After seven years living outside the United States, I’m embarrassed to say that most of what I know about the way that the world works in my former home comes from television.
I’m not talking about True Blood (I wish), but rather those shows with the banal, everyday events of life as constant background noise. I’m talking about The Office or How I Met Your Mother or New Girl. You know… the shows where the characters have real jobs.
Most of the expats I know don’t have real jobs. Sure, a handful do. I even have some friends who are married to men with real jobs. That seems suspiciously like adulthood to me.
What I do — what most of the expats I know do — is cobble together an existence based on somewhere between one and a dozen jobs, supplemented by parents or savings or pure dumb luck. Which is how I found myself spending my Wednesday lunches with a Sorbonne law professor who wants to practice speaking English with me.
I teach ESL to middle school and high school students, helping them with their grammar homework, but the relationship I have with the Law Professor is very different. I realized early on that he didn’t want me to give him exercises to do. What he wants is to talk to me about my native country and ask me really tough grammar questions about English language minutia. Needless to say, I love it.
We talk about politics and cities. He likes me to tell him about my Masters research, and I ask him about his classes. But what I love the most is that occasionally, a topic will come up, and I’ll notice an element of French culture that had eluded me up until then. The Law Professor is — as his title suggests — a professor of law; often, our conversations start or end up there… as it did the time we started talking about the attitude towards crime in each of our countries.
The conversation started with a discussion of the way that people raise their children. As we are both childless, we’re also both of the belief that we know everything and that parents know nothing. And yes, I know that I’m in for a wake-up call. Nevertheless, we were discussing the reason why French children seem to be so much better behaved — in general — than American children, and as we talked about what seemed to be to be rather innocuous subjects — allowances and parents who pay their children to babysit their own siblings — the Law Professor said something that shocked me; not because I didn’t believe it, but because I had never thought about it before.
“Vous êtes dans une culture de récompenses,” he said. Yours is a culture of rewards. In America we do something because we’ve got incentive to do it; when we don’t do something, it’s because we’re afraid of the punishment. And apparently, the French are not the same.
In France, according the the Law Professor, there is a bigger reason to make a decision than punishment or reward. You may say that the same is true in the States, but in our society of contracts and lawsuits, of people protecting themselves around every corner from someone else trying to take advantage of them, I’m prone to disagree. Yes, there are contracts in France; that’s not what I’m saying. And I’m not trying to say, either, that the French have a better moral compass than we do. What I am saying is that the reason the Law Professor gave me for why French people don’t sue the pants off someone the second something goes wrong surprised me… and yet it didn’t.
Community.
When I first moved here, I bore the brunt of a lot of offhand communist jokes from friends. France is far from a communist country, but there is definitely an underlying sense of community here that infiltrates the thoughts of many. When I first started high school and had no idea what constituted right- and left-wing politics (we didn’t talk politics in my house), my roommate told me that her ideal would be that everyone in the world lived in equal huts and shared everything. Without knowing that this was a communist utopian ideal (or even, let’s be frank, any iota of an idea of what the word communist meant), I said, “But why wouldn’t one of them just steal the other guy’s hut and become king of the hut people?”
That’s not a thought that most of the people I meet here have.
The Country Boy’s cousin looked at me strangely when I asked her if it bothered her that her taxes were paying for the school and healthcare of people who weren’t paying into the system. She told me she had never thought about it.
I’m not saying that TCB’s cousin or the Law Professor are representative of all French people, or even that they’re the norm. And I’m not saying, either, that in the States people never do anything selfless; quite the contrary. What I am saying is that there’s a non-militant sense of community here, a desire to do “the right thing,” not because it is right, not because it gives you a sense of being morally better or makes other people think that you seem morally better, but just because it is better… for everyone involved. For the community.
As for me, I’m not sure what I believe yet, where I stand. I know what I was raised with, and I know the beliefs of the country I chose. I am realizing more and more that there are certain elements of my upbringing that exist so far in my subconscious that I don’t even realize that they’re there, which is one of the many reasons I’m so happy that I have interesting, intelligent people to talk to here in France, people who are interested in learning about the differences between our two cultures, like I am.
And I also know that if you’re looking to do something good for the community, cookies are always a good idea.
Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies (recipe adapted from Joy the Baker)
makes about two dozen cookies
10 ounces skinned roasted peanuts, unsalted
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon honey
1 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking soda
Place all of the ingredients for the peanut butter into the bowl of a food processor, except the oil. Pulse once or twice, to chop the peanuts finely. Stream in the oil, pulsing as you do. Stop and scrape down the sides, then pulse again, until you have a chunky peanut butter.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a baking sheet with butter and set aside.
In a mixer combine the peanut butter and sugars until well combined, about 2 minutes.
Add egg and baking soda and mix for another 2 minutes.
Roll into walnut sized balls and create a cris-cross pattern with a fork. Bake for 10 minutes, until lightly browned.
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