Questions of identity

This week: on nationalism and St Patrick’s Day (but not in the way you think); why trams are/aren’t better than buses; and notes on a fashionable cetacean.

Monday was St Patrick’s Day, so of course I got in trouble for making a stupid joke about how he was actually Japanese. I’d forgotten that a significant number of BlueSky users have never previously encountered these so-called “joke” things, and anyway it’s in bad taste because their father died of jokes.

The joke – you don’t have to find it funny to recognise it was meant as such – is a reference to a popular “well actually” often spotted in the wild this time of year, the observation that the one thing we know Patrick definitely wasn’t was Irish. His memoir – the Confessio, one of the tiny number of texts we have from sub-Roman Britain – tells us he was born somewhere in what had been Britannia, but was kidnapped by pirates and sold into slavery across the Irish Sea.

Exactly where Patrick is from is, as with so much else about the 5th century, incredibly unclear, but most of the more plausible options are near the west coasts of Great Britain (Wales, Cumbria). A John Finnemore sketch has an actor play him with a fruity English accent, presumably because it’s funnier. (The punchline is the director asking the actor to do St George instead, which, more anon.) More often it is said he was basically Welsh.

Only he wasn’t. Not because he didn’t come from Wales (though he might not have done) and not because he didn’t speak an ancestor of the Welsh language (he probably did, Brythonic, though he most certainly spoke Latin too). He may well have been from the land we call Wales – but he wasn’t Welsh because Welshness hadn’t been invented yet. The man we know as Patrick was Romano-British, a mix of class status and ethnic group that no longer exists, and which messes with the internet’s sense of how colonialism works by merging both culture and probably genes of coloniser and subject. Trying to map this onto anything that exists today is madness.

In the same way, St George was not, in fact, Turkish, because in his time (the turn of the 4th century) the Turkic peoples were nearly a thousand years off invading Anatolia. What is now Turkey was then a Greek speaking bit of the Roman Empire – but in many ways George wasn’t Greek in the sense we’d understand it today, either, but someone who spoke an ancestor of the same language.

One of the odd things about nationalism is the way it grants today’s identities a sort of timelessness, and assumes they’ve existed since time immemorial. But that’s not how these things work. Some identities – American or Canadian or Australian or Chilean – obviously don’t extend back that far. But the same is true of many old world identities too, and not just those invented by Europeans drawing lines on maps of Africa or the Arab world. Austria has existed for centuries, but the idea it’s not a subset of Germanness is a relatively recent assumption. Belgianness springs from a combination of population transfers due to religious wars, Austrian domination and a firm refusal to be either French or Dutch. Nations had to be invented, from war or politics or being on one side or another of imperialism, and often more recently than you think.¹

In other words, the ethno-nationalists are not merely horrible but wrong. National identities can be born and die, merge and split and evolve, and are anyway defined less by genetics than the stories we tell about who we are. I remember this hitting me at a Seder night dinner one year, when suddenly I understood quite why this ritual, handed down over thousands of years, mattered in the assertion of Jewishness.

At any rate St Patrick may have been from Wales. But he was definitely not Welsh.

He was actually Japanese.

Dates for your diary

The paperback of A History of the World in 47 Borders is out in just eight days! Which means some people are bafflingly already receiving theirs! This is exciting! For me! Perhaps less so for the rest of you. Unless you’ve been waiting for this moment to buy it? Which could happen. That is how paperbacks work. What was I saying again?

Hey look, they’ve made me bookmarks! Image courtesy of the Book Vault, Barnsley.

Oh right, yes, some events:

Thursday 3 April: Waterstones St Albans

Friday 4 April: Interintellect Salon

Thursday 10 April: Waterstones London Piccadilly (with Rob Hutton)

Sunday 13 April: Guildford Literary Festival

Monday 14 April: Waterstones Liverpool (with Neil Atkinson)

Tuesday 29 April: Waterstones York

Tuesday 6 May: Foyles London Charing Cross

Thursday 8 May: Stratford Literary Festival

Be lovely to see you there.

In defence of trams

A perfectly lovely coffee with a former Treasury staffer almost came to blows the other week, when he dismissed trams as “just buses that can’t turn left”.

“People would definitely take the tram!” he went on, adopting the voice of the sort of silly person who thought we should spend public money on new urban transport infrastructure for, say, Leeds. “I mean, not me. But other people.”

We can all be impressed, I think, that I remained civil.

My former civil servant friend is far from the only one to make this argument – he was, as he admitted, merely parroting Treasury orthodoxy, which explains rather a lot (especially to, say, Leeds). A few years back, the Economist, too, dismissed trams – streetcars, in the American vernacular – as a “waste of money”, and noted that: “Critics grumble that streetcars gobble up scarce transit funds for a slow, silly service used mainly by tourists.”

Trams vs buses in Manchester. Image: GMCA.

I instinctively do not buy this. Comparing Manchester to Leeds, or the average European city to the average American one, it feels pretty obvious to me that trams are better than buses; and I think people do respond to them differently. (This is not quite the same thing as saying “they are therefore worth the money”, but is a necessary starting point.) It’s worth stress testing one’s views once in a while, though, so here, best one can tell, are the arguments for and against trams.

The case for the prosecution: trams suck