Mano River impressions, or Notes from the Bump of Africa

For the past few weeks my work has taken me to the countries of the Mano River Union, namely Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote d'Ivoire.  This is an interesting little corner of West Africa, forming sort of a bump on its southwest end.  It isn't the sophisticated, very English stretch of Ghana and Nigeria, but it isn't the sophisticated, very French stretch of the Sahel either.  Especially if we don't count Cote d'Ivoire, the three remaining countries form a little subgroup of their own, with many elements of shared culture.  There is a long history of migration between Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and back, at least as far back as the 1970s, when Guineans fleeing dictatorship and post-dictatorship chaos looked to the more developed climes of their neighbors, only to have a massive counterflow as brutal civil wars broke out in both Anglophone countries.  This back-and-forth migration has further muddied the preexisting situation of many ethnic groups (Kpelle/Guerze, Mende, Susu, Malinke/Mandingo, among others) being distributed across borders in multiple countries.  The result is that there is a lot of multilingualism across the board, both in African and colonial languages.  I would venture to say that in few other places of Africa do you find so many francophones who also speak English, and vice versa.  It seems like everyone in a given country has either worked in one of the others, or is married to someone from a neighboring country (but sometimes with the same mother tongue), or did their Quranic studies or high school or whatever in one of the other countries.

Right now the Mano River countries are a relatively impoverished backwater of the continent, and especially of the West African region, but I wonder if this may someday change.  Their coastal populations, command of both English and French, their major ports and fishing cultures, and tight links between both co-ethnics in different countries and different ethnicities within the same country, seem to suit the region well for success in a globalized world.  Especially Sierra Leone and Liberia seem to have emerged from their wars with a newfound sense of unity and national identity, and a drive to make a decent, prosperous society.  Bad road and air connections between countries are a hindrance for now, but this could be fixed in very short order with just a bit of political will.

There are of course differences that sort of baffle me, too.  The road from Conakry to Freetown is totally atrocious throughout Guinea, up to the Sierra Leonean border, after which it becomes an excellent, smooth, well-maintained highway.  The Guinea stretch literally has sections like those photos you see of jungle tracks in the Congo or the Amazon somewhere, with car-sized holes in the pavement that oblige you to drive down the drainage ditch by the side of the road, which is also car-deep but at least has smooth inclines on the side.  Both countries are notoriously poor, with similar per-capita incomes and malnutrition rates, but Sierra Leone's roads look like Wisconsin blacktop, while Guinea's are like a scene out of Blood Diamond or something.  By the same token, Guinea's capital Conakry hasn't had effective trash pickup for a few years, so the streets are literally overflowing with garbage, sometimes down the median strip, always on the sidewalks, and sometimes closing off entire lanes of traffic with ad hoc dump sites.  There is usually a haze of smoke in the air from burning garbage--it really gets to look post-Apocalyptic at times.  Freetown, on the other hand, looks like a Mediterranean beach resort, quaint, colorful houses neatly arrayed down verdant hillsides  that flow to the sea.  Little garbage to be seen anywhere, street signs and pavement everywhere, and light traffic.  Again, I just don't know what the difference is.  Sometimes I wonder if Conakry is in fact more prosperous than Freetown, and because of this is plagued with  more garbage and more cars, both symptoms of higher consumption.  In any case, Conakry has twice as many people as Freetown.

On the other hand, the natural environment is notably less intact in Sierra Leone, with its denser population.  In Guinea you see pretty dense forest (or savanna, in drier areas) wherever you go, even along major roads.  In Sierra Leone, however, it's mainly grassland and cultivation, until you get to even denser populations in the north, where economics seem to have dictated intensive planting and caretaking of oil and other palms, as well as other useful trees.

Back to the similarities.  Colonialism (or maybe just the sheer abundance of languages, even before the Europeans came along) seems to have worked a perverse linguistic legacy in the Mano River Union.  There is pretty broad understanding of French in Guinea, and English in Sierra Leone and Liberia.  But this can be misleading.  I have often found myself speaking my shaky, un-nuanced French to a Guinean whose French is (in its own, different way) also shaky and un-nuanced.  Add to that a certain reticence on both sides, an expectation that your cultural referents are so disparate that you can't possibly expect to understand one another, and you get frequent situations in which all parties are ostensibly speaking and listening to words they all mutually understand, but they nevertheless don't really understand one another.  Add now to this a culture of deference to authority, where people won't contradict or ask clarifying questions so as not to offend, and you've got a recipe for confusion! This doesn't just happen to me--I've seen lots of Guineans talking past each other, or not understanding the nuance of what the other is saying.  If someone asks someone else to do something, it will usually take a few tries, each try with its attendant response and correction, before party A actually manages to do what party B is requesting.  The misunderstanding is greatest when someone is trying hardest to please the other, since they are overly eager to act and totally unwilling to clarify what's being said!

I thought this was just in Guinea, surely not in the Anglophone countries where almost everyone understands at least Krio, if not standard English.  You know that look of terror that Americans sometimes get when they are talking to a native speaker of West African English?  They know they should understand, but they don't at all, and even things they probably are capable of understanding pass them by, bewildered as they are by the speaker's heavy accent.  That is the look that has greeted me on more than one occasion as I respond in my Chicago English to a fluent speaker of Sierra Leonean English.  They are hearing something they are supposed to understand, but they just can't get the key piece to unlock the meaning of the words mangled by my weird, twisted accent.  When I try to speak more slowly and clearly, it is even harder for them to understand--I'm just making their torture more drawn-out and louder!

Food in Guinea has the other places beat, in my opinion.  The cuisine  across the region is similar--rice with  peanut sauce or cooked greens or spicy stews--but Guineans seem to put more effort into it.  There was the hamburger meal that I indulged myself in at a provincial hotel in Sierra Leone.  It looked great, with a crisp toasted bun and fresh vegetables on top of a burger paddy colored red from the rich seasonings  they mix with ground beef here.  But once I bit into it, I found it to be sinewy and unchewable, sort of a mix of minced offal as opposed to ground prime beef.  I left most of it on my plate and didn't make a fuss, but the waitress just said, "Sorry about the food," as she handed me the bill.  It was as if she'd known beforehand how bad it was  going to be but had been torn between the urge not to contradict me, and the decency to tell me straight out not to order it.  I got a kick out of her quiet dignity mixed with a resigned frankness. 

Music in Guinea is also superior to the other places.  Guinea has a long autoctonous musical tradition, ever since the great medieval empires with their griots, and extending to the Communist state-sponsored music of the 60s and 70s.  The Anglophone countries, on the other hand, seem to be flooded with foreign music in English.  While I enjoy hearing Wham and Whitney and other 80s and 90s acts on the radio, it doesn't give you the sense of a strong national music culture.

One thing that has been noticeably absent from my experience of these countries is war.  For most of my conscious life, I have associated Liberia, Sierra Leone, and to a lesser extent Cote d'Ivoire, with gruesome civil wars that raged in the 1990s.  Even today people outside these countries still refer to the wars, and within the countries the war is fresh on people's minds.  If you get folks to open up, they will discuss the war, and many places and events are defined in time by their relation to the war.  But the countries don't look like war-torn places.  Of course it's been almost 20 years since these wars ended, but I would expect to at least see more of their physical marks--craters, bullet holes in buildings, amputees.  It's almost jarring to not see any of this.  Freetown, which was overrun by one group and then another of marauding, coke-addled killers, just looks like a little Dutch Caribbean town or something.

I'm sure that, as with any place briefly visited, these countries have a lot more going on, just under the surface and invisible to my initial cursory glances.

Children of Blood and Bone

This is a really cool young adult novel I heard about a while ago and wanted to get as a present to diversify the literary diet of some of the young adults in my family and social circle who like fantasy fiction.  I had to read it myself too, and I'm glad I did, because it is a heavy read.  Engrossing and well-done, but it offers a very real, raw representation of systematic oppression.  Lots of science fiction envisions dystopian futures where people are massively oppressed, but it's often crafted by people who in real life are quite removed from the direct experience of day-to-day oppression of them and theirs.  Children of Blood and Bone, on the other hand, is written by someone who's channeling the recent spate of police killings of black youth.  It is valuable and necessary and I think can help a lot of young people imagine and understand what it's like to be persecuted for who they are (or to look at their own situation in a new light, if they're living this already).  But I don't know if I'd recommend it for kids much younger than 15 or so.  For the time being, any younger kids I'm going to give it to their parents, and leave it up to them when to share.

Race, school, and civic responsibility

Over the past year or so I've run across some really good articles that are all related in some way to using one's own social capital to improve the area around oneself, as opposed to using one's advantages in life to cherrypick the best of everything.  Concretely, I am talking about parents' not always looking for the outcome that most favors their own children individually, but rather those options that might provide their children with a decent life and opportunities while not depriving others thereof.

Here's an article by an important analyst of black Chicago, as she muses on what school she should send her young daughter to within the Chicago public schools.  She doesn't have a definite choice yet, but she does not want to funnel her kid into one of the handful of elite schools within the public system.  I have read similar reflections from other parents, and never cease to be surprised that it's often parents of color who are thinking about the greater good of the larger community.  In theory there are a lot more white folks in the US that enjoy a level of economic and academic security that would allow them to think honestly about not maximizing their individual gains at the expense of general wellbeing.  But once again we see black folks serving as the voice of conscience for a larger nation that often doesn't want to listen.

Here is a summary of research into how high-income whites reinforce patterns of social segregation by using their own advantages to maximize positive outcomes for their kids without regard for the effect on everyone else.  Here are a few pithy quotes: 

"These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids’ lives so that they’re better than other kids’ lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people’s kids. When we think about parents calling up the school and demanding that their child have the best math teacher, what does that mean for the kids who don’t get the best math teacher?"

...

"white parents, and parents in general, need to understand that all children are worthy of their consideration. This idea that your own child is the most important thing—that’s something we could try to rethink. When affluent white parents are making these decisions about parenting, they could consider in some way at least how their decisions will affect not only their kid, but other kids. This might mean a parent votes for policies that would lead to the best possible outcome for as many kids as possible, but might be less advantageous for their own child. My overall point is that in this moment when being a good citizen conflicts with being a good parent, I think that most white parents choose to be good parents, when, sometimes at the very least, they should choose to be good citizens."

...

"We have other societies that do things differently. I think when we look across time and history and geography, we can see that the way that we’re doing it—prioritizing your own child over everyone else—is one way, but I don’t think that has to be the only way. I don’t have any grand answer, but I think people could think in bigger ways about what it means to care about one another and what it means to actually have a society that cares about kids."

I would add to this researcher's analysis that it's not just in the US that we see people trying to distance themselves socially from others. Across the developing world I see people replacing long-standing traditions that fostered equity across society with new, consumerist habits wherein everyone is scrambling to buy on the private market goods like education, health, and infrastructure. These are goods and services that should be public goods that we all fight for to get for everyone, but in today's post-Cold War world a lot of that ethic of equity has been replaced by a logic to look out for your own immediate interests regardless of, or even at odds with, every else's wellbeing.

I'll close with a link to an uplifting Op-Ed by Michelle Obama for the Chicago Defender.  In it, she urges the black population of Chicago to stand firm, to keep investing in and believing in and loving our kids, even when the rest of society doesn't much value them.  Again on display here is a commitment to the larger community, and a recognition that our own immediate children are no more important or deserving than anyone else's children.

Says the former First Lady of herself and her brother, "neither of us was anything special. When we were growing up, ... the South Side was full of thousands of little Michelles and Craigs—good kids who worked hard and knew the difference between right and wrong. The rest of the world just didn’t get to see that very often."

On single-room occupancy

This is a nice photo-article about the transition of housing stock in the US, from an abundance of rentable beds and single rooms, to an idealized standard of a single-family home.  This was a fascinating read for me, because I grew up in a neighborhood that went from having at least five SROs I can recall in a square mile, to having none.

I've long thought of creating new SRO-type housing in Chicago, and this article keeps me inspired to do so.

Exposé on palm oil

A long time ago I shared an article about palm oil production in Colombia.  Here is a much more in-depth article about the effects of clearing forest for oil palm plantations in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world.  It is a sobering lesson in how technocratic fixes to one environmental problem can lead to a different, even worse problem, if not thought through carefully.

Theological diplomacy

This is a fascinating article about how different countries are exporting their respective styles of Islam to other countries, as a form of soft-power diplomacy.  I can't think of present-day parallels in Christianity, except for the freelance Evangelical churches that do mission work in developing countries.  But these don't bear the official stamp of an organized country's diplomatic efforts, and my impression is that the most effusively missionary strains of Christianity are also the most radicalized; I don't think the centrist Lutheran or Methodist churches are aggressively promoting their moderate interpretation of Christianity abroad, but maybe they are and I just don't know about it.

In any case, just another reminder that there's a lot of stuff  going on around the world  that I have no clue about.

Intercultural communication

I recently ran across a book called Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication.  It is a bit long, and many of the articles don't interest me, focused as they are on the different business cultures of the US and Japan (I think it was published at a time when the private sector in the US was still very worried about the competitive threat posed by Japan's economy).

There is one article though that caught my attention on Black and White cultural styles in the workplace.  I'm sure some of the author's assertions can be questioned, but I thought it was a useful, honest approach to describe some of the differences in cultural style, and how that can either cause friction or constructive tension in the workplace.  The main differences the author highlights are that black culture accords a more protagonistic and semi-autonomous creative role to the individual, while white American culture stresses the uniformity of work processes and the interchangeability of each person (read: the discouragement of too much individual protagonism or flair).  Another difference is the black comfort with heated discussion as a means to get to the truth, versus the white suppression of emotion in order to avoid conflict and thus maintain a relative unity and harmony.

You'll have to read the article yourself in order to judge its merit, but one thing I reflected on after reading it is how we're all on a continuum.  Some of the traits ascribed to white Americans by this author with respect to black Americans, are precisely the traits ascribed to non-American cultures vis-a-vis general US culture.  In other words, where Americans as a whole (when compared to many Europeans or Japanese) are more direct, more independent and individualized, more willing to engage in argument, and less beholden to maintaining harmony and unity, within the US the reference point changes, so black Americans may embody these traits to a greater degree than whites.  This is pretty consistent with my very idiosyncratic reading of US culture as basically being what happens when you take a bunch of predominantly European people and inculcate West African values and traditions in them.

Community development by staying put

I ran across this New Yorker article a year ago about a small town in Iowa that has managed to maintain its somewhat insular charm while also providing economic growth and  a decent quality of life to its inhabitants (and holding on to its young people). I thought it was an interesting counterpoint to my thinking and concern about people leaving their surroundings in order to develop themselves, as opposed to developing their entire community (and thus bettering their own lot as well).  Here is an example of a community that has managed to do just that, through a mix of cultural predisposition, lucky geographical breaks in terms of the location of higher education institutions and industrial employment, and concerted, conscious efforts to maintain their small town as a viable, pleasant place to live.  The article highlights some of the tensions inherent to any local development approach, most notably that you need to foster a strong sense of place and belonging so the natives stay, but at the same time you don’t want to be so closed to outsiders that you block the needed migration and investment from outside the community.

When I was younger I sometimes decried the type of people who were just content to stay where they are, working in the same place their folks did, finding their greatest meaning and interest in the affairs of their own neighborhood and not concerned with much that transpired beyond it.  As I have pursued economic development as a professional field though, and as I raise kids that I want to be grounded in the community I grew up in, I appreciate more this attitude of rootedness.  At the same time, I’m not sure if I’d enjoy living in a place like the Iowa town described in the New Yorker article.  It might be a bit too perfect, a bit too satisfied with and centered on itself (I'm lucky enough to be from a place like Chicago that is at once rooted and cosmopolitan, so there's something to satisfy all tastes, or at least all my tastes).  On a larger scale, it’s a cruel irony that the communities where people are most active in maintaining and improving the quality of life, are by definition the communities where people have less energy to devote to improving life in the rest of the country and the world.  The end result is that you see nice, cohesive communities constantly investing in themselves and further improving their lot, while nearby there are other communities that would greatly benefit if their neighbors directed some of their dynamism and investments to these other, less fortunate places.

In the end I’m not sure what the best recipe is for broad-based economic development, whether it’s best to have small communities centered on themselves, or whether it’s better to have more centralized, conscious planning to spark broader-based economic development.  Obviously both are necessary—I’m just trying to figure out the place and proportion of each.  There is certainly a need for communities that are centered on their own wellbeing, because this is the only sustainable way for a place to prosper.  At the same time, I worry about the implications of this approach for inequality.  We certainly see that, in the US at least, there are a few places that concentrate most of the well-educated, well-earning, socially- and politically-active people (think wealthy suburbs of any major city), and these people do all they can to improve their community.  This leads to inequality in at least two ways.  One is that these places naturally prosper more than others, because they have the most resources and these resources are continuously reinvested in the community.  But more insidiously, part of the advocacy efforts of these communities is almost always to set up all sorts of barriers (zoning laws, tax paying and sharing arrangements, transport infrastructure, and sometimes literal physical fences) to keep out people with less capital (social, economic, human, and otherwise). 

I have often been in situations where my work entails trying to drive or catalyze economic development through very conscious, technocratic processes.  Sometimes people like me put a lot of work into trying to make development happen, and it takes a lot of time and investment to make just a little progress.  But at the very same time, you’ll sometimes see relatively unplanned or unregulated economic processes generating more poverty alleviation than our best efforts.  This isn’t always or even usually the case, but it happens enough for me to realize that sometimes these more organic, self-centered community development approaches that I’ve highlighted in the prior paragraphs are indeed the best way to reduce poverty and improve economic development.

As I write this and think it through, I guess I’m coming back to an old adage in my field, which is no less true for its being oft-repeated.  In the field of economic development, it’s often best to use a light touch on the planning or governance side, letting natural positive economic and social processes take their course, while using your outside interventions mainly to favor good processes, correct negative side effects (inequality chief among them), and maximize the social benefit of whatever economic growth is occurring.

Percy Jackson and the Proud Boys [THIS IS NOT A NEW CCR ALBUM TITLE]

There have been a few kids’ books that have kept nudging me lately to think about how we talk about the West, especially with our children.  I wrote recently about the Percy Jackson books that my son enjoys.  In these books the Greek gods move their geographical reference points as the center of Western culture shifts.  One character explains that, after divine Olympus was actually located above the physical Mount Olympus, it shifted to Rome, then northern Europe, and eventually reached its current location in the sky above the Empire State building, where the gods live today.  Left out in this description were the few hundred years where the Classical Mediterranean legacy, and indeed the most vibrant, vital bastion of Western culture, was in Baghdad or Fatimid Egypt or Muslim Spain somewhere.  It may seem like a small oversight, but when a book is repeatedly telling kids about what counts or doesn’t as Western Civilization, I’m going to be looking very carefully at any ethnocentrist messages it may be sending (in this case, I think entirely inadvertently, but still).  Leaving the medieval Muslim world out of any discussion of what the West is is historically inaccurate, and speaks more to modern-day interpretations of who does or doesn’t count as part of a Western “us”.

We also recently read a book called World History in 25 Stories, that (unsurprisingly, given its conservative Spanish authorship) is also unabashedly Western-focused and West-promoting.  The book has a cool premise of telling kids about the major events in history through the lens of quirky individual stories.  For the most part the main characters are made-up people that participate tangentially in these major events.  Of 25 stories, maybe 3 feature non-European or non-US protagonists (an obligatory nod to Chinese imperial history, an ancient Egyptian story, and I think an Inca thing).  The rise of West African empires around the Niger River, or South Asia’s long and colorful history, don’t merit a mention.  This omission of non-Western viewpoints is pretty standard, so it didn’t surprise me.  

But even for the few stories that are unavoidably about East-West encounters, non-Europeans are not really given a central part.  There is one about the Andalusian conquest in which a Christian king opens a treasure chest he had been prohibited from opening, thus setting in motion a prophecy that he’ll be defeated by invaders (a prophecy fulfilled when a jealous neighboring king collaborates with the Moors to give them the secret to overrunning Spain).  By this account, the Muslim armies that conquered most of Iberia in a scant few years owed their victory not to astute strategy and superior technology, but rather to a magical prophecy and inter-Christian jealousy.  A story about the Crusades is told by a Syrian soldier, but it is entirely focused on Richard the Lionheart and how much Saladdin revered him.

The book also rehashes the old idea of the Spartan resistance to Persians at Thermopylae as a fundament of Western history, a standoff of the West against decadent invaders.  But the Spartans were not really Classic idealists, upholders of a grand intellectual tradition.  They were themselves pretty barbaric and non-Western, at least by our modern standards or as compared to the Athenians.  Conversely, Persia wasn’t some awful, barbaric kingdom totally alien to the larger culture and dynamics of the Mediterranean world.  If Persia had prevailed after Thermophylae and definitively invaded Greece, I wonder if it really would have drastically changed the overall arc of history.  It might have simply moved up a hundred years or so the timeframe on the Alexandrian and Roman establishment of a cosmopolitan, undemocratic Mediterranean empire extending beyond Greece.

Earlier this year (oddly enough, it was perhaps the day before my mother died), I was in a hotel room in rural Honduras, where I read this very weird article about the simultaneous Insane Clown Posse and Trump supporter rallies in late2017.  There was a passing reference in the article (as if it were something everyone knew about already) to the Proud Boys, which I initially assumed was a gay Trump supporter group or something.  But it intrigued me, so I looked them up online, and learned that they are a group dedicated to promoting the idea that Western Civilization is superior to all others.  Initially this inspired a flurry of snarky thoughts on my part.  Things like, “as if Rudyard Kipling and a few centuries of Euro-American literature and politics hadn’t done that already”.  The article cited above has a great line, that social media has “made a culture out of every preference”, and the Proud Boys seem a prime example. 

But I wanted to engage more seriously with this idea of Western vs. non- Western culture.  I already did so a bit in a prior blog, whereI argued that the distinction between East and West is not only hard to makebut also essentially meaningless, since in the 21st century (and forlong before now, in fact), there has been so much cultural exchange and overlapbetween different cultures in the world that most things can no longer beascribed to one culture as opposed to another.

The Proud Boys, who are loudly unashamed of being Western in an age when there are supposedly all sorts of voices trying to make them ashamed of their heritage, bring up another facet though of this discussion. 

Let me offer a quick comment about people of today being the inheritors of Western accomplishments.  I read an article that I can’t find anymore (maybe it was just a snarky comment on an online article) that had a funny line saying that it’s not like some white dude sitting on his couch in the US had anything to do with Aristotle’s writings, or Newton’s discoveries.  I agree with this.  I (as that proverbial white guy on the couch) am no more linked to Aristotle or Newton than some random guy in Malawi is, and certainly much less so than would be a mathematician or a philosopher from Malawi who is actively engaging with and extending their legacy.  

But if you are going to argue that you as a Westerner are to be especially congratulated for those accomplishments, then the logical extension would be that you’d also especially own up to the crimes of the Atlantic slave trade, the world wars, or colonialism.  If we do concede that the West exists (which, as I’ve argued in my above-cited blog, is a shaky affirmation in itself), then those who are part of the West (like any people in the world) are the inheritors of both glorious and heinous legacies.  If the West exists, and certain people we define as Westerners have more of a claim on its culture and history than do other people, then they would in fact have a greater claim to (responsibility for?) the crimes of the West as well, right?  If you ‘bout it, then be ‘bout it. 

Even if we overlook this issue of accomplishments vs. crimes of the West, and we want to engage in good faith with the Proud Boys’ claims of Western superiority, we still come back to the paradox of what is or isn’t Western, and what makes the West great.  If it’s the current power distribution that defines the West and makes it great, then we would have to admit that the West today is probably located in Asia (or soon will be), where a disproportionate share of the world’s population and economic activity occur.  “Hold on though”, you might argue,  “what defines the West is not the specific arrangement of power right in this historical instant, but rather the impressive accumulated heritage of thought and technology that has come out of Europe, and that the rest of the world benefits from today”.  But the problem there is that this heritage is just as non-Western as Western.  Gunpowder, vaccinations, moveable type, most of the crops that feed the world, and certainly the land and slave labor that fuelled the rise of Europe in the early modern period, came from outside of Europe, and the West’s contribution in many such cases was not to invent something original but rather to combine it in new ways that gave Europe an advantage over other regions (just as Asia is doing today with lots of manufacturing technology that may have originated outside of Asia). 

To get out of this rather sterile dichotomy, I would advocate that “Western-ness” in such discussions comes really to mean modernity as opposed to a clear geographic designation.  But we’re all modern now—no one region has a priority claim on modernity or the superiority that it implies.  There are few places in the world today that are not clearly, firmly situated in the 21^st century, with a shared cultural, technological, and intellectual heritage extending from the Fertile Crescent to Mesoamerica to Qin China to the Vikings to Mansa Musa to Gandhi to Chinua Achebe. 

Continuing then the argument from above, if within this modern order the mark of genius or superiority is the ability to put together inheritances from elsewhere in a novel way, then today’s Asian factories assembling computer components and researching artificial intelligence, or young African writers redefining the modern novel, are at the apex of our development as a world society.  If, conversely, the mark of genius is whoever first invented or worked on these things, then the apogee of the West is still just as much Asian, African, and American Indian as it is European. 

To summarize, there is no coherent argument that the West even exists, and certainly not that it’s innately superior to any other part of the world.  In the end the Proud Boys’ self-labelled “Western chauvinism” becomes a species of ethno-nationalism with a light airbrushing over the “ethno” part.  To convincingly argue that one region or culture is superior to another, you have to narrow your lens so much to a specific period and place (in this case, the few hundred years that Europe and its satellites prevailed militarily and economically over other regions, but before the present when they are eclipsed by these regions) that your claims of superiority are either meaningless or pointless, designed more to justify a foregone conclusion as opposed to a sincere search for which culture is the “best” (which is a stupid thing to spend your time thinking about, anyway).

Free will and liberal democracy

Here is an article describing the many ways in which our concept of free will is a fallacious myth.  Namely, that our feelings and desires don't spring exclusively from some sacred inner source but rather from a mix of our genes, culture, biochemistry and psychology, and only very partially from our own conscious, rational thought processes.  From there, the author goes on to argue that liberal democracy itself is a somewhat unsound construct, founded as it is on this idea of a somewhat rational, reasonable free will in individuals and the collective.

But far from despairing, the author insists that we must continue to defend liberal democracy, and strengthen it based on what we now know of the malleability of humans' [unfree] will, because it is the most decent system we've conceived of yet for honoring the dignity and value of human life and freedom.

My takeaways from the article are twofold.  First, that you should always question yourself, your own feelings, just as rigorously if not moreso than you question the motivations of others.  Often you will find that you are believing something without evidence, or insisting on your initial position out of mere inertia, or that your base urges and passions are being roused (even perhaps manipulated by others).  Skip over the political news feeds that aim to stoke your indignation (but do make the phone calls and petitions for causes that are right).  Don't look at the ads on the side of your browser.  In fact, use a browser like DuckDuckGo that doesn't have those  ads and doesn't track your behavior.  Use a Virtual Private Network to hide your habits and beliefs from those who would track you.  Live in the physical and the analog world more and the digital world less.  All these things will detour you away from forces that would reinforce your own biases or attack your weak spots, and thus improve your ability to question and think about your own behavior.

My second and final takeaway is that we must continue to argue for what's right, even when so many things seem to be working against it.  For me this means insisting in the importance of human life and freedom, that no one person is more important than another nor has the right to more than another, that no one should aim to hurt or oppress another.  These sound like pretty unambitious assertions, but we live in an age of such aggressive meanness, a lack of respect for fundamental human rights, and lots of sophistry that can convincingly argue in favor of even gross violations of decency and rights.  Indeed, there are lots of times when I hear the twisted arguments of would-be autocrats, racists, oppressors, and fascists, and I don't have a pat or passion-inducing answer to their endless "what about?"s and false equivalencies.  But I return again and again to these truths, that people all deserve decent treatment, freedom of the spirit, and equal rights.  These humble principles may not win a cable news debate, but they are the only things you can cling to without doubt or remorse.

Calypso, work, love, and the individual

My older son really likes the Percy Jackson books.  This is a series aimed at young adults (I think more specifically young adult boys) that follows a modern-day demigod son of Poseidon.  Anyway, I have been reading this series on and off to my boys over the past year or two; we’re on the fourth book of five now. 

In the most recent chapter we read, Percy finds himself on Calypso’s island of Ogygia, where like Odysseus, he is tempted to stay with Calypso, making love and enjoying a paradise on earth.  However, the author (Rick Riordan) fleshes out Calypso’s backstory, making her an interesting, three-dimensional tragic hero instead of a treacherous sexpot.  Riordan’s Calypso is herself condemned to Ogygia as a sort of luxurious prison.  She has done nothing wrong, but as the daughter of Atlas, who fought against the Olympian gods in the long-ago war, she is suspect for her sympathies with the Titans, so the gods keep her isolated from the world.  There’s a lot to unpack here about how we define good guys and bad guys, and how often we side with our kin in a conflict where no side possesses a clear moral high ground.

But what I want to talk about is the topic of love and how it fits into a fulfilling life.  Riordan’s rendering of Calypso is a tragic hero because she is stuck on her island isolated from the rest of the world, and can only share the island with someone who elects to stay there for eternity.  Anyone who makes that decision will be waited on by invisible servants (as Calypso is), will be granted immortality, and will live on a tropical/Mediterranean paradise island.  He can share his days with the beautiful, enticing Calypso, the sweet-smelling forest of cinnamon and herbs, the docile birds of the forest, and tend to a magical garden.  But he won’t know what is happening in the real world, won’t be able to participate in history, to help his friends or the world in general to overcome their problems.  The Fates occasionally (every thousand years or so) send a hero to Ogygia, like Odysseus, that Calypso falls madly in love with and who she wants to stay on the island, but Calypso can never have him, because his noble longing to help others in the world (which is of course what makes him so attractive to begin with) obliges him to opt out of the island paradise, as appealing as it is.  Pretty heady stuff for a teen adventure novel.

Percy’s encounter with Calypso (whom he falls in love with but ultimately decides to leaves) got me thinking about what we love in a romantic partner, and what it would be like to spend an eternity on a paradise island with that person.  Let’s get out of the way one thing—Riordan’s Calypso isn’t that interesting of a person, because she hasn’t really been around other people or events or the larger world for millennia.  She loves hearing about Percy’s life and adventures, his descriptions of Manhattan, but I’m not sure what subjects she has to talk to him about.  I understand that Percy is enchanted by, perhaps even truly in love with, Calypso just for who she is—her smell, her eyes, her way of talking, of thinking, of gardening.  And this is ideally what we love in a person, their essence, not what they’ve done in life.  But I don’t think this is realistic in the long term.  Your essence is shaped by what you do, what you’ve lived.  In turn the way you, or another, can get to know your essence is precisely by seeing you act on the world.  So I’m not sure it’s possible in real life to love someone “just for who they are” without regard to their interactions with the larger world.

I love my wife fiercely, and I love how she smells and talks and thinks.  She’s the most interesting person I know, and the only person I can see myself spending a lifetime or an eternity with.  But I don’t know if I could just sit on an island looking into her eyes for eternity.  Most of what we talk about isn’t some idealized concept of who each one is, divorced from reality.  No, we talk about the world, our friends, our enemies, our family, politics, poverty, development, values, novels, movies, our kids.  In short, the relationship between us is profoundly shaped by the world around us, and I think that’s the case for any relationship between two people.  Perhaps what I love most about my wife, and what I think of when I think of who she is, is how she works, how she acts in the world. 

Even when we talk about ourselves, it’s with respect to what we’ve lived through, our personal stories, some of which are from long ago but most of which are being constantly nourished as we continue to live life.  My kids are probably the people I’d be most willing to just stare at and hear them talk or watch them play idly, and love them just for who they are. Hell, they’ve only got a few years of lived experience under their belt, much of which they no longer remember, so my love for them really is for them as they are and not so much for what they’ve done in life.  But even with my children, I don’t want to be around them all the time, and the feeling is mutual.  They want to engage with the rest of the world, and that engagement during the hours we’re apart, each at work or at school, then gives us interesting things to talk about and further explore our relationship in the time we are together.  

Calypso’s lived experience essentially stopped a few thousand years ago when she was sent to live on Ogygia (as would the experience of Odysseus or Percy Jackson if they chose to live there).  Sure, you could talk with her about her life before then, maybe you could talk about that for a few hundred years even.  But eventually in eternity you’d run out of things to talk about.  Even if you both had new reflections on your past experiences, whatever revelations would arise from such discussions wouldn’t be very useful, since you don’t live in a world you can apply those lessons to.

I mean, I guess you could just have sex all day on your island with the love of your life, or plant stuff in your garden, or commune with the birds, but I think that would kind of get old.  Even if it were possible to just live in the moment and enjoy each experience as it happened, each sunset, each birdsong, regardless of whether you’d heard them before, I for one would feel guilty living so well while I knew that other people in the world were suffering, and I would get bored living so tranquilly while I knew that the rest of the world was still happening, still moving.

In this respect I am a believer in the philosophy that humans are defined by our work, that our very uniqueness as human beings is contingent on our acting on the world around us.  This is a big theme in Paulo Freire’s thought, but I don’t think it’s that complicated or weird or radical.

Nevertheless, I try to be objective and critical enough to wonder if my vision not only of love but also of what defines us, and what makes a good life, is misled.  There are certainly people who believe that the individual person is the supreme measure of importance, in the sense that happiness for a person can lie in their own personal likes, pleasures, and desires, or that the ideal romantic love is for an individual person as such, without reference to the rest of the world or how that person interacts with it.  Indeed, I know plenty of people who don’t particularly care about their job, and just spend a lot of time getting through things they don’t like or care about in order to be with the people they love, or practice the hobby that fulfills them, or watch the TV or read the books that titillate them.   

I remember my American friend admiring this when we both lived in Spain.  Having grown up in our US culture where we define people to such a great extent by what they do for a living (despite the fact that many Americans fit the description above of not caring about their work), my friend thought it was really cool that Spaniards were often blasé about their work, and got most of their pleasure from family and friends.  Obviously Spaniards are just as diverse as anyone else in their opinions, but let’s pretend that the archetypal Spaniard I’m describing is accurate.  Such a person might argue that working in the world is a mere distraction from the things that give you pleasure, and that the best possible way to spend your time is to maximize your pleasurable pursuits.  For such a way of thinking, days and nights of idleness and lovemaking amidst pleasant surroundings would be the best way to spend eternity.

But I’ve tried to show above that I don’t think this is a viable conception of the world.  I don’t think any one person does or can exist apart from the world, so accordingly it’s impossible to appreciate or love another person as separate from the world (or even just to entertain your own self apart from the world).  That said, I realize that my conception of love and meaning may sound cynical or utilitarian or unromantic.  

Right now I’m living in West Africa, amid a culture that seems to have a very different concept of the individual than I am used to.  Here people define themselves to a large extent by their families, or even by their jobs (which are often passed on down family lines).  People don’t offer their name when you meet them unless you ask for it, their first names are one of a few possible names determined by the day they were born, and usually they’ll give you their  family name instead of their first name anyway.  And there are like the same 12 last names that cover about 80% of the population.  Families are big too, so kids live and are raised collectively, without receiving a lot of one-on-one adult attention or contemplation of their individual idiosyncrasies.  Marriages are often arranged for utilitarian purposes, and romantic love is not a central factor for many couples.  All that said, and despite the pride people take in their work, here the supreme measure of meaning is the family, specifically hanging out with your kids and with your elders.  Weekends are spent at funerals, weddings, baptisms of people who are only distantly and tenuously related to you.  So even here in a context as different as the American or Spanish ones I’ve generalized, it seems like my preferred focus on working in the world is missing something, missing the focus on immediacy and just enjoying other people that seems to be so prominent in many cultures.

I do want to appreciate each sunset as such, even if I’ve seen sunsets before.  I do want to find pleasure and meaning in the waves lapping on a beach, or in planting a (non-useful, just-because) garden, or in looking into my love’s eyes or smelling her hair.  I do want to just sit back and ponder my kids as they play or do Legos, and think of how wonderful they are and life is.  And I do do all these things.  But I don’t think you could or should spend eternity doing this.  Of course JosephCampbell might argue that those moments are in fact eternity, that our only taste of the eternal is when we smell our loved one’s hair or lose our gaze in the ocean.  For my money though, if I’ve got to be somewhere for eternity, it better be in the larger world, living for others and not just my own pleasure or contemplation.