Fear and Loathing on
the Celtic Fringe
Celt 355
There were once two kingdoms: One had become very powerful
but dead inside -- rumor had it that they had once been happy and alive like
their neighbour but that - as their power grew - they
had become twisted with time. It was said that they had become strong on the
outside but weak on the inside. They
were also said to have an endless hunger for more power. So, eventually, after
they had conquered their own people they attacked and defeated their neighbour. But the King was not satisfied. He did not
just want their lands and their labour – he wanted
their hearts as well. He called on his
wizard, but his wizard told him that it was beyond his power to take the hearts
of other men "Then,” said the King. “you will put
a spell on them – you will wipe their minds clean of who they were – you will
make them forget. And what memories you
cannot erase . . .” the King paused, looking out his window at his newly
conquered land. “ . . . make them hate.” The wizard said, "But, if I do this,
there will be a great confusion -- they won't know who they are." The King plucked a hair from his head and
gave it to the wizard "put this in your brew... and make them want to be
just like us...”
Why We Aren’t On The Map
"The most powerful tool in the hand of the oppressor is the mind
of the oppressed."
Stephen Biko
The job of
the oppressor isn’t done until you hate yourself enough to take over their job
of abusing you.
Self
hatred is a subtle thing. It’s not something people wear on patches sewn to
their bags or tattoos on their biceps. But it’s real. And the Celts have, over all,
come to hate themselves. Or, as they might word it, they have come to hate who
they were. Or, more distantly, who
their ancestors were. Once upon a
time, far far away . . . but hatred felt long enough
no longer feels like hatred. It can come to feel like resignation and
helplessness.
For
example:
I was
looking at a map of indigenous people from around the world. There were a lot
more than I had thought – over 7000 indigenous groups representing about 5% of
the world’s population *– in every area of the world . . . except Europe.
There’s only one indigenous group listed for
Now my
ancestors, the Celts, come from
The Celts, however, were nowhere to be seen on the map. At
some point, they seem to have been erased. Certainly, they would have been on
such a map two thousand years ago – even, arguably, 250 years ago. But, at some
point, that name (and more disturbingly that concept of Celts as indigenous)
was erased. Or, more realistically, it probably happened over time. But happen
it did. I know because I looked and I couldn’t find us anywhere. I could find where our people are – or, more distantly,
our descendants are. But I couldn’t
find the “indigenous people” called the Celts. In
its place, unwritten, are “white people”
and “Europeans”, “French”, “Germans” , “Scottish”, “Irish” and “English”.
We got
erased.
But who
was holding the pencil?
I’m
beginning to fear that it was us.
* * *
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory
against forgetting."
“No matter how many miles or how many years separate a person from
their homeland, we still carry the village in our hearts. Something of this
spark is always passed on.”
Malidoma Some
It took me
a while to piece it together that the Celts hate themselves.
Certainly,
the opening monologue of a character in the cult classic movie version of
Irving Welsh’s book Trainspotting is not exactly the
most subtle of indicators: “It’s shite being Scottish. Some
people hate the English; I don’t. They’re just wankers,
but we were colonized by wankers. We couldn’t even
find a descent country to be colonized by.”
I don’t
think this self hatred is absolute.
Some part
of us remembers where we came from and won’t be erased. Maps be
damned.
So, the
self hatred isn’t complete, but it’s deeper than we think.
But let’s
back up.
It’s no
great surprise that
And, who
wants their child to grow up a poor outcast?
Of course,
one might be tempted to say, “That’s all in the past. Where’s the self hatred
you’re talking about? Bad things happen to good people and you get over it.”
WHO DO YOU TRUST?
People who
have been abused often have a very hard time advocating for their own rights, their
self esteem, their belief in themselves and the value of their own ideas and experiences.
Fundamental to the success of any abuser is the ability to which the abused
stops trusting their own inner wisdom but begins to
trust outer authority.
Consider
white people’s incredible fear of conflict -- the fear of people being mad at
us. Now, white people wouldn’t say they
are afraid of conflict. But, then again, the fish were the last to discover
water. Many people of colour notice this pattern
strongly. There is a fear of discussing some issues. "Oh don't say
that!" Deeply rooted in us is a
fear of disapproval. But why do we care so much what other people think? Is it
possible that we have come to value the opinions of others more than out own?
That we have come to trust the perspectives or outer authorities over our own
inherent, inner wisdom?
When you
no longer believe in yourself, your ability to stand up for your own rights and
opinions is crushed. This can also
result in a sort of passive aggressive behavior. It has, to use a small example, become common
place to go to meetings and not honestly express our frustrations or
appreciations with each other but then go home and really let loose with all of
our complaints -- but never to the persons face.
After all,
what would they think?
On the
surface, people say it’s about being “nice” or “polite” or not wanting to the
seem "ungrateful” (which is very, very different from wanting to be
gracious out of love). But it’s really not about them. It’s about us. We are afraid that people don’t like us; that
they will disapprove. And that’s only a
problem because we don’t like who we are.
But when one likes oneself and respects oneself one stands up for
oneself. One doesn’t fear conflict (or
seek it out). One doesn’t fear speaking
one’s truth.
Consider
the response given by Oisin to St. Patrick when he
was asked "What was it that sustained the Fianna
through all of their battles?" Oisin replied
that it was "The truth in our hearts, the strength in our arms and the
promise on our lips."
Crucial to
them was the ability to know what their own truth was and to trust it. This was
a hallmark of a warrior: to know the truth and to speak nothing but the truth.
Things
have changed since then, we live in a day and age
where, arguably, we no longer embody any of those qualities to any great
degree. One might even say that our very
society is based on their opposites: self deception, laziness, lies and
over-promising.
But of
course, this sort of wisdom is “outdated” our ancestral cultures were
“backwards” and best left “in the past” because we “need to move forward” and
“join the world”.Deep down we believe that the way
our ancestors lived was primitive, less-developed and, somehow, not as good as
the way we live now.
A fellow
student once told me of her Gaelic speaking friend who, when she attempted to
impress him with her newly learned Gaelic over dinner, was abruptly and
forcefully interrupted with the words "don't you speak that at the
table!"
It would seem that we still have the
eraser in our hand.
Of course,
if the modern way of living really was better – there would hardly be a
problem. But it isn’t. Not only is it destroying the natural world, based on
the slavery of millions and the exploitation of millions more . . . it doesn’t
even feel good. Perhaps nowhere is this clearer, for those of Scottish descent,
than in the home country.
“In the most detailed study of health
and wellbeing under taken, the affluent oil capital (
The figures make Aberdeen Central the
self-harm and suicide blackspot of
Each year in the
The
situation is bad and it isn’t improving.
“The suicide rate amongst men in
I’ve had a
number of friends who have attempted, or wanted strongly to, attempt suicide. A
hallmark of all of them was an incredibly, overwhelming sense that they were
worthless a feeling that they were “a waste of space”. What if suicide was a
form of erasing not only our pain . . .
but ourselves?
"It
is through the legacy of this cultural colonialism that many Gaels internalized
a sense of inferiority and lost the conviction to carry their language and
culture forward to a new generation. The
effects of accepting a subordinate, inferior status can be seen in the entire
nation. Scottish teenagers are,
according to the 1997 World Health Organization survey, the least
self-confident and most prone to depression in
(
That the
Christine Grahame a member
of the Scottish Parliament from the South of Scotland and she had strong words
for her fellow M.P.’s in January of 2000: “There are 200,000 people in Scotland who misuse alcohol.” but, as
she points out, over the last 25 years the rate of deaths caused directly as a
result of alcohol has jumped over five times for men and over seven times for
women. But even these figures are, “gross understatements, as they refer only
to cases in which the death certificate records the death as an alcohol death.
There is also an increase, up to 64 per cent, in the number of children in the
12 to 15 age category who partake of alcohol. More important, the number of
units that they are taking has doubled.”
To
put it simply: they’re drinking younger and their drinking more. To make matters worse, we’re probably only
aware of a fraction of it because of “the time lag in the production of
statistics, all those figures will be understated. We are well aware that,
because of the social acceptability of taking alcohol, much of it goes on,
hidden, at home. Like cocaine addiction, alcohol abuse and addiction takes
place at all levels in society. Unlike cocaine addiction, it is socially
acceptable. One third of general hospital beds contain patients who have an
alcohol problem. All indicators—liver disease, suicides, accidental deaths, and
so on—demonstrate that alcoholism in Scotland is 60 per cent to 40 per cent
greater than in England.”(underline mine).
But what
if these increasing numbers of those struggling with alcoholism is really
increasing numbers of people attempting to self medicate their depression? What if we are drinking to forget in a deeper
sense than we had thought? Maybe we stimulate ourselves because there’s something
we’re trying not to see – that it shouldn’t be this way.
In researching this paper I kept
struggling with the question of how this all started. Then I ran across an
article in Transition Magazine by Donna McCloskey which said it clearer than
I’d ever heard it.
“To find the roots of addiction, we must look at what psychoanalyst Eric Erikson called “psychosocial integration.” All children are
intensely motivated to maintain close social bonds with their parents, and with
other caregivers and family members. Unless this drive is badly thwarted, older
children and adults later extend their social bonds to friends, school-mates,
and co-workers, and to recreational, ethnic, religious, or other groups. Erikson saw this as a life-long struggle to achieve psychosocial
integration, a state in which people flourish both as individuals and as
members of their culture. Psychosocial integration is essential for every
person in every type of society; it makes life bearable, even joyful at times.
Insufficient psychosocial integration can be called “dislocation.” When
severe, prolonged dislocation is forced on people—through ostracism,
excommunication, exile, or solitary confinement—it is so hard to endure that it
has been used as a dire punishment since ancient times. If severe enough,
dislocation often leads to suicide.
Dislocation can arise from a natural disaster that destroys homes, or
from a debilitating accident or illness that bars a person from fully
participating in society. It can be inflicted by violence, as when masses of
people are driven from their territory, or when a child is so abused that
he or she shrinks from all human contact. It can be inflicted without violence,
as when a parent instills in a child an unrealistic sense of superiority that
makes the child insufferable to others. It can even be voluntarily chosen,
for example, in the single-minded pursuit of wealth.
No matter the cause, the pain of severe dislocation provokes a desperate
response. Dislocated people struggle to find or restore psychosocial
integration—to somehow “get a life.”
The historical correlation between severe
dislocation and addiction is strong. Alcoholism gradually spread with the
beginnings of free markets after 1500, and eventually became a raging epidemic
with the dominance of free-market society after 1800. Opium use, which had been
unproblematic in
The highlands of
Alcoholism in the highlands is poorly documented. Distilled liquor was
abundant and part of clan life, but I can find no mention of it as a problem.
In the aftermath of the clearances, however, alcoholism became a significant
problem.
The history of Canadian Aboriginals presents another example of
dislocation leading to addiction. Before they were devastated by Europeans, all
native cultures in
Although some Canadian Indians developed a taste for drunkenness when the
Europeans first introduced alcohol, for a long time many abstained, or drank
only moderately or as part of tribal rituals. It was not until assimilation
that alcoholism emerged as a crippling and almost universal problem for native
people, along with suicide, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and so forth.
A popular explanation for the widespread alcoholism of Canadian Indians
is the idea of a racial inability to handle alcohol. But this seems unlikely,
given that alcoholism only became widespread once assimilation subjected them
to extreme dislocation. Moreover, if Aboriginals have a “gene for alcoholism,”
the same must be said of Europeans, since they too almost inevitably become
alcoholics when subjected to extreme dislocation in the vast Canadian
wilderness.”
As one of
my professors at University pointed out, "They are in between two worlds,
with one foot in one and one in the other -- they have had their culture torn
from them."
These are
people engaged in a seismic scale cultural shift every bit as unnerving as a
level 9 earthquake.
“Defining what colonization means is difficult because
dictionaries define colonization without including in its meaning the effects
of it. The effects of it are truly what define it. One way of explaining
colonization is that it is the act of possessing or inhabiting a distant land
by a group of emigrants or their descendants. What this does not explain is how
these lands were colonized and what effects the colonization had on the
indigenous people whose land was being settled. This is my concern—the effects
of the colonization on the Indigenous people of this land, the land itself, and
the colonizers. Duran and Duran (1995) explain in detail how devastating the
effects of colonization and western-minded thought and behavior have had and
continue to have on Native American communities. Problems such as alcoholism,
drug abuse, suicide, intergenerational genocide, posttraumatic stress disorder
and internalized oppressions to name a few.” (Noel 75-76)
Consider
what has changed over the past two thousand years for the Celts (with a sharp
acceleration and intensification in the past 250 years):
How to Destroy a Culture With One Simple Move:
Imagine
that you live on a tabletop.
The
tabletop represents the culture in which you live. When the table top is
stable, your community feels safe. The ground beneath you is firm. You are held
up. If the table has enough legs and pounding on the table produces little
result. That table is very resistant to
oppression. Like a drum -- the harder
you beat of the louder it gets.
The
institutions of the culture – the song, dance, stories, ceremonies and rituals
are the legs of the table. The more legs
the table has the stronger it is. In the Celtic world these institutions would
have been things like: fiddling, piping, poetry, the Druidic and Bardic order, dancing halls, ceilidhs,
seasonal fire festivals, storytelling, and traditional education.
(Talking about the arts, dances, ceremonies etc.) "It seems to me that within
societies that suppress peoples experience of these
forms, whether the suppression's economic or ideological, the function and
coping ability of the people within those societies begins to break
down." (Jensen, Listening, 295)
The table
can be broken with brute force but that requires the time and effort of a
virtual genocide. But, if you can remove
the legs one by one, the tabletop can become incredibly unstable and the
slightest wind feels like an earthquake for those living on it. If you remove
enough legs it will eventually fall on its own or with the lightest of taps and
then the pieces can be rebuilt into whatever form the oppressor should
choose.
"once people are taught to despise the modes of thinking,
customs and prejudices of their ancestors, and consider as barbarism and
vulgarity all that in their childhood
they were accustomed to regard is excellent and elegant -- the whole Web of
thought and feeling is unraveled, and
cannot be readily or easily made up in a new form." (Grant 1811, 126)
But this
metaphor isn’t totally accurate. For one, a table isn’t alive. So perhaps a web
is a better metaphor. But also, it doesn’t speak to the intergenerational
nature of these issues. For example, it’s been well documented that when
various organisms (from sea sponges to human beings) are subjected to high
stress situations there are clear biological symptoms and affects they exhibit.
This is not surprising. What is surprising is that their off-spring – who were never directly subjected to the stress -- exhibit many
of the same symptoms.
Indigenous
cultures are incredibly interdependent webs of relations. The colonizers job is to break that Web and
reduce people to a state of dependence on them. The oppressed must be made to
need the oppressor. Those abused must be made to rely upon the abuser.
And,
assuming the colonizers don't just kill everybody, the survivors will likely go
through a predictable pattern of response:
Can’t Get a Witness - Why The
Community Doesn’t Care:
It would,
of course, be understandable to think that things are going better than ever
for the Celts. There has been a boom in
all things Celtic. But what isn’t so
obvious is what this boom is covering. We’re faced with two problems that go
largely unseen:
Because no
one thought the star was worth saving.
The Three Opponents We Face:
All great stories are, at their core,
about the journey from slavery to freedom.
A core theme in the mythical journey
of the Heroes quest is that of the “worthy opponent”. First, the hero sets out on some quest. The
hero is then beset upon by various opponents that test their commitment to
their quest. And these opponents usually come in three forms: the external
opponent, the intimate opponent and the internal opponent.
And a hero can only be initiated by
an opponent. The greater the opponent the greater the hero.
Perhaps this is why Caesar gave such a glowing and appreciative appraisal of
the Celts as warriors. The more worthy his opponent – the
more worthy his victory.
“The greater the obstable the more glory in overcoming it.”
Jean Baptiste
Moliere
If the
protagonist succeeds in facing these three opponents they become a hero – they
succeed. If they do not, they fail and we have a tragedy on our hands. I
remember my high school English teacher Mr. Carson pointing out the difference
between the tragic/tragos and the pathetic/pathos –
in the pathetic stories you knew the hero was doomed to failure from the
beginning (e.g. The Hunchback of Notre Dame . . . not the Disney version) but
in a tragic story it could have been different. There was a point at which the
hero could have turned back, but they choose not to.
And,
perhaps it is easy to think of what is happening in this world as somehow
inevitable – that people are a bad animal and what else could you expect from
them? Many have come to see humanity as a virus or cancer spreading over the
face of the earth. They consider our situation to be a pathetic situation –
full of pathos.
But, what
the world really has on its hands is a tragedy.
We not
doomed to this. Despite
"I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far,
that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er."
Macbeth III, iv, 136
Oppression: The External Opponent
"The
Indian must be made to feel he is in the grasp of a superior." --
My friend
“The most cogent statement of the
psychology of decolonization comes from the African American writer Kenneth
Stamp, who studied the documents of slave owners in the South. Stamp presents
the five stages slave owners used to enslave human consciousness. As an
experiment, I substituted the terms Irish and British/Roman where Stamp used
Negro and White.
1.
Establish
and maintain strict discipline with
unconditional submission. The [Irish] should know that the [British/Roman] is
to govern absolutely and he is to obey implicitly. That he is never for a
moment to exercise either his will or judgment in opposition to a positive
order.
2.
Implant
in the [Irish] a consciousness of personal
inferiority, “to know and keep their places” to “feel the difference
between the [British/Roman] and the [Irish]. To feel that ancestry taints and
that color is a badge of degradation.
3.
Awe them with a sense of the [British/Roman]
enormous power. “The only principle upon which slavery/colonization can be
maintained is the principle of fear. We have to rely more and more on the power
of fear.”
4.
Persuade the [Irish] to take an
interest in the [British/Roman] enterprise and to accept his standards of good conduct. “The
colonizer should make it his business to show his [Irish] that the advancement
of his individual interest is the same time an advancement of theirs. Once they
feel this, it will require little compulsion to make them act as becomes them.”
5.
To
impress [Irish] with their helplessness, to create
in them a habit of perfect dependence upon their colonizers.
(Noel 71-72)
It could be tempting to think that
“The Scottish crown did not passively accept the continuing
existence of a separate culture in the north.
When James I and VI convoked and assembly of clansmen on Iona in 1609,
the resulting statutes urged island landowners to submit at least one child for
schooling in English, a policy backed strongly by the Privy Council in 1616,
which demanded that "the vulgar Inglische toung be universallie plantit and the Irische language . .
. abolisheit and removeit." While verbal declarations that little in
practice, they set in stone official attitudes to the Gaelic language that the
Islanders would eventually internalize.
It was universally associated with "barbarity and ignorance"
and seen as an obstacle to the formation of a unified British state.”
(Tanner 52)
And these attitudes found there way
onto the ground in many forms. But perhaps none is clearer than the school
system in the transparency of its hatred.
“As in
He made it his duty after the opening prayer to hand the boys
a roughly carved piece of wood... the boy transferred it to the first pupil who
was heard speaking Gaelic. That offender
got rid of it by delivering to the next, who in turn placed it in the hand of
the next again... at the close of the day it was called for by Mr. Kerr. The child who happened to possess it was
severely flogged.
These kinds of punishments did not die out as the century
progressed." (Tanner 52-53)
Betrayal - The Intimate Opponent:
Sometime
the betrayals which cut the deepest come from those closest to us.
Findlay
MacLeod, one of
Of course,
for a long time British attitudes about the inferiority of the Gaelic language
and culture found little purchase amongst the Gaels. They came, after all, from
the British. They were disregarded. The Gaels had little time for the religion
or politics of the south. But a crucial turning point came when those
criticisms were delivered in their own language by their own people – at that
point, the audience was listening. No longer was the message of the inadequacy
of the Gaels coming from without – but within from their own Chiefs, Ministers,
teachers and poets. The modernist world view no longer seemed to be some
“outsider thing”. But poison is poison no what package it comes in. Some Gaelic
poetry of the early 1700s,
" . . . encouraged Gaels to internalized the English-speaking
world's prejudice that they were a barbaric society and a missionary field just
as savage and primitive as native
An English translation of this Gaelic poetry, celebrating the
spread of the Gospel around the world equated, very unflattering, the former
“barbaric state” of the
"The
Gaels were ignorant and blind
Learning
was scarce in their midst
Their
knowledge was so slim and slow
That
they could not judge their loss..."
(
But it’s
important to pause here. It would, after all, be tempting to make this about
the English and blame it all on them. But this is a much older and bigger game
than that. Here’s the short story: The Romans colonized the continent and then
stuck it to the English. The English Oppressed the rest of the Celts and all of
them came over to
It’s also
not about the British for a second, and perhaps more important reason. Often
some of the deepest injustices inflicted were not done by the outsiders.
"Few nationalisms do not incorporate a wound. The icon of national identity is not complete
without the scar left by a foreign sword....
For
example, the Patronage Act of 1712 gave the government the power to appoint
ministers, a feature of which the rich landlords were behind. After all, like
the U.S. President’s power to appoint the Supreme Court Judges, this one decision
had far reaching implications. If you had religious control of the people, and
one can’t underestimate the power of religion in that particular place and
time, then you also had political control. So, a particular
breed of sympathetic ministers were appointed and “radical” ministers –
who might rock the boat and actually oppose the policies of the government,
were not.
These were
ministers who would carefully craft messages that would encourage assimilation
into the new way of life offered up by the British and who would condemn
anything that smacked of traditions that might lead to free-thinking or the
possibility of rebellion. For example, the Ossianic
tales and ballads were very popular amongst the people. Not so amongst the clergy. Consider that the Fianna lived in the wilderness unchecked by Christian
principles, warring with enemies and enjoying long hunting expeditions for
exotic game. They lived “outside” the very system into which the priests had
been paid to bring people.
"Such
was the popularity of this secular material that the clergy periodically
attempted to discourage it, such as when the introduction to the Gaelic
translation of the book of common order (1567) warn people about their sins in
preferring the "vain hurtful lying worldly tales composed about... Fionn mac Cumhaill with his
warriors." (
During the
clearances there were ministers who would, with a straight face, tell their
flock that they were being sent off of their land because they had sinned
against God. What is so puzzling about the clearances is how quietly many of
the Highlanders left. As Neal Ascherson puts it,
there were many possible reasons such as
" . . . the preaching of Presbyterian ministers who warned their
flocks not to resist what must be there will of the Lord; the failure to
develop any alternative leadership when the clan hierarchy abandoned its duty
of protection; above all, perhaps, the hopelessness of resistance when the
consequences would probably be mass arrests of the men and separation from
their women and children who would be packed off to Canada on their own.... On
a much slighter scale, there a are echoes here of the moral agony inflicted on
the post Holocaust Jewish generations by the fact that most Jewish communities
in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe went quietly to the slaughter, urged by their
own leaders to board the trains and lorries without a struggle." (Ascherson 209-210)
The bitter
irony in all of this is that there was actually a higher survival rate amongst
those Jews who participated in the
“And
there are modern reasons why some Scots resist our language. Some Tories and
other Unionists still see Gaelic as a bulwark for Scottish independence. And
the neo-liberals view all minority languages as a barrier to the free expansion
of global consumer-culture.
This
leaves Gaelic in a vulnerable position today. On the one hand, Gaelic is
experiencing an unprecedented revival. Gaelic is again being taught in schools
in the