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    Eseuri: Dan Culcer. Recycling myths and identity crisis
    Scris la Wednesday, July 11 @ 15:58:01 CEST de catre asymetria
    Memoria
    The Romanian intellectuals, philosophers or sociologists, studied, discovered and valued mythical thinking (B; P. Hasdeu, N. Densusianu, Vasile Parvan, Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica, Mircea Vulcanescu, Traian Herseni, Vasile Lovinescu).
    But now it is not only about studying it, but saving it and regenerating it in order to be able to respond to the aggression of the “post-modern world”, where the identity crisis is politically exploited and maintained by groups that cultivate mythical thinking and organise, with its help, new and strong identities within themselves while towards the exterior they attack and disorganise other identities through excessive rationalization, through using myths for the sake of politics and ideology, through ridiculing and undermining pseudo-criticism.


    Recycling myths and identity crisisBy Dan Culcer

    The starting point of my insights is observing sociological behaviour problems caused by loosing identity substance with individuals and the efforts such individuals make, whenever they become aware of what causes their negative feelings, to recuperate the roots and the substance of their identity. The hypothesis will be unfolded analogically. That is, I’m going to start from a common idea: the individuals’ suffering, their crises are reflected in the behaviour of the community they belong to. I’m deliberately using the word community rather then nation to avoid discussing different possibilities /ways of defining the notion of nation.
    But what if such phenomena – like the identity crisis and others -do not get to the level of consciousness? How do the individuals or groups react? Like in any similar situation they will look for derivatives or will try transfers to other domains of behaviour in critical situations.
    This is where violence, the denial of authority, moral disintegration, difficult social integration – with serious consequences on the entire society they belong to - come from. The more so, as the society itself will be touched, modified and harassed by such phenomena of global moral crisis, by the dramatic consequences of the efforts made for adjustment when subjected to recurrent economical crisis. I have noticed all these when analysing my own behaviour, that of the members of my family and by paying attention to the immigrants and their descendents I have lived and worked with since 1987. With the first generations the behaviour can be marked by the intense wish to get integrated, to get a powerful new self-identity as if wanting to get a new skin or even a new self. Meanwhile touches of xenophobia towards similar or different elements come to the surface. They may be expressed by means of strict political options which “local” politicians make use of, manipulate.
    The unexpected large number of landed “strangers”- Europeans or non-Europeans – who can be found on the lists with candidates nominated by Jean Marie Le Pen’s National Front does not only express the political cunning by means of which they try to avoid being accused of racism or xenophobia, but also an intensive process of “making them French”. It is common knowledge that in these cases opportunistic behaviour exceeds the common limits as it is felt like a compulsory identification with the model (the individuals become “better Catholics than the Pope himself”).
    In other political groups an opposite phenomenon is exploited: the denial of total integration by means of programmatic multiculturalism, which hides a programme of a so-called democratic traditional republican political integration, while all these “ghetto-like” groups are used as a mass that local socialists and communists manipulate.
    The second generation is touched by the identity crisis. They either go for obsolete behaviour or, on the contrary, they rebel against the society of the majority in order to find a negative identity (“The Suffering of the Descendents”).
    Rising against the father who does no longer convey the elements of identity, who has lost authority along with his original identity becomes the dominant behaviour. The rising against society derives from the first.
    One might think that such phenomena only have to do with different groups of immigrants while, in fact, the whole of the population gets touched by such identity crisis. Less visible, as they might be migration movements, they define the whole of the European population including the original population of France and Romania in the last two centuries.
    We don’t only mean migration over the borders, but internal movements as well, which, as insufficiently researched as they may have been since the 18th century through to nowadays, are still significant. These internal fluxes have strong negative consequences as they split families, break troffic social chains, estrange brothers, make tradition forgotten and uproot the man from his place and origin that can give him a sense of security (“The Mioritic Space”).
    Let’s only mention the migration of a part of the population from Moldavia to Transylvania in a search for employment, between the 60’s and the 80’s of the 20th century, or, after 1990 the significant movements of Romanians towards the Western Europe.
    Who can evaluate the consequences of the absence for long periods of time from their families, whose medium they thus disrupt, of people from the villages in Maramures or Oas who left for France? In some cases half of the working population in a locality lives in Paris area for 250 to 365 days a year in places like Nanterre for example, living out of stealing, illegal working, prostitution and begging, through selling newspapers. The internal consequences are disastrous: demographic – the massive depopulation of some localities, a low birth-rate - sanitary – chronic and endemic diseases, caused by the extreme living conditions abroad - moral – the degradation and completely loosing of self and group proud as this is no longer assisted and controlled by any collective supervision, moral degradation as a consequence of stealing, prostitution and drugs. They seem irreversible.
    If we consider the intensity and duration of the social crisis in once imagination, that is a complete blockage of a proactive reforming social thinking with the masses in Eastern Europe in the last five decades, the appropriation of ideals imposed through cultureless, the lack of a social ideal or the transfer of one’s ideal towards the past for example, which are clear signs of revaluing a national communist era as a “golden era” as opposed to the present, we will understand how deep the traumas caused by the crisis of identity as a cause and effect of living conditions evoked and invoked by us really run.
    What are these elements of identity, this substance of identity?
    We find here again the mythical history and geography, the traditional morals, the set of values within which the difference between good and evil should function. It is right here where the crisis is born: the difference can no longer be clearly seen or stated.
    The mother cannot compensate for the absence of the father who is working abroad. The mononuclear families of the immigrants have even stronger effects on the children’s personalities. The absence of their grandparents also does. The grandparents remained afar, unknown were not able to convey to them anything about their roots (“Roots”).
    These negative aspects (causes and effects) have the same nature as troffic (nutrition) chains. We have named them “social troffic chains” and we will consider that mankind does not only feed on food but more so on psychological substance (Stefan Lupascu – “The three materials”). The breaking of the social troffic chains echoes in the whole structure of the group, in the individual-family-society-humanity continuum. Decaying from the human status is the main consequence.
    All these phenomena have been observed separately on a micro-social level, but the behaviour associated with them has not been analysed and related to similar phenomena in the macro-social, continuum of the community. The deep, profound relationship between them has not been studied enough yet. It is as if the passing, the translation by means of analogy would have to go over an unbridgeable gap.
    For the sake of critical thinking as well as to struggle against the consequences of the national-communism, the cultures in the Eastern-European countries are on the verge of abandoning any self-defence systems to throw the remnant of communism, the last specific spiritual values, overboard and tear down the last fortifications from the height of which they could not only defend the spiritual territory of the community but also see, watch and understand the nature of the world fights and struggle against the destructive morbid consequences which can become irreversible, lethal for the community and for the individuals that belong to it.
    What can we do? First and foremost we need to revalue, rediscover and spread out all the values produced by these cultures. Nothing of what has been produced in these cultures should remain unknown. This was the kind of attitude that was the blueprint of an action of recuperation of our cultural inheritance between the 70’s and the 80’s for instance. The printing of the “Collection of Romanian Philosophy” started by Constantin Noica, the fact that Vasile Lovinescu’s work were issued, that of the Romanian sociologists belonging to Gusti’s school, the complete reprinting of Simion Mehedinti’s work, followed by the revaluing of Ion Conea’s geopolitics, of the statistics and sociology by Anton Galopentia, of documents of recent history, memories, and republishing books that had been censored during the communist regime are good examples.
    To some extend this activity has been carried on after 1990. But the degrading of the living standard, the fall of the social prestige of the intellectuals, their being toppled from a hierarchy of values by those suffering from “intellectual flat foot” and chronic ability of “dealing with IT” that lawyers (I shall not forget to praise a minority belonging to all the fields mentioned above for whom their job continues to submit to an ethic code and have an intellectual content) have caused the loss of contact between this culture, recently recuperated, and its beneficiaries to be,- the educated youngsters and grown-ups. Under a permanent pressure of nowadays reality we import not only the superior product of old culture, but the waste of this culture as well, under the pretext of free information which leads to intoxication without having someone able to provide the antidote around.
    Meanwhile the organisation structures of a centralised state economy are torn down. The basis of cooperative agriculture explodes to leave room to random actions as agriculture is no longer subsidised and the state refuses to be involved. Producing goods for ourselves has been replaced by unnecessary importing of goods. Vocational schools have lost their prestige for good. Several universities known for their educating students for profitable jobs claim to be the ones to produce the new elite: The Law Faculty, Commerce; Medicine and Engineering are loosing their prestige.
    The professional structure of the Romanian Parliament offers a significant image. It is very much like the one before 1944. Vasile Lovinescu’s interpretations, especially those of the Romanians tales, leaving out some statements that are difficult to be verified, allow us to integrate empiric observation in a systematic analysis.
    We can see two essential things: that between the mythical and the social one there is no discontinuity. We can realise that the mythical level is the identity link any human group needs to become organised, a crystal and not a solution, not even an “oversaturated” one or a pond full of tadpoles that are never to become frogs.
    We should differentiate between criticising the political manipulation of myths, which is necessary and urgent, and criticising the myths about identity themselves in a destructive way, which undermines tribal identity. In this way, we will put a stop to the destructive process that the criticism of identity myths, which has become opportunistic ideology, generates (Ion Aurel Pop vs. Lucian Boia). The more so we need to do anything it takes (and for that we need to look for the right methods) to regain our myths and replace them at the basis of our society at the beginning of the “troffic” chain, by spreading out culture and through initiation.
    The state cannot have this role alone, neither can the government party, the opposition or the school. All these have a natural tendency to use the myths for political purposes and the political purposes are not of general interest although they should. The phenomenon of irradiating myths of foundation from different initiative centres, known or unknown ones, visible or invisible, could be the golden/best way. We know the risk; it is that of a greater influence of certain sects, of different secret societies that both regain and degrade myths, which they turn into a good. But we should take it. Mircea Eliade and C.G. Jung were among those few European thinkers who recognised the presence of myths in the degraded forms of modernity in different individual and collective activities (from the UFO partisans to the groups of paintball fighters: The Colours of the War).
    The sociologists, such as Michel Mafessoli in France, have studied mythical humane activities and the tribal solidarities, which were either reconstructed or invented.
    The Romanian intellectuals, philosophers or sociologists, studied, discovered and valued mythical thinking (N. Densusianu, Vasile Parvan, Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noica).
    But now it is not only about studying it, but saving it and regenerating it in order to be able to respond to the aggression of the “post-modern world”, where the identity crisis is politically exploited and maintained by groups that cultivate mythical thinking and organise, with its help, new and strong identities within themselves while towards the exterior they attack and disorganise other identities through excessive rationalization, through using myths for the sake of politics and ideology, through ridiculing and undermining pseudo-criticism.
    The communities in the Eastern Europe are more fragile than ever. Between 1945 and 1990 they were subjected to a violent process of loosing the values of their culture by the Soviet system of propaganda in a view to ensuring political, social and economic control over these states and territories. After 1990 they have not been able to breathe freely because of drugs, unemployment, starvation and excessive imports, while inadequate reforms, later to be aborted or delayed, generated street children, lots of unemployed, dying pensioners and trade unionists manipulated by secret services. The newspapers are full of evidence that the social goods that used to be somewhat still valuable had been done with in the name of the free market. In fact we have witnessed these goods being transferred in the hands of some swindlers (Sever Muresan) for nothing, and the export of favours without their being reinvested in the neo-colonial territory, now completely dependent.

    The Romanian community in Romania is the victim of such aggression against the spirit that is against the psychological material we consist of, against our feeling of belonging, proud, continuity and solidarity. The basis of Romanian civilization itself is under attack again. The tools come from the arsenal of classical elements, the most superficial ones starting from “late modernity” through to systematic propaganda and manipulation, prevention of complete regaining of tradition, deforming it through propaganda, imposing of excessive and unballanced self-criticism about communities around (Hungarians, Ukrainians, Russians, Serbians, Bulgarians, Polish, Germans and Jews) or against those that influenced them (the French, the Americans) in the name of the interest of these other communities. The derogative attitude towards the values of the Romanian community is realized under a number of pretexts from among which the most common ones are the so-called existence of a traditional xenophobia, a metaphysical and intrinsic anti-semitism, some pogroms and extensive genocide actions, to the behaviour of the community, to the lack or rarity of significant contributions to the world culture (Ioan Petru Culianu).
    Historical realities are only explained or analysed, from a nowadays perspective, that of the humanitarian Decalogue, political correctness or defending the rights of the minorities, as if the respective decisions and actions never had a cause or a chronology neither did they have a part in similar social and historical series of other communities or behaviours of other political groups. This is not about avoiding a historical and moral judgement, but avoiding disregard of chronology and prejudice as well as the moral attitude of a non-existent superiority.
    The inferiority complex, which we ourselves have cultivated with the help of our intellectuals, is minutely exploited.
    It would be ridiculous to adopt a national paranoid attitude. We do not see here a complot against the Romanian nation, but a conjunction of complex phenomena whose sense and significance haveto be analysed in a very lucid way, but whose consequences have to be urgently stopped by means of the wisest and cheapest method: recycling and revaluing of our myths.
    For all the other solutions: the reform of the economy, the fight against corruption, the regaining of the instinct of creation through work, the blockage of capital exportation, the rebuilding and moralising of the political class, counter-propaganda, fundamental scientific research a.s.o., there is need for money, lots of money. Where from?
    We have to accept that recycling our myths is an active act of survival of cultivating our minds and spirits, without which we are doomed to fall back into the status of an animal. There is no such thing as a global humane identity. There are only regional or national identities and the ethnical communities are the only ones to be understood and maintained for the moment. That is: within this space and this time.

    Dan Culcer
    Conference, mars 2003

    Translation of romanian by Laura Silvestru
    Associated Topics

    Etnografie


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