Aimless Indignation

I am tired of cultural philosophizing. I mean about the unfathomable Russian soul, about the great cultural truths we can glean from “the American smile,” about how Germans are logical and French are emotional and Russians suffer as a hobby, etc. It’s just lame. People just pick up these ideas and then bend all reality with which they come into contact to fit them. The source of my especial annoyance today is our literature class, in which all we do is listen to the same unquestioned statements rehashed again and again to fit every poem we read.

Issue number 1: The American Smile
Everyone talks about how Americans smile all the time, and these smile-commenters are very damn smug about the whole thing. If Americans were not so hypocritical, or so naive, or so rich, or so unable to understand suffering (whatever trait the speaker wants to impute to America at the moment), we would stop all our stupid smiling. The most charitable interpretation of the American smile is that it is a cultural unwillingness to discuss unpleasantness, a cultural expectation that everyone should be happy and cheerful and that everything should be great all the time. Whether or not it is true that we feel that we must live up to a high expectation of success in life, I resent the classification of smiling as a form of hypocrisy. Here is my own sweeping cultural theory, based not on ethnic character traits but on the actually cultural basis of forms of nonverbal communication: while Russians think of a smile as communicating only happiness, for Americans the smile serves a double function, communicating either happiness or goodwill (or both, of course). In America, when people smile at each other on the street, they are not saying “I wish you to know that I at this moment am especially happy,” they are saying “I wish you well, and our relationship, even if it is only a relationship of short standing and based only on our sharing the same sidewalk, is positive and friendly.” There is nothing hypocritical about smiling in such a situation, even if each smiler is harboring grief and sorrow. The smile is not, in this situation, an expression of emotion but a social gesture, communicating an honest message. In America, a dishonest smile is not a smile when one is actually sad, but a smile when the smiler is actually working against the smilee, or does not wish him well.

Issue number 2: Only Russian Orthodoxy takes seriously the issues of grief and suffering
The evidence that was brought forth in our literature class today for this was that in western Christendom the most important holiday is Christmas, showing that we are concerned with individualism and positiveness and such (it’s important that God became man, every human being is important, etc.) and in Holy Russia the most important holiday is Easter, before which a proper number of tears have been shed, unhappiness experienced, etc. Um, unfair ignoring of independent variables. Christmas seems like a bigger deal than Easter in the West mainly because it corresponds with the secular holiday celebrated by Russians on New Year. And then, all the evergreen and light imagery of Christmas is about pretty much the same thing that Russians talk about as being their own higher, more atune-to-the-closeness-of-death-and-dispair understanding of Easter: celebrating the victory of life over death, light over dark, good over bad that comes even in the frightening circumstances of winter and want.
And then, where do they get off claiming to have the only form of Christianity is which pain and suffering get coverage? They need to be sent to Spain to look at some gory crucifixes, or read about medieval pilgrims putting stones in their shoes, or watch The Passion of the Christ or something. I find all of those things fairly distasteful, but it’s the principle of this silly psychological analysis of entire cultures that is under discussion. If Russia gets to over-emphasize sorrow and suffering, so do we. Stop trying to hog all the misery for your own country, Rooskies.

I could go on for a long time. People just decide these silly things—American movies always have happy endings, Russian culture is based on the number 3 (because they are so holy), etc., and then they only see what supports them.