Our cultural ambivalence

Title

Creator

Vivencio, Jose

Language

English

Source

Volume XV (Issue No.1) January 1963

Year

1963

Subject

Essays

Ambivalence

Cultural values

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

Instead of the refinements, socially we are inclined to favor the vulgar that is in western culture. This essay attempts to explain our cultural attitudes toward the west.

Fulltext

Instead of the refinements, socially we are inclined to favor the vulgar that is in western culture. This essay attempts to explain our cultural attitudes to ward the west. OUR CULTURAL AMBIVALENCE Vivencio Jose Our cultural relationship with the west has been culti vated and encouraged for centuries that nobody among us can legitimately claim ex emption from its impulses and influencesj While there are so many things desirable in western culture embodied in its demands for excellence and perfection, the unrelent ing search for knowledge, the adventurous spirit of specula tion and the utilisation of scientific formulations and others that strongly recom mended to us their cogent necessity for our time, never theless there are certain atti tudes with which we regard culture that have driven us to confront dilemmas we usually resolve against our favour. (£hese attitudes have widely contributed to the imbalance of our intellectual tradition and ultimately to the confu sion and alienation that are characteristics patent to our culture. A case in point is the atti tude wherin we take Spain and America as whole sym bols of western culture when in reality they are not. But of course, this has been pos sible because for a long time our contact has been restrict ed to these countries. This mistaken regard has contrib uted to our ignorance of the fact that culturally and intel lectually they are only parts of the vigorous continent of Europe where until recently the great issues and events of the world are decided first in the mind. It is in countries like Germany, England and France where an older and a stronger cultural tradition can be found which, taking its substance from the native soil imbibed the elements of JANUARY 1963 13 the classical age and became concretised for us in terms of their arts, philosophy, and science whose richness is for ever a challenge to human in quiry and experience. Cultural Ambivalence Hence, while there is gen erally a constriction of our cultural relationship mainly with the two countries men tioned above and therefore a misunderstanding of our par tial cultural parenthood there is also a miscalculation of its ultimate meaning. In spite of our proud declarations of po pularising education, the fin est and deepest thoughts* of the west have not been a gen erative and constructive force in our social thinking precise ly because education has lacked the quality to enrich and stimulate the apprecia tive and critical intelligence, nor has it fully approximated the challenge and the standa r d s which the highest achievements of the west has to offer to us. The publicised avowal we pay as" our allegi ance to western culture is therefore contradicted by the inept demonstration pf our appreciation. Thus, the recent reaction to ban a novel of great literary and cultural merit like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for example, while at the same time our choice not to show any outward protest against the flood of imported comics and cheap detective novels, can be an indication of this ambivalence. Our ac claims are dictated by the taste of the controlled multi tude while our counsels are based on the easy reaches of intelligence that to continue the analogy, while socially we may yield to cultural out rages like the soap operas, the twist, and crude popular mu sic we will reveal at once our implied if not downright dis gust when the question turns on serious drama, ballet, or classical music which are in tegral components of western culture. In short, instead of the refinements, socially we are inclined to favour the vulgar that is in western cul ture to the extent that we de sist or default from thinking that this is not all of the west, and also to obscure the fact that the proper homage we can pay to its artists, thinkers and scientists is one of gentle and sceptical intellectual con14 Panorama limitation rather than by bias or ignorance which we use to justify our chosen intention. Western Heritage Attempts therefore to pro tect the public must always favour excellence for these can never corrupt us except as we regard them from a puerile point of view. Serious and sincere actions must be directed against the crude and the vulgar even how much they are found to be socially acceptable precisely because social corruption arises from these sources. We must also accept the fact that cultural excursions involve a risk in intelligence and orientation for the very notion of indi vidually in culture demands a particularl approach that is unique to any of its particu lar aspect to be explored. Hence, in one way culture demands nuances of human adaptations especially in in telligence to which its finest and higest refinements seek communion. The perennial challenge poised by intellig ence engaged in advancing and understanding culture would somewhat be a confir mation and at once a rejec tion too of the banality and stupidity of their age, and which is perhaps made near er and more relevant to us by the cogency which the re membrance of Socrates, Ein stein, Rizal, Darwin, Tagore, Shakespeare, and others will always arouse in us. While we may therefore de clare our western heritage, we must at the same moment af firm our rights to be mental ly challenged which is a pre condition concomitant to our acceptance of such a heritage. For in as much as we propose excellence for our considera tion, such a demand posits also the affirmation of free dom to pursue these excellen ces to wherever they will lead us as long as such an action is first confined to and con firmed by discussion and whose solutions are solved af ter the clash of reason and logic. Cultural Fringes Bur our reaction to such a proposal has not only been marked by indifference and abstention but also by out right denunciation because we have • feared for so long the serious actions of intellig ence. This ingenuity to re sist, together with time and the social process conspires JANUARY 1963 15 therefore in wording against our enlightenment that a condition is still being prod uced where a time-lag in our cultural reception hinders our minds in ^making a cor rect appraisal of the perspec tive of things. For one, our being at the receiving-end of the intellec tual movements in the west opens up to us only the cul tural fringes when the west is already at the cultural cen tre, This makes us fight now also for principles western peoples have already won a hundred years earlier that we miss in the process a sense of contemporaniety precisely be cause our intellectual com plexes are still checked by the impositions and demands of the undesirable survivals of the past. This makes also for our misplaced seriousness to consider according to a critic as epigrams what are already cliches abroad and novelties that which are already anti quated and outgrown by the west. Hence, we can take our being a semi-feudal society with indifference still in spite of the great progress in sci ence and economy in the west; we can regard and res pond to the evils of medieval ism with a kind of tolerance born not out of our liberal ism but by an over-optimistic and over-masochistic turn of mind that legalises for us the hopes that they can be work able still in our times; and ul timately to take secularism and science as suspicious en croachment on the body po litic; and the free and intel ligent spirit of man that re presents to us its expression in scholarly anguish as inspir ed by the devil and therefore fit for a ritual of exorcism and slaughter. Cultural Values This mental condition and inclination have so far prod uced among our intellectually sensitive sector a sense of con tradiction and escape because the west has been romanticis ed in our imagination. So that when we seek an affir mation of our desires we will at once propose an immedi ate exodus to the west which we consider as our cultural home. The opposition of our cultural values is such that we have taken what belongs to us either with selective con descension or disgust as to make us compare hastily, to our conscious disadvantage, 16 Panorama say, the slums of Manila with the affluent quarters of Lon don, our sari-sari stores* with the intellectual’s cafes and art galleries of Paris, and our nipa huts with the skycrapers of New York, completely forgetful of whatever our own could offer and empha tic in our assertions of con tempt for our worst aspects so that we can justify our re signation, and our neglect or our suppression of whatever are the worst qualities of these foreign cities mention ed. Hence, we tend also to forget that what we seek in these lands and what they stand for us in our imagina tion as a concatenation of po sitive achievements and pro gress have been made possible not because of escape and endless rantings but by hard unremitting work through long years of struggle, which when allowed to operate in our country may eventuate ultimately to the realisation here of what we desire in those cities. On the other hand, the reaches of our self-alienation can only be matched by the degree to which we have es tranged ourselves from the quest of eastern culture. For our colonial submission has resulted into a situation where we have not only been suddenly cut-off from our past and everything that it signifies but also has isolated us from our immediate neigh bours. We have been “tribalised” and “insularised” so tho roughly that even now a de claration of nationalism is re garded with suspicion and the effort to emerge from our iso lation in order to. widen our cultural relationship with/nir neighbours is stifled by insidi ous interests that on the one hand, our estrangement may indicate itself in the ability of some of our intellectuals to discuss intelligently all the phases of the European Com mon Market but showing ig norance and embarrassment when the question of the Asian Common Market (where we rightfully belong) becomes the subject of. in quiry; or on the other, this may show up in a mentality addicted to favouring the Monroe Doctrine while at the same time suspicious of those among us who advocate the Asia-for-the Asians policy. Eastern Culture This western constriction of our minds and grasps may January 1963 17 also reach the particular ab surdity to assess eastern cul ture as something quaint and inferior not only out of ig norance but also because of the extent to which we try ourselves to believe that, since the particular Chinese we meet in the street used to be a poorly dressed peddler with slit eyes and used a chopstick when he eats, and the Hindu as a lean businessman with a long beard and deep set eyes wearing a strange garment, and since both are coloured peoples, we conclude at once that their culture is necessa rily inferior to that of west ern man whom we socially deify. In other words, there is a tendency in us to reduce these things to personalities and prejudices as cultural indices and as long as we regard east ern man as a stranger to us, to hide th’e fact (as in truth our education hides it from us) that old China and old India as particular manifest ations of eastern culture pos sess a cultural tradition as ancient as any that can be found in the world and offer ing as varied excellences in arts and philosophy as any country in the west can offer; or to make secret the thing that, until the tenth centu ry, eastern culture and politi cal sway as shown by these two countries are superior to any which thie west can offer. In point of fact, as a historian reveals, not in one instance alone did the east ci vilise the west. But through the contingen cies of history, whatever the east inculcated in terms of its refinements to the west had been underestimated because of the latter’s subjugation of the former that was made pos sible by the birth of the im peratives of a new and a then vigorous economic order that sought its nourishment in the material wealth of the east so that it can survive and remain strong. Hence, the tales of the un couth and treacherous orient al and the myth of the white man’s burden later on plagu ing the accounts of western writers. It is therefore para doxical that while the west proposes to us the experience of its whole cultural universe from the vulgar to the refineed, it has portrayed to us in turn the worst qualities not only of ourselves but of other orientals as well, and our ha 18 Panorama bitat as a random country of base, helpless, and uncultur ed persons who must be “ci vilised” with each need for loot and the expansion of commerce up to a point where they are insisted upon to forget their ancient cultufe that they can be remolded into a colonial appendage wherein captivity is the rule. Intellectual Confusion Ultimately, these kinds of thinking that direct our minds to appreciate the un wanted elements of both east ern and western culture con fuse our intellectual and cul tural tradition for so long. However, it is being correct ed now by the hew driving force of nationalism whose creative spirit is sweeping the renascent areas of the world. Our ability to examine our relationship with both cul tures can be illuminated if we at once take ourselves, our needs, and our desires and whatever is worth preserving and developing in our cul ture as a starting point from where the other qualities spe cial to east and west must be related and referred. Any widespread and intensive cul tural movement that will draw us nearer to the realities and to ourselves must take these considerations seriously. For only then we can main tain for our examination an independent and balanced perspective that will insure a conscious act of will to affirm our bold allegiance to cul tural refinements and an equal rejection of those as pects that are anti-human and debasing. It is only this choice that will find for our cultural ambivalence its har monious resolution. A pleasure-loving character will have pleasure of some sort; but, if you give him the choice, he may prefer pleasures which do not degrade him to those which do. And this choice is offered to every man, who possesses in literary or artistic culture a neverfailing source of pleasure, which are neither withered by age, nor staled by custom, nor embittered in the recollection by the pangs of self-reproach. — Thomas Henry Huxley January 1963 19

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