If the reader cares to consult the indexes of any two dozen important scholarly books, the odds are very high that she or he won’t find an entry for ‘luck’. Academics are deeply committed to such concepts as ‘social forces’, ‘institutional structures’, ‘ideologies’, ‘traditions’, ‘demographic trends’ and the like. They are no less deeply committed to ‘causes’ and the complex ‘effects’ that follow from them. Within such intellectual frameworks there is little room for chance.
Once in a while I would tease my students by asking them if any of their friends or relatives had ever been involved in a motor accident. In response to a positive reply, I would then ask: ‘Do you really mean it was an accident?’ And they would usually answer with something along the lines of: ‘Yes! If Grandma had stayed chatting in the shop five minutes longer, she wouldn’t have been knocked down by the motorcyclist’; or, ‘If the motorcyclist had left his girlfriend’s house five minutes earlier, Grandma would still have been chatting in the shop.’ Then I would ask them: ‘So how do you explain the fact that over the Christmas holidays the authorities can predict fairly well how many Americans will be killed in accidents? Let’s say that the actual number turns out to be 5,000. The authorities will have looked at statistical trends over past Christmases and predicted, say, 4,500 or 5,500, not 32 or 15,000. What “causes” these predictions about “accidents” to be so good?’ Once in a while a clever student would reply that the answer is probability theory, or ‘statistical probability’. But in what sense can ‘probability’ be understood as a ‘cause’? More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim faced the same problem when he studied the most lonely of all human acts: suicide.
The point is that we have not yet managed to eliminate chance and accident, let alone luck, in our everyday thinking. We do try to explain bad luck. For this reason or that, because of this person or that, I had this or that bad luck. Yet we cannot explain how good luck intervenes either in our scholarship or in our daily life. This is why, in the preceding account of my life as a scholar and intellectual, I have put such emphasis on my general run of good fortune: the time and place of my birth, my parents and ancestors, my language, my schooling, my move to the US and my experiences in Southeast Asia. It makes me feel like the grandpa who stayed to chat with the shopkeeper five minutes longer.
At the same time, chance does not knock on our door if we do nothing but wait patiently in the shop. Chance often comes to us in the form of unexpected opportunities, which one has to be brave or foolhardy enough to seize as they flash by. This spirit of adventure is, I believe, crucial to a really productive scholarly life. In Indonesia, when someone asks you where you are going and you either don’t want to tell them or you haven’t yet decided, you answer: lagi tjari angin, which means ‘I am looking for a wind’, as if you were a sailing-ship heading out of a harbour onto the vast open sea. Adventure here is not of the kind that filled the books I used to enjoy reading as a boy. Scholars who feel comfortable with their position in a discipline, department or university will try neither to sail out of harbour nor to look for a wind. But what is to be cherished is the readiness to look for that wind and the courage to follow it when it blows in your direction. To borrow the metaphor of pilgrimage from Victor Turner, both physical and mental journeys are important. Jim Siegel once told me: ‘Ben, you are the only one among my friends and acquaintances who reads books unrelated to your own field.’ I took this as a great compliment.
Scholars, especially younger ones, need to know as much as possible about their changing academic environment, which offers them great privileges but at the same time tends to confine them or leave them stranded. In the G8 countries most professors are very well paid, have plenty of free time and opportunities for travel, and often have access to the general public through newspapers and television. What they usually lack is closeness to their countries’ rulers. It is true that in the US there have been some high-profile political professors – such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, Summers and Rice – but the huge country has more than 1,400 universities, and the capital city has no first-class model. In poor or medium-rich countries, professors are often less well paid, but they enjoy superior social status and access to the media, and, especially if they work in capital-city universities, are able to develop close contacts with the circle of their rulers. In both environments, if for different reasons, they have a high degree of security with regard to their futures. Their high salaries and high security are justified on the grounds of defending ‘academic freedom’ and ensuring professionalism. The first claim is a good and classic justification, so long as the professors practise it themselves – which they do not always do. The second is more recent and more ambiguous, since it depends on qualifications set by senior professors, requires long periods of disciplinary apprenticeship, and is marked by a jargon which is increasingly hard for intelligent laymen to grasp. Furthermore, professions are notoriously self-protective, and this outlook can encourage conservatism, conformism and idleness.
Professionalism is also increasingly accompanied by changes in the philosophy and practice of higher education. Active state intervention is visibly increasing almost everywhere, as policy-makers attempt to square the intake, processing and production of students and professors with the ‘manpower needs’ of the ‘labour market’, and respond carefully to demographic trends. More and more states make efforts to tie research grants to the state’s own policy agenda. (In the US today, for example, a huge amount of money is being poured into ‘terrorist studies’ and ‘Islamic studies’, much of which will be wasted on mediocre or mechanical work.) Corporate intervention, direct or indirect, benign or malign, has been on the rise for some time, even in the social sciences and humanities. Professionalization is also having its effect on undergraduate education, where the older idea that youngsters aged between eighteen and twenty-one should be gaining a broad and general intellectual culture is in decline, and students are encouraged to think of their college years as mainly a preparation for their entry into the job market. It is highly likely that these processes will be difficult to reverse or even slow down, which makes it all the more important for universities and their inhabitants to be fully conscious of their situation and to take a critical stance towards it. I think I was very lucky to have grown up in an era when the old philosophy, in spite of its being conservative and relatively impractical, was still strong. Imagined Communities was rooted in that philosophy, but a book of its type is much less likely to emerge from contemporary universities.
In the America of the 1950s, when there were huge institutional pressures to conform to the prejudices and ideology of the Cold War state, far the bravest, funniest and most intelligent comic strip was Walt Kelly’s Pogo. Set in the swamps of Florida, its cast of animals included caricatures of dangerous politicians, opportunist intellectuals, apolitical innocents and good-hearted but comical average American citizens. Its hero, little harmless Pogo, is the only genuinely thoughtful figure, and to this animal Kelly gave the masterfully funny and telling line: ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us.’ It is just this sceptical, self-critical stance which I think scholars most need to cultivate today. It is easy enough to despise politicians, bureaucrats, corporate executives, journalists and mass media celebrities. But it is much less easy to stand back intellectually from the academic structures in which we are embedded and which we take for granted.
Young scholars will have to think seriously about the consequences of the interacting processes of nationalism and globalization, both of which have a way of limiting horizons and simplifying problems. Let me then draw to a close with some remarks about nationalism in relation to the peculiarity of Europe.
In its heyday, Europe had two unique and inestimable intellectual advantages compared with other parts of the world. The first was its self-conscious inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The Roman Empire was the only state ever to rule a large part of today’s Europe for a long period – even if this era is extremely remote in time. But it was not a ‘European’ state, since it controlled the entire Mediterranean littoral, a large part of today’s Egypt and Sudan, and much of the Middle East, and it did not rule Ireland, Scandinavia or much of northeastern Europe. Furthermore, over time, it drew its emperors from many parts of the Mediterranean world. No European state or nation has had any chance of claiming exclusive inheritance from this extraordinary polity, nor has any of Christianity’s multiple sects. The Empire is not available for nationalist appropriation, not even by Italy. Here there is a huge contrast with China and Japan, and probably also India, where antiquity is easily nationalized. The ancient history of the Japanese islands is inseparable from their relations with mainland China and the Korean peninsula, but it can be nationalized as ‘Japanese history’.
Even better, a substantial part of the extraordinary philosophical and literary production of Graeco-Roman Antiquity survived into early modern times, thanks to monkish copyists in the West, but also to Greek-speaking Christian Arab scribes under the rule of Byzantium. As time passed, their translations into Arabic allowed Muslim thinkers in the ‘Maghreb’ and Iberia to absorb Aristotelian thought and pass it on to ‘Europe’. This inheritance offered ‘Europe’ intellectual access to worlds (Greek and Roman) which in profound ways were alien to Christian Europe: polytheistic religious beliefs, slavery, philosophical scepticism, sexual moralities contrary to Christian teachings, ideas about the formation of personhood from the bases of law and so on. Direct access to these worlds depended on a mastery of two languages which for different reasons were both difficult and alien. Ancient Greek not only had its own orthographic system, but also borrowed heavily from languages then used in today’s Middle East and Egypt. (Though a kind of Greek survived into modern times, it was profoundly changed by Byzantine Christianity and by centuries of Turkish-Ottoman rule.) Ancient Latin in its most advanced forms is grammatically and syntactically far more difficult and complex than any of the major European languages of today. Better still, it gradually became ‘dead’. That is, neither ancient Greek nor ancient Latin belonged to any of the countries in Europe.
For all these reasons (and others I have not mentioned), Graeco-Roman antiquity brought Difference and Strangeness to European intellectual and literary life right through till the middle of the twentieth century. Just as in fieldwork, this awareness of Difference and Strangeness cultivated intellectual curiosity and enabled self-relativization. There were city-states and democracy in ancient Greece. The Roman Empire was much larger than any other state in European history, and as its ruins were spread almost all over Europe, one could recognize its greatness no matter where one might be. The literature, medicine, architecture, mathematics and geography of Graeco-Roman antiquity were clearly more sophisticated than those of medieval Europe. And all of them were products of pre-Christian civilizations, products which had pre-dated the appearance of ‘messianic time’. While China and Japan tried to bar Difference and Strangeness with their ‘closed-door’ policies, Europe came to hold antiquity in high regard and adopted it self-consciously as its intellectual heritage.
Students today may read Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, Cicero and Tacitus, which is all to the good, but they typically read them in translation – in the everyday national languages which they take for granted; hence Difference and Strangeness have been drastically reduced. Egyptian students cannot read hieroglyphics, Arab students are unlikely to read Aristotle in the version from which their Christian ancestors made their early translations, and not many Japanese or Chinese can read Pali-language Buddhist texts.
Europe’s other great intellectual advantage was due to its small size, the lack or porosity of its geographical and conceptual boundaries, and its history of military, economic and cultural competition between a range of medium or small polities in close propinquity. Especially since the early modern period, which saw the development of print-capitalism and the Reformation, Europe was further divided by vernaculars and religions. Coupled with technological advancement in the production of weapons, rivalry and conflict deepened, which in turn fed into the intensification of competition in various fields. War, travel, trade and reading kept polities of divergent sizes in constant, if often hostile, contact (above all, trade in peacetime was amply facilitated by rivers and ports). Characteristic of this situation is the relation of English to Dutch. Most English people today have no idea that hundreds of English words come from what the huge Oxford English Dictionary categorizes as Old Dutch, but they treasure the hostile expressions ‘Dutch courage’ (bravery based on drunkenness), ‘Dutch treat’ (inviting a woman to dinner and insisting that she pay half the bill) and ‘Dutch wives’ (solid, hard bolsters for comfortable sleeping). On the other hand, dead Latin for some centuries kept European intellectuals in touch with each other, especially once print-capitalism set in. For about two centuries after the invention of modern movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century, more books were printed in Latin than in any vernacular language, and Latin was generally understood by European intellectuals. Hobbes and Newton wrote and published in Latin and thus could extend their influence over large parts of Europe.
Difference and Strangeness were built into this political disorder engendered by rivalry and conflict. The rediscovery of antiquity in the Renaissance period eventually destroyed the Church’s monopoly of Latin. This new situation opened antiquity to non-clerical intellectuals who were free from the Church’s dogma. These developments were then to lead to increasing competition between European countries to advance their knowledge of antiquity and beyond. Before the late seventeenth century, when some French intellectuals began to claim the superiority of their civilization, none of the European countries denied that the civilization of antiquity was superior to its own, and they competed against each other to learn more about it in order to be civilized. Whether in wartime or peacetime, no country could boast that it was the centre of civilization, a European version of ‘sinocentrism’ as it were, and throw its head back declaring it was no. 1. Innovation, invention, imitation and borrowing took place incessantly between different countries in the fields of culture (including the knowledge of antiquity), politics, global geography, economics, technology, war strategy and tactics, and so on.
Nothing like this existed in East Asia, nor even South Asia. In East Asia, China and Japan both set up their geographical and cultural boundaries and often attempted to shut out the ‘barbaric’ outside world with drastic closed-door policies. The necessity of competition with other countries over politics, economics, technology and culture was only scarcely felt. Southeast Asia was probably the closest parallel to Europe. It was diverse in terms of culture, language, ethnicity and religion. Its diversity was further magnified by the historical lack of a region-wide empire (which was associated with frequent political turmoil), and later by the colonial rule of various Western powers. It also resembled Europe in its openness to the outside world through trade.
Because Europe, after Rome, never experienced a single stable master, it remained an arena of conflict, cooperation, commerce and intellectual exchange between many medium-sized and small states, and became the logical place for the birth of linguistic/ethnic nationalism, typically directed from below against despotic dynastic regimes. Though European nationalism adopted key ideas from the Creole nationalism of the Americas, it was deeply affected by early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, which was foreign to its Creole predecessors. It had huge appeal for outstanding poets, novelists, dramatists, composers and painters. It was also quite aware of, and felt solidarity with (though not always, of course), other popular nationalisms as fellow movements for the emancipation of the people from despotic dynasties – a solidarity later expressed institutionally in the League of Nations, the United Nations, and many other forms.
After the world wars of the twentieth century, however, many young nationalisms typically got married to greybeard states. Today, nationalism has become a powerful tool of the state and the institutions attached to it: the military, the media, schools and universities, religious establishments, and so on. I emphasize tools because the basic logic of the state’s being remains that of raison d’état – ensuring its own survival and power, especially over its own subjects.* Hence contemporary nationalism is easily harnessed by repressive and conservative forces, which, unlike earlier anti-dynastic nationalisms, have little interest in cross-national solidarities. The consequences are visible in many countries. One has only to think of state-sponsored myths about the national histories of China, Burma, both Koreas, Siam, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam or Sri Lanka for Asian examples. The intended effect is an unexamined, hypersensitive provinciality and narrow-mindedness. The signs are usually the presence of taboos (don’t write about this!, don’t talk about that!) and the censorship to enforce them.
For a long time, different forms of socialism – anarchist, Leninist, New Leftist, social-democratic – provided a ‘global’ framework in which a progressive, emancipationist nationalism could flourish. Since the fall of ‘communism’ there has been a global vacuum, partially filled by feminism, environmentalism, neo-anarchism and various other ‘isms’, fighting in different and not always cooperative ways against the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights’ interventionism. But a lot of work, over a long period of time, will be needed to fill the vacuum. To explore what can be done and to carry out its findings is a task to which young scholars can make vital contributions.
Hegemonic powers tend to posit ‘human rights’ as a universal, abstract and global value to be invoked at their liking. In contrast, civil rights movements which seek equal rights for the citizens of a nation cannot easily be denied by the state, and they have indeed succeeded in expanding political and socio-economic rights, as seen in the US in relation to Blacks and women, even though it has taken many years to bring about genuinely emancipatory changes. In this regard ‘nation’ and ‘nationalism’ still hold many possibilities.
From this angle one can also see the value of ‘area studies’, provided they are not too urgently steered by the state (rebellious Indonesians like to call the state the siluman – a scary spectre), which, when faced with political or economic difficulties, is prone to fan nationalism and a sense of crisis among its people. The fact that young Japanese are learning Burmese, young Thais Vietnamese, young Filipinos Korean, and young Indonesians Thai is a good omen. They are learning to escape from the coconut half-shell, and beginning to see a huge sky above them. Therein lies the possibility of parting with egotism or narcissism. It is important to keep in mind that to learn a language is not simply to learn a linguistic means of communication. It is also to learn the way of thinking and feeling of a people who speak and write a language which is different from ours. It is to learn the history and culture underlying their thoughts and emotions and so to learn to empathize with them.
When I arrived at Cornell in 1958 I had to learn in a hurry how to type my seminar papers, with four fingers, on a manual typewriter. For distribution to other students, we typed on a kind of green gelatin paper, which allowed us to erase small errors with white paint, and then run off the corrected final text on a simple mimeograph machine. Changing anything was a slow and painful matter, so we had to think carefully before typing. Often we worked from long-hand drafts. Today, working on a computer, we can change anything and move anything in a matter of seconds. The decline in sheer pain is a blessing, but it is worth remembering that the pearl is produced by an oyster in pain, not a happy oyster with a laptop. I am not sure that today’s seminar papers show any stylistic improvement over the products of forty years ago.
In those days libraries were still sacred places. One went into the ‘stacks’, dusted off the old books one needed to read, treasured their covers, sniffed their bindings, and smiled by their sometimes strange, outdated spellings. Then came the best part, randomly lifting out books on the same shelf out of pure curiosity, and finding the most unexpected things. We were informally trained how to think about sources, how to evaluate them, compare them, dismiss them, enjoy them. Chance was built into the learning process. Surprise too.
Today, libraries are trying monomaniacally to digitalize everything, perhaps in the expectation that eventually books will become obsolete. Everything will be findable ‘online’. Randomness is perhaps disappearing, along with luck. Google is an extraordinary ‘research engine’, says Google, without irony in its use of the word ‘engine’, which in Old English meant ‘trickery’ (as is reflected in the verb ‘to engineer’) or even ‘an engine of torture’. Neither Google nor the students who trust it realize that late-nineteenth-century books feel this way in one’s hands, while early-twentieth-century books feel that way. Japanese books are bound one way, Burmese books another. Online, everything is to become a democratically egalitarian ‘entry’. There is no surprise, no affection, no scepticism. The faith students have in Google is almost religious. Critical evaluation of Google? We do not yet teach it. Many students have no idea that even though Google ‘makes everything available’, it works according to a program.
One effect of ‘easy access to everything’ is the acceleration of a trend that I had already noticed long before Google was born: there is no reason to remember anything, because we can retrieve ‘anything’ by other means. When I was a graduate student, I used to enjoy decorating my seminar papers with quotations from poems that I had either been taught to learn by heart, or which I had fallen in love with in a random way. Without thinking much about it, I memorized poems I liked, and often recited them to myself in the shower, on the bus, in the aeroplane or whenever I could not get to sleep. Memorized this way, the poems were lodged deep in my consciousness, not the meaning so much as the sound, the cadences, the rhymes. My fellow students were amazed and pitying. ‘What’s the point? You can just look them up!’ They were right, but even Google will not give you the sheer ‘feel’ of, say, Rimbaud’s dizzying ‘Le Bateau ivre’.
Around 2007 I went to Leningrad to help with an advanced class on nationalism for young teachers at various Russian provincial universities. Over the decades my spoken Russian had almost disappeared, except for ‘Good morning’, ‘Thank you very much’, and ‘I love you’. But to show some solidarity, I started to recite the final stanza of a beautiful poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, a radical who committed suicide under the early Stalinist regime. To my astonishment, all the students immediately recited along with me:
Svetit vsegda |
Shine always, |
Vestit vezde |
Shine everywhere, |
Do dnei poslednikh dontsa |
To the depth of the last day! |
Svetit – |
Shine – |
I nikakih gvozdei! |
And to hell with everything else! |
Vot lozung moi – |
That’s my motto – |
I solntsa! |
And the sun’s! |
I was in tears by the end. Some of the students too. They were still part of an oral culture, which Google is helping to end. But there is at least one reservoir untouched – unknown hand-written letters kept in family attics or trunks, that sometimes live secretly for decades or even centuries.
Google is a symbol, maybe innocent, of something much more ominous: the global domination of a degraded (American) form of English. In the US itself, today, it is commonplace to read theoretical works for which the bibliographic foundations are all in American English and published in the United States. If there are foreign works cited, the references are often to American translations made sometimes two decades after the original publication in Japanese, Portuguese, Korean or Arabic. It is as if they have no value till they are available in American. This is not entirely an American invention, as it has its roots in the UK’s world domination between roughly 1820 and 1920. But the UK was still part of Europe, and references to books published in German, French and Italian were still completely normal. But today, more and more scholars feel that they have to publish in American. In itself this may be acceptable, even natural as long as it does not affect our consciousness. But the effect is that more and more scholars in different countries feel that unless they write in American they will not be recognized internationally, and at the same time American scholars become lazier about learning any foreign languages except those they have to acquire for the purposes of fieldwork. Here one sees the huge difference between dead Latin and live American. The émigré political scientist Karl Deutsch might be right: ‘Power means not having to listen!’
‘Globalization’ of this kind is of course resisted too, and one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism. There are thousands of excellent scholars in many countries, politically opposed to American hegemony, who, as a matter of principle, write only in their mother-tongues either solely for their compatriots or, if their languages have a wider readership (e.g. Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, French, Arabic and a few others), for a limited transnational public. Many others write in their mother-language for apolitical reasons: they can express themselves best in the language, or they are too lazy to master another. There is nothing terribly wrong with any of this, and much that is good. But it does risk the obvious perils of not being exposed to the views of good foreign readers, or of falling into narrow-minded nationalism.
Nationalism and globalization do have the tendency to circumscribe our outlook and simplify matters. This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism. Hence, in the spirit of Walt Kelly as well as Karl Marx in a good mood, I suggest the following slogan for young scholars:
Frogs in their fight for emancipation will only lose by crouching in their murky coconut half-shells.
Frogs of the world unite!
_________________
* This is not to deny that contemporary nationalism does not still contain a powerful emancipatory and egalitarian element – the huge modern gains in relation to the position of women, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, for example, would have been unimaginable without its help.