Dice Carlos, “Ethnocentricity: Tranquility vs. Productivity”

It is 6:09 am and I have been up for the past 45 minutes and awake for the past hour. Thoughts are rushing through my head at the rate that raindrops are tapping on the roof and it's pouring outside. Yesterday, Kyle (a.k.a. “Carlos”) and I lead a planning meeting during which we presented our opus of a model for expanding the work that he and I have been doing for the past 3 weeks and which I have been doing for the past 3 months. The meeting went really well and in many ways, it was my final piece of work in San Juan, as for the next 3 weeks, I will be traveling with Andrea and then passing off what I have been doing to the others who live here.

I've been doing a lot of reflecting about my experience.

The scientist in me views things very linearly. As many of you know, I cannot multi-task, which is perhaps a manifestation of a this more fundamental tendency for me to place things in sequential order. Causal relationships are often linked in this manner: one event brings into effect another which in turn causes something else to happen. Physics (until you get down to quantum mechanics which simply links probabilities to every outcome) is the perhaps the most basic example of this linear relationship: you throw something with a given force and direction and it's path is dictated by the laws of nature. I tend to project this metaphysic onto all that I do: I classify my surroundings on some sort of straight line in my mind. This has its benefits and its drawbacks. It aids my understanding of how to get from Point A to Point B, my productivity. After all, if you can't organize the world in some personal way, how can you affect that world in some meaningful way?

However, this is ultimately a false view of the world, despite that fact that my suburbanite instinct, cultivated by the very-linear progression from high school to college to medical school and beyond, would beg to differ. While there are discrete answers to questions about the physical world, there are often not singular responses to human questions. What is the best book every written? What has been the most important moment in history? What is the best song ever written? Of course, there may in fact be correct answers to these types of questions, if one person is answering them. For me: 1984, when my parents met (for obvious reasons), and Paranoid Android by Radiohead. But those are not the universally correct answers. My experience here has often called this principle, whether and when there are universally correct answers, into question.

Kyle and I were talking about a class that he took at Dartmouth about cross-cultural differences. We were comparing the culture here with our own back in Los Estados Unidos. I think I would boil it all down (to the extent that I can) to this: in the USA, we value productivity and measure our lives within that rubric. We value ambition. The American Dream says: “Come to the United States and you will go as far as your ability and hard work will take you!” Whether or not you agree with the legitimacy of the American Dream (I, for one, think that there are many stipulations that need to be added to it for it to be valid), the very idea of achievement grounds our cultural value system. Because of this, combined with the propensity for Americans to assign a monetary value to everything, we norteamericanos can easily classify lives just as physicists classify forces: linearly. The businessman who makes more money has a more successful life than the guy who sweeps the floors at McDonald's.

Nicaraguan success is certainly measured similarly. However, layered above the simple American standard for success is tranquility. Mind you, this is not the same as happiness. I would argue that our cultural values dictate the paths to happiness, but that happiness is ultimately the end goal of all people from all cultures. While individual cultures attach linear paths to happiness, adding a pluralism of cultures makes this world view planar. My observations have led me to believe that the means to happiness in the US is productivity and achievement, whereas the means to happiness here in Nicaragua is tranquility.

In my 3 months here I have only seen one person exhibit any level of stress and that person is me. When plans falls through, and I'm left pulling my hair out trying to figure out how to fix the situation, I will often turn to others around me and find their response to “¿Como estas?” is “Traquilo.” This often pisses me off, since in these instances I feel like I've been left to the dogs and handle situations on my own. However, this is a powerful observation: everything that I have experienced in the past 3 months points to the fact that Nicaraguans simply do not feel the emotion of stress. The question is: Which way is better, productivity or tranquility? The answer, for me: productivity; for my Nicaraguan friends: tranquility.

I think that, while I came here to produce, to somehow spend my time in a meaningful way so as to help with this water filter project, this cross-cultural experience is fundamentally a practice session in how to see the world in another way. It is a chance to change or at least weaken the instinct, developed from cultural values, to view “my way” as the “right way” and “their way” as incorrect. Instinctually, peering down the American road to happiness, I frustrate myself with the thought that here, work will go on until people's blood pressures rise. I'm sure that my Nicaraguan friends have been equally frustrated by my insistence on working past that point. While morality has some power to stratify some cultural values (I can confidently say that the Nazi world view is objectively wrong) creating somewhat of a 3D view from what was once a linear road to happiness and then a planar combination of paths, I think that the majority of comparisons between cultures remains planar—relativistic.

The funny thing is that even the most seemingly fundamental of linear relationships, classical physics, is in fact not true. In 1905 Albert Einstein showed that everything with respect to the laws of nature is relative, when he wrote his famous paper on Special Relativity.