Om Ian Buruma’s simplisme goed te kunnen begrijpen dient men ondermeer het boek Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed (2018) lezen. Daarin citeert de Britse journalist Will Storr de Amerikaanse hoogleraar sociale psychologie, Richard Eugene Nisbett die erop wijst dat de ‘complexiteit van omgevingen dat Oosterlingen kunnen tolereren veel groter [is] dan Westerlingen kunnen.’ Nisbett voegde hieraan toe dat:
the street scene in East Asia is just chaotic to us. And people say, ‘Oh, well, what about Times Square?’ To which my answer is, ‘Yeah, what about Times Square?’ The Confucian versus Aristotelian difference has also been detected in a study of newspaper reports. Researchers deconstructed stories in the New York Times and the Chinese-language World Journal about two mass murderers. They found the American journalists tended to blame flaws in the killers’ characters — they suffered from a ‘very bad temper’ or were ‘mentally unstable.’ The Chinese reporters, meanwhile, emphasized problems in their external lives — one had lost his job, another found himself ‘isolated’ from the Chinese community. These findings were supported by interviews that found the Chinese more likely to blame life pressures for the killer’s actions, with many believing that had his situation been less stressful, he might not have killed at all. The Americans’ black-or-white, good-or-bad perspective, meanwhile, led to a greater conviction that the crime was inevitable. As we’ve discovered, back in our tribal hunter-gatherer days, the thing that all human selves fundamentally want is to get along and get ahead. Everyone has this in common. When we’re born, our brain looks to the environment to tell it who we ought to become in order to best fulfill this deep and primal need. What it’s looking for is the model of the ideal of self that exists in its cultural surroundings.
Alleen door de context te elimineren kan men de schuld bij De Ander leggen. De mainstream-media wijzen dan ook altijd collectief ‘Poetin’ aan als het vlees geworden Kwaad in de wereld, en niet het Russische volk, waarvan driekwart tijdens de laatste presidentsverkiezingen op ‘Poetin’ stemde. Het Kwaad moet voortdurend geïndividualiseerd worden, wil het effectief zijn. De complexe context leidt immers alleen maar af, terwijl het criminaliseren van een héél volk onmogelijk is geworden om westers geweld voor een regime-change te rechtvaardigen. Met andere woorden: het enige 'legitieme' politieke argument moet zijn de bevrijding van het Russische volk, door het verdrijven van deze — in de ogen van de Amerikaanse elite en haar corporate media — ‘tiran.’ Bovendien is de Europese bevolking sinds de Tweede Wereldoorlog huiverig voor het stigmatiseren van een hele bevolking, daarvoor zijn de herinneringen aan het nationaal-socialisme en fascisme nog te levendig. Voor de westerse massamedia blijft niets anders over dan het massaal verspreiden van propaganda. Daarbij is de journalistieke kadaverdiscipline verbijsterend, maar onvermijdelijk. Al in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw waarschuwde de Franse aristocraat Alexis De Tocqueville in zijn legendarische beschouwing Over de Democratie in Amerika (2012) voor het feit dat
[h]oe gelijker de standen worden, hoe minder sterk de mensen individueel zijn, des te gemakkelijker laten zij zich meeslepen door de massa en des te moeilijker houden zij als enigen vast aan een opvatting die door die massa is verlaten.
Over de ‘koortsachtige’ mateloosheid van de Amerikaanse cultuur merkte hij op:
In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords, it seemed to me as if a cloud habitually hung upon their brow, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. The chief reason for this contrast is that [they are] forever brooding over advantages they do not possess. It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should not have chosen the shortest path which may lead to it. A native of the United States clings to this world’s goods as if he were certain never to die; and he is so hasty in grasping at all within his reach that one would suppose he was constantly afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications…
Death at length overtakes him, but it is before he is weary of his bootless chase of that complete felicity which forever escapes him. At first sight there is something surprising in this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance. The spectacle itself, however, is as old as the world; the novelty is to see a whole people furnish an exemplification of it. Their taste for physical gratifications must be regarded as the original source of that secret disquietude which the actions of the Americans betray and of that inconstancy of which they daily afford fresh examples. He who has set his heart exclusively upon the pursuit of worldly welfare is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time at his disposal to reach, to grasp, and to enjoy it. The recollection of the shortness of life is a constant spur to him. Besides the good things that he possesses, he every instant fancies a thousand others that death will prevent him from trying if he does not try them soon. This thought fills him with anxiety, fear, and regret and keeps him mind in ceaseless trepidation, which leads him perpetually to change his plans and his abode…Men will then be seen continually to change their track for fear of missing the shortest cut to happiness.
Het gevoel eeuwig psychisch gemobiliseerd te zijn, de bedreiging van zowel binnenuit als van buitenaf, wordt gevoed door begeerde met de daaraan onlosmaakbaar verbonden angst en onzekerheid. De Ander wordt zodoende gezien als concurrent in de jacht op schaarde goederen. Zeker anno 2018, nu ook vrouwen massaal op de arbeidsmarkt zijn verschenen. Dit alles verhindert dat vele Amerikanen, zeker de middenklasse, zich geworteld voelen in een gemeenschap. Het is deze zelfde vervreemding waaronder Ian Buruma gebukt gaat. Net als iedereen is ook hij een kind van zijn tijd, maar dan in het extreme. Als exponent van de IK-generatie is hij obsessief met zichzelf bezig, met zijn positie in de pikorde, met imago. In zijn boek Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What’s It’s Doing to Us ( 2018) beschrijft de Britse journalist, Will Storr, hoe het mens- en wereldbeeld van westerlingen en oosterlingen wezenlijk verschillen. Hij wijst erop dat:
In Chinese, there isn’t a word for individualism (the nearest they have translates to ‘selfishness’). The term for ‘human being’ in Japanese and Korean translates as ‘human between’. Most studies show that East Asians have lower self-esteem than Westerners.
Tijdens zijn onderzoek interviewt Storr professor Uichol Kim, a social psychologist at South Korea’s Inha University, omdat
I was hoping to discover not just that East Asian stories are different, but that these differences reflected how their selves are different. If so, this would surely constitute yet more powerful evidence that self and culture really are symbiotic. ‘In the East,’ he told me, ‘stories are different.’ It isn’t so much riches, nor the love of the maiden, nor the bravos of the many that tend to form the structure of their tales. It’s harmony. This is the form many traditional Asian stories take: an incident such as a murder is recounted from the perspectives of several witnesses and then an event or twist takes place which, in some way, makes sense of them all. But don’t expect this sense to be obvious. ‘You’re never given the answer,’ he said. ‘There’s no closure. There’s no happily ever after. You’re left with a question that you have to decide for yourself. That’s the story’s pleasure.’ ‘And there’s no implication by the storyteller as to which character’s perspective was right?’ I asked. ‘They’re all right. And they’re all wrong. Of course!’ Likewise, in an Eastern form of story known as Kishōtenketsu, something happens, then something apparently unconnected takes place which makes us view the first thing in a new way. We’re encouraged to search for the harmony between the incidents. ‘One of the confusing things about stories in the East is there’s no ending,’ said Professor Kim. ‘In life there are not simple, clear answers. You have to find these answers.’ The Asian author often doesn’t impart a simple lesson of wisdom in the telling of a tale. How could they when it’s not possible for one hero, one author, to ever know the truth? ‘How does anyone know the absolute truth? They can only tell what they know. You in the West see human beings as objects. But that is actually wrong. Human beings are subjects. A person is very egotistical. What I feel, what I see, is from my perspective. But someone viewing me can have a different perspective and a third person can have a third perspective. The truth is when all three perspectives are respected and combined. Then I arrive at harmony. But in the West it’s right and wrong. It’s simple.’ This process of learning how to harmonize differing perspectives is what Asian thinkers mean when they talk of ‘cultivation of the self’. ‘It is the path of wisdom.’ Perhaps the most extraordinary and revealing difference in our storytelling comes in that inherently me-focused genre, the autobiography. What could be more obvious than recounting the tale of a hero from real life? And how else could you tell it than by reliving that hero’s life, as if from their eyes, with them at the centre of the action, describing their decisions and views on the action around them? And yet, according to Professor Qi Wang, for nearly two millennia, there was ‘hardly any real autobiography’ in Chinese literature. And most of that which came to exist would be hardly recognizable to us. In China, accounts of an exalted person’s life tend not to include their opinions or subjective facts about them. They are, instead, characterized by ‘a total suppression of a personal voice’. Rather than being in the spotlight of the story, its subject is traditionally presented as a bystander, ‘in the shadows.’ None of this is to suggest, of course, that there aren’t any Eastern stories that centre on a ‘hero’ as we’d recognize them in the West. But according to Professor Kim, the hero’s status is often earned a different way. ‘In the West you fight against evil and the truth prevails and love conquers all,’ he said. ‘In Asia it’s a person who sacrifices who becomes the hero, and takes care of the family and the community and the country.’ What unites the stories of our two cultures is that they’re accounts of change. In the West we seek to bravely conquer the forces of change whilst in the East they seek a way of bringing them into harmony. But all stories serve the basic function of giving us insights into who we need to be in order to cope with the terrifying, ever-shifting world. In the memorable words of Professor Roy Baumeister, ‘Life is change that yearns for stability.’ No matter where we’re from, stories teach us how to gain that stability. They are lessons in control.
Opmerkelijk is dat Ian Buruma zes jaar lang in Japan verbleef, maar toch zo weinig hiervan heeft geleerd. Zijn werk wordt getypeerd door een kritiekloze verering van het individualisme en het onbegrensde Verlichtingsgeloof dat hieruit is voortgevloeid. Dit geloof verklaart zijn onverschilligheid tegenover slachtoffers van de Amerikaanse terreur, want met grote stelligheid verzekert hij de Engels lezende wereldbevolking dat
even if the end of Pax Americana does not result in military invasions or world wars, we should ready ourselves for a time when we might recall the American empire with fond nostalgia.
Vanuit zijn individualistische overtuiging zijn deze ‘we’ niet de wereldgemeenschap, die mede door de Amerikaanse terreur in disharmonie leeft, maar ‘de west Europeanen’ en ‘Japan.’ Deze mening verraadt niet alleen een grote mate van onwetendheid, maar tevens een blindheid voor de werkelijkheid. Hij weigert te beseffen hoe diep de continuïteit van het Westers c.q. Amerikaans geweld verankerd is in het bewustzijn van de witte man. Over de mateloosheid, voortkomend uit vervreemding, en het onvermogen diep te wortelen in Amerikaanse bodem en dus te demobiliseren, schreef de prominente Amerikaanse cultuurcriticus Wendell Berry in zijn essaybundel The Unsettling of America (1977) over hoe:
the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of gold seeking in the middle of the last century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves — no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken anthill. In our time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice (hebzucht. svh).
In aansluiting hierop stelde Berry:
The Indians did, of course, experience movements of population, but in general their relation to place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration (verering. svh). The land was their homeland. The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland. But there were always those among the newcomers who saw that they had come to a good place and who saw its domestic possibilities. Very early, for instance, there were men who wished to establish agricultural settlements rather than quest (een zoektocht. svh) for gold or exploit the Indian trade. Later, we know that every advance of the frontier left behind families and communities who intended to remain and prosper where they were. But we know also that these intentions have been almost systematically overthrown.
Generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been dispossessed and driven out, or subverted and exploited where they were, by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado. Time after time, in place after place, these conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities, the beginnings of domestic cultures. They have always said that what they destroyed was outdated, provincial, and contemptible. And with alarming frequency they have been believed and trusted by their victims, especially when their victims were other white people.
If there is any law that has been consistently operative in American history, it is that the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become 'redskins' — that is, they become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation. The colonists who drove off the Indians came to be intolerably exploited by their imperial governments. And that alien imperialism was thrown off only to be succeed by a domestic version of the same thing; the class of independent small farmers who fought the war of independence has been exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct.
Het grote en wezenlijke probleem in de geschiedenis van de Amerikanen is het ontbreken van het gevoel bij een gemeenschap te horen. ‘Roots, to belong’ zijn hierbij sleutelbegrippen. De Amerikanen zijn altijd ‘on the road’:
Belongingness is the human emotional need to be an accepted member of a group. Whether it is family, friends, co-workers, or a sports team, humans tend to have an 'inherent' desire to belong and be an important part of something greater than themselves. This implies a relationship that is greater than simple acquaintance or familiarity. The need to belong is the need to give, and receive attention to, and from, others.
Belonging is a strong and inevitable feeling that exists in human nature. To belong or not to belong can occur due to choices of one's self, or the choices of others. Not everyone has the same life and interests, hence not everyone belongs to the same thing or person. Without belonging, one cannot identify themselves as clearly, thus having difficulties communicating with and relating to their surroundings.
Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary argue that belongingness is such a fundamental human motivation that we feel severe consequences of not belonging. If it wasn’t so fundamental, then lack of belonging wouldn’t have such dire consequences on us. This desire is so universal that the need to belong is found across all cultures and different types of people.
Ieder mens met een beetje sociale intelligentie realiseert zich dat het het gevoel nergens bij te horen ‘verschrikkelijke consequenties’ veroorzaken, aangezien het ‘zo’n fundamentele menselijke drijfveer’ is onderdeel te zijn van een groter geheel. Dit is de voornaamste reden van Ian Buruma’s pogingen ergens bij te horen, of dit nu een groep Japanse theaterspelers was dan wel de corrupte joods-Amerikaanse elite. Het zal duidelijk zijn hoe traumatisch hij zijn verstoting uit de groep ervaart. Zeker wanneer daarmee ook zijn mens- en wereldbeeld ernstig wordt beschadigd. In The Unsettling of America beschrijft Berry de continuïteit van de Amerikaanse roofbouw en daarmee de vervreemding en vernietiging van het gemeenschapsgevoel aan de hand van het lot van onder andere de Amerikaanse boeren, de binnenlandse slachtoffers van het expansionistische beleid van Washington en Wall Street:
As so often before, these are designated victims — people without official sanction, often without official friends, who are struggling to preserve their places, their values, and their lives as they know them and prefer to live them against the agencies of their own government, which are using their own tax money against them.
The only escape from this destiny of victimization has been to 'succeed' — that is, to 'make it' into the class of exploiters, and then to remain so specialized and so 'mobile' as to be unconscious of the effects of one's life or livelihood. This escape is, of course, illusory, for one man's producer is another's consumer, and even the richest and most mobile will soon find it hard to escape the noxious effluents and fumes of their various public services.
Nu het individualisme is geëindigd in het totale egoïsme, waardoor het individu letterlijk zowel als figuurlijk alleen nog zichzelf kan zien, terwijl tegelijkertijd het onderhuids verlangen naar gemeenschapszin almaar groeit, zien we in feite het failliet van de westerse cultuur, zoals die zich sinds de Renaissance heeft ontwikkeld. Het individualisme heeft ondermeer geleid tot de huidige stand van zaken, waarbij enerzijds slechts 64 schatrijke individuen evenveel bezitten als de helft van de hele mensheid tezamen, en anderzijds de wereldbevolking bedreigd wordt door alles vernietigende oorlogen en de desastreuze gevolgen van de klimaatverandering, de snelle uitputting van grondstoffen. Storr komt tot de volgende samenvatting:
Perhaps the greatest difference between the Aristotelian and the Confucian is in their tendency to be acutely conscious of being a part of a greater whole. The Asian self melts, at the edges, into the selves that surround it, whereas the Western self tends to feel more independent and in control of its own behavior and destiny. Studies suggest, not only that Asians don’t feel as in control of their lives as Westerners, but that they don’t feel the need to be. Change is the function of the group, rather than the individual, their priority harmony rather than freedom. These deep substrata of thought can lead to startling differences above the surface.
Meer hierover en over mijn oude vriend Ian Buruma later.
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