(to the tune of “The Saints Go Marching In”)
Albania! Albania!
You border on the Adriatc
You have three million people, an abundance of coal
And your chief export is bauxite
That isn’t how the song goes – Coach’s version of the song goes slightly differently, importantly in the chief export, and he adds some lines about Albania being a communist republic. But this is what I always think of first when thinking about Albania.
On a certain level, this is fantastic – millions of must-see TV viewers in the mid 80s actually learned a certain basic set of facts about an obscure, small country in the Balkans from Cheers – but on another level, I can appreciate how this little ditty makes yet another cheap joke against an easy target. And hey, Albania in the mid 80s was an easy and hilarious joke. The dictator since World War II, Enver Hoxja, managed to find a paranoid obsession in Communist China, the Soviet Union, and the United States and the west – despite the fact that British secret service agents enabled his takeover of the country. His response was to build several hundreds of thousands of Maginot Line-like bunkers across the country (which today, no doubt, are primarily used by teenagers looking to smoke weed and have sex).
But the country is changing. I was here fifteen years ago, and while I can still navigate around Tirana, the capital, well enough, as I walk around, I find myself looking for once-prominent landmark buildings which are now surrounded by a sea of subsequent construction. I’m staying at a five-star hotel which is better than any other business hotel I’ve stayed in since the salad days of the British bank’s no-expense-control travel policy, and the central square is now flowery and forested and green.
On the drive in from the airport, which back then was a two lane pockmarked concrete footpath but is now an EU-financed motorway up to French standards, the major sights used to be Saudi-financed mosques and madrasas and far more “Lavazh” stands than was required given that most cars were ten year old Mercedes Benz with sagging rear suspensions. Now, the sights look identical to the highway from the airport to central city in Johannesburg or Manila or Nairobi – too much blue-black reflective glass, stuccoed surfaces on top of rebar and concrete skeletons, endless pasteboard roadside advertisement mostly for foreign companies, and then once you emerge to the center of town, roadworks and cosmetic improvement projects that never seem to be completed. Albania has graduated from being the reductio ad absurdam of the Balkans to being just another slightly-more-than-undeveloped developing economy. My hosts tell me that rural Albania hasn’t changed at all. This inspires hope on one level – the one that found an epiphany equal to Spaulding Grey’s perfect moment on a beach halfway between Tirana and the southern border – and despair on another, the level that remembers being told at gunpoint to stop talking to a terrorized father’s daughter at a roadside snack stand.
The food is good, but then it was before as well. Lunch was at an old school Italian restaurant in the square behind the national museum, where I went for lunch every day fifteen years ago and is just as fantastic today as it was back then, but back then you had to reserve a table and today you just walk in. Dinner tonight was in a slick London-standard open kitchen restaurant and the food was fantastic – but my multi-track brain was spinning about how incongruous this was relative to fifteen years ago, when lightly truffled vinegarette dressings on a veal carpaccio plate would have made no sense.
On the walk back to the central bank, my host observed that the changes were disrupting the country outside Tirana. The capital attracts the youth of the country just like capital cities attract all ambitious young people looking to affect the world, which is propelling Tirana towards internet-inspired aspirational materialism, but the rest of the country left behind is isolated and confused and so terrified by the changes that they are vapor locked from moving forward. So Albania is really just a microcosm of the modern world: there are those who are willing to buy into the transactional global world, either by choice or seduced by the promise of material reward, and a much larger population that views the changes as being more terrifying than a warlord’s arbitrary but personal exercise of absolute power. The system of urbanization, the instrumental system of global capitalism, strips away all power to understand the world from a single moral perspective – those that crave that dessication have an option to move, but those that cling to historical meaning are left behind in the countryside to die. It is, really, a form of organic holocaust on the part of modernity – modernity has enough internal rational consistency to know that it is killing a population which shares a certain non-modern attitude towards meaning, but because it doesn’t explicitly kill, because it simply waits for mortality to carve its course, it allows itself no guilt and can (with some degree of self-justification) ignore the dehumanizing aspect of consigning an entire generational population to irrelevance.
The modernist ethical framework – which abstracts humans to instrumental objects – is deadly. But because it doesn’t actively order death, we can participate in it without the guilt that a principal to genocide should be forced to face. It’s not that we’ve been ordered to slaughter the transitional generations – we haven’t been so ordered, and we don’t actively participate in the death of their hopes. Instead, we make those people who are unwilling or unable to adapt into irrelevancies, cartoonish non-humans whose confusion marks them out. We consign them to a long-lived, state-supported form of hell, in which they go through their day-to-day value generation and familial relationships in a shadow space, in which their efforts are unrecognized at best, and insulted in the normal course of being, by an urban modernist ethos which declares them to be utterly without generally recognized instrumental value.
I don’t defend the older folkways blindly; they suppressed women as chattel, for example, and in Albania the folkways included notions of blood feud that allowed for no escape from multi-generational tribal battles that could only finally be solved by a loving being who wished to take on the burden of ceasing conflict by committing suicide, and even then mechanisms existed to restore the feud. But the older folkways at least allowed for a collective expression of a connection to the infinite, to the transcendant, which are incomprehensible to the post-Communist, post-atheist Albanians of today.
Across the closed-off street in front of the hotel is a scrubby park. On Sunday night, a Rita Ora concert in the main square made the park uninhabitable, the pumping bass and shrieking treble from the main square acoutstically focusing in that tiny triangle of muddy grass so as to make staying there impossible. Some old guys were smoking cigarettes in the lee of the sound on the far side of an ice cream stand. A beggar was passed out and snoring happily, despite the ambient sound assault, on the grass between the bus stop and the curb in front of the best hotel in town.
There are easily four times the number of children visible here compared to London. In London and Tirana both, they are visibly unhappy when they come out accompanied by their parent, or grandparent, or nanny. There are more young Albanians in Tirana than, say young people in Birmingham, a similar sized city. But both are desparately unhappy.
The data connection in the five star hotel is so much better than what I had in the five star hotel in London that I’m considering arbitrage-driven internet startup opportunities. Sure, there will be some issues around customer data “privacy” as the startup bases itself in a non-EU territory, but who cares? I mean, no internet company really views data as anything other than a tradeable commodity; it comes down cynicism. Are you able to stomach the idea that compliance is an empty rules-based exercise, or do you have an internal compulsion to do what is right as defined by the general principles embedded in regulation and legislation and public policy pronouncements? Do you seek to conform with your best interpretion of society’s constructed sense of the good, or do you simply seek to check the box against rules which are exogenously described?
My host was fascinating tonight. He probed me with questions about recent papers from macroeconimists which challenge conventional thinking about the role of banks in the money creation process, but he was really trying to find out whether I thought deeply about those issues and then applied the same deep thinking to broader topics. It wasn’t what I expected in Albania, but it was a very, very pleasant surprise.
I meandered back to my hotel. It was promenade time, which only can happen in cities with appropriate density and appropriate familial-oriented social constructs. That’s the instrumental description; participating in promenade is a visceral experience, it can’t be captured by a language of social constructivism – it is a collective rejection of that mode of life and dialogue. Or perhaps not a rejection but a challenge. Its survival – and it is surviving, as there are as many teenagers and millenials on promenade as there are parents and elders – is a living challenge to the monolithic presence of instrumental living. Why are we walking? Because it’s what we do. It’s how we are human. Stop asking why and just walk. Or sit and watch it all unfold. But please, stop asking why.