The Miseries and Pleasures of Toilets

Fear the Chinese, declared my sister upon the conclusion of our recent trip to Western China. Not because they are the growing, massive, hard working nation to watch out for, but because of their ability to endure harsh, unsanitary lives on a daily basis.

As I do a quick run over the internet on Chinese toilets, it becomes apparent that many people have written about their experiences in China specifically because toilets seem to make a visit to China most memorable. And memorable it is. As I am flipping through the images I found online, the inner of my stomach squirm, and the vision and stench of the last few public toilets I forced myself into spring up unrepressed, regardless of the fact that I did stuff tissues on my face and tried to intake as little air as possible.

Against my initial inkling to publish some pictures along with this entry, I have decided to spare us the more explicit visions and my own verbal but very graphic description of my experience. Instead, here is a highly sarcastic, hilarious entry – albeit the fact that the writer should consider himself lucky not to have encountered some of the much more horrible ones these.

I can’t help wondering why so little attention is given by the Chinese to the hygiene of their toilets, although I should note that the government seems to be making some efforts by giving stars to cleanliness of public toilets, and contrasting it to the very memorable passages from Junichiro Tanizaki on the same subject:

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in mediation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, ‘a physiological delight’ he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves.

As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quite so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons.

Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 1977, Harper T.J. & Seidensticker, E.G., Trans., 1991: 13-14.

Now I have never been to Japan to check whether or not its public toilets are as sanitary as Tanizaki mentioned, but his passages, which I first read while studying architecture and laboriously attempted to achieve in my designs, impressed upon the importance of cleanliness to create such a pleasurable, sensual, and phenomenal toilet experience twice.

Why such difference in appreciation towards the act of exerting our bodily waste?

The Will of the Mind

Happy New Year everyone! I have been away these past few weeks, reading Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”, and came across this following passage, which only confirms my previous posting on “The Fittest of Human”:

Nature does not dictate what we should accept or how we should live our lives. Some feminists and gay activists react with fury to the banal observations that natural selection designed women in part for growing and nursing children and that it designed both men and women for heterosexual sex. They see in those observations the sexist and homophobic message that only traditional sexual roles are “natural” and that alternative lifestyles are to be condemned. For example, the novelist Mary Gordon, mocking a historian’s remark that what all women have in common is the ability to bear children, wrote: “If the defining quality of being a woman is the ability to bear children, then not bearing children (as, for instance, Florence Nightingale and Greta Garbo did not) is somehow a failure to fulfill our destiny.” I’m not sure what “the defining quality of being a woman” and “fulfilling your destiny” even mean, but I do know that happiness and virtue have nothing to do with what natural selection designed us to accomplish in the ancestral environment. They are for us to determine. In saying this I am no hypocrite, even though I am a conventional straight white male. Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake” (Pinker, 1997: 52).

The Dawn of Corporatist Education

Opinion, The Jakarta Post, 1 December 2007
Published as "The Rise of Privately Funded Education" *

The delivery of education in Indonesia has long been operated by private educational institutions. But more recently, with increasing cost of running an educational institution and funding its programs, and decreasing government subsidies to support such costs, most educational institutions have to rely on private corporations to fund its educational programs. Even public universities have started to become privatized, while more and more corporations have established private educational institutions.

This article attempts to explore the social and cultural cost of privatization of education and the possible danger this may bring to the development of the society. The case of single corporations founding and funding private educational institutions will be discussed in more depth due to its mushrooming growth and especially alarming repercussions.

With the expansion of free market and its campaign for privatization, Indonesia is not the only country that faces the challenges of funding educational institutions. Even universities in the developed countries have to seek funds from the private sectors. Naomi Klein, in “No Logo” (2000) warns that researches being funded by private sectors can compromise the integrity of research findings. She cites a study that “found that companies maintained the right to block the publication of findings in 35 percent of cases, while 53 percent of the academics surveyed agreed that “publication can be delayed”” (Cohen, Florida, & Goe, as cited in Klein, 2000: 112-113).

In Indonesia, private corporations not only fund educational programs and research projects, but single-handedly found educational institutions, fund its whole operation, and seek profit from providing educational services to the society – creating educational systems that I would call corporatist education.

The term corporate university refers to educational programs and institutions founded by corporations to train their employees in core beliefs, operating and value systems of the corporations. But corporatist** educational institutes, the private corporations in Indonesia, go beyond this sphere to form and deliver main stream educational content to those who can afford their ‘services’.

While many of these corporations may found educational institutions out of sincere desire to contribute towards improvement of the quality of education in Indonesia, others may do so for more practical reason that rises from the simple equation of market demand. Still others attempt to bring in more fundamental vision to the kind of community and future generation they seek to form: the ones that would conform to their corporate beliefs and extend their reaches to more fundamental facets of our lives.

These latter corporatist educational institutions run the operation of their educational institutions very similar to the way they would run corporations – with cost benefit factors, marketing surveys, and the running of marketing and management of the institutions by professionals who may or may not have interests in the value of educational and academic quest for development of knowledge. In these institutions, students and their parents are customers whose demands must be met regardless of academic integrity.

Some of these corporatist educational institutions manage their educational institutions the way corporations would manage their offices and commercial areas: highly secured, gated, exclusive communities with their own privately run food courts, parking lots, and students’ dormitories. Every now and then, these institutions would run sponsored and marketing events where other corporations could promote their latest products to students. Some of them even look and feel like the malls, where people who ‘don’t belong’ won’t have access to the educational compound.

In describing the effect of corporate sponsorship to the “re-engineer[ing of] some of the fundamental values of public universities,” Klein mentions that “[m]any professors speak of the slow encroachment of the mall mentality, arguing that the more campuses act and look like malls, the more students behave like consumers” (Klein, 2000: 109).

To make matters worse, corporatist educational institutions polarize even more the already divided social economical classes of Indonesian society. In his book, “Manifesto Pendidikan Nasional” (National Education Manifesto, 2005), Prof. H.A.R. Tilaar describes the impact of consumerism to education: “… most of [national pluses schools] are very elitist because they are very expensive. This consumerist life style is highly contrasted with the everyday realities of many children on the streets, many of whom are homeless … and have no access to education. [It] has dampened our feelings … towards the poverty that majority of Indonesian society is living in” (Tilaar, 2005: 27).

To illustrate the above point, several weeks ago, I was invited give feedbacks to presentations by fourth-year architectural students from one of the corporatist universities. I was stunned by one particular presentation of a student’s point of view about an urban problem she observed, and was even more baffled by her proposal. She noted that the price of a pack of instant noodle was cheaper at Carrefour than at the (illegal) street vendors. However, the (legal) inhabitants by the railroad of the Mangga Dua area she investigated did not go to Carrefour because they had to take a roundabout walk or take the ojek (motorcycle taxi).

Her design proposal was a building that would bridge over the railroad track into the Mangga Dua Mall so the inhabitants could go directly to Carrefour. Thus, in her reasoning, the legal inhabitants of the area would no longer need to purchase items from the (illegal) street vendors or use the service of ojek – because “by law these (illegal) people would have to anyway be evicted from the area.”

In her argument against corporations sponsoring educational events and programs, Klein stated: “When corporations sponsor an event on a university campus [or school] … they cross an important line between private and public space – a line that is not part of a consumer’s interaction with a corporation as an individual shopper. We don’t expect morality at the mall but, to some extent, we do still expect it in our public spaces – in our schools, national parks and municipal playgrounds” (Klein, 2000: 445).

With the lack of national parks and municipal playgrounds in Indonesia, where social exchanges among different social economical classes could occur, educational institutions have become our last frontiers where ideal form of the society could be envisioned, discussed, debated, and continued to be developed. Yet, with the constant growth and encroachment of corporatist educational institutions, could we still hope for such public arena?

Notes
* This is the original, unedited version.
** Not in the original manuscript: The term corporatist is borrowed from Klein's "Shock Doctrine" (2007):

"Corporatism, or "corporativism," originally referred to Mussolini's model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society - government, businesses and trade unions - all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. ... an evolution of corporatism [can be defined as]: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector - the workers - thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth" (Klein, 2007: 86).

Between Work and Family: A Faustian Bargain?

I recently heard from a friend that someone I know is going through a rough family crisis. He is one of the most curious, driven, insightful, and intense architect and thinker that I know in person, and I have always wondered at what personal cost he does these with.

Coincidentally, I am reading Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom” (1994) , and reaching the part where he went through a very rough time in his life, and was about to divorce his first wife. This is what he wrote:

“I wondered – not for the first time – whether one was ever justified in neglecting the welfare of one’s own family in order to fight for the welfare of others. Can there be anything more important than looking after one’s ageing mother? Is politics merely a pretext for shirking one’s responsibilities, an excuse for not being able to provide in the way one wanted?” (Mandela, 1994: 212).

In “Creating Minds” (1993), Howard Gardner studied seven highly creative people: Gandhi, Einstein, Freud, Stravinsky, (Martha) Graham, (T.S.) Eliot, and Picasso and revealed that in their personal lives and relationships, these otherwise geniuses were treating their families and friends from “disregard to simply sadistic”. Einstein just wanted to be left alone to do his work, whereas Picasso was driving several people into psychological trauma and suicides. (!) According to Gardner, these highly talented, top of the crops human seemed to think that they might not be able to achieve what they had in their lives without the luxury of time and unnecessary ‘distractions’ of normal family and social lives.

But I’m wondering whether certain disciplines are also more prone to what Gardner terms as Faustian bargain than other disciplines of knowledge. For example, people in the business- and economic-related fields seem to have more normal family and social lives in comparison with the disciplines of knowledge covered above (politics, science, arts, language). Or maybe I just haven't heard of it.

Do you think there is such a thing as a Faustian bargain between work and family (or social) lives? If so, do you think this spreads across the disciplinary board? Or, are certain disciplines more prone to it than others? And, to bring up and rephrase Mandela’s question: Is it ever justifiable? Or is work merely a pretext?

The Fittest of Human

When you hear about Darwin’s survival of the fittest, and look at your own circle of friends and acquaintances, who do you think would survive in the long run?

I used to think that Darwin’s survival of the fittest means the survival of the strongest, healthiest, and smartest. Among my own circle of friends and acquaintances, I think of those sensible people who are smart and open minded, culturally diverse, environmentally conscious, physically healthy, and financially stable – those who I think would naturally be at the top of our human pyramid.

But more recently, as much as I think those at the top of our human pyramid should survive, the reality of it is that most people in this category are also the least likely to have or want to have many children of their own.

So it suddenly dawn on me that the fittest of human may actually mean those who are fittest in their adaptations to our human social cultural environment; in other words, those who are most in line with the majority of human chain: the middle part of our human pyramid.

Care to share your own thoughts about this?