A Human Seeing

As I mentioned previously, I so take for granted the fact that Chinese leadership is authoritarian that it is easy for me to forget that they call themselves a republic. It’s easy to forget, considering that both in my own conversations and in the media, I have heard Chinese people point to the current US president as a smear on democracy’s name. (As someone who despises DJT I will be the first one to acknowledge that the particular democracy that promoted such a debased individual to its highest office has indeed been corrupted in numerous ways.) Such discussions make me ponder the limits or downfalls of US representative democracy.

I assumed that so much bashing of American democracy entailed that the Chinese government could shamelessly praise the benefits of benevolent dictatorship and turn democracy into a dirty word. To my surprise, however, democracy (民主 mín zhǔ) can be seen listed as the second most important of China’s “Socialist Core Values” on nationalistic ads like the one below.

“Socialist Core Values: Prosperity, Democracy, Civilization, Harmony, Freedom, Equality, Justice, Rule of Law, Patriotism, Dedication, Integrity, Friendship”

I suppose I had underestimated the cross-cultural power of paying lip service to comforting buzzwords like democracy, even in China.

Placing the obviously Orwellian redefinition of the word “democracy” aside, it is necessary to point out to any patriotic American readers that life isn’t all pain and suffering for Chinese citizens. While they may not live in a democracy, economically their lives have significantly improved over the last few decades and there is at least a perception that the government played a positive role in that. And there is good reason for them to feel hopeful about aspects of future development considering China is projected to replace the US as the world’s top economy before 2030, and has spent more on infrastructure than the US and Europe combined.

I am unwavering in my deep support for legally protected human expression and political freedom. (I would be an utter fool to argue against free speech on a personal blog.) But apologists for Chinese autocracy bring up a valid point when they argue that being able to freely call the president an asshole in the US is small consolation when your city’s infrastructure is crumbling, you can’t afford basic medical care, and your elected representatives only serve the interests of concentrated wealth anyway.

Critics of Western-style democracy love to point to Singapore’s late autocratic leader Lee Kuan Yew as a foil to the gridlocked and inefficient legislative chambers across Europe and the Americas. As Singapore’s first prime minister, he held a monopoly on power and jailed anyone who opposed him. Even after his death, a 16 year old Singaporean boy was arrested for criticizing him online. On the other hand, he ruled for the decades during which the tiny country saw its most explosive economic growth and improvements to its standard of living. To quote an article from The Atlantic:

For Lee Kuan Yew, “the ultimate test of the value of a political system is whether it helps that society establish conditions that improve the standard of living for the majority of its people.” As one of his fellow Singaporeans, Calvin Cheng, wrote this past week in The Independent, “Freedom is being able to walk on the streets unmolested in the wee hours in the morning, to be able to leave one’s door open and not fear that one would be burgled. Freedom is the woman who can ride buses and trains alone; freedom is not having to avoid certain subway stations after night falls.”

It is enough to make you question if a constitution like America’s, which aims to guarantee political rights, is sufficient for protecting citizens’ rights to fulfill their basic daily needs. Does it immediately follow that debates, due process, self-rule, etc. leads to better housing, healthcare, roads, education? I don’t think we necessarily have to choose between the two. South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are all development success stories in East Asia that haven’t relied on anything near Singapore’s or China’s level of political oppression to flourish as economies.

It would be a cop out to simply say, “There are pros and cons to every system of government” and leave it at that, but in a meandering and lightly sourced blog post such as this, I won’t be able to definitively answer if democracy leads to the highest standard of living in all cases. In fact, it can be argued that the reverse happened for America; that as the postwar standard of living improved and the economy saw growth rates never before seen by any nation, the government began to deliver (relatively) more on its promise of representing all US citizens. It is easier to compromise with the demands of your citizens when waterfalls of abundance are crashing over your head. Perhaps we are only a fair-weather democracy, reinforcing racial hierarchy when economic growth is less exponential. American historian Edmund Morgan argues in his book American Slavery, American Freedom that American democracy was able to exist because of, not in spite of chattel slavery. The economic surplus produced by $3.5 billion dollars worth of free slave labor (which is equal to $75 billion current US dollars) was what freed white America to come together in a false brotherhood of whiteness and play their democracy game in the first place.

The zero sum dynamic of white Americans’ gain coming at the cost of black Americans’ loss carries through to the education system as well. When only white males were allowed to attend college, a university education was extremely cheap (in fact many state colleges were tuition free), and not so coincidentally, in the 1960s and 70s when more women and minorities started entering university campuses and organizing liberation movements that some governors couldn’t stand, state governments cut funding for universities, one of the catalysts for college tuition to begin its meteoric rise which continues to this day. Considering this and many other historic disparities in resource allocation between races, one can’t blame writer Ta-Nehisi Coates for concluding that, with DJT’s election, white America has demonstrated that it would rather burn its institutions to the ground than let all citizens in America benefit from them. It is impossible to defend the American political system as the best on Earth when such a racial hierarchy has always been an essential part of its nature.

Still, I intuitively choose democracy over any supposed benevolent dictatorship because in a properly functioning democracy, the people have a system they can use to pursue their community’s best interests. People know when their own community’s roads and schools are neglected and can act to rectify those problems. In that sense, democracy can absolutely lead to a higher standard of living and economic growth.

However the key phrase there is “properly functioning”. The problem with this way of thinking is that every other system of government sounds equally plausible when we only regard it within the ideal conditions. One could just as easily say that in a properly functioning benevolent dictatorship, the omnipotent leader focuses all his energy on improving the lives of his subjects. In a properly functioning communist society, all the citizens have their material needs met and have no ambition to do better than their neighbor. In a properly functioning representative democracy, policies that the population widely supports, like the legalization of marijuana, would be enacted.

A few years ago, I discussed politics with a Saudi acquaintance and he believed that Saudi Arabia doesn’t implement the true Islamic system of government. “In fact,” he said, “No Muslim country in this world correctly practices Islamic government.” In other words, in a properly functioning Islamic caliphate, everything would be ideal. This reminded me of how no communist society has ever reached a state of pure communism. A vanguard party has seized control in many nations, but they never managed to get to stage three of the plan where the vanguard party (along with the entire government) is dissolved, money is no longer needed and everyone is equally prosperous. To many of us in the US, the failed experiments of the Soviet Union and Maoist China prove that the goal is not attainable–at least not through vanguardist means. I asked my Saudi acquaintance, after making the above point about communism, “If everyone is failing to make your ideal Islamic government a reality, at what point do you have to throw out the ideal?” He responded that the ideal doesn’t have to be thrown out, just updated.

I look at democracy with a similar attitude. If the ideal isn’t being realized in the US then let’s update it. A quick look around the world reveals that “benevolent” dictatorships in no way hold a monopoly on economic growth and high standards of living. (And if their growth is higher than social democracies it’s often because they are industrializing much later than them.) Canada, Switzerland and, as always, the Scandinavian countries have the highest standards of living and their democracies are healthier than that of the US, in part because their systems are younger and thus more recently updated versions of the democratic ideal. Scandinavia, with it’s fairly homogenous population, has stronger social welfare policies and labor movements than the US. Additionally, it has democracy in the workplace, thus economic rights are prioritized along with political rights. This leads to what political theorist Benjamin Barber calls “strong democracy.” Economist Gar Alperovitz elaborates on strong democracy in his book What Then Must We Do:

I’m talking about genuine democracy, not just voting. Real participation… The kind where people not only react to choices handed down from on high, yea or nay, but actively engage, innovate, create options–and also decide among them.

There are so many interesting things I’ve read about specific changes that can be made to make the US a more thriving democracy, I will have to devote another blog post to it.

China will probably over take the US as top world power. Let’s not allow that possibility to make us cynical about the benefits of fully actualizing the democratic principles we were taught about in school.

[To be continued]

I found a poem in a notepad file from a few years ago about some close friends. It’s short–the only poems I feel comfortable sharing tend to be extremely short and to the point. There’s less room for error when you stick to one image and leave it after four phrases. If I had to give it a title I guess I’d call it Saltwater.

Her love for him is diluted

Dissolved in a bucket of tears

She can’t filter it back out

Ever again he fears

Last fall I deactivated my Facebook account and I haven’t been back since. I’m still not exactly sure what changed in me but I’m glad it changed. It has been a long time coming. Throughout the months leading up to my account’s final deactivation I had temporarily deactivated and reactivated it several times. I’m officially done with all social media timelines for the foreseeable future. I’m only on Gmail and Messenger. Messenger is useful because it’s linked to my Facebook account and it allows me to message all of my Facebook friends even though my Facebook account isn’t active. Since I live in China, I also need to have a WeChat account, and I do use that for texting friends but I never use it to post “moments” (the WeChat equivalent of status updates) on the Wechat timeline, and I don’t even look at what other people post on it.

For years, especially the years after I finished college, I spent a considerable amount of my daily life on Facebook, reading and sharing news articles, commenting, and mindlessly scrolling the newsfeed. I would login just to check what one friend was doing and then I would suddenly slip and scroll into a bottomless pit. These days I still keep up with the news, I’ve just lost the need to share it with hundreds of friends.

Where does that need to share come from? I constantly shared news articles because they were about issues that concerned me and I genuinely wanted more people to talk about them. In fact, I viewed my own role as a minor zeitgeist influencer. That’s not a grandiose delusion–we all contribute to our own social network’s marketplace of ideas, but not all of us take that role seriously. When you view your posts on Facebook with that kind of potential significance it can turn into a burden. Reading this, you may think it’s no wonder that I eventually got overwhelmed, considering the sheer number of issues to keep track of and bring to the public’s attention, but that wasn’t the only reason I left Facebook. When I think about it now, I boil it down to three main reasons.

1) Time wasting

This one is pretty self-explanatory so I don’t have much to elaborate on here. I will say that, as unnecessary as a lot of my activity on there was, I did read a LOT of informative articles, absorbing a great deal, and as futile as my debates with friends and strangers may have been, I feel like it developed a voice for me and sharpened my rhetorical tools.

2) Embarrassment

The public nature of every status, every comment, every like and angry reaction left me trying to examine all my activities through as many eyes as possible. How could I be misinterpreted here? I can’t like this because it’ll probably show up on this person’s newsfeed. I should edit that status. I should delete that comment before anyone replies. I should hide this status from that person. And so on. I’m already neurotic as it is. Having an extension of myself online that anyone could scrutinize and misunderstand at any hour of the day left me constantly feeling a subtle, creeping dread after almost every status I posted.

3) Narcissistic tendencies

The problem I feel most embarrassed about is the way Facebook infected my own way of thinking. More often than I care to admit I found myself having what I call Facebook fantasies. I would daydream about having some enviable experience (usually traveling somewhere exotic) and I imagined that experience through the lens of what it would look like to my friends on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel to some place few American tourists dare to go? Maybe I’ll briefly befriend some armed group in a desert and they can point their guns at the camera and it’ll look all gritty and stylish, like a Vice Documentary. “Where ARE you, Jeremy?? Is that safe????” “How are you still alive??” “Great shot!” would just be the beginning of my deluge of comments and likes. Nobody would then deny that I’m definitely an interesting person worthy of attention. Whenever I realized I was having another Facebook fantasy like this I would immediately cringe and curse my own brain for being so ridiculous. Then after that I would curse Facebook.

It’s been months since I noticed having my last Facebook fantasy. Five months clean. I’m not sure at this point if I will ever go back. I already talk to my Facebook friends through Messenger and I get email updates on world news through my email. The irony isn’t lost on me that most of my three or four readers here on this blog are only aware of my updates because of a family member sharing them on Facebook, so I can’t fully hate Facebook, but sharing my blog posts isn’t enough reason to reactivate. The only reason I can imagine returning will be to post photos again. But even then, they’d have to be some extraordinary shots to compel me to walk back into the dark alleys of social media and contact my online like-dealers again. Maybe if I go to Somalia and spend a day or two taking selfies with some Kalashnikov toting pirates I’ll have to share those photos. That would be such a cool aesthetic for my online persona.

I’m now entering the fifth month of my China sojourn, attempting to adopt a second foreign culture. Years ago, after reading several fictional and non-fictional accounts of the American invasion of Iraq and being fascinated by the beauty of Arabic calligraphy for years, I adopted Arab language and culture as my interest. I wanted to learn a language that was very distant from European languages like English and French, and my goal was to be able to speak to the most people possible, so it didn’t hurt that Arabic is the fourth or sixth most spoken language on Earth depending on whose list you consult and how you count speakers. (After telling my Nigerian Arabic language partner at IU that I learned languages based on how many people I would be able to speak to with it, he joked, “My friend, if everyone went by that rule then nobody would ever learn my native language [Hausa]!”)

No matter how much we claim to be citizens of the world, or that we find all languages interesting, language nerds always have a favorite. It also holds that some languages or sub-cultures just don’t click. During and after middle school, a pivotal period for shaping my taste and tolerance of exotic sounds, I was mesmerized by Bollywood music, Raï, and traditional Japanese Biwa music, among other genres from around the world that may be too foreign to most American ears. On the other hand, I never got into K-Pop, anime, or the actual movies attached to the Bollywood songs I loved. I missed the boat on those art forms and often found them corny and bewildering. I felt much more at home with the idea of being a modern day orientalist, quill in hand, devouring Arabic texts by candlelight at the desk of my study.

Now I embark on a new lengthy and expensive adoption process. It’s daunting to start from zero all over again, even exhausting. I’ve made the decision that this is the last time a new language gets V.I.P. treatment from my brain (other V.I.P.s include French, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi), by which I mean that any other new language I decide to learn will be for fun, at most only dabbling in it without the pressure of setting “total fluency” as my goal. I can feel myself reaching the limits of my patience already. During a lesson in McDonald’s the other day in which my Chinese teacher taught me about using measure words in the context of ordering certain quantities of food (“I want two cups of coffee” “three boxes of cookies” etc.) I found myself thinking “I’m learning how to say this again?” It was only a momentary twitch of mental resistance, but one that I haven’t experienced before. I took it as a sign that I’m ready to stick with languages I’ve started learning so far, including Mandarin, and only improve on those.

A few times over here I’ve gotten the feeling that I’ve abandoned my Middle Eastern child. I get nostalgic for the soul that I find in Arabic shaabi music that I have yet to find an equivalent of in Chinese music. Soul is a completely subjective term, and it wouldn’t be fair for me to say Chinese music doesn’t have it. But so far I’ve mostly been exposed to a lot of the Chinese pop that plays in taxis and stores, which frankly doesn’t feel like it has its own unique flavor. A lot of it sounds heavily influenced by J-Pop and K-Pop which is in turn just an East Asian twist on American Pop genres. Of course Chinese music is incredibly diverse, so it’s impossible to make any one statement that applies to every genre. There is a very meditative and cerebral appeal to traditional Chinese instrumental music, especially when knowing that the music was composed by a monk more than a thousand years ago. That is a different and very valuable expression of the human soul. But at the moment I miss a different kind of soul. Fiery vocals, the fluttering, soaring voices of Egyptian singers like Hakim that reverberate with every emotion along the human spectrum. This nostalgia for Arab culture has led me to spend the last month listening to Warda the legendary Algerian singer and several Egyptian shaabi musicians.

I don’t know if I’ll ever truly master any of the languages I’m trying to adopt, or even if I managed to pull off the usage of my adoption metaphor in this post. (I could have just as easily used a dating metaphor for languages, for example, “I feel like I’m cheating on Arabic with Chinese.”) All I know is that “adoption” is the word that felt right for what I’m doing. I’m not adopting these cultures in that I’m dressing like them or believing their dominant ideologies, I’m adopting them in that I’m deciding that I now identify as a student of their culture. I thought that I had picked my pet foreign culture for good and that culture was Arab Islamic. Now here I am in China and I’m still adjusting to life after love of Arabic.

Saudi Arabia is living in the 1400s. No, I mean that literally. The year on the Hijri calendar is now 1436. Dictated by the cycles of the moon, year 1 started when the prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca (around 632 AD). In the Kingdom, this and the international Gregorian calendar are sometimes used side by side, though Saudis get along just fine within their borders without learning the Gregorian calendar—just like many Americans get along fine without learning the metric system, which everyone else (including Saudi Arabia) uses.

Same with numbers—most of the world uses the Western Arabic system (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9), while parts of the Arab world write numbers the Eastern Arabic way (١‎ ٢‎ ٣‎ ٤‎ ٥‎ ٦‎٧‎ ٨ ٩).‎ Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is much more globalized than it was a few decades ago and uses Western Arabic numerals on most street signs, many Saudis still prefer using the Eastern Arabic numerals. Even in a place as globalized and bilingual as the polished cellphone store selling iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at the Riyadh airport, the man behind the counter copied my passport number into Eastern Arabic numerals while he was filling out the form for my new SIM card.

It should not come as a surprise then that the university I work for labels its room numbers in the local system, much to the chagrin of the foreign Westerners struggling to find their classrooms. On multiple occasions I have had to help a British teacher find his room numbers in the School of Languages and Translation. “They’ve really got to put the western numbers up in here—how are we supposed to read this shit?” he complained. I laughed and shook my head in commiseration, yet then I couldn’t help but imagine how absurd it would be for a Saudi teacher in the U.S to demand, like this Brit, that classroom numbers be written in the numerals he’s accustomed to.

This kind of outlook is common among many of the Western teachers here. So far I have met a grand total of one American teacher who has put any effort into learning Arabic. Other than that, the Westerners confirm the monolingual stereotype—even ones who have taught here for more than a year. Expats can generally get away with not knowing Arabic since: A) public signs are in Arabic and English; B) most of the people in the Saudi workforce (the shopkeepers, laborers, taxi drivers, etc.) come from partially Anglophonic countries like Pakistan and the Philippines; and C) it’s not uncommon to meet Saudis who can sputter through phrases of broken English. In this environment the teachers grow accustomed to walking around talking English at locals without even asking if they can speak any. This is something that is very foreign to me. Even when I don’t know a country’s local language, I at least ask if a person knows English before jumping into an exchange, it’s just the polite thing to do. These teachers aren’t meaning to be rude, they just vastly over-estimate the amount of English spoken by Saudis. Among the Arab countries in which I’ve lived, Saudi Arabia has been by far the most monolingual Arab country I have visited so far  and that’s a dream come true for me, since I enjoy using my Arabic as much as possible. On campus I’ll be dressed in my extra foreign-looking western clothes (with everyone else in their very Saudi white thobs and red shimaghs) and a student that I’ve never met will walk up and start a conversation in Arabic even though I’m obviously Western, simply because he’s another example of a Saudi monoglot.

The situation of mutual monolingualism between the Western staff and this university causes more than just problems with finding room numbers though. After a couple of weeks of the teachers going without the official student rosters, reminding the administrators of our department daily that “We need official student lists”, and being forced to use the crude system of passing around a blank piece of paper for students to sign every class, the higher ups finally got around to lazily emailing us a 300-hundred page PDF of ALL students enrolled in ALL classes under ALL departments of the university—ALL in Arabic. Of course, this made all of our individual class lists incomprehensible for the monoglots and a chore to locate, complicating our record-keeping—a problem most of the teachers faced with the jaded amusement that all expats acquire after working in the KSA for a few months. “Unbelievable. They didn’t even translate it,” one teacher said shaking his head. As inefficient as it was for the administration to just send us the entire school’s enrollment list untranslated, I once again couldn’t help but switch the rolls in my head and acknowledge the absurdity of a hypothetical group of Saudi teachers at an American university complaining that the student rosters weren’t translated into Arabic for them. How could anyone work in a foreign country without expecting to use the foreign language? English is indeed the current world language, but I stand by my belief in the importance of cultural humility as a guest in a foreign land.

On the other hand, the only reason these monolingual foreigners even applied for these jobs in the first place is because the Saudi employers never stipulated a need for any Arabic knowledge whatsoever in their job listings, sometimes even going as far as reassuring teachers that knowing Arabic was not necessary at all and even undesirable, since only English should be spoken in class. In this case that’s a big difference between the Saudi way and the American way: at American colleges job listings for foreigners often require knowledge of the local language. Not so in the KSA. So I had to cut my peers some slack. They had been hired with the promise that the system would cater to their inability to speak Arabic. But in many cases, the system caters to no one at all, partly because there is no system. “This is Saudi Arabia,” our grinning administrators slyly remind the teachers who ask too many questions or voice too many criticisms. These excuses are a sure way to bring the discussion to a swift conclusion, the status quo forever thriving on our collective resignation.

In my experience as a foreign male at least, one thing I truly appreciate about the Saudi Arabian way—and I’ve experienced it in other Arab countries as well—is the prevalence of greeting strangers. Strangers greeting you whenever you cross their path is even more common here than it is the Midwest. On the men’s campus though, it’s like the Midwest on steroids. You can be in the middle of a conversation with someone off to the side in a hallway and a stranger to both of you will walk by and quietly greet you without stopping. (It’s usually polite to pause and greet him back.) I’ve picked up this habit now so I greet anyone and everyone that I walk by on campus just to see if they’ll respond, and they all always do!

The Saudis I have met say that Islam is the source of their customary greetings and invitations. Karam (‘generosity’) and the relationship between hosts and guests are generally treated as very important, and I can attest to the sincerity of their gestures. New acquaintances always insist on buying food and or drinks for me and invite me to their homes. As a guest they almost never allow you to return the favor, however, because if you aren’t a guest in their home they will still cite the fact that you are a guest in their country, and will be very insistent on not letting you buy them anything. Sometimes you can manage to give back, though.

Since the idea of hell is such a reality to them, many Sunni Muslims here think of da’wa (‘proselytizing’ or literally ‘invitation’ to Islam) as another, more important form of invitation and generosity. In a university lounge there is always a Qur’an lying on a table in the corner of the room for anyone who wants to read it. One time I was in that lounge sitting across the room from that table with a colleague when some students I didn’t know came in and sat there. We struck up an Arabic conversation with one another from across the room, talking about car crashes in Saudi Arabia and other topics that had nothing to do with religion. When the students got up to walk to their class, one of them picked up the Qur’an from their table without explanation and brought it to me smiling politely. “Take,” he said. I chuckled back. “Thanks, I already have one,” I said, which is true.

I have gotten very accustomed to being proselytized by Muslims. Unlike U.S. culture where it is considered intrusive to ask someone’s religion, the question here is constant, and among the first questions anyone asks after being introduced to you. Even though I’m an agnostic/atheist (depending on my mood), I always say I’m a Christian, which for some Muslims isn’t much of a better answer. I like to study their facial expression immediately after I tell them. Most simply look down and nod once or twice and then move on to another topic, which is relieving. A small minority respond by saying, “Christians are our brothers,” or “Christianity is the closest religion to Islam,” which always a very pleasant, touching surprise in such a conservative country. I let them know how much I appreciate the sentiment. Others are less satisfied. This group then calculates a rebuttal. I can see their gears grinding as they prepare to regurgitate the theological arguments harped on in the Qur’an. “So, you believe Jesus was the son of God… But don’t you know that God does not beget and was not begotten?” If it’s a person I don’t want to get to know very well, I politely nod, never revealing how nonreligious I am, and tell him that I respect Islam but believe that everyone must find their own path in life, and usually it usually ends at that. If it’s a person I plan on getting to know well, I again say that I respect all religions including Islam, but I also go ahead and reveal that frankly I am not a religious person and so these arguments against Christianity have no effect on my original position. If he’s open to it, we end up having interesting philosophical discussions. Those who aren’t accustomed to hearing such a drastically different worldview abandon persuasion for pure incredulity. “Okay, but why? Why aren’t you Muslim? Really, my friend, I want you to become a Muslim. What can I say–what will it take for you to convert?”

In these situations it has become a cliché that we foreign non-believers with some knowledge of Islam cling to the phrase, “laa ikraaha fid-diin” (“there is no compulsion in religion”) from the first chapter of the Qur’an, meaning that no one should be forced into a religion. Even more commonly cited than that one is a verse from the last part of the Qur’an: “lakum diinukum wa liya diin” (“you have your religion and I have mine”). This verse ends the 109^th chapter without any caveats, emphasizing the finality of its meaning. We non-Muslims of course like it because it can be interpreted as a message of tolerance and coexistence, acknowledging difference of religion, even implicitly legitimizing that difference.

Whether or not everyone shares this interpretation, I can safely assume I’ll be citing that verse again over the coming year.