This weekend I realized people don’t really believe in foreign countries either.

A long rambling essay, but interesting. From There Is No Time Or Distance by Sarah A. Hoyt.

Calls to mind L.P. Hartley's line:

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

Or

The Gloomy Academic
by Louis MacNeice

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it
Page by page
To train the mind or even to point a moral
For the present age:
Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,
The golden mean between opposing ills...
But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;
These dead are dead
And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas
I think instead
Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists,
The careless athletes and the fancy boys,
The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics
And the Agora and the noise
Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring
Libations over graves
And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly
I think of the slaves.
And how one can imagine oneself among them
I do not know;
It was all so unimaginably different
And all so long ago.

Hoyt is talking about the rarely considered crevasse of communication between individuals. She puts it as between people from different cultures, and I agree that that is true. But I would extend it to all communication between all individuals. We each of us are an aggregation of experiences, learnings, assumptions which can come crosswise to effective communication no matter how much we have in common. It is simply a fact of life to be overcome through persistence and goodwill. We have to work to understand others. We have to work to be understood.

From Hoyt's opening lines.

Actually this post should be called “there is no difference.”

This weekend there was an unfortunate kerfuffle in one of the private groups I belong to on Facebook between two people who both read this blog and who both are normally level-headed if feisty.

Unfortunately, as you guys know, I decided this was a fine weekend to sand my living room floor, which, courtesy Euclid Cat had two massive stains (it takes a lot to stain four coats of polyurethane, and thank heavens it hadn’t got to the flooring, but we had furniture there while we worked on the dining room floor and, as a result, we couldn’t even see where he was peeing. I knew it was somewhere in there, but I couldn’t reach it. So…) So I wasn’t aware of the flare up till 14 hours later.

I’m not going to go into the details of it, but I’ll say the reader who is Australian was making a perfectly responsible and sane argument FOR AUSTRALIA. Meanwhile the reader who is American and knows the conditions here didn’t even understand what this person was getting so hot about, since there isn’t the slightest resemblance between the two countries, and the culture is different enough too.

This is when something hit me between the eyes and was a bit of a shock.

I don’t think anyone who hasn’t actually acculturated between two countries understands how different cultures can be, deep down, at the bone level and the most basic reactions level, let alone what causes the difference, from inherited influences to just deep built in assumptions about climate/physical plant/fauna.

And some of the people who have acculturated, at that, might not be self-aware enough to see the difference, and just replace one set of assumptions with another and roll with it. (Or get caught somewhere between. Well, to some extent we all get caught somewhere between. The question is, what percentage is in the new country. I’d say for me, after being in Portugal recently, probably 95% American. There are things trained in before the age of 3 which I’ll never let go of, though some got truly weird with the acculturation, like how I react to “shame.”)

That experience this weekend was the “clicking in” of something that’s been bothering me for a long time. In our writers’ group I used to run across people who projected modern AMERICAN female back into the time of pharaohs. One of my best friends refused to believe me when I told her there was zero chance of an alien race having the same university system as the US since even Portugal (avowedly human) doesn’t. There were other things. You guys have heard me rant about several “historical” books that make the past exactly like the future only with different tech. The fact that they don’t understand that tech affects not just how people live but how they think, feel and react is another of those things I don’t get, as I think even within living memory we should be able to see how different things have gotten. See for instance not wearing of aprons, because the clothes are cheap enough and abundant enough that ruining a shirt is not a big deal, unless it’s a very good shirt.

Then there is the foreign thing. No, seriously. I was utterly stunned when in Friends there was a reference to a Portuguese couple as “Swingers.” Sure, I’m sure there are Portuguese swingers. There were in the seventies. And sure, it’s possible to find a couple of them in the US, but that reference was the culmination of a lot of references to the Portuguese are free-flowing, open-minded (in a sexual way) people, and it made my jaw drop. Portuguese are the product of Moorish and British (in the North) cultural influences. They tend to be repressed around sexual stuff, and even if they do it, don’t talk about it in public. Then at a conference someone said something about one of my stories betraying the “guilt free” (to sex) attitude of Latin culture.

Not all Latin cultures are the same. Even Romans, the original Latin culture, were somewhat repressed, for their time, it was the things that they were repressed about that were unimaginably weird. So, you know, hanging a mural of animal-child copulation in the living room? Cute. Having sex with your wife midday? Shocking. Eh.

I think people project Brazilian (because of the language) and maybe French onto Portuguese, but seriously, it’s not the same. There’s more difference than between American and British (for various reasons too long to go into.)

So I’m used to running into this in the US, but this last trip to Portugal was a LONG and frustrating chain of running into this from the Portuguese side. I’d already had minor run ins with it in the past — the Portuguese refuse to accept that “My God” jeans isn’t a big brand in the US, for instance. — but this time it was all sorts of things and at all levels, probably reflecting the fact that I’ve been here 34 years and therefore even their minor assumptions rub me wrong.

Assumptions? Oh, sure. There are markers of class. And ideas about what brands are “good” and how you should never ever use or wear the others (and a complete lack of understanding some of those brands don’t exist in the US) and and and and… It had me rolling my eyes and talking about cultural provincialism.

But until this weekend I didn’t realize how prevalent and universal it is, since the clash took place between two people from native anglophone cultures, both of which are denizens of the net and contact people of other countries, regularly. Okay, one of them didn’t know she was dealing with a foreigner (except maybe Canadian and those, sorry Chris, aren’t real foreigners. Oh, they are, but… Canada is America’s hat. So, closer.)

This weekend I realized people don’t really believe in foreign countries either. They’re willing to accept that some things (and those usually conform to their mental picture of the generic “culture” or “region”) are different, but that the fundamentals and the cherished unexamined assumptions might be different is unthinkable — literally. And if we can think of them, we still assume the other country is somehow “wrong” or worse “pretending” to be different to be contrary.

I subscribe to the Classical Liberal belief in human universalism. All humans are equal in the sight of God and all have the same universal human rights. But my, how we are able to build edifices which make it seem as if we are so different as to be separate. I think it is one of the greater exercises in cognition - to believe in human universalism while facing extreme human diversity. It is a position not subject to proof. It is a matter of chosen faith in an idea. An idea which I believe to be beneficial.

Hoyt is elaborating on that intersection where we try and accord equal rights and equal respect while recognizing profound differences as well. We cannot assume differences mean that "they" are separate from us. Similarly, we cannot assume that equal rights means that "they" are the same as us.

Some interesting ideas in her essay. Interesting on a difficult topic.