Peripheral Visions

ultimately lethal ways to set up an intelligible exchange. Often in warfare one becomes more symmetrical with the enemy while increasing inequality at home. Israel is a society in which many believe passionately in democracy and in equality between the sexes, yet military preparedness supports authoritarianism, and women who are kept away from conflict (partly because of gender attitudes among Arabs, dutifully reflected) are forever at a disadvantage. Cold war concerns for security made the West mirror the East in spy games and McCarthyism.
    In the Philippines, when Americans and Filipinos interacted, it was usually the Filipinos who had learned to manage English and, superficially at least, Western cultural systems, but we saw a few situations in which genuinely bicultural individuals improvised new solutions. One Sunday morning a fire broke out on the eleventh floor of a new thirteen-story office building on Ayala Boulevard, the shiniest and most pretentiously modern part of metropolitan Manila. When the fire department was summoned, however, it became clear that the pressure in the city water supply was not strong enough for hosing above the ninth floor. A large crowd gathered to watch the fire, which would have to be allowed to burn unchecked in the upper stories. The crowd included both Americans and Filipinos, many connected with the businesses in the burning building. There was no overt conflict, but there was a striking contrast between ways of responding to the situation, and a good deal of muttered commentary. I was able to watch the American response in three ways: introspectively in myself; in the Americans whose comments I could overhear; and in the behavior of an American executive whose firm rented the ground floor of the building. These responses fitted together very neatly.
    In myself: I fidgeted, following a train of thought in which I fantasized appropriate action in the absence of water pressure; the only thing that occurred to me was that one might be able to enter and strip flammable curtains and carpets from the ninth and tenth floors. Listening to Americans in the crowd: they stood there and said, over and over, in criticism of the Filipinos enjoying the show, “You would think somebody would do something! How can they just stand there?” The American executive had taken off his jacket and tie and, without anyone helping him, was carrying boxes of company records from the ground-floor offices into the building next door.
    All these exemplify the same theme, the itch to take action (and the perception of inaction as inferior). Americans tend to say to themselves (as I did), There must be something I could or should do. If they are uninvolved, they may stand by without acting themselves but assuming somebody should be acting. In this case, there really was little to do except stand and wait: my own project, as I recognized almost at once, was nonsense, since the floors involved were full of smoke and highly dangerous. The activity of the executive carrying boxes from the ground floor to the neighboring building was also nonsensical, for clearly the fire would not be allowed to burn lower than the ninth floor. Gripped by the American compulsion to take action, he looked both desperate and rather silly. He was responding, however, to a cultural need; any American directly involved at that point would have had to find some kind of action, preferably muscular exertion, whether it were helpful or even actually increased the danger. Inaction was the appropriate behavior, but it was culturally abhorrent. Americans tend to take a crisis situation as one which calls on them for a decision between positive courses of action; we seem to have difficulty even mentioning and discussing inaction as one of the alternatives. Sometimes, especially in foreign policy, Americans get into trouble by acting when they should sit still, yet in some situations this aspect of American “initiative” is a source of strength.
    The impossibility of saving the upper stories was partly the consequence of projects undertaken without working out the possible contingencies, in this case the erection of high-rise office buildings where water pressure was not available for adequate firefighting, decision making not based on elaborate forecasts or alternative courses of action. This may be related to the style of Filipino “initiative,” much appreciated in international working groups, a lively willingness to undertake new