(This post is cross-posted at HitCoffee.)
In my last post,
I promised to write about Spanish persons' thoughts on politics. But
what I have to say is probably more about the process of observing
others' views and my wish to avoid at least some of the pitfalls when
doing so. In short, this post will be more about me than about Spain or
the Spanish.
First a preface. I'm aware of (many of) my
limitations. I know little of Spanish history beyond what anyone would
know after having taken two semesters of Western Civ. I probably know
even less about Spanish politics, and I haven't gone out of my way to
educate myself. I also spoke with only a few people in Spain. And
those people had their own motivations, their own biases, and their own
reasons for saying what they did. The language barrier probably also
prevented me from discerning much of the nuance of what they said--and
probably prevented me from even understanding much, although my wife was
there to translate. I write this because I don't want to be that guy
who goes to Europe or who has European friends and says, "they believe
x," and then uses that generalization as evidence in favor of their own
preferred policies in the US.
One of my wife's set of friends is a
family that is probably "middle class" in the sense of "people who do
non-manual and professional-like labor and are relatively better off
than most people" (and not in the American sense of "everybody who is
alive and not super poor or a billionaire"). They had a lot of
complaints about the government's restrictive laws for businesses. One
person wanted to start up an internet business and sell things online,
but the licensing and other regulations made it way too costly. That
family also seemed to be concerned that those regulations created a too
large black market economy.
That critique meshes pretty well with
my own neoliberal views. But my wife and I met others who probably
would have disagreed with her friends. For instance, one taxi driver we
met was upset, if I understood him correctly, over the Spanish
government's proposals to endorse austerity programs and taxes on
workers and over its complicity with German monetary policy. That taxi
driver, I assume from his comments but I'm also putting words into his
mouth, wanted to keep many of the regulations which he believed
protected workers like him but which my wife's other friends wanted to
lessen or liberalize.
The Spanish people I talked to seemed much
better informed about US politics than I was/am about Spanish or
European politics. While it's probably a bad thing for Americans not to
know as much about politics outside the US as they do about politics
within the US, I decline to chide my compatriots too much for their
ignorance, which as it happens is my ignorance, too. Spain is a
smaller, less powerful country than the US and and daily life in Spain
seems to be enmeshed in international affairs in more obvious, or at
least more obviously direct, ways than daily life in the US is. It's
not because Spanish people are more virtuous or American people are more
"anti-intellectual." It's largely because circumstances demand greater
attention to international matters.
Also, and with due respect to
the people I met, their knowledge of US politics seemed on some level
superficial. The people I talked to, not surprisingly (to me), disliked
George W. Bush and "the Republicans." One person said, if I understood
right, that the Republicans were the party of the past or the old guard
(I believe his word was "ancianos"....although I might be
misremembering or I might have misheard). However, I suspect, that the
persons I spoke with don't quite understand how our system of single
member district representation, along with our presidential
(non-parliamentary) system, works. In other words, I don't think they
fully realize that someone can vote for the Democrats or the Republicans
without necessarily supporting even most of that party's platform.
I
don't say this as an indictment against them. I have an even less firm
grasp on Spanish politics and how the Spanish government works. When I
saw mention on Spanish TV about "el presidente del gobierno," I thought
they were referring to something like a prime minister--and wikipedia
says I'm right--but I the word "presidente" tripped me up and for a
second I thought Spain had a presidential system like the US or a
presidential/parliament system like France. I'll repeat what I said
above. The Spanish people I met know more about the US government than
most Americans, including me, know about the Spanish government.
My
lesson from all this is the unsurprising one that people resemble each
other in their propensity to frame things in ways they can understand
and that supports their own biases. The Spanish are human, just like
me. That lesson seems corny or even "awe shucks-y," but the fact that I
"learned" that lesson means that I had a caricature of what it meant to
be European or Spanish or non-American. And now that caricature is
less strong. (I'll concede that, as commenter David Alexander suggested
in my last thread, I'd have a chance to learn even more lessons if I
had gone to India or Saudi Arabia. I don't claim that my 9 days as a
tourist in a western country necessarily exposes me to difference.)
In
other words, and still not surprisingly, travel might help expose
people to other worldviews in a way that my own provincialism does not.
I don't mean provincialism as a self-deprecating epithet, either. I
have a lot of reservations about cosmopolitanism and about "travel
culture" and I believe those reservations still have merit. When one
cuts oneself off from the local, one loses something and the loss is
real. But going to Spain has demonstrated that those reservations have
their limits and that if the loss is real, so is the gain.
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