The Averaged Iranian

ایرانی میان گین شده

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Participants •Citizens •
Posted by Rezwan • Apr 11, 2009 • (0) Comments •
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Any statement that begins with "Iranians..." is going to be a generalization, and therefore, not true. "Iranians like poetry." "Iranians don't like to wait in lines." "Iranians are devious." And so forth. These statements can't be true, because you will always find some Iranians who don't fit the statement. Some Iranians don't like poetry, some love lines, some are guileless, and so forth. We're all individuals.

Despite this logic, the "Iranians..." conversations won't stop. Do we have these conversations because we actually think we know all Iranians based on our limited encounters with our family, friends and neighbors? Do we really want to know what "Iranians" are like? Or do we want to create a model of what they should be like?

These "Iranians are..." sentences are usually spoken with authority, as if the speaker already knows what every Iranian is like. Such knowledge is technically impossible. But it raises the question: Does the speaker want to know what actual Iranians are like, or is the speaker wedded to their bias.

Do these conversations help us to discover who our fellow Iranians are? Their true preferences vs. their adopted conforming external behavior.

Do we really want to know what our fellow Iranians think, what they like, what they dream of, what their morals are? Are we systematically sending out people to survey them on their actual opinions about everything. Political opinion polls? I don't think so. Do we have an Iranian Kinsey asking our fellow citizens about their actual sex lives, or an Iranian Freud psychoanalyzing them? That's how they do it in America, and Iranians aren't American. So there.

Collective Iranian Identity

It seems to this humble observer that most of the people who engage in the "Iranians..." conversation are actually trying to invent Iranians. They want to define them. They are not on a fact finding mission. They are on an identity creation mission.

Worse, they already have defined them. They believe they already know what Iranian identity is. What it should be. They are guardians of this identity. They are the judges of Iranian-ness, boldly evaluating those around them to see if they fit into the "Iranian" mold.

They do this with the best of intentions. They love Iran and Iranian-ness.

I'm glad they love Iran and "Iranians". My feeling is that they are mostly out of touch with actual Iranians, because I believe that actual Iranians are individuals, and can't be put in any mold. [whoa! "they"! I'm having pronoun troubles here]

The more you work on defining a collective identity, the more you find individuality irritating. The act of trying to pin down a collective identity is limiting and excluding. Being Iranian seems to involve NOT being a lot of other things. It's defined in the negative, it's defined in the past, it's defined by not changing.

It's static.

If you are dynamic, if you change, have you been contaminated? It seems from the conversations that you have. You deviant.

Identity is also defined as a possession. Not a process. The identity is a thing. A discrete possession. In many situations, it doesn't serve you, but you have to lug it around anyway. A stone around your neck. It's not a process, where today you are faced with new factors, so you dynamically engage them in creative new ways, you explore, you try things. No. Those explorations are deviations, not part of the identity baggage. Dismissed!

The message seems to be: you have to give up your individuality, your explorations. These detract from Iranian-ness. Who you actually are, what you actually want, these things are irrelevant. These things are corruptions. They are from the outside.
Remember, this is a draft essay.

Identity Ideology: Organic vs. Mechanistic

This attempt to impose collective identity among people has a parallel in government ideology. As noted, Iran's government tends towards an "organic" ideology, as opposed to "mechanistic". The tendency to try and define Iranians without actually exploring their individuality is the parallel of this. It is an "organic" view of citizens as opposed to a "mechanistic" or "individualistic" view.

This concept deserves more discussion. I think it shows the key split in thinking about identity.

As you can see, I am biased towards mechanistic and individualistic perspectives. You should know that.

Averaged Iranians and Averaged Americans

All right then. Let's step away from the imposed, ideological collective identity of Iranians. How do we find out who actual Iranians are? How do we discover their true preferences?

We could just spend more time with our fellow human beings, talking to one another as if we believe we ARE human beings, individuals, instead of having assumptions about who each other are. We could take the time to get to know people and be open to their unfolding evolution as people. Every person would be an adventure. Every conversation a discovery! A lifetime of discovery awaits, as no two people are alike! Every day a new day!

Or we could try to use surveys, polls and samples to get a bunch of data, average it all together, tweak the data a bit to suit our prejudices, and leverage these methods to create a mass Iranian public as over-defined yet ambiguous as we could want and then use THAT to push our fellow Iranians into conforming to our ideals. In other words, we could do this like they do it in America, with all those surveys and opinion polls. Americans, lacking the coherence of an old country like Iran, have to do their generalizing the hard way, backing it up with poorly designed surveys.

What is the purpose of this activity?

The book "The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public" is a good place to start looking at this activity and its impact on creating a mass public. Some quotes:

The committee will study the American people, their jobs, the insides of their houses, what they do evenings and holidays, what they learn in school, what they think of their neighbors, what is wrong with their health, and so on. It may even track down that slippery spectre, the average American, so long pursued by novelists with kodaks and fountain pens."

Why are people compelled to do this?

[This] played upon two sorts of fantasies in the modern United States. One was the promise of empirical surveys to disclose the society to itself. The other was the possibility of locating a definitive midpoint in an infinitely heterogeneous nation, whether through a typical community like Grandview (almost certainly modeled on an actual social survey, Middletown) or through more elaborate techniques of scientific sampling. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, this core America was the elusive target of social scientists but also marketers, commentators, and politicians.

I still find these surveys as irrelevant as the old-fashioned "Iranians..." conversations. Just because 52% of Americans do x, y, or z, it doesn't make x, y or z any more "American" of an activity.

A few other interesting links:
The movie Magic Town, discussed in "The Averaged American" above. Apparently this is a charming story that explores the absurdity of the existence of a "typical American town".

The book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Just as you always thought:

Russian-Jewish immigrants came from the shtetls and ghettos out to Hollywood...In this magical place that had no relationship to any reality they had ever seen before in their lives, or that anyone else had ever seen, they decided to create their idea of an eastern aristocracy...
The American Dream - is a Jewish invention.
--Jill Robinson

They [the Jews of Hollywood] not only believed in the American Dream, rather than see it fail, they tried desperately and successfully to manufacture the evidence for its survival...and for its existence. -- Hy Craft, Screenwriter

This book is fascinating as it points out that the American film industry, which has defined what "America" is, was founded and for more than thirty years operated by Eastern European Jews who, the book argues, felt themselves excluded from American-ness. This very exclusion seems to have motivated the creation of an ideal America through film. This is a fascinating look at identity creation issues. I recommend it.

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