between the rock and the cold, cold sea

I realised a thing today.

I'll always think of myself as Irish. But I am beyond done with the general tone of the culture here.

I realise I spend most of my time in a very unusual environment. In my religions and theology and ancient history classes, I'm surrounded by geeks, by people who value knowledge for the sake of knowledge and not necessarily for its functionality. Half my Greek class is gay. There are fellow atheists, and other non-Christian types, and the odd person or two who'll start a conversation about slash and fanfic. Even the well-muscled boys at the wall are physics and engineering postgrads. The internets are full of congenial types, and trollishness can (mostly) be avoided.

And then I stick my nose back out into the land of middle-income middle-class Ireland, and the stupid, it burns. I mean, I'm clever, but I'm no genius. I know stuff, but not nearly enough. I understand some, but sometimes I'm thick as two short planks about things, but when I fuck up and be an insensitive ass, I do try to do better when it's pointed out to me, you know?

But it takes effort, or it ought to, to be that self-satisfied in one's lack of knowledge and lack of desire to acquire it, as so many people are. I mean, I don't expect people to be perfect? But when I walk past a busstop and I hear a knot of people talking about fags and lesbos and Nigerians -

It makes me very angry. People of a certain age have the excuse of unfamiliarity: the world's changed a lot since they were young, and it's very hard to let go of the things you grew up assuming were true (I should know: I got myself a whole raft of Catholic hangups about sex that most Catholics don't even get anymore), but guys, you're young. But not that young. You don't have that excuse.

And don't even get me started about the newspaper opinion writers. Who get paid for their offensive bullshit, even if it's not as obvious.

Okay, enough venting.

It just annoyed me more than usual today, because I had some great conversations with good people about identity and social constructions thereof in the context of the Roman and Greek world. About how you can't see history as always progress and how historical people are not any less intelligent because the lens through which they viewed the world, the things which they accepted as self-evident, are utterly/mostly/very/slightly different to ours. About how you can't romanticise history, but you can't see it all as mud and disease and war and death, either. About how we are not necessarily better than our forebears, even if we are different in ways that we see as good.

Nor can we say we're not better, of course: as I said to K., history'd be a fine place to visit, but if someone invents a magic time machine, I'd be stopping off for a sex-change before taking a trip back to have a look at my much-loved Greeks and Romans.

But that sort of thing carries over. And once you learn to look at things in context, to insert yourself as far as possible into the mindset of a Hellenistic Greek or a 1st century Roman or a Judean living in Egypt to better understand how they look at the world and what mattered to them, it's kind of hard to un-learn that, or to fail to apply it to the world around you. There are no absolutes, only people. And understanding context is everything.