From five-books.com, distinguished LSE criminologist, Professor David Downes on why Durkheim is relevant today.
Lady Greenfield posits three types of identity. Those who are “Someone†locate themselves in relation to others, changing and responding as they gain experience. Those who are “Anyone†are characterised by action, not reflection, and have a more rigid caste of mind. Those who are “Nobody†are the hedonistic young, forever receptive to new stimuli but lacking the ability to assign any meaning to them. She fears that we are all becoming Nobodies.
In this nightmare world, the demarcation between individuals will become blurred as biotechnology is used to reshape faces closer to the desired ideal, and electronics obliterates the gap between the real and virtual worlds. Age will have no meaning as the limits on reproductive life are removed through IVF and genetic engineering. We will all look the same, think the same, and behave the same, bouncing unreflectively through life like a pinball in a penny arcade.
If I don’t find this wholly persuasive, it is because I mistrust predictions of the future based on a snapshot of the present. Much of what Lady Greenfield says about reality TV, the decline of a shared culture, and the relative ignorance of the young are common currency among those of us in middle age. But to extrapolate this into despair at the disappearance of human individuality might be to stretch an idea beyond its natural limits.
The best exemplars are the Japanese hikikomori – young men, predominantly, who have withdrawn from society and spend their time locked away in their rooms in symbiosis with a screen. There are said to be a million of them.
Last minute preparations by 1st year students @ Kings College London, outside their temporary hall of punishment, the Royal Horticultural Halls in Pimlico, London.
Lots of debate following Germaine Greer’s criticism of Monica Ali in The Guardian:
Reality bites | News | Guardian Unlimited Books
Greer certainly seems overly prescriptive when she takes Ali to task for not having a better grasp of Bengali:
She has forgotten her Bengali, which she would not have done if she had wanted to remember it.
Greer seems to have taken an unhealthy interest in the particulars of Ali’s personal history – it’s clear that she is strangely keen to discredit her and contest her right to explore Bangladeshi-ness in the UK. This obviously says more about Greer than it does about Ali: what’s it to you Germaine? Do Ali’s privileged education and comfortable material circumstances really disqualify her from writing about the community in Brick Lane?
Her approach to her Bengali characters is not all that different from
Paul Scott’s treatment of his Indian characters in The Raj Quartet. An
author may say she loves and respects the characters she has created.
But what hurts is precisely that: she has dared to create them.
The quotation above makes it clear that we GG has an agenda that predates this novel and has little to do with it.
Her closing remark about misrepresentation makes me think that it’s she who is out of touch, not Ali:
It hurts to be misrepresented, but there is no representation without
misrepresentation. London’s Eastenders don’t watch EastEnders, because
they don’t recognise its version of their demanding and rigorous
minority culture. They watch Coronation Street instead. Farmers don’t
listen to the Archers. And Bangladeshi Britons would be better off not
reading – or, when it comes out, seeing the film of – Brick Lane.