AMERICAN CULTURAL PATTERNS
This is a little lecture to myself as I try to understand why I sometimes fit into American cultural patterns (I am writing in American English after all) and sometimes I feel uncomfortable fitting in and want to escape. Don’t listen to this lecture if you don’t like being lectured to. I am simply trying to straighten myself out .
1. Culture is the way we Sharing our feeling along passage. Culture is the way that we share and enhance what is most significant to us as a tribe. Central to culture is language because language is the way we share in the most precise and intense way. But we also share and enhance cultural identity in many other ways: food, clothing, housing, gesture, intonation, facial expression, art, music, sports, work of all kinds, religion in shared bonding of patriotism and nationalism. We are born into a rich culture that is contributed to and enhanced by all the members of the tribe over time which results in all kinds of rituals and ways of sharing. Culture contains within it so many ways of enhancing and deepening our communication with each other and our feeling of identity.
2. Culture is dreamed up and imagined and in some ways seems made up and artificial. There are thousands of cultures, all of them different, and while each tribe shares meaning within their culture, cultures all look artificial and made up and arbitrary when looked at from the outside. There is obviously no right culture and no right religion. The only fundamental thing of all fundamentalist religions and cultures, is that that they grow out of some fundamental human inner visceral passage that is out of consciousness. They are all created by groups of humans who share the same basic DNA which impels them along unconsciously in similar ways. Human nature is fundamental, but no cultural construction by humans is the one fundamental human right way.
3. Cultures can constrain individuals within the culture and immobilize them and suffocate them. While culture through language and customs can enhance the individual passage, when a person doesn’t fit into cultural conventions they can seem empty and a threat, immobilizing a person or suffocating him.
4. Change. For all these reasons cultures which are dreamed up to enhance the intensity of life of the people in the culture through imagination and reinvention can also cause people who are dissatisfied or left out to insist on reinventing and enhancing in new ways the conventions of a culture, of all cultures over time. So for this reason cultures are in continual flux and change and evolution. Languages are continually reinvented with words taking on new meanings and words that are unsatisfying being dropped. This is true of food, clothing, housing, the technology of work and religion. Culture is continually refreshed and reanimated.
5. When this change is very rapid and very dislocating forcing tremendous adaptation on the part of people the shift can often delight people who welcome a renewed culture and a new future while at the same time causing a great backlash from people whose identity is dependent on the culture that appears to be being abandoned.
And it seems to me that that is where we are right now, not just in America but also in Iran which blames America for dislocating its Islamic fundamentalism and in India and in China and in Brazil, everywhere where there is rapid technological change upending every thing, which means everywhere.
In rapid cultural shift some people, mainly older people but whole groups of people who feel their identity to be threatened, want to hang on to the old (dreamed up, not fundamental, but fundamental to them) values and other people, mainly younger people, quickly adapt to the new technology and changing cultural values and feel liberated in the new emerging culture.
This tension between the values of the old and the values of the young were there when I was a boy and have been there all they through human history with the old hanging on and the young wanting to do things in new ways. But right now change is so rapid that everyone is discombobulated leading to pretty intense culture wars.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 