Sometimes, perspectives that you may have because of another culture are held by people that never left that culture as well. I always find that somewhat reassuring. It shows that even though you may have arrived at the opinion or idea using different cultural pathways (as opposed to logical arguments) you can still end up in the same place (usually a logical argument) sometimes. Maybe even a place of partial belonging?

Saro-Wiwa explained the matter succintly on US radio shortly before his arrest:

“Shell does not want to negotiate with the Ogoni people. Each time they’ve come under pressure from local people, their want has always been to run to the Nigerian government and to say to the Nigerian government, ‘Oil is 90 percent of your foreign exchange earning. If anything happens to oil, your economy will be destroyed. Therefore, you must go and deal with these people, these troublemakers.’ And most times, the government will oblige them and visits local communities of poor, dispossessed people with a lot of violence.
And when these communities then protested and said, ‘Look. Look at the amount of violence that is being used against us, even though we are only protesting peacefully,’ then the oil companies will come and say, ‘Well, there is no way we can determine how much violence a government decides to use against its own people.’ So, basically, the local communities have no leverage with the oil companies at all.”

This post will not be what one usually reads regarding multinational corporations (MNCs) and globalization and general evilness.  Don’t get me wrong – what Shell has done is absolutely terrible. But having your life caught up with one and becoming a TCK because of one makes it difficult to just say that MNCs are evil and should behave. Some nuance and better understanding of why some MNCs misbehave is needed.

I am an affirmative global. I believe that globalization is ultimately more for good than for bad. I believe this for both personal and logical reasons. The personal reasons are what makes me wonder how some MNCs end up doing such horrid things and others don’t. My sponsoring organization has scandals in its past, but the biggest one involved the CEO writing himself a spectacular severance package that the board didn’t really approve, not human rights abuses. In terms of people getting hurt, there is only an asbestos lawsuit inherited from an American company they bought. Also, “my” MNC is bringing with it worker safety standards along with concern for quality from Switzerland and Sweden to China along with the foreign managers, because that’s what the managers know and value. (I know, because I had a summer job translating work procedures into English once.) They pay well. They give opportunities for foreign travel. So why isn’t “my” MNC making power technology in sweatshops?

Perhaps part of the answer is to be found implicit in the question. “My” MNC makes technology products – well-understood and mature technology, but technology nonetheless – which requires educated and skilled labor. I learned that transformer winding is an art that takes years to master on the floor as a teen. It’s “just” winding special paper around flat copper wire, yet it takes years to get good at it. And it’s not something you can get an education for – you have to learn by doing. The projects are designed by electrical engineers. One does not put electrical engineers in a sweatshop and expect them to just crunch out more work, no matter where in the world they are located. One does not fire a winder who won’t work 12 hours a day and hire a new one off the street. And due to the high shipping costs of large power technology products, it’s more cost-effective to build it as locally as possible if there’s a larger market – and hiring locals, rather than sending in a very expensive team of expats, is clearly the better move. So perhaps a key predictor of MNC misbehavior is whether unskilled labor can be used to make their product.

However, there is another factor. Nigeria’s military dictatorship is surely a factor in Saro-Wiwa’s death. With no pretense of caring for the people, a dictatorship enables many bad things, including doing anything the company that supplies 90% of the country’s income by exploitation of natural resources wants. This usually also includes taking as much of the money as possible. Even in countries with “merely” weak governments, exploitation of natural resources of nearly any kind can be accompanied with severe pollution, destruction, and labor abuse. (Diamonds, gold, other metals.) Processing can also be similar, such as in metal smelters in the former USSR. Ultimately, someone important is looking the other way in the countries in which these things happen, and that someone (or more likely someones) just doesn’t think other people’s suffering and pollution of their country is as important as getting rich and/or staying in power.

Those of us in democratic countries with laws against all of these abuses that can be and are enforced can only really use consumer power (and some limited legislation of the type that companies doing business in “our” country must follow environmental and labor regulations elsewhere as well) to try to influence the misbehaving MNCs. The lack of regard of leaders for their citizens is something that the citizens of those countries must fix or ask for help with – much like Saro-Wiwa tried to do. I’m not saying that this is simple or straightforward by any means, nor do I pretend to know how to do it. I just know that one country trying to “fix” another has never really worked and has all kinds of problematic overtones. (Including this silly war in Iraq – I made the argument before the invasion that even if Bush was right, it would still be a bad idea. I hate to be right on both counts.) Even if Shell is acquitted – and I really hope they’re not – Ken Saro-Wiwa was right when he spoke at the end of his mock trial:

“I repeat that we all stand before history. I and my colleagues are not the only ones on trial. Shell is here on trial and it is as well that it is represented by counsel said to be holding a watching brief. The Company has, indeed, ducked this particular trial, but its day will surely come and the lessons learnt here may prove useful to it for there is no doubt in my mind that the ecological war that the Company has waged in the Delta will be called to question sooner than later and the crimes of that war be duly punished. The crime of the Company’s dirty wars against the Ogoni people will also be punished.

On trial also is the Nigerian nation, its present rulers and those who assist them. Any nation which can do to the weak and disadvantaged what the Nigerian nation has done to the Ogoni, loses a claim to independence and to freedom from outside influence.”

The trial is being held in New York.

This man talks to the world almost exactly like I would. I think many of us third culture kids know that in some general sense, our lives are like prototype lives in the future, when cultural globalization starts catching up to economic globalization. I didn’t expect to see a third culture kid openly espousing third culture values in my lifetime as president of any country, let alone the only Western country that is still very nationalistic. I thought the revolution would start in a small European country in my old age, when my generation had gotten older and let old ideas for an old world go. With Obama’s election, I have gone from feeling culturally marginalized to feeling like I unconditionally belong, not only here but anywhere. If a TCK can get elected president here, we can make our way anywhere, no matter how parochial things may seem.

In fact, the International Herald Tribune has an article about the extended first family, which speaks English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, Swahili, Luo and Igbo. How normal is that in the third culture? My family speaks Finnish, Swedish, Polish, German, Chinese and English. I can relate to these people. Everybody is a unique product of place, culture, and genes, but belongs together. Connects. There is no Other simply because of someone’s culture or genes. Otherness happens because of refusal to connect and understand others, because of closemindedness. And now we have a mini-UN third culture family in the White House!

Obama is the only politician in any country that I have heard who really touches my heart. He is like me in a way no other politician I’ve seen. His message, approach and attitude are like balm on wounds. This man can allow me to feel like I have a place in the US after all. The neocons have lost, hopefully permanently. It’s not just the wow factor of a TCK getting elected in a fantastically nationalistic country – his attitude and approach feel so intimately familiar. He is averse to burning bridges and acts as if he himself can be one at any time. He understands that any of his words may be picked up by news media and broadcast anywhere in the world, and addresses a global audience accordingly. He thinks about whom he’s talking to and makes changes to make them comfortable – by, say, wearing a silly American flag pin. I wouldn’t have worn one either.

Sweden had a very bad prime minister for quite a while, up until the last election. But who cares if Sweden’s prime minister is an idiot other than the Swedes? No one. The prime minister of Sweden has no power to inflict suffering on others. The president of the United States, however, can and might. I have high hopes that the coming one knows and understands the responsibility he carries.

“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.

I was in a pub with a television turned to CNN with a college friend and my boyfriend recently. I was facing the TV and could read the captions. Some sort of discussion show was on, and to my great astonishment, two white, middle-aged, male Americans were talking about “the media” as if they in the act of being televised weren’t part of it, and then started discussing the “liberal media”. The “liberal media” is a conspiracy theory that some American conservatives believe that’s like a mutation of the libel that Jews own all the newspapers, except in this case it’s “liberals”. (Don’t be confused like I was initially upon re-expatriating to the US: the word “liberal” may have nothing to do with the political movement of liberalism and might be defined very loosely as “person American conservatives don’t like”, including libertarians, communists, and gay people. There is no ideology attached to “liberal” here.) So I’m sitting in this bar, choking on my pint, and I remember the paper I wrote and the professor’s comment, and realize in a flash what he meant was that to believe that the US media isn’t biased was unusual. But I had just re-expatriated to the US and had been taking in a fare of European news over the past 10 years or so, followed by CNN International and BBC World.

Perhaps American politics gets its unique attributes from the poor communication of real news to the American people. I don’t know if it’s been this way for a long time, or whether this is something that started occurring with the rise of the neoconservatives around the time we repatriated. But one thing is for certain, namely that most US newscasts are about on par with Chinese when it comes to objective reporting and truth-seeking. I’ve been trying to understand how Bush got re-elected and how people in the US were so taken in by what (to me) was obviously propaganda. Maybe the news is the key to understanding what happened.

“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.