Why I am pining for North Macedonia
Of the places that I visited and lived in during those two years or so, Skopje wasn't the most pleasant. My ATM card and prepaid card didn't work, so I had to Western Union money to myself. The housing was inexpensive, but predictably noisy, as across the street from a large elementary school and playground. I caught the vibe of the city rather quickly -- a monumentalism that made interesting things to look at, but not really places to dwell or wander. There was an interesting new music concert at the new philharmonic hall one night with a pan-Yugoslavian group, and a few English-language bookstores (but, peculiarly, missing translations from the local language), and everyone was very friendly, but the main advantage of the place was a small study with a big desk that I moved to underneath a large window, a place to read, and think, and write. The housing of the city is almost entirely relatively new, rebuilt after the earthquake in the 1960s (some interesting photos in the museums). Large concrete colonies, very similar to the housing in coastal Montenegro, with substantial retail and restaurants on the ground floor of most buildings, in addition to the half-dozen or so local malls. Across the river, in the historical Muslim quarter, things were very different, but aside from some nighttime peregrinations across the bridges, I lived in the new city. The cathedral is new, and nice -- a very puzzling structure has been raised on the old cathedral site to honor the local saint of recent times.
For none of these things am I pining, though. There is something else. On a few weekday nights, I heard music coming from what was clearly an outdoor performance nearby. Gandalf rose from his desk and wandered down into the village. The concert setup was the universal box stage, lights and sound, apparently now rentable in any city anywhere in the world. But the square was filled with the people who lived in the concrete semi-brutalist housing above, all the businesses open and thriving, including the bookstore with coffee, outside of which I set up with an Americano. Apparently, not so much a unique event, but the festival customary to some summer evenings. (Being there in summer was important -- I have been in Balkan cities with similar pollution issues from temperature inversion, and it can be a trial.)
I was beguiled.
The standard of living in the Balkans is thuoght to be low, because there's not much money involved, but the first sign that I caught that the economic analysis might not capture the true view was noticing that the cities in Romania cleared out on weekends and holidays, when everyone went to their second homes. It is possible to live well on less money than cycles through households in the West, when living well involves a solid supply of basic things, and not extravagant expenses for the latest devices. (For some reason, October in rural Bulgaria comes to mind, as the streets and paths near the houses begin to fill with cords of chopped firewood for the winter.
The point of living well is to allow people to be human, and engage in the work of human beings, and have the modest and gentle leisure that even an economically challenged society can furnish. Understandably, the apartments above in the semi-brutalist aren't filled with philosophy, given that that sort of thing was forced on them in the context of the last empire, with agitprop priced at cost. But mine would be.
The difficulty with my own culture reaches deeper than the economically-intensive notions of the good life. After the industrialization subsequent to the second world war, the sense of civilizational context in the context of daily experience has almost completely dropped away. The trucks of frozen hamburgers roll in weekly, and people take their sense of reality from their televisions. As a result, and this is somewhat difficult to express, when I go to a coffeehouse and have a coffee, I have very little sense of the civilizational context that this event is happening within. It is simply a corporation raised to furnish coffee at a certain price, as it might anywhere in the world there was money to be made, and we make the transaction in the manner of old Scottish shopkeepers, and I sit down and drink my coffee.
(I actually tended to patronize Western coffeehouses when I was in the Balkans, but that was primarily because I much prefer counter service to table service when dealing with unknown folks in different cultures.)
Even so, many people in my country wouldn't have a clue what I was talking about here -- coffee is coffee, and one is friendly to the local business-folks, get the coffee, and sits down and enjoys it. But the festival evening with some consciousness of the civilizational context is very different. In the corporate form, coffee is served, no matter who you are, and who the business is. A neighborhood business in a small country, though, makes the coffee as an exercise in nation-creation. They would be shocked (if not surprised) to find bad things going on in their own country, and this would have to do with the coffeehouse in the evenings. On the contrary, in the corporate context, unconscionable things could be going on on the street outside while the barista was pouring the coffee, and no one would bat an eye.
Industrial prosperity for significantly more than a preponderance of the people can be achieved by using only a percentage of the population, and treating a small subset very badly. The danger is that these industrial structures (artistic, academic, professional) can be taken over by syndicates -- this isn't as categorically evil as it might sound -- a syndicate, in the 19th century, was the customary means of dealing with the outside world under the corporate seal -- some university press workers are still referred to as "syndics". But when these factions govern the effective mechanisms of industry as factions, they think it a duty to govern without a sense of justice, or at least not an iota of it beyond the requirements of the positive law. As a result, extraordinary injustices can result when people don't go along with some of the questionable practices. I was a professional stage actor for over a decade with a strong conservatory degree, and then every opportunity vanished for a few years; I earned a top-tier law doctorate while taking as many doctrinal courses as possible, and then passed two bar exams unassisted, and found no work; I wrote a 300 page research doctorate dissertation while grading up to 4,000 papers per year and the requested defense wasn't scheduled. I had worked as a professional in the field in NYC for a decade and had the law degree, but there were no opportunities to collaborate or teach at the large state university other than the remote electronic grading.
I'd like to think that all of these things would be thought deeply troubling in a coffeehouse with a civilizational context. In the corporate model, I merely have the $3.76 required for a small cup of coffee from time to time. And this would be bad enough, if the story ended in a humble concrete apartment lined with paperback books of philosophy. But the syndicates of my country play rougher games than that. One is simply put to the street, excluded from the common life.
So I pine for these concrete brutalist apartments that would afford the possibility of reading, thought, and work. The streets are cold in the northern cities, and the corporatist culture continues to dominate the minds of the people through television and music.