reader. Whether this effect is intended or unintentional, her single-minded and impenetrable prose creates a mental space in which none dare to penetrate, and thus is perhaps self-serving in that it justifies her own academic credentials. While this writer is personally in awe of her ability to create such a text, he is disappointed with her inability to communicate her ideas effectively.

B.B. Chaudhuri:

The 'theoretical intervention' by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is as abstruse as Dipesh Chakrabarty's discussion is lucid. She examines some postulates of the 'subaltern' historiography in the light of recent advances in linguistics. However, she addresses readers as a specialist would talk to a small coterie of specialists. Since the present reviewer does not belong to this charmed circle, he feels it would be foolhardy of him to try to glean any pearl from the depth of this bafflingly obscure piece of composition.

P.J. Thum:

You said it, man.

How One Bumbling Idiot (Me) Got Into Harvard

Highly amusing article in the New Yorker today. It explains quite well the admissions philosophy of Harvard, Princeton, and the other Ivy leagues. You can read the article for yourself, but I thought I'd highlight a few significant paragraphs:

... Harvard, Yale, and Princeton chose to adopt what might be called the “best graduates” approach to admissions. France’s École Normale Supérieure, Japan’s University of Tokyo, and most of the world’s other élite schools define their task as looking for the best students—that is, the applicants who will have the greatest academic success during their time in college. The Ivy League schools justified their emphasis on character and personality, however, by arguing that they were searching for the students who would have the greatest success after college. They were looking for leaders, and leadership, the officials of the Ivy League believed, was not a simple matter of academic brilliance.

... It is a wonderful thing, of course, for a school to turn out lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. But Harvard didn’t want lots of relatively happy and successful graduates. It wanted superstars, and Bender and his colleagues recognized that if this is your goal a best-students model isn’t enough.

In effect, the Ivies admit students whom they think will be the greatest success after they graduate. In the real world, of course, success is not determined by your academic results. Success is often more closely correlated with your willingness to work hard, your drive to succeed, and your ability to work with other people. That's why, for example:

... recruited athletes have an acceptance rate to the Ivies at well over twice the rate of other students, despite S.A.T. scores that are on average more than a hundred points lower.

All this is highly debatable, of course, but then again the track record of the Ivies in turning out highly successful graduates speaks for itself. This reflects something I've been banging on about for a long time: our stress on academic results in Singapore is highly misplaced, not just when it comes to choosing our future leaders, but also as a general plan of education at large for our extremely limited population. We need to emphasise the skills which contribute to success in the real world, not in the classroom. Often they overlap, but more often they don't.

We need to produce successful people, not successful students.