...observations and ramblings from a learner and traveler...

29 July 2017

A "we" as big as humanity

  Since I am studying in proximity to a good library right now, I am also trying to examine some of the books that I have had on my 'wishlist' for a while and see how good they really are. In Lustig and Koester's Intercultural Competence, I found this nugget which relates directly to the need I constantly see for us to meet and be in relationship with those we fear or reject, whether our fears are cultural, economic/vocational, religious, or martial. It is difficult for us to love 'them' - whoever 'they' might be - without meaningful relationship.

The casual we for most of us does not include the 50 percent hungry, the 60 percent in shantytowns, and the 70 percent illiterate. Most of us construct our we without including them. Thinking of the world close up, as if it was a village of one thousand people, forces us to confront what we mean when we say "we." ...
How often does our we come to include people of other faiths, other nations, other races? How often does our we link rather than divide? Our relation with the "other" may move, as Smith puts it, through a number of phases. First we talk about them - an objective "other." Then perhaps we talk to them, or more personally, we talk to you. Developing a real dialogue, we talk with you. And finally, we all talk with one another about us, all of us. This is the crucial stage to which our... dialogue must take us if we are to be up to the task of creating communication adequate for an interdependent world. 
- Diana L. Eck, as quoted in Lustig's Intercultural Competence, pg 5 (italics original)

If the world were a thousand-person village... (2001 stats; ibid., 4)

09 July 2017

Consumerism, Zen, and this TCK

 Ewa Hoffman's Lost in Translation is assigned reading for my MA class; overall, it is excellent, but Part 2 "Exile" has been especially poignant to me, as a TCK who rejected the torturing consumerism of American culture when he was ten. (Technically, the author is a CCK, cross-cultural kid, not a third culture kid, but that's beside the point.)

 She also describes many of the feelings of lostness within and disengagement from a culture graphically. Yet, it was at the point where she began describing her response to materialism that the book really grabbed me. I don't recall having read anything so near to my own feelings about materialism. Finally, she speaks of being alone in a dorm over the holidays in a way that vividly recaptured that experience for me.

Concerning Her Reponse to Materialism and Consumerism:

  After battering myself again and again on the horns of lust and disgust, I begin to retreat from both. I decide to stop wanting. For me, this is a strange turn: my appetites are strong, and I never had any ambitions to mortify them by asceticism. But this new resolution is built into the logic of my situation. Since I can’t have anything, if I were to continue wanting, there would be no end to my deprivation. It would be constant, like a never-ending low-level toothache. I can’t afford such a toothache; I can’t afford to want. Like some sybarite turned monk who proves his mettle by placing himself in seductive situations, I can now walk between taffeta dresses and silk lingerie without feeling a shred of temptation. I‘ve become immune to desire; I snip the danger of wanting in the bud.   By the same sleight of consciousness, I’m becoming immune to envy. If I were to give vent to envying, there would be no end to that either. I would have to envy everybody, every moment of the day. But with my new detachment, I can gaze at what my friends have as if they lived in a different world. In this spatial warp in which I have situated myself, it doesn’t make any difference that they live in big houses with large yards and swimming pools, and cars and many skirts and blouses and pairs of shoes. This way, I can be nice to my friends; I can smile pleasantly at their pleasures and sympathize with their problems of the good life. I can do so, because I’ve made myself untouchable. Of course, they might be upset if they guessed the extent of my indifference; but they don’t.

[...]

 In my lush Western Sahara, I’m confronting a tantalizing abundance that doesn’t fill, and a loneliness that carves out a scoop of dizzying emptiness inside.

Concerning Eastern religions in American culture:
Two decades later, when the Eastern religions vogue hits the counterculture, I think I understand the all-American despair that drives the new converts to chant their mantras in ashrams from San Francisco to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of excess as it is to a society of radical poverty. It thrives in circumstances in which one’s wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived – or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one’s self.

[...]

...America is the land of yearning, and perhaps nowhere else are one’s desires so wantonly stimulated...

Concerning lonely breaks:
...in my nearly empty dorm during a holiday break, I forget my ascetic techniques, and the desire for the comfort of being a recognizable somebody placed on a recognizable social map breaks in on me with such anguishing force that it scalds my spirit and beats it back into its hiding place.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (pp. 136-140). Plunkett Lake Press. Kindle Edition. (Emphases added.)