Reducing events to 'cultural pathology'

Two years ago, in the Philadelphia suburbs, a recently fired Korean American came home, shot his wife and two children, and then turned the gun on himself. I was reminded of this tragedy earlier this month after rereading, of all things, an article I was assigned for a History seminar in 1995. Its author, Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova, describes how the word "Balkan" evolved from a geographic misnomer to a term of cultural prejudice to an epithet for tribalization, "primitive" hatreds and political fragmentation. So what's the connection between the Balkans and the local man who killed himself and his family? According to NBC 10, the tragedy happened because the culprit couldn't bear to "lose face." The station's news crew then proceeded to visit a nearby Korean church to interrogate its minister on the supposedly "Asian concept of face." It should be obvious that East Asians possess no monopoly on personal pride and status. So what would drive reporters to consider a middle-aged man's pent-up frustration a reflection of his alien culture? For that matter, where did they -- and so many Americans -- acquire the idea that saving and losing face are so peculiar to East Asia? Far from being an isolated case, this distortion is part of a wider pattern -- the result of collusion among servile academics, sensationalizing journalists and a close-minded elite -- that determines how we look at the rest of the world. As Todorova demonstrates in the case of the Balkans, it was travelers, diplomats and missionaries who first formulated myths about non-Western cultures based on little more than their own aristocratic and ethnocentric prejudices. They were then elaborated upon and legitimized by the burgeoning academic discipline known as Orientalism or "area studies." Finally -- and hand in hand with the other two -- journalists seized these firmly established images, drumming them into the minds of a new generation of the reading and TV-watching public. Keep this process in mind as you ask yourself the following questions. Are the peoples of the Balkans more predisposed to ethnic hatred and historical grudges, and are their wars somehow more savage than wars elsewhere? Are East Asians the only people driven to murder by personal failure? Is Islam, whatever that means -- the religion itself, all one billion Muslims or only Arabs and Persians? -- inherently violent, fanatical and terroristic? These are not random equations. One article I read last year on the political situation in Kosovo dismissed the entire region as condemned to violence: "This is the Balkans, after all." And sweeping excoriation of "Islam" is the rule whenever a bomb explodes or a Middle Eastern government decides it doesn't like U.S. policies. And in 1997, during the so-called Asian fundraising scandal, some members of Congress asserted that John Hwang and the Indonesians, Indians and other Asians accused of spying for China didn't know they were doing wrong because their culture taught them not to question authority. This argumentation is dangerous precisely because it misrepresents human reality and boils down extraordinary complex and diverse societies to a simplistic cultural pathology. Don't like Russia's inability to embrace Western-style democracy overnight, or Greece's intransigent support for the Serbs during NATO's 1999 war? Blame it on their "Byzantine" heritage of autocracy, anti-Western prejudice and political machinations. Dismayed by the political feebleness of Asian Americans? Just point the finger at their "passivity," as one Penn Law student argued at a discussion last spring -- conveniently ignoring the two Chinese revolutions, the Vietnam War and numerous other upheavals that have shaken 20th-century Asia, and ignoring altogether the ethnic minority's U.S. history. I do not believe that cultural differences are irrelevant or that all people are really identical "deep down." As someone once noted, "just because Germans and Syrians both get Baywatch on satellite TV doesn't mean they're the same people." But this form of offensively reductionist cultural abuse, which never aspired to honesty to begin with, is even less appropriate for portraying the realities of our age. Today, people, ideas and cultures are crossing and mixing more than ever before. To value humans for the complex creatures they are -- and allow people and governments to begin to understand each other -- we must lay these invented myths to rest. And the sooner, the better.

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