Let’s take a look at how we manage to remain at the pinnacle of half-ass lackluster so-so-ness.
You may have noticed that we Turks don’t care too much about quality. In fact, some might even point out that we actually have a genius for mediocrity. Anyone who’s had their plumbing patched with paint and cement, or who’s eaten a ‘karışık’ (mixed) anything that combines potato salad and french fries with bread and ketchup and mayonaise, or whose request for directions has been met with a grunt and a point of the finger by someone who was either too lazy to say ‘Second street on the right’ or too ashamed to say ‘I don’t know’, will have figured out that in all endeavors we undertake, we almost invariably opt for some kind of sloppy all-encompassing middle-way quick-fix. If there’s a corner that needs to be cut, we’ll be damned if there isn’t a way we can cut it even more. We are at the blunted edge of average, and absolutely nothing is going to sway us too much from our blurry path.
So where do we get our knack for all things shabby? Is it a generally underdeveloped sense of aesthetics? After all, the Turkish worldview is a moral one, not an aesthetic one that has evolved in the Western realm of relativistic epistemology. Ours is a religious universe of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, Black and White, and anything in between – the means and the ways that go to shaping and forming that universe – is profanely unimportant in comparison to the sublime overall picture. Our world is the imperfect and ephemeral abode of stop-gaps, band-aids and patch-overs that precedes an eternal afterlife of perfect heavenly bliss… so go ahead and fix your toilet with duct tape in the meantime.
Perhaps another factor is our inability to abstract our private selves from our professional personae – put simply, our inability to differentiate at-work-Me from sitting-on-the-living-room-couch-scratching-my-ass-Me. Working-Ayşe is the same person as at-home-Ayşe, and at-home-Ayşe doesn’t like working but begrudgingly does it anyway because she needs a job, so she’ll be damned if she’s going to help you get a refund on that TV without an audible sigh followed by a nasally whining tone of irritability that is meant to convey – through an alternation of sluggish and jerky movements accompanied by a vacant frown – that she really doesn’t want to be there and that you should be grateful that she’s bothered to help you – the customer – at all, so just back off and stop pestering her already with your ‘warranty’ and your ‘receipt’ and stuff, okay?
Maybe it’s partly both those things, but our general under-par state of affairs also has a lot to do with our undeveloped capacity for critical thinking, and resulting lack of critical discourse. This isn’t to say that we don’t have a gift for complaining – quite the contrary, we’re exceptional complainers. We just don’t have an aptitude for critiquing, because it’s easier and more convenient to complain than to critique. While the latter necessitates some kind of deconstructive scrutiny followed by a positive proposal for the amendment of that which is critiqued (which takes up precious brainergy), all you need for complaining is to simply point at the thing that is inconveniencing you and badger on about how you wish it wasn’t there (since complaining is only ever undertaken when things go wrong, i.e. when it’s too late).
Critical thought, on the other hand (be it in media, high-culture, or on a personal day-to-day basis) is a quality that is switched on at all times, before things go wrong. It’s like a vigilant quality control mechanism that points out the inherent underlying weaknesses of a given system/procedure/thing/practice, done for the preemptive purpose of avoiding potential mistakes (in the form of lost money, time, resources, emotional frustration, and sometimes sanity) in the near future. It’s a skill that is formed through a rigorous educational process which is subsequently maintained by those who have undergone that process. It trains citizens to demand excellence and to approach all things questioningly, thus necessitating a general adherence to certain elevated standards on the part of those in any kind of service industry who know that anything that is shoddy will not earn them money, because a discerning critically-attuned public will simply not go for it, since they will not settle for second best.
But unfortunately, our pedagogical system for the most part promotes blind obeisance to authority, rather than any kind of critical refinement that could and would demand accountability from those who sell us things or sit behind desks for a living. This is further bolstered by a legal system with strong libel laws that almost enthusiastically confuses critique with insult, and is augmented by social norms that deem outright criticism to be bad manners. And so we’re used to making do with a lackluster second best, even though we live in potentially the best city and the best country in the world (yes, I checked). But unfortunately, your ceiling still leaks; TV still sucks; you will still go to the wrong place 4 times before you get to the right place when dealing with any kind of official paperwork; politicians still never resign but only retire; douchy poseurs still get away with crappy art and shitty ideas and bad food served at exorbitant prices more than they should; and you still can’t seem to get exactly what you want rather than something sort of similarish that you’ll just have to make do with instead.
Then again, perhaps it’s the fact that we don’t care that is so endearing about this country, that we’re not too stringent about precepts and rules, that we have other creatively flexible ways of dealing with things that maybe somehow works – a distinct A La Turca way of doing things that has evolved as an alternative style of living, and which, once one has got the hang of it, might prove more appealing than that of suffocating overcautious legal procedures that regulate every aspect of a life further incapacitated by hypercriticism and compulsive second-guessing.
So what’s the solution? Who knows, I just enjoy complaining.
