Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a post on the ever-tricky concept of ‘mentalities,’ within the context of the Russia-Ukraine War.
Best,
Sam
ON MENTALITIES
The topic of mentalities keeps coming up for me. In an interview discussing Russia and Ukraine, a Russian dissident journalist says, “If there is one word I could get rid of, that word would be ‘mentalities.’”
And I understand what she means — and the good intentions behind that. The idea of ‘mentalities’ is one step away from ‘nationalism.’ Mentality presupposes some sort of fixed cultural self — and, in any conflict, it is the weapon with which to cudgel another culture. Russians have a slavish mentality, Ukrainians are quick to say — they have no history of independence, no history of democracy, and the result is this zombiesh obedience to power. Russians counter that Ukrainians are too malleable, too easily influenced by the West or by the far-right.
‘Mentality’ is a highly-efficient cultural tool for not engaging with the individuality of someone else; for assigning them a place within a group identity, from which, in times of crisis, it’s possible to make sweeping generalizations. In Goodfellas, the mobsters, justifying a hit, say that they actually kind of like the kid, that he’s done nothing wrong, but that “his family was all rats so he’d have grown up to be a rat.”
But, when you’re traveling, the real joy of it — the kind of ‘deep traveling’ that is endlessly addictive, that one can keep one at it endlessly — is the discovery of how widely divergent mentalities can be in different cultures. One of my favorite stories ever is something Paul Bowles tells about traveling to Morocco in the 1930s.
He was in Marrakesh and was looking for a bus to Taroudant, so he asked a passing man if there was a bus and the man said yes, and said the bus would arrive early the next morning, and described the bus and vouched for what a smooth ride the bus would be.
So Bowles checked out of his hotel, waited where the man told him to wait — and waited for hours. Eventually, the man turned up and was very perplexed to find Bowles sitting all by himself in the heat, with a suitcase beneath him. Bowles, now very cross, asked him where the bus was, and the man sweetly replied that of course there was no bus — there was really no good road between Marrakesh and Taroudant, a bus was a pipe dream — but that Bowles seemed to want a bus and the man felt that by telling him about a bus he could “make Bowles happy.”
There is no judgment anywhere in that story — and none in the way that Bowles tells it. There’s no argument that, really, it would be better for Morocco to ‘progress’ to a point where it dealt in physical buses as opposed to imaginative ones, but there is a very clear sense in which the entire world-conception of these two strangers is utterly different — and, of the two, there is much to be said for the Moroccan’s perspective, the ability to conjure up whole buses and bus routes on command, the ability to instantly generate ‘happiness’ for a traveler. And how else can one describe the difference in world-conception except through a term like ‘mentality’ — the idea that point-of-view is culturally determined, results from a nexus of tradition, upbringing, etc, and is in some way inalienable to a person — and however much Bowles would have assimilated to Morocco when he lived there (and he did assimilate greatly), he would never cross over to being able to create buses for travelers in need.
The alternative to a concept of ‘mentalities’ is, in a word, liberalism — the usually very sincerely-held belief that societies progress and that there is a fixed good life to which all members of all societies are owed. The rebranding of ‘the third world’ as ‘the developing world’ covers this idea nicely — the idea being that parts of the world like rural Morocco are in a process of on-going ‘development’ and that sooner or later great buses on great roads will takes the place of locals’ improvisations.
It’s hard for me to argue against that idea completely. There is no question that if a culture determines that it wants to use the benefits of technology, or of foreign influence, to ameliorate its material conditions, then the culture is entitled to that. But I would be very reluctant to say that that is better — that any kind of universalized point-of-view is preferable to the infinite variegation of ‘mentality’ in all its different forms.
In politics, too, I find myself similarly reluctant to dispense with mentality as a fundamental building block for how the world works. In thinking about Russia, for instance, it really does become difficult not to feel that Russia’s current expansionism isn’t just the result of its current regime; that the regime is responsive to something very deep in the Russian ‘mentality.’ Call that an expansionist sensibility with a very deep nostalgia for Russia’s imperial past. Call that the ‘Russian soul,’ with its imaginative flights, with its lack of interest in proportion or moderation. Call that a ‘principle of vertical symmetry,’ with an exaggerated respect for those at the top of the state structure. The point is that it’s impossible to hope — as I think everybody in the West is secretly hoping — for Putin to eventually fall and some moderate liberal to step in. That was what was hoped for in the ‘90s and, clearly, the divergence between Russia and ‘the West’ went beyond the Communist regime; and the difference was something closer to the domain of mentality.
What that means, in other words, is that there are no easy answers. ‘The Russian Soul’ exists, manifests itself in the political sphere, has its own beauty, but in politics is utterly incompatible with Western values. It’s impossible to impose Western values on Russia. It’s impossible to accept the exercise of intrinsic ‘Russianness’ as it applies to the invasion of Ukraine. In the end, cultural differences turn out to be very real. It is not impossible — it’s actually one of the best things in the world — for very different cultures to find ways to speak to each other. But it is important not to imagine (as is often implicit in the liberal project) that mentalities can be smoothed over completely; that it is somehow preferable to have only one ‘mentality.’
Are you sure Ukraine isn't waiting for an imaginary bus called NATO or EU whatever imaginary carrot they believe has been dangled? What a great story. Imaginary goals, real bombs -- the illegal cluster bombs Lady Diana campaigned against, of all things. We'd all be better off to take a few steps back and think this through rationally for a change.
I mean, real estate values permanently go down to ZERO after nuclear war, and considering that Israel already has plans to evacuate all Jews from the USA in the event of something like that, yeah, let's rethink our conclusions.
Perhaps orthogonal to the point here but everyone should read The Sheltering Sky.