The Myth of Collective Pride

Not long after I arrived in the Netherlands I felt disappointed by the quality and variety of food available on the stands of grocery stores.
Oh my buddha, is everything really only available in boxes, freezers, tins, etc?. Where do I find uncooked beans?! I cried to myself in mild frustration.
Like anyone either too lazy to bother understanding why things are the way they are or just bent on believing that their way of doing things is better, I, too, decided to conjure up theories consistent with my version of reality.

Do “they” know how much better food tastes when cooked from “scratch”? Why do “they” give “them” (companies) so much power to decide what food is supposed to taste like by allowing them pre-cook it according to their caprices and put it on the shelves? Big companies, it must be them. Packing things for convenience and profit and spending part of the profit to convince us that we’re better off with their “new product”.
On and on I’d conjure up conspiracy theories the size of my frustration all while getting a dose of “feel good” from the idea that “our” way is better and that I should be “proud of our” stores and they food the sell.

I think society is fraught with that sort of cheap self-delusion. Yours might not manifest itself in the exact same way, but too often, when confronted with the foreign, we go on the defence, grab our verbal weapons (hopefully that is all we grab) and wage wars in the name of our narrow mindedness to protect ourselves from the “dangers” of reality. When we feel lost or confused we run to collective pride and try to hang on to whatever artificial construct of pride we can find in search of some fake sense of control. Empty of substance we fill our heads with empty pride.

Having lived here long enough, I now laugh at the insanity of my self delusions. I realised, at long last, that cultural practices aren’t necessarily the product of deliberate decisions we make, but the common denominator of our collective wishes acting beyond our control. That in order to understand “them” you need, as best you can, attempt a walk in “their” shoes. If you walk in their shoes long enough you’ll realise that if anyone were to be born under your conditions, they’d probably be as drenched in artificial pride as you.

I’ve started to find it odd that people say things like “be proud of your country/food/culture/language,etc”. The idea seems to be that your “country/food/etc” is better than that of “others” and as some sort of recognition you should sound the trumpet of pride and clothe yourself with glory. My objection to the idea is not rooted in some sort of self-pity, inherent emptiness and irrationality of the idea of collective pride.

I don’t think the idea of pride in any collective attribute, such as culture, is rational. I admit that certain individuals within a group may have a well-grounded rational sense of collective pride. However, that doesn’t apply to the majority of us. At least not those of us that advertise pride anyway.

Let’s look at language: you may speak a language known to be difficult by a large portion of the world’s populace and feel “proud” to be able to speak it without problems. However, the majority of the speakers of your language would have had no direct influence on the status of the language and probably don’t even remember learning it. They’d have made less effort than someone trying hard to learn it as a second language. Any pride that comes from that is nothing short of delusion. While you may be proud of your ability to express yourself in your language, pride in the language itself is futile.

A short and honest reflexion on being “proud of my country” will lead to similar conclusions. It’s fine and all to like/prefer/love your country, but at least be honest enough to accept that pride is not the word that describes your affection to your “homeland”. You can no more be proud of your country than the lottery of nature can be proud of planting your country on dry land. I think both are equally ridiculous propositions.

My point is this: you can be proud of the things you worked hard to achieve, things you can influence or change the course of. You can be proud of your ability to play a sport for which you practiced hard, the fruits of your labour, the fact that you deliberately may have changed lives for good, your act of giving and helping others (if you want to be proud of your humility that is). Your mother can love you and be proud of you. She LET you live and has/had a lot of say in what you do/think/say etc. You, however, may love her and APPRECIATE all of that and invoke pride whenever you want to emphasise your appreciation.
Ataturk, George Washington, Amelia Earhart, Nelson Mandela, Benazir Bhutto,and a many unsung heroes, these people, for example, can be proud of their countries. They made efforts to change their countries and the consequences are still felt today. Without them things would have been different.
It’s funny how these are also the least likely to preach the gospel of “pride”.

As 2014 retires and ushers in a new year. As new hopes, new homes, new friends, new lovers, new losses and new gains queue in the factory of yearly events. As you face the foreign forces coming up your way: love more, hate less, pride less, pride more, laugh more, meet more, kiss more (the same person if you can), make more love and less (verbal or other kind of) war.

After all, it’s a friggin’ new year and you’re not growing younger. So Pete’s sake, make it a better one!!!

The Unbearable Choicelessness of Choices (Rant)

If there’s anything modern overcaffeinated consumerist culture has successfully instilled in our minds it is the illusory benefit of having choices or options.

Day in and day out we’re bombarded with multiple options or choices of the same product disguised in different shapes and forms with little to no functional difference, all with their own set of sub-choices.

From foodstuff to electronic devices, from something as inconsequential as the delivery method of the book you’ve ordered online to the material of the umbrella you want to buy: you’ll be given an endless array of possibilities tailored to “your” taste.

Do you want this product with or without option x?

What’s the difference? you ask.

The x version is faster, allows you to see your mother’s make-up more clearly when you video chat, you’ll even be able to see the gray hair on your dad’s head.

Also, after we successfully create a taste for you, this product will go very well with your new taste. The narrative goes on and on ad nauseam.

We seem to have reached a point where we produce more choices and faster than we could possibly evaluate them. The only benefit being the very idea of having “choices” and not the benefit of the choices themselves.

Were I to find myself in a situation where I would desperately need to print photos of aliens in high resolution, this X megapixel camera will be handy and therefore worth the investment.

Choices, I’m beginning to suspect, provides the right dose of feel-goodism that allows for the expansion of our ever-growing egos.

Of what good is the choice of say going to a city with a “wide variety of activities” when you can only feasibly enjoy one or two.

Somewhere between the rush to close the ever widening hole of self-inflicted human emptiness and our acculturated deep-frozen and ready-made personalities, we’ve lost ourselves in the rat-race of desperately using one choice of product or what have you to fix the hole created by another without ever thinking about the fundamental need we’re trying to satisfy.

 

Progress can simplistically be modelled by the following: Our ability to make a wide array of toiled paper each allowing you a certain level of comfort depending your perceived level of sensitivity of your rear-end.

 

Of course choices aren’t necessarily bad, but it is wiser to evaluate them according to the basic need they’re supposed to satisfy and not the different ways you could satisfy said need.

Is it gone? Is it fading in the air?

Faded Scents

I smell the scent strips lying on desk. One by one I raise them to my nose, pause for a second and wait for the scents sprayed on them to reach my olfactory receptors.
One, two, three seconds and my receptors perceive nothing. There’s got to be at least one that held the smell for more than 2 days, I think to myself.

I pick the last one, raise it to my nose, close my eyes in an attempt to intensify my sense of smell at the expense of sight… and there it was: the scent of evaporating memory, the burning embers of a magical past, the last frontier that every perfume note must cross before it fades into nothingness.
There’s something fascinating about a perfume’s ability to summon the most dormant of memories. Their ability to transport us to a different time, to first moments, to stop the past from going too far from the present. To bring us closer to those things that used to be so present then, but that now are only accessible by thought. It makes us prisoners of smell.

I like to believe, more out of romanticized naivety than rational conviction, that some people carry their perfumes with them everywhere to enhance their presence. To keep an eye on the reality of they’re fading relevance. To remain present.

I held on that scent strip, trying to extend the molecules still left in it. The last evidence of liquefied memory, the burning embers a strong scent. I quite like the notion of burning embers, the dying fire that remains from the bonfire of memories. Nothing quite represents it so nicely as the evaporation of the last notes of a perfume.
They force us to confront our inner fears, give us hope that some strong wind will blow to rekindle the fire you’re now holding on to, that some “deus ex machina” will emerge out of nowhere to save the day.
They, in essence, abandon us to the beauty of the glory they’re trying to preserve, hoping against hope that they’ll be refreshed.

 

Ranting on Culture, Integration and Reason

I get on my bike and make my way to a 5pm appointment for viewing a room in neighbourhood nearer to my faculty. I get to the street where the apartment is located and  become more aware of the neighbourhood and try to get as much details about the area as I can in less than 15 minutes. The architecture of the houses, the structure of the shops and the number of people wondering the streets and my guess of where they could possibly be heading to. 

Minutes later I find myself deep in an apparent futile exercise trying to get details for which I knew no use. Or didn’t I?

I quickly catch myself  in an unconscious act of  discrimination. Turns out I was surveying the demographic make up of my potential neighbourhood. Curiously enough I was trying to figure out the ratio of ethnic Dutch to Obviously-Not-Ethnic Dutch, whatever that meant. Nothing about this affair surprised me more than what I planned to do with the information I was gathering. If I had reasons to believe, based on the few minutes of data collection, that there ratio I wanted to determine was below some imaginary threshold, I would declare the area incompatible with my “preferences”. Preferences here, I realised, was nothing short of a word I wanted to use to sound like I was simply exercising my right to choose and not involved into some nefarious deed.
But was I really discriminating? Could the genuine manifestation of my “right to choose” in this instance have been any different?

This realisation took precedence over all other thoughts and I met my potential landlord in a spirit of self-awareness and self-examination. 
He shows me the room and the bathroom and we make our way to the kitchen. At this point all I was doing was simply look, touch nothing, and pretend I can infer the functioning state of the furniture from the evidence provided by sight alone. A notion I later abandoned to an awkward situation. 
We get to the kitchen and my potential landlord wants to know what I think of the place. So I look around, touch the table, open the fridge and he interjects by asking “What are you doing? Why did you open the fridge, you don’t have anything in there!”. I was caught off guard, speechless and my brain was too busy trying to make sense of the timing of his words to think of a logical explanation. All I could say was, I’m sorry I didn’t mean….! We moved on and I was still confused so my analytical brain went crazy trying to get to all sorts of logical basis for his reaction and I got to this: culture. This realisation immediately linked with my earlier thoughts and is pretty much the reason of this post.

Western cultures attach a high value to “culture” and it is within the framework of this idea that much of the “integration” talk in the West is mostly about. 
I, being an avid reader of western news as well as a follower of the its politics, have become too aware of the sensibilities of these issues to the point that I’ve sought to distance myself from any behaviour that could remotely be construed as being counter to integration efforts. 
It is this precise view that, I believe, led me to paying attention to the ethnicity ratio of the neighbourhood I was visiting. I feared that by being in an area with a  high “immigrant” make up I’d be making a case for the proponents of anti-immigrant politics. Never mind that the definition of immigrant is, in its proper context, free from ethnic associations, but that doesn’t matter since that term has now become a term that exclusively refers to certain individuals with a certain “background”. Those to whom the term doesn’t apply have now moved to the “emigrant” category.

Behind my distance from the apparent immigrant is this unconscious drive to appear “integrated” regardless of the fact that I see nothing to integrate into since I’m sure I have no “culture” to speak of and that I see no logical incompatibility between my ways and the those of the “others”, whoever they are. I like to believe that I’m guided more by the dictates of reason than the dogmatic norms that guide cultural behaviour conditioned by circumstances long rendered irrelevant by modern interaction between cultures.

As much I as understand that certain “cultures” find it offensive that you open their fridges, think of their gods in particular ways, speak at a particular pitch, I also fail to see the reasonable proportionality of the force employed in vociferously defending such habits as if they come from some natural consequence that is evident to everyone. 

Behind the notion of cultural integration lies the unspoken assumption of “natural culture”. The culture to which all other cultures should naturally converge on their path to progress. Failure of integration policies, I believe, lie at core of this assumption for it limits the possibility of cultural enrichment through a selective filtering of certain beneficial, and sometime impossible to get rid of, cultural practices that come certain the foreign. It’s an assumption that is held to be so obvious that everyone who is not aware of it should be told of the high cost to pay for it all while ignoring the irrational basis for culture itself. 

In all of this, I learnt, all are losers. Those, who like me, have been conditioned to avoid the cost of “non-integration” due to “high visibility” as well as those who find choose to live with “like cultured” people at the expense of the disenfranchised. 

It’s about time modern societies woke up to realised that the switch to the 21st century happened a decade ago and that we are now almost as connected in reality as by coca-cola.

Identity

A friend I’ve come to appreciate more asked me a question about identity I couldn’t answer and I promised to give it some thought later.

The question was one of being torn between at least two different places in such a way that one doesn’t know to which of those places they’re more a part of. The more I thought about it, the more I sympathized with the idea.

One of the aspects of globalization I’ve become aware of is characterized by some sense of dilution, the kind of dilution that salt feels when it meets water.

Suddenly it can’t tell which part of the taste its responsible for or what to call itself in this new configuration. In salt-land it was fully aware of its name and now it must content itself with only being aware of its function. It recognizes what it does, but not what it is. But which is important to know what it is or what it does? What’s in the name?

Duplicity, or multiplicity, demands a compromise. Every fork on a road demands a compromise, a choice. Every move away from something is a move to something else and at the end of every gain there is loss. It’s up to you to choose which way you want to look at it.

Most people who have traveled to distant places soon find themselves at a loss of what people call identity. We leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go. The more places we go, the more of ourselves we scatter and we’re gain the joy of having left parts of us in all those places and we become strangers everywhere.

This strangeness is an identity in itself. It’s the mark of the global soul, the motivation for most of our displacements. It’s a strangeness that gives the best feeling of belonging. Belonging to a bigger picture instead of some fragments of it. Feeling like a stranger everywhere is the closest you’ll ever get to feeling at home in the globalized world. You’re essentially home everywhere. Your home becomes both mobile and invisible, like your heart.

Vilnius, Lithuania

The Choice

Today I stared determinism in the face and asked it what it wanted or what it expected of me. I’ve long been weary of the concept and hardly gave it a chance to understand what it’s all about.

Now, determinism is nothing more than just a fancy way of saying “You didn’t chose that” to whatever it is you claim as yours or to be associated with.

Determinism says “sure you’re this or that, but don’t take any credit for it, it’s just a consequence of something you might not be aware of, which is a consequence of something, which, surprise surprise, is a consequence of something else ad infinitum.

The problem I have with determinism is not semantic, existential or anything else you could care to mention, but the simple implications of accepting it as an explanation for things that happen.

It’s the fear of its assault on the norms and basis of relationships among people that prevents me from giving it any considerations.

Determinism renders “magic”and passions in our relationships as cliches for the mere reason that we give those things a lot of value and we wouldn’t want anyone to take that way, much less a philosophical concept.

It questions our “choice” of friends and argues that we don’t really chose our friends as much as we don’t chose our neighbours or the country in which we are born.

We live in a house in a particular neighbourhood and we gain a neighbour we didn’t chose. Someone, some time in the past, migrated to some place, settled there, maybe because they thought there was nothing ahead, and consequently we are not born in New York, Caracas, Cochabamba or whatever other places statistics forbade us from being born in.

Lending more force to determinism is the idea that the people in our lives, excluding family, came to it by serendipity and not by some calculated steps on our part to gain them. It essentially argues, depressively, that whatever you say to them, could be said to anyone who might have been there on the moment of choice, rendering our words and vows as generic and lacking in substance.

Today I “chose” to be a part of a group in my class, and wonder how much of it was really “my choice”.

Simplicity

“The more you have, the more you have to worry about”

One of the most important lessons traveling has taught me is about simplicity. It feels like i’ve been on one long lecture on values, priorities and societal influences.

I guess traveling is about a search to find oneself. To look for emotions we can’t find in our natural habitat, sights that have become so accustomed to and that have become too cliche to be appreciated with the same awe. To (sometimes briefly) escape from the horrors of routine and the daily depressing news of home politics and to meeting people from places we’ve only heard about or didn’t know existed. Fictitious characters that exist in distorted forms intended to sell more newspaper than to encourage a healthy understanding between people. I’m the first Angolan most people I’ve met have ever met. Most didn’t know the country existed and seem to have had an exaggeratedly distorted view of it, or any other places they visited in the newspaper. But of all things that propels us to traveling there is one almost unconscious reason which never quite finds an expression. Travelers feel it, but can’t quite word it. I can’t do it either. But I can express it from my point of view in this post.

I’m writing this post on a slow boat trip from a Chiang Mai, Thailand to Luang Prabang, Laos. Coming from a developing world, I can easily adjust my sense of “comfort” to just about any livable conditions. Most of the my fellow travelers, however, can’t echo that sentiment with identical truth as most come from “developed countries”. I quote developed counties not because I don’t believe in the semantic meaning of the term or its relevance in modern times, but simply to question the benefits inherent to them.

I’ve just had a conversation with a guy who comes from a rich family and who has now lived away from his country in Europe (can’t be too specific without permission) for 15 years. He has lived in Thailand for quite some time and has gone out with a few Thai girls, He’s current girlfriend is also Thai. He made the point that motivated me to write this post.
His point, rewritten according to how I understood, or like to think I understood: “If we come from countries as developed as ours and we are able to afford more, why do we take pleasure in traveling in boats like this, living in hostels like the ones we stayed in, and put ourselves in the way of malaria and other diseases foreign to us?”
I can’t say that everyone agrees with the sentiments expressed in the above question or to what extent some disagree, but I definitely see a million dollar question there.

We think that we’re not really happy with the way things work in our homes, or at least realize that we are not. That most of society is so absorbed in trying to please “others” that it forgets to live their own lives.
Traveling removes us from that sort of “thou shalt impress thy neighbor” environment and we quickly realize that most of our materialistic pursuits are not as necessary as we believed them to be. We become conscious of the fact that happiness can be achieved without the pile of wealth that forces us to create a different sort of wealth to protect it and that materialistic consumerism only replaces the very happiness it seeks to acquire by replacing it with the fear of loosing all we’ve fought so hard to achieve, sometimes risking happiness itself in the process.

In traveling we learn that there’s more to life than the relentless search for acceptance or approval. That the pursuit of happiness won’t necessarily end when one achieves that big cheque, buys a new house in a new neighborhood, eats at restaurant X and drinks in the company of equally or more “sophisticated” Ys. That people don’t have to think or look like you to make you happy. That you don’t need wear a particular brand to fit into a particular category and categories themselves are irrational constructs that makes us work more to move from one to the other.
In essence we learn that we can be ourselves and live not to accumulate wealth, but to live happily and comfortably.

Dionisio Nunes

Traveling

It all start when one day you find yourself in a new place. All is new and different from anything you find familiar. The strangeness of the place makes you fall into yourself and you begin to miss home, your friends and your bed. If you, like me, are the type who reaches out to anyone who displays the remotest desire to meet new people, you’ll be lucky to find a group of fellow travelers in whom you find new friends, replacement friends for some. If you’re an introvert person, you’ll find yourself sitting in a corner, waiting for someone, anyone to ask that dumb question that will save you from the loneliness of your isolation: “Hi, do you by any chance know the password for the wifi?”
In the open life of a traveler such a question is about all you need to forge a friendship that transcends continents, cultures and preferences.

Every time I think of the types of people I’ve met in my travels, I question my personal preferences as far as friends are concerned. Usually I congratulate myself for not having created any… or buried them.

It’s not the only thing I burry. When we travel, I believe, we press pause on our “real” lives and adopt a new life. A second life if you like. One in which we surrender to chance, danger, new tastes, carelessness and to just about anything different from what are used to or have been warned about. One in which we go by same name, but with a different personality. Most of the times, we stick to the acquired personalities for life or until we press the resume button when we return. We stretch the limits of our social capabilities.

Traveling gives us the liberty to become new people, to experiment the life we wanted but couldn’t quite live in our usual routine dominated life. It allows us to be fools without the negativity inherent to the word. It removes all the external pressure that inhibits open-mindedness and for some it melts the icy wall that prevents us from freely talking to our neighbors.

In essence, it removes us from the cages of identities, prejudices and conventions.

Being in a world that doesn’t know our rules, gives us the freedom to break them without being judged by them.

PS: If this article sounds too licentious for you, it’s probably because you don’t understand the context from which I write.

Dionisio Nunes