i decided at some point that i see no merit in nationalism. what is nationalism? why should i care about something that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago just because it happened in the (arbitrarily defined) geographic region i was born in by chance and do not even live in any longer? china is so big that kin selection doesn't even begin to explain it. but what's consciously conceived doesn't change what in fact happens. stuff to do with china's past and present frequently gets me very emotional. it's not rational.and why is it such a visceral response?
i used to justify the conflict between my disappointment in the country and its people and my love for the bits and pieces of chinese culture by distinguishing the loyalty to one's government from the affinity to one's culture. however, i have always known that what makes the government the way it is, and the people the way they are is an integral part of the cultural genome. the good and the bad stemmed from the same source and had coexisted alongside each other all this time. going further on the same thought, what am i but a collection of memes that i gathered over the years? what i am but what i've seen and heard. i AM a continuation of the system of ideas that has been put into the plastic mind of mine. i have been wired to respond to emotionally taxing issues related to my grandparents, and even my ancestors. this nationalism is, in fact, biological. if i decided to rebel against the bits of the culture i don't like, i'd lose a lot of me. and then for consistency's sake, i have to lose the bits i like, whatever that's left, too. my options are to lose a large part of what makes me me, or to live in contradiction.
maybe this is why people from cultural entities with longer history carry more baggage with them, because the longer a culture persists and the more vast and complex it becomes, more unlikable things accumulate in the culture itself. this makes it hard for the offsprings to decide on an appropriate reaction to their own culture, and eventually results in the love-hate relationships, and frequently conflicting intellectual agony which some, like me, experience.
5 comments:
I have the same feelings way too many times.
Isn't Singapore an exception? Short history, but much agony in its offspring.
Maybe it's just particularly unlikable.
you don't think singapore struggles a little with the chinese culture thingy? i feel that singapore is one of a few immigrant countries that clings on to the motherland culture. it's weird. you don't see americans clinging on to irish "values"
americans celebrate irish values in its pubs. :) and maybe its just me, but i dont see singaporeans carrying much cultural baggage at all.
but i agree. the longer sth is the more crap it collects. which is why i think having to move house once in a while helps to reduce the clutter at home; only the essence remains.
I think that Sg has just managed to cram so many unlikable things into its short history that there's a lot of agony even with a short history. Intense social engineering tends to do that.
I think that insofar as Sg does struggle with Chinese culture, it's struggling with the artificial imposition of what LKY thinks is Chinese heritage on the populace. The country is now much more divided along ethnic lines than it was in the 60s and 70s. Much of this is due to the rigid 'bilingual' education policies and other racially divisive actions (SAP schools, pushing Malays into police rather than army, explicit racist remarks about Chinese being genetically disposed to be this or that, I could go on).
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