Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells in a wonderful story why only knowing one story of someone is nearly always one-dimensional and omits important information.

Many interesting things have happened since I last blogged – like Russia’s imperialism rearing its head again and the global financial crisis.

Russia invading another country is something I didn’t think was going to happen again, simply because the cost of creating uncertainty by starting a war tends to be bad for business. Apparently, Russia is less integrated into the world economy than I thought. This, combined with surging nationalism, isn’t good for anyone – especially not Russia’s neighbors.

The nationalization of Fortis shows how we are all interconnected and how very little is “national” anymore. The Thai government’s problems became everyone’s problems. Now, the desire to have the “perfect” house and the willingness to lend money to lots of high-risk people is becoming everyone’s problem as well. These problems cannot be solved by any one government, although of course they can help. The view that you don’t have to worry about what happens in another country has evident flaws, especially when it comes to economics.

“In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.” 

The ideas he sees having come into existence and spreading are the following:

“First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.”  

This rather describes my ideas about religion.

I wrote earlier about my feelings for the forest and how my Christian mother and I have no particular religious or moral conflicts because we recognize the same spiritual experiences in the other and do not want to fight over essentially philosophically different interpretations of spirituality. That sounds an awful lot like “common moral intuitions”. Another part of that is perhaps the aforementioned dynamic process of relationships and the transcending boundaries and overflowing with love. One just doesn’t condemn people to Hell right after overflowing with love. We love each other, and do not see why dogma in an ancient (and sexist) book should change that. After all, if God is unknowable, how can we judge?

The main thing that gives me dyspepsia about most religions (some Buddhist ideas excluded) is that I have no idea of what properties such a deity would have nor what it would want. If those questions could be answered by observation and experiment, they would be within the realm of science. All that is left, then, is intuition and spirituality. This doesn’t particularly help, either. If I think God is talking to me, am I divine or insane? Even if you assume that God does talk to sane people, the odds seem much in favor of insane. Charles Manson thought that God was speaking to him, too. And then there’s serious projection problems – being human and therefore acutely irrational, (if only I was a Vulcan!) how do I know I’m not just seeing or hearing what I want to see or hear? It’s something we’re very prone to do, both individually and as societies. The Bible is full of misogyny because it was written by an even more sexist society than ours. There is nothing in the Bible about the Higgs boson because the society that produced it knew nothing about bosons, or any other elemental particles for that matter. Any deity would surely transcend the particularities of any particular time or culture. And so, the existence of a deity doesn’t by any stretch of the imagination make any so-called holy texts or religions true. 

As a feminist, I have to question misogyny in religion in particular. Why would a deity care about gender? Gender and sexual reproduction is simply a gene-mixing mechanism. It makes no sense for God to value one gender more than the other. The obvious reason anyone would say so is simply power. That’s not particularly divine. I don’t think God could possibly care about what I wear or what I cover or don’t. I don’t think God cares about how many sexual partners I’ve had or will have. As a third culture kid, I have to question jingoism and chauvinism in religion. Why would God choose a people? Why would some people be more special than others, just because they have declared themselves followers of a particular named God? If God really cared about big proclamations of allegiance and loyalty, God is about as mature and self-confident as a cult leader or narcissist. That seems to be attributable to worldly religious leaders rather than God, once again.

Ultimately, I believe that we are all individually responsible for our moral choices and ideas. Following someone does not abdicate your personal responsibility, and doing what “everyone” in your culture is doing is no excuse either. You really do have to make decisions for yourself. Perhaps you decide that enough of your ideas coincide with an existing mainstream religion and that you will join that religion. That’s okay, but that still doesn’t excuse you from questioning dogma.One compelling practical argument in favor of thinking for yourself and questioning dogma is the potential increased cooperation in the world community. Traditional religions tend to be very divisive. Anyone who’s spoken to a right-wing American Christian knows what I’m talking about. Many Muslim identities and dogma are similarly divisive. In order to not, say, blow ourselves up, finding new identities that do not divide us in the name of the divine are essential.

Sam Harris talks about how to proceed with religion and spirituality, past dogma and hate, in his book The End of Faith. He suggests that irrationality is a root problem, and that spirituality is something that can be systematically explored and learned.  I agree with Harris. Being religious or spiritual does not require being flat-out dedicated to irrationality, and sticking to dogma can be very dangerous. There are existing spiritual practices that use learning and experimentation with mental states and experiences that do not require dogma or irrationality. For the sake of the world community, we should adopt them more than we have.

In Hotelland, I am everywhere and nowhere, exactly where I’m from. It’s tremendously comforting to belong somewhere. I belong at the Marriott more than all these people around me, who are just visiting from Localland. Who don’t see that the head chef isn’t doing a good job. Who miss local things. I can see why lots of TCKs end up in hospitality management. This is probably what Saskia Sassen is talking about in her essay “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims”. I feel at home in the San Fransisco Marriott because I’ve already felt at home in Marriotts elsewhere. Hotelland comes with me, and to some extent I do want Hotelland to push Localland aside. Although I hate touristy areas of any town because they’re inauthentic, authenticity doens’t bother me much when it comes to Hotelland. It’s what I’ve got, in terms of not constantly having to work to understand everyone in Localland worldwide, whereas no one even considers that they need to understand me too. And because of that, I wish Hotelland were bigger. The locals have so much space, they can afford to give some of it to us, the global nomads. The entire world is theirs! They have roots everywhere. The only roots I have are in the air – is it too much to ask for some space for them, too? They tend to get squished in the scramble for space in Localland.

Anyway, returning to the original topic, from Hotelland I know how to make anywhere a new home. While sipping my Cosmopolitan (no pun intended) , I started thinking about a word I saw on TCKID: xenofilia. The word stuck with me, because it was a bit of a surprise. Logically, it’s the obvious opposite to xenophobia, but somehow it never occurred to me that there was a direct logical opposite – I always thought of the opposite of xenophobia as comopolitanisms. The poster who used it implied briefly that TCKs were xenophiles. In a sense, maybe that’s true. As much as I complain about being poorly understood myself despite having to understand all the locals, I do enjoy getting to know new cultures, things, thoughts and foods. However, I don’t think of them as xeno – as alien or Other – simply things that exist that I don’t know yet.

There are two cultural phenomena I can think of that makes me relate in an alienated way. One is widespread sexism, like in the Middle East. Being a woman whose parents are feminists from some of the most egalitarian countries in the world and having spend ten years in the most egalitarian country on earth as a child, I feel like someone’s trying to cut off my arms sometimes when men from very sexist countries start opening their big mouths. Sexist men from less sexist countries tend to get a hammer in the head from someone in their own culture – often another man – that makes it a cultural deviation, not a rule I’d have to abide by when I interact with them. Locals throwing hammers at sexists gives me permission, too.

The second is hyperlocalism. People who are from a small town somewhere in the world and have never left scare me, because my repatriation went very poorly at the hands of such people. People with strong regional accents make me a bit uncomfortable, as if one moment they will be smiling at me and then biting me in the neck the next, after screaming OUTSIDER!!!. Small towns can be cute, but to me they’re a bit scary. I don’t want to stay long, and I don’t want to step out of the “I’m just passing by” role. There is no Hotelland in those places, they are too small. Our kind does not go there enough. I was ostracized by people who look just like me and where I didn’t speak the language with even a hint of an accent. If real xenophobia can come out even when there is no tangible difference to seize on, what will happen when there is? When my parents briefly moved to 合肥 (Héféi), I could feel the localism coming at me immediately. I don’t even know exactly what I picked up on. Something about how people looked at me that I recognized from Sweden, even though they were looking a lot more because I looked foreign. Something about how they talk to each other. I’m not sure. But it was scary. I felt like I was back in the small Swedish town where I lived during my repatriation and I almost had a panic attack.

That’s why Hotelland is such a pleasure to be in. If I don’t open my mouth, I could be from anywhere. I am from anywhere. I could have arrived from anywhere in the world. I could fly to anywhere when I leave. I both belong and am free.

References

Sassen, S. (2000). Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims. In F. J. Lechner and J. Boli (Eds.), The Globalization Reader (pp. 70-76). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

I heard a song on the radio here in the US called “I think I’m turning Japanese”. I don’t know who it’s by, but the name is hard to forget as it’s repeated in the refrain. First I thought it might have something to do with expatriation and the expression “going native”, and as I was busy internally frowning on people who think of the world in terms of “us” and “natives”, the American in the car with me (of course this happened in a car) said that it came out during the 80s, when Japanese cars started making significant inroads into the American market. Apparently, driving Japanese cars makes one Japanese.

In my gender and technoculture class, a discussion about the social function of the microwave got derailed into discussion of new technology in general. Someone informed me that American pentecostals (a radical Christian sect of some sort) thought that the Devil attached itself to Japanese electronics. Obviously, not everyone could have been that irrational (or funny), but that anyone came up with that idea as a religious belief at all says something about how society at large related to Japanese goods.

Based on the song and the religious belief, it seems like Americans had a pretty strong emotional reaction to imported, superior goods. Perhaps it’s cool to be Japanese not only because it’s exotic, but that it’s perceived to be exotic in a superior way.

给大家新年快乐!

春节快乐!

Happy Spring Festival!

“central to the social construction of the engineer is the polarity between science and sensuality, the hard and the soft, things and people. (…) the complementary values of hard/soft are also used to legitimate female exclusion from the world of engineering.” (p.145-146)

Another sentence from the book made opened up my eyes to its validity during class discussion:

“It is evident that men identify with technology and through their identification with technology men form bonds with one another.” (p.141)

At first, I disagreed with the idea that only men do this. I identify with technology and bonded with most of my male friends through technology (and paper roleplaying games and computer games.) But then I realized that this is exactly how I’ve mainly been excluded in my research group. My male colleagues bonded with each other very quickly over the vacuum chamber in a completely different way than they approached me. They never shared information other than what is strictly necessary to operate the chamber spontaneously. But those two conflicting experiences beg the question of why such bonding through technology was possible in some cases, but not this one.

The answer might have come from my psychology of culture class. In Social Psychology of Culture, Chiu and Hong summarize research done with a global approach (using the mean behavior as indicative of the culture as a whole) measuring culture differences between many countries. The list of five countries that scored the highest on feminity (p. 32) are Sweden, Norway, Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland. The men I bonded with through technology were Swedish. My collagues are from countries with significantly less gender egalitarianism. This could also explain why I know so many women engineers from my childhood – they were Swedish women. I think culture moderates the impact of gender stereotypes in science and engineering to a very strong degree. The same stereotypes may be found all over the world (has someone checked?) but even if they are, their real, everyday impact on women can be worlds apart.

References
Wajcman, Judy. (1991). Feminism Confronts Technology.University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Chiu, C.-Y.; Hong, Y.-Y. (2006). Social Psychology of Culture. New York, NY: Psychology Press.