A Life Beyond Boundaries (18 page)

If the reader cares to consult the indexes of any two dozen important scholarly books, the odds are very high that she or he won't find an entry for ‘luck'. Academics are deeply committed to such concepts as ‘social forces', ‘institutional structures', ‘ideologies', ‘traditions', ‘demographic trends' and the like. They are no less deeply committed to ‘causes' and the complex ‘effects' that follow from them. Within such intellectual frameworks there is little room for chance.

Once in a while I would tease my students by asking them if any of their friends or relatives had ever been involved in a motor accident. In response to a positive reply, I would then ask: ‘Do you really mean it was an accident?' And they would usually answer with something along the lines of: ‘Yes! If Grandma had stayed chatting in the shop five minutes longer, she wouldn't have been knocked down by the motorcyclist'; or, ‘If the motorcyclist had left his girlfriend's house five minutes earlier, Grandma would still have been chatting in the shop.' Then I would ask them: ‘So how do you explain the fact that over the Christmas holidays the authorities can predict fairly well how many
Americans will be killed in accidents? Let's say that the actual number turns out to be 5,000. The authorities will have looked at statistical trends over past Christmases and predicted, say, 4,500 or 5,500, not 32 or 15,000. What “causes” these predictions about “accidents” to be so good?' Once in a while a clever student would reply that the answer is probability theory, or ‘statistical probability'. But in what sense can ‘probability' be understood as a ‘cause'? More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim faced the same problem when he studied the most lonely of all human acts: suicide.

The point is that we have not yet managed to eliminate chance and accident, let alone luck, in our everyday thinking. We do try to explain bad luck. For this reason or that, because of this person or that, I had this or that bad luck. Yet we cannot explain how good luck intervenes either in our scholarship or in our daily life. This is why, in the preceding account of my life as a scholar and intellectual, I have put such emphasis on my general run of good fortune: the time and place of my birth, my parents and ancestors, my language, my schooling, my move to the US and my experiences in Southeast Asia. It makes me feel like the grandpa who stayed to chat with the shopkeeper five minutes longer.

At the same time, chance does not knock on our door if we do nothing but wait patiently in the shop. Chance often comes to us in the form of unexpected opportunities, which one has to be brave or foolhardy enough to seize as they flash by. This spirit of adventure is, I believe, crucial to a really productive scholarly life. In Indonesia, when
someone asks you where you are going and you either don't want to tell them or you haven't yet decided, you answer:
lagi tjari angin
, which means ‘I am looking for a wind', as if you were a sailing-ship heading out of a harbour onto the vast open sea. Adventure here is not of the kind that filled the books I used to enjoy reading as a boy. Scholars who feel comfortable with their position in a discipline, department or university will try neither to sail out of harbour nor to look for a wind. But what is to be cherished is the readiness to look for that wind and the courage to follow it when it blows in your direction. To borrow the metaphor of pilgrimage from Victor Turner, both physical and mental journeys are important. Jim Siegel once told me: ‘Ben, you are the only one among my friends and acquaintances who reads books unrelated to your own field.' I took this as a great compliment.

Scholars, especially younger ones, need to know as much as possible about their changing academic environment, which offers them great privileges but at the same time tends to confine them or leave them stranded. In the G8 countries most professors are very well paid, have plenty of free time and opportunities for travel, and often have access to the general public through newspapers and television. What they usually lack is closeness to their countries' rulers. It is true that in the US there have been some high-profile political professors – such as Kissinger, Brzezinski, Summers and Rice – but the huge country has more than 1,400 universities, and the capital city has no first-class model. In poor or medium-rich countries, professors are often less well paid, but they enjoy superior
social status and access to the media, and, especially if they work in capital-city universities, are able to develop close contacts with the circle of their rulers. In both environments, if for different reasons, they have a high degree of security with regard to their futures. Their high salaries and high security are justified on the grounds of defending ‘academic freedom' and ensuring professionalism. The first claim is a good and classic justification, so long as the professors practise it themselves – which they do not always do. The second is more recent and more ambiguous, since it depends on qualifications set by senior professors, requires long periods of disciplinary apprenticeship, and is marked by a jargon which is increasingly hard for intelligent laymen to grasp. Furthermore, professions are notoriously self-protective, and this outlook can encourage conservatism, conformism and idleness.

Professionalism is also increasingly accompanied by changes in the philosophy and practice of higher education. Active state intervention is visibly increasing almost everywhere, as policy-makers attempt to square the intake, processing and production of students and professors with the ‘manpower needs' of the ‘labour market', and respond carefully to demographic trends. More and more states make efforts to tie research grants to the state's own policy agenda. (In the US today, for example, a huge amount of money is being poured into ‘terrorist studies' and ‘Islamic studies', much of which will be wasted on mediocre or mechanical work.) Corporate intervention, direct or indirect, benign or malign, has been on the rise for some time, even in the social sciences and humanities.
Professionalization is also having its effect on undergraduate education, where the older idea that youngsters aged between eighteen and twenty-one should be gaining a broad and general intellectual culture is in decline, and students are encouraged to think of their college years as mainly a preparation for their entry into the job market. It is highly likely that these processes will be difficult to reverse or even slow down, which makes it all the more important for universities and their inhabitants to be fully conscious of their situation and to take a critical stance towards it. I think I was very lucky to have grown up in an era when the old philosophy, in spite of its being conservative and relatively impractical, was still strong.
Imagined Communities
was rooted in that philosophy, but a book of its type is much less likely to emerge from contemporary universities.

In the America of the 1950s, when there were huge institutional pressures to conform to the prejudices and ideology of the Cold War state, far the bravest, funniest and most intelligent comic strip was Walt Kelly's
Pogo
. Set in the swamps of Florida, its cast of animals included caricatures of dangerous politicians, opportunist intellectuals, apolitical innocents and good-hearted but comical average American citizens. Its hero, little harmless Pogo, is the only genuinely thoughtful figure, and to this animal Kelly gave the masterfully funny and telling line: ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us.' It is just this sceptical, self-critical stance which I think scholars most need to cultivate today. It is easy enough to despise politicians, bureaucrats, corporate executives, journalists and mass media celebrities. But
it is much less easy to stand back intellectually from the academic structures in which we are embedded and which we take for granted.

Young scholars will have to think seriously about the consequences of the interacting processes of nationalism and globalization, both of which have a way of limiting horizons and simplifying problems. Let me then draw to a close with some remarks about nationalism in relation to the peculiarity of Europe.

In its heyday, Europe had two unique and inestimable intellectual advantages compared with other parts of the world. The first was its self-conscious inheritance of Graeco-Roman antiquity. The Roman Empire was the only state ever to rule a large part of today's Europe for a long period – even if this era is extremely remote in time. But it was not a ‘European' state, since it controlled the entire Mediterranean littoral, a large part of today's Egypt and Sudan, and much of the Middle East, and it did not rule Ireland, Scandinavia or much of northeastern Europe. Furthermore, over time, it drew its emperors from many parts of the Mediterranean world. No European state or nation has had any chance of claiming exclusive inheritance from this extraordinary polity, nor has any of Christianity's multiple sects. The Empire is not available for nationalist appropriation, not even by Italy. Here there is a huge contrast with China and Japan, and probably also India, where antiquity is easily nationalized. The ancient history of the Japanese islands is inseparable from their relations with mainland China and the
Korean peninsula, but it can be nationalized as ‘Japanese history'.

Even better, a substantial part of the extraordinary philosophical and literary production of Graeco-Roman Antiquity survived into early modern times, thanks to monkish copyists in the West, but also to Greek-speaking Christian Arab scribes under the rule of Byzantium. As time passed, their translations into Arabic allowed Muslim thinkers in the ‘Maghreb' and Iberia to absorb Aristotelian thought and pass it on to ‘Europe'. This inheritance offered ‘Europe' intellectual access to worlds (Greek and Roman) which in profound ways were alien to Christian Europe: polytheistic religious beliefs, slavery, philosophical scepticism, sexual moralities contrary to Christian teachings, ideas about the formation of personhood from the bases of law and so on. Direct access to these worlds depended on a mastery of two languages which for different reasons were both difficult and alien. Ancient Greek not only had its own orthographic system, but also borrowed heavily from languages then used in today's Middle East and Egypt. (Though a kind of Greek survived into modern times, it was profoundly changed by Byzantine Christianity and by centuries of Turkish-Ottoman rule.) Ancient Latin in its most advanced forms is grammatically and syntactically far more difficult and complex than any of the major European languages of today. Better still, it gradually became ‘dead'. That is, neither ancient Greek nor ancient Latin belonged to any of the countries in Europe.

For all these reasons (and others I have not mentioned), Graeco-Roman antiquity brought Difference
and Strangeness to European intellectual and literary life right through till the middle of the twentieth century. Just as in fieldwork, this awareness of Difference and Strangeness cultivated intellectual curiosity and enabled self-relativization. There were city-states and democracy in ancient Greece. The Roman Empire was much larger than any other state in European history, and as its ruins were spread almost all over Europe, one could recognize its greatness no matter where one might be. The literature, medicine, architecture, mathematics and geography of Graeco-Roman antiquity were clearly more sophisticated than those of medieval Europe. And all of them were products of pre-Christian civilizations, products which had pre-dated the appearance of ‘messianic time'. While China and Japan tried to bar Difference and Strangeness with their ‘closed-door' policies, Europe came to hold antiquity in high regard and adopted it self-consciously as its intellectual heritage.

Students today may read Plato and Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, Cicero and Tacitus, which is all to the good, but they typically read them in translation – in the everyday national languages which they take for granted; hence Difference and Strangeness have been drastically reduced. Egyptian students cannot read hieroglyphics, Arab students are unlikely to read Aristotle in the version from which their Christian ancestors made their early translations, and not many Japanese or Chinese can read Pali-language Buddhist texts.

Europe's other great intellectual advantage was due to its small size, the lack or porosity of its geographical
and conceptual boundaries, and its history of military, economic and cultural competition between a range of medium or small polities in close propinquity. Especially since the early modern period, which saw the development of print-capitalism and the Reformation, Europe was further divided by vernaculars and religions. Coupled with technological advancement in the production of weapons, rivalry and conflict deepened, which in turn fed into the intensification of competition in various fields. War, travel, trade and reading kept polities of divergent sizes in constant, if often hostile, contact (above all, trade in peacetime was amply facilitated by rivers and ports). Characteristic of this situation is the relation of English to Dutch. Most English people today have no idea that hundreds of English words come from what the huge
Oxford English Dictionary
categorizes as Old Dutch, but they treasure the hostile expressions ‘Dutch courage' (bravery based on drunkenness), ‘Dutch treat' (inviting a woman to dinner and insisting that she pay half the bill) and ‘Dutch wives' (solid, hard bolsters for comfortable sleeping). On the other hand, dead Latin for some centuries kept European intellectuals in touch with each other, especially once print-capitalism set in. For about two centuries after the invention of modern movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century, more books were printed in Latin than in any vernacular language, and Latin was generally understood by European intellectuals. Hobbes and Newton wrote and published in Latin and thus could extend their influence over large parts of Europe.

Difference and Strangeness were built into this political
disorder engendered by rivalry and conflict. The rediscovery of antiquity in the Renaissance period eventually destroyed the Church's monopoly of Latin. This new situation opened antiquity to non-clerical intellectuals who were free from the Church's dogma. These developments were then to lead to increasing competition between European countries to advance their knowledge of antiquity and beyond. Before the late seventeenth century, when some French intellectuals began to claim the superiority of their civilization, none of the European countries denied that the civilization of antiquity was superior to its own, and they competed against each other to learn more about it in order to be civilized. Whether in wartime or peacetime, no country could boast that it was the centre of civilization, a European version of ‘sinocentrism' as it were, and throw its head back declaring it was no. 1. Innovation, invention, imitation and borrowing took place incessantly between different countries in the fields of culture (including the knowledge of antiquity), politics, global geography, economics, technology, war strategy and tactics, and so on.