Transcultural pictures
About a week ago I started taking half-hour walks in the morning, sometimes with my son.
Ethel KVALHEIM Lane
We are both transcultural travelers and therefore our sources of entertainment will never dry up.
The last two days we took our camera to capture aspects of the American suburban culture that in another cultural context might look or sound hilarious or intriguing.
Thus our German friends will savor the name Ethel Kvalheim Lane. As 30% of the local population is of Norwegian ancestry I am sure the word ‘Kval’ in Norwegian has a totally different meaning than the German word ‘Qual’ (‘torture’) and they would not conjure up pictures of Lady Ethel torturing her family in their home (‘Heim’). Or Ethel being the name of a jail where people are tortured, a torture-home. That would make no sense. To make sense she should have changed her name into “Guantanamo Kvalheim’.
The sign “NO CONCEALED WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT” will fill with admiration all our friends outside the USA for our courage, bravery and toughness to walk these streets with our weapons concealed. Up to that point, that is.
CHREMOLATRY: a new word for an old disease
Every December I spent in Western Europe or North America I was trying to find a diagnostic word that would describe the epidemic disease that befalls the inhabitants of these regions. They start buying things in unimaginably enormous quantities, wrap them up and give them each other, or keep them for themselves. Things they do not need. The average West European owns 10 000 things, the average North American even 20 000 things. They don’t know how many of these things they really need. But they keep on multiplying them.
What are we experiencing each December? A wild rush fore more things. Back in 1998 I was almost crushed by the shopping multitudes in the center of the Westphalian city of Münster. The next advent Sunday the crowd managed to really stomp a person to death there. Here in the US I saw the same stampede for more things on TV as ‘Black Friday’.
I remember Georges Perec’s first novel, ‘Les Choses’ that describes how a young couple explores “happiness” in a consumer society by surrounding and burying themselves under an increasing number of objects. The English title ‘Things: A Story of the Sixties’ pretends the phenomenon was limited to the Sixties of the previous century.
“Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necesitate” is a statement known as Occam’s razor, or Ockham’s razor, and word for word it means that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” It is sometimes expressed in Latin as ‘lex parsimoniae’ (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.
If we were to translate this recommendation from the realm of epistemology into the realm of everyday life we might say: do not multiply things beyond necessity. I could also say: ‘stop reifying!’ (from Latin ‘res’ thing + ‘facere’to make, reification can be loosely translated as thing-making; ) or ‘stop making more things than needed!’
Today the legendary light bulb went up in my head and I found the diagnostic name of the disease that takes epidemic proportions every year in December:
CHREMOLATRY. I made it up from the Greek words
chrema = a thing,(also: business, spec. money, riches)
+ -latry = worship
I waive the copyright on it and send it out to my friends and acquaintances as a diagnostic name they can also use as a diagnostic tool by asking themselves the question:
“How deep am I affected by CHREMOLATRY? How deep am I worshipping things and how much do I contribute to their multiplication beyond necessity?”
Would our merry race go on multiplying the things on the face of the earth, polluting also the air, the water, even our brains if we asked us this question? Would the cult of multiplying things beyond necessity reach its paroxysm at the end of each year?
I doubt it. No appeal to reason has led to more reasonable conduct of life on a mass level in the long run.
On an individual level, however, the question might lead to the question “what are the things that I really need?” and might even mark the starting point of a wonderful journey of self-knowledge, purification, simplification, stress elimination. Or even peace of mind that is happiness.
how to explain to your kids that they are aliens
My legal status is currently almost congruent with my cultural identity. In Romania, where I was born and raised as a Hungarian, I was not an alien. I was part of a minority. In Germany I became a German citizen after relinquishing my Romanian citizenship, so I was not an alien, but a Spätaussiedler, an immigrant of German ancestry.
Finally I almost managed to bring my legal status in line with my cultural identity: a Central European in the Midwest, a legal alien.
My wife says I shouldn’t call myself an alien or even a legal alien, though. She says they don’t use that technical term any more in the US but another technical term: ‘permanent resident’ or the non-technical term: ‘recent immigrant’. This is technically correct, since the Wikipedia defines an alien as someone “who has temporary or permanent residence in a country (which is foreign to him/her)” It further proposes that he or she “ may be called a resident alien of that country. This is a subset of the aforementioned legal alien category.”
My personal view on the matter is that there are advantages in being a bit of an outsider: you can distance yourself more easily from the local forms of culturally accepted idiosyncrasies (like no speed limit in Germany or shooting your family, neighbors and presidents in the US, or beating your wife in Hungary) and have more fun discovering new manifestations thereof.
I only run into difficulties when I am pressed by my children who are dual citizens of Hungary and Germany to give coherent explanations. I keep on avoiding to discuss this issue until they grow a bit more so they can read How To Be An Alien by George Mikes (whose contributions to Radio Free Europe were definitely funnier than mine and so are his explanations regarding the legal and cultural status of being an alien).
But I might still have to teach them somehow the lesson Sting learned as an Englishman in New York:
“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say.”
Sedaris lowered himself again
David Sedaris lowered himself again: he told dirty jokes during a performance in Madison, Wisconsin: Celebrated humorist Sedaris not above ribald comedy at Overture
That would have been perfectly acceptable in any country in East or South Europe, where political correctness is not part of the national hypocrisy toolbox.
Back in the late 1990s I did business development in East Europe for a German company and all export business development managers assembled every year three times to exchange their ideas and experiences at the German headquarter. On one of these occasions we had to be trained to use a new software but the software manager had left for vacation without leaving the password for his substitute. It took the substitute about two hours to reach him and during this time we all told dirty jokes, except our German colleagues who were embarrassed since the ribald words marking the punch line of a joke translated into German were only ribald and vulgar but not funny.
Our German colleagues shook their heads incredulously also when I told them that little booklets entitled ‘The best Gypsy Jokes’ and ‘The Best Jew Jokes’ are sold at every railway station and at hundreds of other places in Budapest by Gypsies. And I’m sure they are collected and published by Jews.
Parallels between Epicureanism and Confucianism
The parallels between Epicureanism and Buddhism have been seen and shown, discussed and understood during the last years but its parallels with Confucianism, at least to my knowledge, not yet. I was not aware of any parallelism myself before reading Bertrand Russell’s ‘Eastern and Western Ideals of Happiness’.
I was sometimes musing about the pros and cons of how the Western world might have evolved if Epicureanism and not Christianism had been installed as state religion by the Romans. Would the creed and conduct of life of the middle classes have been able to influence the cruel fanaticism if the lower classes or the cruel cynicism of the ruling classes?
Such speculations are of course mote but after reading Russell’s essay I tend to see more positive than negative possibilities of a practicable system of ethics imposed by the ( a quasi ‘state-religion’)based on an understanding of human nature, and the cultivation of humanity such as Confucianism had been in China for2400 years.
The following quotations might enlighten the parallelisms that I discovered for myself (emphasis mine):
The civilisation of China, as every one knows, is based upon the teaching of Confucius, who flourished five hundred years before Christ. […] His personality has been stamped on Chinese civilisation from his day to our own. […]
During his lifetime the Chinese occupied only a small part of present-day China, and were divided into a number of warring states. During the next three hundred years they established themselves throughout what is now China proper, and founded an empire exceeding in territory and population any other that existed until the last fifty years. In spite of barbarian invasions, Mongol and Manchu dynasties, and occasional longer or shorter periods of chaos and civil war, the Confucian system survived,
bringing with it art and literature and a civilised way of life. It is only in our own day, through contact with the West and with the Westernised Japanese, that this system has begun to break down.
A system which has had this extraordinary power of survival must have great merits, and certainly deserves our respect and consideration. It is not a religion, as we understand the word,
because it is not associated with the supernatural or with mystical beliefs. It is a purely ethical system, but its ethics, unlike those of Christianity, are not too exalted for ordinary men to practise.
He […] never exacts anything contrary to nature and the natural affections.
Confucius was in all things moderate, even in virtue. He did not believe that we ought to return good for evil. […]
The principle of returning good for evil was being taught in his day in China by the Taoists, whose teaching is much more akin to that of Christianity than is the teaching of Confucius. […]
It is characteristic of China that it was not Lao-Tze but Confucius who became the recognised national sage. Taoism has survived, but chiefly as magic and among the uneducated. Its doctrines have appeared visionary to the practical men who administered the Empire, while the doctrines of Confucius were eminently calculated to avoid friction. […]
Chinese governors naturally preferred the Confucian maxims of self-control, benevolence and courtesy, combined, as they were, with a great emphasis upon the good that could be done by wise government.
It never occurred to the Chinese, as it has to all modern white nations, to have one system of ethics in theory and another in practice. I do not mean that they always live up to their own theories, but that they attempt to do so and are expected to do so, whereas there are large parts of the Christian ethic which are universally admitted to be too good for this wicked world.
We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practise, and another which we practise but seldom preach. […] In practice, our effective morality is that of material success achieved by means of a struggle; and this applies to nations as well as to individuals. Anything else seems to us soft and foolish.
The Chinese do not adopt either our theoretical or our practical ethic. They admit in theory that there are occasions when it is proper to fight, and in practice that these occasions are rare; whereas we hold in theory that there are no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are very frequent. […]
Young China—that is to say, the students who have been educated on European lines—recognise modern needs, and have perhaps hardly enough respect for the old tradition. Nevertheless, even the most modern, with few exceptions, retain the traditional virtues of moderation, politeness and a pacific temper. […]
If I were to try to sum up in a phrase the main difference between the Chinese and ourselves, I should say that they, in the main, aim at enjoyment, while we, in the main, aim at power. We like power over our fellow-men, and we like power over Nature. For the sake of the former we have built up strong states, and for the sake of the latter we have built up Science.
The Chinese […] will not work, as Americans and Western Europeans do simply because they would be bored if they did not work, nor do they love hustle for its own sake. When they have enough to live on, they live on it, instead of trying to augment it by hard work. They have an infinite capacity for leisurely amusements—going to the theatre, talking while they drink tea, admiring the Chinese art of earlier times, or walking in beautiful scenery. To our way of thinking, there is something unduly mild about such a way of spending one’s life; we respect more a man who goes to his office every day, even if all that he does in his office is harmful.
Living in the East has, perhaps a corrupting influence upon a white man, but I must confess that, since I came to know China, I have regarded laziness as one of the best qualities of which men in the mass are capable. We achieve certain things by being energetic, but it may be questioned whether, on the balance, the things that we achieve are of any value. We develop wonderful skill in manufacture, part of which we devote to making ships, automobiles, telephones and other means of living luxuriously
at high pressure, while another part is devoted to making guns, poison gases and aeroplanes for the purpose of killing each other wholesale. We have a first-class system of administration and taxation, part of which is devoted to education, sanitation and such useful objects, while the rest is devoted to war. In England at the present day most of the national revenue is spent on past and future wars and only the residue on useful objects. On the Continent, in most countries, the proportion is even worse. We have a police system of unexampled efficiency, part of which is devoted to the detection and prevention of crime and part to imprisoning anybody who has any new constructive political ideas. In China, until recently, they had none of these things. […] The result was that in China, as compared to any white man’s country, there was freedom for all, and a degree of diffused happiness which was amazing in view of the poverty of all but a tiny minority.
Comparing the actual outlook of the average Chinese with that of the average Western, two differences strike one: first, that the Chinese do not admire activity unless it serves some useful purpose; secondly, that they do not regard morality as consisting in checking our own impulses and interfering with those of others.
Confucius taught that men are born good, and that if they become wicked, that is through the force of evil example or corrupting manners. This difference from traditional Western orthodoxy has a profound influence on the outlook of the Chinese. […]
Among ourselves, the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forgo ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others. There is an element of the busybody in our conception of virtue: unless a man makes himself a nuisance to a great many people, we do not think he can be an exceptionally good man. This attitude comes from our notion of Sin. It leads not only to interference with freedom, but also to hypocrisy, since the conventional standard is too difficult for most people to live up to.
In China this is not the case. Moral precepts are positive rather than negative. A man is expected to be respectful to his parents, kind to his children, generous to his poor relations, and courteous
to all. These are not very difficult duties, but most men actually fulfil them, and the result is perhaps better than that of our higher standard, from which most people fall short. […]
Another result of the absence of the notion of Sin is that men are much more willing to submit their differences to argument and reason than they are in the West. Among ourselves, differences
of opinion quickly become questions of ‘principle’: each side thinks that the other side is wicked, and that any yielding to it involves sharing in its guilt. This makes our disputes bitter, and involves in practice a great readiness to appeal to force. In China, although there were military men who were ready to appeal to force, no one took them seriously, not even their own soldiers. […] The great bulk of the population, including the civil administration, went about its business as though these generals and their armies did not exist. In ordinary life, disputes are usually adjusted by the friendly mediation of some third party. Compromise is the accepted principle, because it is necessary to save the face of both parties. Saving face, though in some forms it makes foreigners smile, is a most valuable national institution, making social and political life far less ruthless than it is with us. […]
If the whole world were like China, the whole world could be happy; but so long as others are warlike
and energetic, the Chinese, now that they are no longer isolated, will be compelled to copy our vices to some degree if they are to preserve their national independence. But let us not flatter ourselves that this imitation will be an improvement.
The student of Epicureanism will have no difficulty in discovering the parallelisms between the teachings, and especially the results of practicing the teachings, of Epicurus and Confucius.
David Sedaris thanks for “aggressive piglet” jokes
I could not meet Ernest Hemingway. I could not meet Kurt Vonnegut. I could not meet JK Salinger. But I could meet David Sedaris.
As a very special birthday present from my wife. On Thursday, April 7, we drove to Davenport, Iowa, to see and hear him. On the stage he seemed smaller and frailer than I had pictured him. But he was much funnier than I hoped he would be.
After the reading, I joined the long and winding line of one or two hundred autograph hunters. It took him about twenty minutes to start his signing session. He talked and smiled with each and all of us while trying to devour a huge steak. After another 30 minutes it was my turn to tell him a joke.
I decided to introduce him to a Hungarian joke character that portrays a facet of the Hungarian collective soul, the dumb and self-defeating ‘aggressive piglet.
‘ The aggressive piglet falls into a pit.The good fairy is coming along and notices the piglet at the bottom of the pit. She calls: - Hey Piglet, wait a minute I’ll go and get a ladder!
The aggressive piglet shouts back: – I won’t wait!!!
and another one:
The aggressive piglet goes to the railway station ticket sales and says:
- Give me a railway ticket!
- Where would you like to go?
- None of your damn business!
David seemed to enjoy the piglet, since he mentioned him above his signature (see picture above).
I have no picture with Ernest Hemingway. I have no picture with have no picture with Kurt Vonnegut. I have no picture with JK Salinger. My wife is a law-abiding lady and she just could not pretend the ubiquitous “No photos, please!” warnings.
My satisfaction could have been complete: I have seen and even talked with the best living American short story author. Except that David Sedaris said on the stage that the best living American short story author was Tobias Wolff…
I could have gone on wondering whether I have just met the best living American short story author or not, had I not taken a firm decision to ignore David’s ranking as less reliable than my own. Upon taking this decision my satisfaction was complete again. Irreversibly, this time.
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