An Academic Broadside

A . B O R J A S - I N Q U I G

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I am a paid scholar at London School of Economics. On a recent visit to the Continent, whilst enjoying a quiet café in Paris, standing at the bar in a tabac outside Gare du Nord, I found my senses jarred from the reverie of my researches by a loud uncontrolled din at the end of the bar. Although not a British subject, my sensibilities have been tuned during the last years of my residence in London. I found this intrusion quite disturbing, to say the least. The waiter had been pulling a tray of saucers out of his dish washer, and now was replacing them with a reckless toss onto a pile of saucers, which was already very tall. One of these flying saucers had crashed, and cracked, and smiling wickedly the waiter swept the shards of porcelain off the stainless steel countertop, where they had fallen, and into a basket. Then he continued the job to tossing saucers in ones and twos, managing to break several more of them before starting on the cups. I couldn't help but compare what would have been the reaction to these sounds in England. Here they were happy sounds, the pleasantly stimulating crash and clatter of a Frenchman giving vent to his irrepressible passions, possibly as they related to a rendezvous later that same evening. In England, to disturb the immediate environment like this would have been grounds for a pink slip.

In Colombia, where I was raised to the age of fifteen, my mother once suspected my father of flirting with another woman at a community dance. When they returned to their house, she confronted him with the fact that he had been having a colorful conversation with their neighbor (who shall remain unnamed here). My father denied that he'd been flirting. The more violently my mother accused him, the more passionately he claimed his innocence. She had always been a passionate woman, my mother, and could frequently be seen with a pistol stuck through her rawhide belt. We lived on a ranch where anyone could be called to shoot a stray wild animal that tried to threaten our cattle. On the night in question, she pulled her pistol and aimed it at my father's head, and dared him to lie to her one more time about having flirted with their neighbor. When he swore that he loved only her, she shot him. She was a very good shot, and she had intentionally severed only the ear on the right side of his head. He was holding his bleeding wound when, again, she asked if he had flirted with the other woman? Unblinkingly, with tears streaming from his eyes, my father denied it. She was the only woman he had ever loved, he insisted. My mother shot him again, on the other side. "I won't miss a third time," she declared -- asking him the same question. He was missing both ears, and bleeding profusely, and he again denied having made any overtures to those foreign parts. This was enough to finally reassure my mother that she had been mistaken. My father was willing to risk, for her, his life.
It is a well-established fact that Colombian woman are dangerously sensitive on the subject of the fidelity of their husbands. In a global setting, the simple need to be sure of what is inherently ambiguous, can often translate into a risk that becomes difficult, or impossible, to justify. Nationalism, for instance, builds upon one of the most easily identified communities of risk. The foreign policy of nations, which began with the seizure of slaves, relies upon an ideal balance -- a healthy internal economy to provide the maximum leisure time to a ruling class, protected by an assertive policy of conquest and domination over other neighboring states. The evolution of a risk which began as a need for slaves, through history, has clearly exhausted its viability as a model in the world of the nuclear missile. We need only look at the tested and strained relationship between the brother-states of Pakistan and India to clarify the unacceptable risks in maintaining a credible deterrent. In this situation, the price of learning the degree of fidelity in your transgressor neighbor's statements is prohibitively high. You could always invade, and clarify the situation, or you could live with an unknown amount of risk.
This is not a new phenomenon developed at the end of the 20th Century, as some gold-rush advocates may wish to convince us. The fact that fear -- a simple self-protective mechanism -- has been necessary in the evolution against the unknown, does not start with the Atomic Age, in Los Alamos, or with Nubian incursions into what is now Ethiopia. To venture out from a safe place into an unknown one has always been a fear-provoking moment of taking a risk. To venture out of the cave to hunt, and bring home the bacon, that is to survive, and to be able to relax occasionally and enjoy life for a few hours, has always meant that it was necessary to venture beyond the easy and comforting thing to do. Doing so has never been simple, or easy, but it has always been important. Finally we always did have to go out -- and the further out we go, the further out we get.
These disruptions of forms, the interruption of one form which produces another form, in some important way different, are signal events. The plate may break or the plate may not break, as it is tossed with panache on to the top of the other plates, but it will certainly make a clattering noise -- and abuse the ears of an Englishman. My mother felt terrible afterwards about how she had mutilated my father's head. We will hope to never endure the spectacle of India and Pakistan calling the bluff on the veracity of each others' statements. In the future, we may also need to decide between mutating the human form, or not. This will present us with another untested risk. Does being able to mutate the human form mean that we must plunge forward, regardless? Or is the question itself -- of knowing what will happen when we alter the human form -- enough to prevent us from knowing what is our risk?
My thesis is that the risks that we face are what define us as a community. If we are to succeed in containing anger, terror and fear, which is the natural first instinct of an Englishman, exposed to the sound of porcelain as it breaks, we must re-evaluate the forms of our thinking. Perhaps in France this same noise is more pleasant than it would have been in Euston Station. When David asked for an excerpt of my dissertation, I was hardly thinking about the pleasantness, or unpleasantness, of the clattering of cups. I hesitated -- until this quick café outside the Cafe du Nord. Now I don't think there is a form problem here at all. The problem is only about the look of honest joy on the face of the waiter as he deposits my check upon a plate. That is, with adaptive thinking, globalism will allow us to enjoy the personality in the noise. Given the fragile state of the forms in which we now live, this should be enough to pull us all into the same community -- or else.

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