I've been in this country for three years and four months now, but I think I'm feeling more out of place and out of step with those around me now than at any time since I arrived. There are various causes, though I admit that their effects on me might be intensified by us being out of term time, so that I'm no longer surrounded daily by a department-full of fellow foreigners.
Let me tell you about my problems...
First, transport and city design (or lack of it).
Yesterday and on Sunday I took my car and drove up to the northern parts of Denver for a couple of things I needed in shops in that area, and for an appointment I had. I'm lucky enough to live in the middle of the city so that I can walk to many places, and to be able to take the Light Rail to work; but you only have to drive a little north to have it rammed home that this is indeed land of the car, and that it's a very ugly land: stretches of bleak highway, streets and streets of scattered businesses with no sense of spatial community, the horrible clone housing developments of Thornton.
On the way home on Sunday I came down Washington Street, a road which in the middle of town is a pleasant residential street, but which in the north turns out to be a godforsaken wasteland scattered with a number of seedy-looking bars that you could only get to by car. And there is another of my ongoing cultural difficulties: my discomfort with the general tolerance of drinking and driving here. You see a few signs along the roads urging you not to do it, and I know that the police do stop people and charge them now and then - but it is still socially acceptable in a way I don't think it is in Britain any longer. As a pedestrian I have enough trouble not getting run over by people talking on mobile phones as they drive, without having to worry about how much they've drunk as well. Actually, I did almost get hit by a car last week, but that was due (as often) to the rule which allows drivers to turn on a red light, something they usually do while craning their necks around to look at the oncoming traffic instead of at the road in front of them - but that is a rant for another day, if I live long enough to write it.
The waste of petrol in this driving culture is something I have difficulties with too, but I'm more often struck by the unquestioning waste of other resources. It's December now, and many people have their houses decorated on the outside and lit up like... well, like Christmas trees, except on an entirely different scale. It doesn't seem to concern anyone. The waste of electricity is rivalled only by the waste of water for the rest of the year. Here we are in a semi-arid climate, and all around are stretches of green lawn. To be fair, there are rules about water waste, but these are to prevent people using excess water while still keeping their lawns green - no one seems to think that having green lawns in such a climate might in itself be wasteful. The rules say that you shouldn't have water seeping over the sidewalk, too, but all summer you have to paddle through muddy puddles and dodge sprinklers if you're on foot. I might have mentioned before that they have sprinklers in the courtyard of my apartment block which go off morning and evening - for what reason I know not, since they are only watering woodchips and a strand or two of ivy.
Well, I could go on to the news, and to my disgust at the religious side of politics here coming out so clearly in the race for the presidential candidacy (see Justin Webb's BBC blog), my alarm at George Bush apparently trying to edge us towards WWIII (does that photo look to anyone else startlingly like a throw back to the Cold War, by the way?), or my accustomed feelings of anger at the news of yet another suicidal maniac who has been imbued with so little empathy in this self-righteously "Christian" nation that he thinks it is reasonable to take a group of random strangers with him when he goes (this one claiming that he will now be famous - is this the reason for Bush's policies too, I sometimes wonder?). But I won't. I'll go instead into a more personal experience in the last week which has left me feeling more alien than usual.
I went out on three dates (and dating - there's a weird American experience in itself) with someone I got on well with, in spite of major differences in our backgrounds. The third time we went out earlier this week I asked him about his faith, since I knew he called himself a Christian. He said he used to be a regular church goer, now wasn't, but was "spiritual" - everyone here calls themselves "spiritual," which always brings to my mind a mixture of slave songs and ouija boards, though I don't think that's what they mean by it. All of this is OK by me, though he seemed less comfortable with my concept of life after death as getting eaten by worms. In fact, though, I'd asked only because I needed to know that I wasn't dealing with someone who subscribed to Creationism or Intelligent Design. And it turned out that I was. Not wholehearted Creationism, but the idea that everything was too complex to have happened on its own, and that there had to have been "a helping hand." I asked him if that meant that he didn't believe we'd evolved from single cell organisms, and he said that he didn't. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the small matter of evidence, and he remarked that there was evidence for the other view too - at which point I should probably have asked calmly what evidence there was, but I fear that I instead ranted for a little while about the drawbacks of faith-based "science" which looks for evidence only to try to back up what it want to be true. We parted soon after.
I have told three friends about this - two non-Americans who reacted with a mixture of horror and sympathy, and one American who, though sympathetic, told me that it was a question that should be avoided in this country. But while I can and do avoid such questions with students, colleagues, and even with many of my friends, is it really a good idea to avoid such a question with someone you're dating? Isn't it better to find out sooner rather than later that your worldviews are incompatible? For me this isn't some side issue - it's a fundamental question about how we relate to the world and how we fit into it. In my case not very well, evidently, if the world is Colorado. To make me feel even more out of place here, he told me later in an email that he'd never met anyone before who didn't believe in a "higher intelligence." Are we so thin on the ground, or is everyone else just avoiding such questions?
I've been comforting myself a lot over the last couple of days by avidly reading the Pharyngula blog and various other articles on evolution, atheism, and so on, in part just to reassure myself that there are other ways of thought in this country, even if they are under constant attack. I particularly liked this article on the anthropocentric conceit - precisely my problem with Christianity and its foundations, from the moment near the beginning of Genesis when God gives man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (and then there's chapter 4 - God respecting Abel's offering of a lamb, and not Cain's one of "the fruit of the ground." As a vegetarian, I find that especially hard to stomach). It explains why Christians are particularly resistant to any science which threatens that sense of God-given superiority.
It's turned me back to thinking about my own work too, both research and teaching. I wonder sometimes as I read my student papers on literature if it is doing any good to any of us, but then I look at these debates over what should be taught in schools and universities, and I realise that just by making students support their statements with evidence from the texts I'm moving them just a nudge in the right direction. As for research, whatever small corner we are working in it is still a blow for inquiry and evidence over faith and fabrication.
And if I stress the importance of evidence here and now, it is not without an eye to the cavalier treatment of it by the current American president.
Let me tell you about my problems...
First, transport and city design (or lack of it).
Yesterday and on Sunday I took my car and drove up to the northern parts of Denver for a couple of things I needed in shops in that area, and for an appointment I had. I'm lucky enough to live in the middle of the city so that I can walk to many places, and to be able to take the Light Rail to work; but you only have to drive a little north to have it rammed home that this is indeed land of the car, and that it's a very ugly land: stretches of bleak highway, streets and streets of scattered businesses with no sense of spatial community, the horrible clone housing developments of Thornton.
On the way home on Sunday I came down Washington Street, a road which in the middle of town is a pleasant residential street, but which in the north turns out to be a godforsaken wasteland scattered with a number of seedy-looking bars that you could only get to by car. And there is another of my ongoing cultural difficulties: my discomfort with the general tolerance of drinking and driving here. You see a few signs along the roads urging you not to do it, and I know that the police do stop people and charge them now and then - but it is still socially acceptable in a way I don't think it is in Britain any longer. As a pedestrian I have enough trouble not getting run over by people talking on mobile phones as they drive, without having to worry about how much they've drunk as well. Actually, I did almost get hit by a car last week, but that was due (as often) to the rule which allows drivers to turn on a red light, something they usually do while craning their necks around to look at the oncoming traffic instead of at the road in front of them - but that is a rant for another day, if I live long enough to write it.
The waste of petrol in this driving culture is something I have difficulties with too, but I'm more often struck by the unquestioning waste of other resources. It's December now, and many people have their houses decorated on the outside and lit up like... well, like Christmas trees, except on an entirely different scale. It doesn't seem to concern anyone. The waste of electricity is rivalled only by the waste of water for the rest of the year. Here we are in a semi-arid climate, and all around are stretches of green lawn. To be fair, there are rules about water waste, but these are to prevent people using excess water while still keeping their lawns green - no one seems to think that having green lawns in such a climate might in itself be wasteful. The rules say that you shouldn't have water seeping over the sidewalk, too, but all summer you have to paddle through muddy puddles and dodge sprinklers if you're on foot. I might have mentioned before that they have sprinklers in the courtyard of my apartment block which go off morning and evening - for what reason I know not, since they are only watering woodchips and a strand or two of ivy.
Well, I could go on to the news, and to my disgust at the religious side of politics here coming out so clearly in the race for the presidential candidacy (see Justin Webb's BBC blog), my alarm at George Bush apparently trying to edge us towards WWIII (does that photo look to anyone else startlingly like a throw back to the Cold War, by the way?), or my accustomed feelings of anger at the news of yet another suicidal maniac who has been imbued with so little empathy in this self-righteously "Christian" nation that he thinks it is reasonable to take a group of random strangers with him when he goes (this one claiming that he will now be famous - is this the reason for Bush's policies too, I sometimes wonder?). But I won't. I'll go instead into a more personal experience in the last week which has left me feeling more alien than usual.
I went out on three dates (and dating - there's a weird American experience in itself) with someone I got on well with, in spite of major differences in our backgrounds. The third time we went out earlier this week I asked him about his faith, since I knew he called himself a Christian. He said he used to be a regular church goer, now wasn't, but was "spiritual" - everyone here calls themselves "spiritual," which always brings to my mind a mixture of slave songs and ouija boards, though I don't think that's what they mean by it. All of this is OK by me, though he seemed less comfortable with my concept of life after death as getting eaten by worms. In fact, though, I'd asked only because I needed to know that I wasn't dealing with someone who subscribed to Creationism or Intelligent Design. And it turned out that I was. Not wholehearted Creationism, but the idea that everything was too complex to have happened on its own, and that there had to have been "a helping hand." I asked him if that meant that he didn't believe we'd evolved from single cell organisms, and he said that he didn't. Somewhere along the way I mentioned the small matter of evidence, and he remarked that there was evidence for the other view too - at which point I should probably have asked calmly what evidence there was, but I fear that I instead ranted for a little while about the drawbacks of faith-based "science" which looks for evidence only to try to back up what it want to be true. We parted soon after.
I have told three friends about this - two non-Americans who reacted with a mixture of horror and sympathy, and one American who, though sympathetic, told me that it was a question that should be avoided in this country. But while I can and do avoid such questions with students, colleagues, and even with many of my friends, is it really a good idea to avoid such a question with someone you're dating? Isn't it better to find out sooner rather than later that your worldviews are incompatible? For me this isn't some side issue - it's a fundamental question about how we relate to the world and how we fit into it. In my case not very well, evidently, if the world is Colorado. To make me feel even more out of place here, he told me later in an email that he'd never met anyone before who didn't believe in a "higher intelligence." Are we so thin on the ground, or is everyone else just avoiding such questions?
I've been comforting myself a lot over the last couple of days by avidly reading the Pharyngula blog and various other articles on evolution, atheism, and so on, in part just to reassure myself that there are other ways of thought in this country, even if they are under constant attack. I particularly liked this article on the anthropocentric conceit - precisely my problem with Christianity and its foundations, from the moment near the beginning of Genesis when God gives man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" (and then there's chapter 4 - God respecting Abel's offering of a lamb, and not Cain's one of "the fruit of the ground." As a vegetarian, I find that especially hard to stomach). It explains why Christians are particularly resistant to any science which threatens that sense of God-given superiority.
It's turned me back to thinking about my own work too, both research and teaching. I wonder sometimes as I read my student papers on literature if it is doing any good to any of us, but then I look at these debates over what should be taught in schools and universities, and I realise that just by making students support their statements with evidence from the texts I'm moving them just a nudge in the right direction. As for research, whatever small corner we are working in it is still a blow for inquiry and evidence over faith and fabrication.
And if I stress the importance of evidence here and now, it is not without an eye to the cavalier treatment of it by the current American president.
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