Showing posts with label Croatia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Croatia. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Internet and Philosophy

The Internet is truly miraculous. The other day I ran into an essay by Croatian philosopher Mario Kopić whom I met years ago in Dubrovnik. It immediately brought to mind our last meeting, at a wine bar in Dubrovnik's Old Port that served the loveliest mellow red wine from a small barrel on top of the counter. Over the years, I lost Mario's e-mail so when his essay reminded me of that meeting, I attempted to find him on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites that have helped me find other friends - alas to no avail.

Mario does not seem to write a blog, does not post his philosophical essays online and does not tweet. As he said in a rare interview to a Dubrovnik magazine, he clearly "lives apart." What little of his work can be found online is posted by others. It's not hard to guess why. Few of his essays - profound contemplations on cultural and existential themes - can be skimmed through quickly and superficially as we do most of our online reading. One that I found, titled Church and Nihilism would probably resonate with any online reader if they could understand it. It's not an easy read even for a Croatian native speaker and it's nearly impossible to translate. I will try my best to convey what it says.


The basis of the Christian ethos is love, which is also in the core of the Christian belief, says Kopić. This essence of Christianity has been obscured by the Church's efforts to achieve and maintain power and domination.  Mind you, this is a simplified, unauthorized interpretation of the original text. The author is much more sophisticated and nuanced. 

While he talks about Christianity in general, it seems clear to me that Kopić refers mostly to the Catholic and the Eastern-Orthodox Church. He says the Church has deviated from the Christian ethos of love for the divine to hatred of everything it perceives as contrary to its preaching. The Church also has taken away from man the right to act according to his own conscience. That right, Kopić asserts citing the Bible, was God-given to mankind through Adam, making the original sin, the birth of Christ and the Resurrection possible. By denying individuals their freedom of conscience, the Church assumes the role of lawmaker and law-enforcer, not unlike the state. In fact, the philosopher notes, the Church has, whenever possible, used the state to help impose its will on the people. By placing the church law above love, it has changed man's status from that of an autonomous God's creation to that of a church member. In this and many other ways, the Church annihilates man's God-given autonomy as much as the secular state does.

Furthermore, instead of promoting the sanctity of life except by banning abortion, 
Kopić notes, the Church even today tolerates death penalty and blesses armed forces, in some cases even war criminals. 

Kopić further states that no law or religion should replace individual conscience, but stipulates that conscience is not possible without awareness, i.e. understanding of one's own self and the rest of the world.  Human dignity, he 
argues in an elaborate fashion, results from a person's ability to contain his/her own desires out of love or deference for others. The ability to control oneself cannot be enforced by Agents or Supervisors appointed by the Church or the State, says Kopić and concludes that without love, neither God nor people have much of a future. 

The essay is about Christianity, but its basic ideas can apply to any religion. And Kopi
ć is not the only one to promote them. Years ago, I asked a renowned Muslim scholar, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Professor of Law at the University of California, how God judges a person who has been instructed by his imam to go and kill in the name of religion. Here is what he replied: “The Quran is very explicit about the individual accountability of each person, fully and completely, for their own actions and that they will not be allowed to say in the final day that ‘this person told me’ or ‘that person convinced me.’ That message of individual responsibility and individual accountability is critical [to Islam].” 

Fadl also said a Muslim has to make efforts to understand the Quran and he has to go out of his way to befriend non-Muslims. "God created different people because only through the understanding of human race in all its diversity can people gain true understanding of the Creator," he said.

Interviewed for the same story, late Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California said that Judaism, Islam and Christianity can be compared to different languages teaching the same basic things. The role of religious teachers is to facilitate communication among groups that use these different languages.

“All of us believe that God created the individual in his own image, regardless of race or gender or religion. We are invested with an inviolability - with a divine potentiality. We all come from Adam. And Adam, we must remember, was not a Jew. He was not a Christian. He was not a Muslim.”


Rabbi Schulweis said all men and women, regardless of their religion, are  created by God So "to love God, but to hate his creation, is not only a contradiction, it is the uttermost blasphemy.” 

Jewish or Muslim?
There is now near universal agreement among scholars that most world religions, especially the monotheistic ones, share common ethics, although the rites and traditions differ.  A Muslim might be surprised to learn that Christianity's New Testament requires women's subservience and invisibility, not unlike the strictest Islamic law. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul said that women must be veiled, and you can still see Catholic women in many countries covering their hair when they enter a church. It is believed that St. Paul also wrote  (Corinthians I, 14:33-35 ) "the women should keep silence in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as even the law says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home." Ultra-Orthodox Jews also require that women cover their hair and submit to the husband's rule. (On that topic I highly recommend the Israeli movie Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem).

It is the outward demonstrations of diversity rather than true religious differences that provoke tensions between religious groups. Catholic theologian James Wiseman, professor at The Catholic University of America, said there is something in the human nature that compels us to differentiate between "us" and "them". But he said religions do evolve with time and so in the 1960s, the Vatican affirmed for the first time the sanctity of non-Christian religions. “The Church has a high regard for the manner of life and conduct, the precepts and doctrines which, although different in many ways from her own teaching, nevertheless often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all people,” said Wiseman.

The Internet could make inter-religious communication easier than ever. It even has translation engines to lower down, if not diminish, language barriers. But when did you last see a civilized intellectual discussion on any topic on the Internet? Most online exchanges, religious or secular, are controlled by "Agents" and "Supervisors," including anonymous commentators who revile in the crudest language anyone who disagrees with them, powerful groups that control the thinking of their members, purveyors of hatred and authors of clever and catchy phrases that promise to stick. Philosophers like Kopić reserve their thoughts for readers who would make more effort.

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Affected and Dissected

"North wind blowing....." - no,no, not in Washington anymore, thank God! The weather is finally quite humane here.  The quoted "north wind" is blowing in Croatia, at least figuratively, according to my dear friend, writer and translator Marina Horkić.  She writes from Zagreb - an exclusive essay for this  blog.

Marina Horkić                                                          Zagreb, March 2015

Marina Horkić

North wind blowing. Hats pulled down, collars upturned, eyes cast to the pavement. Zagreb, Croatia, on the BBC weather forecast recognized only generically, as the Balkans. These are not real countries with a name and instant recognition, these are blurry areas. In its third decade as an independent state, Croatia is moving in fits and starts through a post-war, post-this&that crisis.  Discarded paper and plastic bags blown down the street, green PVC trash cans gaping open after yet another hunched plastic-bottle collector has rummaged through them - it could be just any city anywhere in the world.  Fifty lipa per bottle - a government initiative to protect the environment. In a place wracked by unemployment, a whole bag of bottles might buy you a lunch. Only yesterday a friend, an economist – too many of them in this sluggish economy – was made redundant.

The news on the radio is bleak. What comes to mind is The New World Disorder. Daily conversations in the streetcar and debates at work are not uplifting either. Following the recent presidential election the nation seems ever more polarized. Fors and againsts. Those who fought in the 1990s war for independence and those who did not. Those who once were and those who now are.

To wash out the sour impact of reality, I put on a Massaki Suzuki CD and try to extract some wisdom from my grandmother's floral fiesta tea cup, which has miraculously survived Croatia's transitions from one country or political system into another - no less than seven times in just over one century - and which has humbly served for drinking whatever is available at a particular time. For a spell, it was coffee made of acorns. Today, the choices are endless.

I have set out to write how translating two female writers into Croatian, a Londoner Zadie Smith and a Lagosian Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, affected me personally. Really, how does delving into the inner structure of another's mind affect you? For a few months, which is the time needed to translate a book, working a few hours a day, or a whole day sometimes, you ride the tide of another's mental energy, you absorb and transform them into lexical constructs of your own language, hopefully retaining the original resonance. What remains after the process is completed, the book submitted to the publisher, and the long wait for the fee to land on your account begins?

Zadie's NW and Chimamanda's Americanah - I'll call the authors by their first names since, although unaware of it, they were my closest buddies for the two long hot summers of 2013 and 2014 – grapple with the adult worlds on the border of the orderly landscape of youthful urban hopes and expectations. London and Lagos of their respective novels are divided into the haves and the have-nots, into the cans and the cannots, the successful and the unsuccessful, the winners and the losers. Likewise, the world I live in as an adult is far removed from the imagined toffeeland of my growing up. It is increasingly torn along the same dividing line of haves and have-nots, of those who posses a know-how to life and those who do not. It must have always been so, only that for a short while I was on the youthful winning side, too overwhelmed with life to notice its underlying inequalities.

Zadie ends her novel with a surprisingly opportunist conclusion that what the main characters Keisha and Leah have, the winning side of the territory they now occupy, is well-deserved, something they have fought for. What lingers, however, is a What If. What if you were born just a few kilometers or a few neighborhoods away from the side where it is possible to win? If you were born in a village on the front line of a raging civil war, or in a house where your next door neighbor turns out to be a weekend militiaman of an opposing group's army, given to setting enemies' houses on fire? What if you were born into a family where violence or neglect or illiteracy simply bruised you too badly to be able to claw your way to any sane territory? The answer is simple and it forces itself as painfully on me as sympathy for Felix and Nathan, the two characters in the NW story who are marked by a losing streak.  It engulfs me and I avert my eyes towards Chimamanda.

Hers is the dilemma of Africa vs. America, of African vs. Anglo-American identity and its solution in Americanah could be simplified to: east or west, home is best, spiced up by the ever-effective love shall prevail. Fair enough.

And what is the solution to the rift in my mind caused by the constant tug of war between pro-Croatian and pro-European forces in my country, between good nationalists and bad commies, between those in favor of a church-guided state and those in favor of the secular one, not to mention the widening gap between those who delve through garbage bins for plastic bottles and those who dictate the import of luxury designer labels?


I turn to my grandma's porcelain cup for answer, but it just stares back at me blankly.  Velvety voices of Bach's Matthäus-Passion fill the room. Chimamanda, after all, is closer to my heart.

***
Marina Horkić is the author of the acclaimed Croatian novel Seks, domovina i rock 'n' roll, and  translator of major English-language best-sellers.  She lives in Zagreb.

Thursday, June 12, 2014

Croatia Marks First Anniversary As European Union Member


I asked a longtime friend and fellow journalist from Zagreb, Željko Žutelija, to give me his thoughts on how Croatia has fared in this past year.  Here is his account:


A Letter From Croatia

 By Željko Žutelija
Croatia became a European Union member on July 1, 2013.   In this past year, has it become a true member of the European club?  Has it adhered to its standards both in legal terms, as agreed during the long and arduous accession process, and in terms of securing a European standard of living for its citizens? I don’t think so.

Željko Žutelija
Croatia struggled hard to overcome many of the hurdles on its EU accession path - more than any of the other 27 members.  Some of the less developed and less westernized ones (think Bulgaria, Romania) were admitted into the European club much earlier and much quicker than Croatia.  In addition to regular EU requirements, Croatia had to clear its wartime record,  prove that no crimes were committed in its fight to liberate a part of its territory taken by ethnic Serb rebels.  It also had to deal with Slovenian and Italian blackmail over the Adriatic Sea.

Despite numerous misgivings, the majority of Croatian citizens voted to join the union.  Some thought of it as a return to its Austro-Hungarian roots, others as a clear cut from former Yugoslavia.   But EU’s youngest member is not doing as well as the rest of Europe, and not only the “Old Europe” -- France, Germany, Britain – but also its nations "in transition", such as Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.

It is true that Croatia suffered devastation and huge economic losses during the 1990s war, but it has been an independent democratic country for almost 20 years now.   This land of a thousand islands along the gorgeous Adriatic coast, with major rivers flowing through it, with picturesque mountains and lakes, fertile soil and well educated population has profited relatively poorly from all these resources.   The economy has not recovered since the 20008 global crisis, the unemployment rate is high -- staggeringly so among the young people -- and the rich-poor gap is growing to the point that some people struggle to survive, while "the elite" wallows in gross opulence.  

The government makes decisions in every relevant sector, from economy to industry, to education, to culture, so it is clearly the main culprit for this stagnation.  No matter which political party takes over, it disappoints.  The leaders turn out to be incompetent, or corrupt, or both.   So far none has envisioned a feasible way out of our growing socio-economic crisis.   The huge governmental apparatus is costly and unproductive.   The judiciary system remains heavily backlogged.  The bureaucracy stifles entrepreneurship and blocks new investments.  The situation has prompted a new exodus of the most talented young people, similar to an earlier one at the turn of the last century when a grape blithe destroyed coastal vineyards and many cultivators moved to California.   There are now as many Croats living abroad as there are in Croatia. 

While the rest of Europe moves on, albeit slowly, Croatia continues to drown in recession.  The coveted freedom from the Yugoslav shackles has not ensured the anticipated sense of well being. The EU membership probably will not either  (think Greece).
DUBROVNIK, CROATIA
But a tourist would not sense any of these darker undercurrents during a short visit to the country.  Central Zagreb has more cafés than any other European city of its size, and they are always full of fashionably-dressed young people.  There is a general feeling of lethargy, as if no one ever needs to work. It is not much different in other Croatian cities.  Getting together “for coffee” is an essential part of the Croatian lifestyle, perhaps born during the era of Austrian coffeehouses, but widely expanded under Communism, when one was proud to be able to “always work less than one is paid for.”

It is time for Croats to wake up from the Utopian dream in which a “brighter future” always beckons, but is never reached.  The youngest EU member needs a concerted effort of its most talented and most dedicated people to pull it out of the bog.  If you see empty cafés on your next visit to Zagreb, you’ll know the country is on the road to real prosperity.