I have been having a tough time readjusting to life in the DR after a fantastic trip to the US. Basically, I left for the States feeling satisfied with my work. I came back with fresh questions about the significance of it all. So I thought maybe I should try to sort out these conflicting thoughts and feelings with you all, my dear readers, in a series of posts we shall call ”The Tough Questions.”
So the question for today is: How much free will do people really have considering the constraints of the culture and the environment they grow up in?
This is a familiar question in the American academic realm, almost the same as the nature vs. nurture debate. Here in the DR, it’s a little bit more nurture vs. free will. I think about it all the time, especially when I’m trying to decide if I can blame someone for their behavior or if I have to write it off to their environment. For example: Most Dominican men are terrible cheaters (as in infidelity) and liars (when dealing with women). But there are those exceptions who recognize this behavior is wrong and refrain from doing it, such as my host dad (as far as I know).
Since I’ve gotten back from the States, I’ve been having a hard time finding my motivation to start new projects. This is a real problem, because oftentimes my role here is that of motivator: I kind of have to persuade people to participate in my stuff, which is unfortunate, because we Americans like to think that we come into a developing country with a bachelor’s degree and everyone is more than overjoyed to learn from us! That is not so. I have to be the motivator, but it’s hard to motivate when you yourself have none. What gets me down is thinking about just that – why it’s so hard to motivate people.
The residents of El Limon have lots of reasons to despair: their government is a stinking trash heap; their schools are more like holding cells for children; no one shows up on time or generally does anything they say they will; there are no jobs; the youth seem to be interested only in impregnating, getting pregnant and/or getting drunk; criminals are never, ever caught.
But I also think about how much potential they have to change things. I just finished a small business class: there are tons of opportunities for entrepreneurship. The DR has plenty of programs for people to participate in free, my classes included, but also a government technical school that sends teachers to the community to teach classes FOR FREE! Do we have any of those here in El Limon? No. Before I came, no one ever bothered to investigate why the two schools weren’t hooked up to the power grid and therefore couldn’t use their 45 computers. It took the gringa to get outraged about it and do something. Heck, one of the items on my to-do list is to switch the schools’ libraries, because by mistake, the high school books went to the elementary school and vice versa. But do I really have to be the one to do something about that?
The problem is that the culture here is a little too laissez-faire for my taste. People are accustomed to things not working properly. They’re not educated enough to know that their educational system is a violation of human rights. Living in a developing country has helped me understand why people here don’t feel more empowered to change things. It’s exhausting. And the culture sets in – I, too, find myself showing up late to things, and making excuses, and being lazy, because no one calls you out on it like they would in the States. Ask yourself – if absolutely no one cared if you showed up to work tomorrow, would you still go? So there’s this lackadaisical culture, where problems just fester because they always have. Why don’t more people break out of it?
Culture and our environment shape us much more than we, as individualistic Americans, would like to believe. One thing that helped me see this more clearly was the book Peace Is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who writes for the West. He puts it like this: Think about all your accomplishments and how many of those were possible because of your environment or the situations around you that happened by chance. How many were 100 percent of your construction? We tend to think of our failures as having a general cause, but that our accomplishments are wholly ours. That’s just not true. Those of us who have succeeded in large part have done so because of some unearned privilege: socioeconomic status, good parents, access to education, talent, intelligence, etc.
But crediting all our accomplishments and failures to our environment creates in itself a culture of disempowerment, of lack of individual responsibility. Somehow we have to encourage people to break the binds of culture and make their own way. It’s also depressing to think of humanity as a bunch of sheep doing whatever everyone else around them is doing. Aren’t we capable of critical thinking? Can’t we see when some cultural practice (like cheating on your wife, and bringing home HIV, for example) is doing terrible harm? We have consciences, even if we don’t have reason, don’t we?
One thought I’ve had to resolve all this is that people are truly, disappointingly hard to change. With the right preparation, we can think our way out of the status quo. But even if our intentions are good, our ability to realize change in ourselves is bad. That’s why we invented institutions. They force us to stick to our intentions. Universities require us to complete a curriculum at a certain level of performance to get our reward. Our jobs do the same. Our parents’ associations, our professional associations, our laws, our churches, our gyms. (There may be no better example than the Army, which persuades people to die for bad intentions.) All these things are designed to help us improve at what we can’t better in ourselves on our own. But here, none of these institutions work. So the people never rise to meet their greatest dreams.
I have to think about this tomorrow when my head has cleared from that delicious glass of wine.
your post made me think of the following which I just read a few days ago. I’ve been thinking about it every since. Your description of the DR culture sounds like it is “pre-modern” according to the man below.
“Berger identifies four features of consciousness which he claims characterize modern man. He attributes these features largely to the modern rise of industrial capitalism, with its attendant rationality, bureaucracy and technology, although here we cannot explore why this is so.
The first of these features is what Berger calls openness, by which he means that modern man, unlike pre-moderns, can entertain multiple life-plans, deciding not only what he wants to do but also what he wants to be. This open-ended quality of modern life leaves the individual without any pre-determined identity, in that he can define himself in so many different possible ways.
A second feature of modern consciousness is its reflective quality. If modern man can create and recreate his identity, then he is forced to reflect about what that identity can or should be. Modern consciousness is therefore “peculiarly aware, tense, ‘rationalizing.’
Thirdly, modern identity is individuated. If modern man creates his own identity, then his capacity to do so is critical to his self-consciousness. Thus individual freedom, rights and autonomy come to be taken for granted as moral imperatives of fundamental importance.
The fourth feature Berger identifies, and the most important for our purposes, is that of differentiation. By this Berger means that moderns live in a multiplicity of social worlds. Pre-modern man, as Berger puts it, “… whether with his family or at work, or engaged in political processes or participating in festivity or ceremonial … was always in the same world.”
(source: “How do Modern Jewish thinkers interpret religious texts? by Moshe Sokol”)