_____________________________________________________________
It wasn't long before some Jews showed up from Judea insisting that everyone be circumcised: "If you're not circumcised in the Mosaic fashion [e.g. The Laws of Moses], you can't be saved." Paul and Barnabas were up on their feet at once in fierce protest. The church decided to resolve the matter by sending Paul, Barnabas, and a few others to put it before the apostles and leaders in Jerusalem. After they were sent off and on their way, they told everyone they met as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria about the breakthrough to the non-Jewish outsiders. Everyone who heard the news cheered—it was terrific news!
When they got to Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas were graciously received by the whole church, including the apostles and leaders. They reported on their recent journey and how God had used them to open things up to the outsiders. Some Pharisees stood up to say their piece. They had become believers, but continued to hold to the hard party line of the Pharisees. "You have to circumcise the pagan converts," they said. "You must make them keep the Law of Moses."
The apostles and leaders called a special meeting to consider the matter. The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated. Then Peter took the floor: "Friends, you well know that from early on God made it quite plain that he wanted the pagans to hear the Message of this good news and embrace it—and not in any secondhand or roundabout way, but firsthand, straight from my mouth. And God, who can't be fooled by any pretense on our part but always knows a person's thoughts, gave them the Holy Spirit exactly as he gave him to us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us, beginning at the very center of which they were and working from that center outward, cleaning up their lives as they trusted and believed him.
"So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too? Don't we believe that we are saved because the Master Jesus amazingly and out of sheer generosity moved to save us just as he did those from beyond our nation? So what are we arguing about?"
There was dead silence. No one said a word. With the room quiet, Barnabas and Paul reported matter-of-factly on the miracles and wonders God had done among the other nations through their ministry. The silence deepened; you could hear a pin drop.
James [the younger son of Mary, the bother of Jesus] broke the silence. "Friends, listen. Simeon has told us the story of how God at the very outset made sure that racial outsiders were included. This is in perfect agreement with the words of the prophets:
.....After this, I'm coming back; everyone
..........I'll rebuild David's ruined house;
.....I'll put all the pieces together again;
..........I'll make it look like new
.....So outsiders who seek will find,
..........so they'll have a place to come to,
.....All the pagan peoples
..........included in what I'm doing.
"God said it and now he's doing it. It's no afterthought; he's always known he would do this.”
................Acts 15:1-18 (The Message)
_____________________________________________________________
The Hive
Culture is powerful. Originally I thought of culture as a layer used to process and categorize reality, a way to relate to others quickly and easily while holding tightly on to our own sense of accumulated identity. It's something much more elemental and powerful than this, though. Culture is not the accumulated body of traditions and beliefs that make a people unique among other peoples, but rather it is the need for that collective identity that is ingrained within us, perhaps down to the DNA level. This need to belong to a pack of others like us in some way, any way (even in invented ways) shapes and defines how we think of ourselves and influences our every decision. It is this relationship of self TO others in a relative sense that binds us. We are not merely a singularity but we are rather part of a collective. Perhaps this hearkens back to our distant evolutionary cousins, the insects.
I drove down to the hardware store the other day and noticed that a bee was trapped in the car with me. I let it out, but the freedom I gave it was an unhappy one. That bee was doomed to die in separation from the protection of its own hive, and any other hive would only see it as an invader. Too far and disoriented to ever make it home, it would die an intrusive outcast to its own species. Bee destiny can be cruel too.
Human culture is not so instinctively locked as bee culture (I hope), but our history is full of such displacement and isolation. The Jews lost Jerusalem, lost all of Israel in 73 A.D. and were doomed to wander the Earth as outsiders to every culture with which they lived for nearly 2,000 years, homeless, hated aliens. What is this thing we call culture, and why does it have such power?
There is a distinct and huge difference between humans and our tiny, six-legged brethren. Bee hives in New England and termite mounds in Africa operate fundamentally the same as they did 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago. If I stepped back 100 years, I could fit in with some effort, but to step back to 1692 would be impossible. The cultural differences would make me completely un-integratable. Step back 1,000 years, or 1,000,000 years and forget about it.
Culture for humans is both solid and fluid—it impacts with the force of a solid, but it also bends and flexes with the fluidity of a river. It has always been this way (we trade, we intermarry, we war), but this melting and mixing is accelerating at an exponential pace. The walls of geography and tradition are disappearing as the Scientific and Information Revolutions make the world smaller and smaller, less and less mysterious. Those strange and mysterious far easterners aren't convenient and manageable stereotypes anymore, they are coworkers.
A dichotomy exists within human culture that cannot exist within animal culture. You cannot separate the bee from the hive. The individual and the collective are one. Humans transcend this structure.
Consciousness. Our human self-awareness is a flame that does not burn anywhere else within the animal kingdom, a heat that melts the solidity of the hive, softens the leaden collective and allows us to flow. It is the thing that allows us to rise up and look back down at the honeycomb and notice it, conceive of it, think beyond it, accept it, reject it, embrace it, ignore it. We can kill the outsider just as easily as we can invite him to dinner.
Here is the nature of my underestimating culture—even though I routinely choose to rise above the constructs of my culture, it routinely pulls me back inside. I am like that electron, zooming around noticing stuff. Sometimes I am here, visible, streaking, sometimes I am gone, but always I am somewhere around the dense nucleus of my culture—my family, my church, my town, my country. I can notice it, conceive of it, think beyond it, accept it, reject it, embrace it, ignore it, I can even escape it with much effort, but it exerts force on me, it binds me, it influences me, it draws me back. What is this thing, and why does it matter to me? More importantly, how do I resolve within this force, and how does it affect how I resolve?
Invention
First and foremost, the varieties of human culture are purely human invention. The human culture in which you exist now only exists within your consciousness here and now in this temporal moment of time. It was invented by you and others around you, and when you die it will die with you.
Any given culture is not a natural thing, like an element on the periodic table or termite mounds, universal and unchangeable. As the world changes, so culture within your consciousness changes in order to continuously provide useful meaning; it is a tool we constantly reinvent to give meaning to what constantly changes. Japanese culture in 2008 is different than Japanese culture in 1938.
Humans are wonderfully creative, and we use this creativity all the time to build meaning around the baffling complexity of our universe. Some of that wells up inside us as music, then comes spilling out as percussion, rhythm, melody, verse, chorus, harmony, sung and hummed together, cherished, recorded, passed down. Some of it provides names and shapes to the mystery of creation, the terror of destruction, and the meaning of existence. Culture is the shovel we continuously invent to move this mess around. The moment we cease to exist, so does our particular brand of culture. Cultures have gone extinct through the centuries just as readily as anything else.
Hierarchical
Culture is all about structured organization. It’s all about filtering the inputs of the world so they have meaning, so those inputs can be more quickly acted upon, so they can be absorbed and understood by self within a context that makes the information more readily meaningful. This does not mean that the meaningfulness of the input is “true” or “false”, only that it is more readily exploitable. For instance, if I am a Muslim Fascist, I don't simply see the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City as an act of terror, of cowardice, cruelty and horror (e.g. through an American, or Western cultural, or a civilized filter); the incident is filtered by my cultural world view, and the sight of the towers burning and crashing to the ground is a vision of bravery and sacrifice. To the Muslim Fascist there were only 11 people who died on September 11th, 2001. All the rest were soulless infidel meat. That's culture in action.
It works like this.
Three things in this structure are constant for all cultures—I is the green center, various levels and flavors of “US” surrounds "I", and we are surrounded by that dangerous and mysterious red ring of "THEM." Everything is variable in the US layer-—the number of inner circles between I and THEM, what each circle represents, how thick each layer is, how permeable each layer is, and especially how permeable the US layer is. “US” and “THEM” are natural and ancient and instinctual. Bees are all about US and THEM. There is no higher, global, all inclusive “WE” in the world of bees.
The hierarchies are also a matter of scale. US and THEM applies to family, (sister and non-sister (everyone else)), and replicates at every level you move up in multiple directions. For instance—-my family vs. not my family; my neighborhood vs. not my neighborhood; my town vs. not my town; my state vs. not my state; my country vs. not my country; I, me mine vs. everything not I, me, mine. We view ourselves relationally within the universe-—we are at the center surrounded (preferably) with what makes us safe. This is the central dynamic of Self-to-Other-—somehow I need to relate to you.
Divisive
Division is safety. People are dangerous, and I need to protect myself. The self is wrapped in layers that increase in density, and the increased density provides protection. The layers around me act as filters, not only affixing meaning to inputs as they approach the core self, but also allowing that input to only come as close as I perceive as a reasonably safe distance. In this regard, culture is like a blanket that we use for protection, and this mechanism makes culture incredibly important to us. Like all creatures that can respond to their surroundings, we gravitate towards what feeds us and we pull away from what hurts us. It is in this context that the layers between I and THEM become US.
Culture becomes the defining filter system that weeds out the danger and draws in the nourishment.
Because culture is closely associated with what makes us "US", it takes on a life of its own. Because we draw our life from this US, it must therefore be full of Life that can be drawn. I feel safe in my house for many reasons-—locks on the doors, rules for my home, expectations as to my role and the roles of my family members. All of these things combined allow me to sleep safely at night. Whatever unknowns are out there, they are safely locked outside the walls of US.
Subjective
There is no such thing as collective objectivity. There is no socio-cultural embodiment of a peoples' past, present and future. If this was so, then we would not have choice, we would not have our uniquely subjective ability to choose our destiny. Because we have this freedom, culture is necessarily a thing of the moment. If you take a baby girl from China and raise her in America, she will absorb the collective beliefs, preferences, filters and tools used in America to organize, prioritize, understand and manipulate the world around her. Chinese culture will be, to her, an alien platform. If she goes back to China she will only have the cultural context to relate to little more than the similarity of body features.
Is this alienation from her Chinese roots a bad thing? It depends on how you want to slice up the cultural pie. She has a culture, it's just not temporal 2008 Chinese culture. “But she should be with her own people”, a Chinese nationalist may argue. But she is with her own people, other human beings. How do you dice it? If you want to define her “people” by the color of her skin and the shape of her eyes, then so be it. But be aware that her heart could be transplanted into the chest of an African boy. Where is the line between nationalism and racism? When does the act of protecting one's culture become an act of mere bigotry?
Consider your own community. At what point do your neighbors draw the lines between their collective similarities and their individual differences? The color of their skin, the smell of their cooking, the sounds of their music and accents, the texture of their hair? If these things get in our way, what then makes us a good neighbor, a Good Samaritan? Blindness? The loss of hearing, taste, smell, and feeling? Losing all of these is death. We can only come together when we resolve from within our collective that the collective is not as important as others around us. That Chinese girl is more important the Chinese culture's obsession with only having male children. The Jews were more important that the Nazi culture of racism and violence that tried to exterminate them. As a race we can only come together when we chose to shed the differences (color, texture, rhythm) and embrace the similarities (hunger, love, self).
Manipulative
Every community is a kind of cultural collective. Community is, at a minimum, self plus one other. Every community has its own set of rules, it's framework that makes meaningful the events happening within and to the community. This accumulated communal framework is a cultural collective, or simply a collective. Each family within a community, and even each member within each family, is both a part of and separate from the larger community collectives that surround and infuse them—-work collectives, religious collectives, neighborhood collectives, friend collectives, nationality of origin collectives, “race” collectives, class collectives, gender collectives, body type collectives, etc ad infinitum collectives. These associations drive us, define us, exert influence on our decisions every second of every day, and yet they are an illusory force. I agree to learn and follow the rules for work, but I don't have to. I have simply agreed to follow them. If I break the rules, I pay a price, but the ability to break the rules is there. If the price is high (say, my life) and the punishment is defined and enforced (others in the collective will follow through on the punishment), then suffering the results of my decision is the decision I make. The force is an abstraction, agreed to on mutual consent from within the collective, but it is not immutable law. The force changes with the times. Teenage pregnancy of unmarried girls used to be shameful in Western Culture, but now it is viewed as just another kind of "normal" to the point that some girls plan on getting pregnant to fit in. The force is illusory and abstract, but it is powerful.
Catalytic
Because culture is an invented, subjective, organized and divisive abstraction it is necessarily volatile and catalytic. Culture can change dramatically, explosively in one generation. The chain of 100 generations of tradition can be snipped and ended in a single generation. Consider the Mayans. They had a culture that thrived for 1,000 years that was ended in a few years by invasion and disease. Times change.
Culture is not a force of stability, it is a force of catalysis. Because humans learn, cultures modify. Because humans move, cultures combine, compound, transform, mutate. To be a Latina in 2008 is different than it was in 1908 and different still in 1808. But it was more similar between 1808 and 1908 than it is from 1908 to 2008. The reason is that the mixing and mutating and changing are hyper-accelerating. As information and people mix more and more widely, the layers that surround us become more and more diluted with different perspectives. The very encasing of culture starts to swirl around us like multicolored clouds. As the world shrinks culture becomes less an exercise in “Who am I” and more an exercise in “Who am I becoming”. This is the chemistry of the inner rings, but what of the outer layer? Friction.
As society becomes more and more globally integrated, there is a kind of cultural super-charging that occurs. Tension builds between “Who am I” and “Who am I becoming” as the layer of US gets thinner and thinner, as the layer of Them gets thicker and heavier. The various prejudices and beliefs passed from generation to generation are challenged, changed, abandoned. As the outer rings of culture collide the friction heats up that was once a comfortably warm, safe center. The comfortable boundaries of time and space deteriorate as we can now see and feel and smell and touch those dangerous THEMs who were before simply part of the distant abstraction. In the heat things start to change, they start to melt, to absorb and breakdown. The very structures that once kept us warm--common love, joy, laughter, song, language-—start to burn.
For the most part it is the good things, the things that nourish us that most readily get passed down through time. Survival is the closest thing to a filter for the system that there is, but in truth there is really no filter system for the filter system. Either a culture survives, warts and all, or it dies, beauty and all. Good bye Athens, hello Sparta.
Thinner
The world is shrinking. What was once hard and fast meaning is becoming unmeaning as I way them against the myriad of perspectives I am bombarded with every day. I find that the legends and myths told to me by my parents are exactly that—legends and myths. The magic fades. What was once ME and US surrounded by a distant THEM becomes an uneasy, scary WE. The walls are getting thinner, I can hear the neighbors, and they sound more and more like me. Like drops of oil on water, we are floating nearer and nearer to each other as the pool shrinks, as the curse of Babel is reversed. We bump up against each other and the membranes shudder for a moment, then disappear was we bleed together.
In the end, culture is a decision
Culture is a beast that protects, but it also destroys. It creates the illusion that humans are so many locusts, a cloud that swoops down and devours the land, driven by patriotism or religious fervor, but in reality we are not driven by the beast if we choose not to be. All too easily we try to hide under the blanket of culture, disappear in the cloud of bugs, vanish in the ripples of oil, but we can't. At the end of it all we are faced with decisions, and we are held accountable for those decisions. The guards at Auschwitz tried to hide under the blanket of the Nazi culture of fear and obedience, but in the end they were held accountable for their actions and paid with their lives. In the end we all are accountable. Unlike the locust, unlike the oil that obeys the immutable laws of physics, we choose. You are one self, and once you are done living your life, when you are laid into the grave, the security blanket of culture will not keep you warm.
It wasn't long before some Jews showed up from Judea insisting that everyone be circumcised: "If you're not circumcised in the Mosaic fashion [e.g. The Laws of Moses], you can't be saved." Paul and Barnabas were up on their feet at once in fierce protest. The church decided to resolve the matter by sending Paul, Barnabas, and a few others to put it before the apostles and leaders in Jerusalem. After they were sent off and on their way, they told everyone they met as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria about the breakthrough to the non-Jewish outsiders. Everyone who heard the news cheered—it was terrific news!
When they got to Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas were graciously received by the whole church, including the apostles and leaders. They reported on their recent journey and how God had used them to open things up to the outsiders. Some Pharisees stood up to say their piece. They had become believers, but continued to hold to the hard party line of the Pharisees. "You have to circumcise the pagan converts," they said. "You must make them keep the Law of Moses."
The apostles and leaders called a special meeting to consider the matter. The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated. Then Peter took the floor: "Friends, you well know that from early on God made it quite plain that he wanted the pagans to hear the Message of this good news and embrace it—and not in any secondhand or roundabout way, but firsthand, straight from my mouth. And God, who can't be fooled by any pretense on our part but always knows a person's thoughts, gave them the Holy Spirit exactly as he gave him to us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us, beginning at the very center of which they were and working from that center outward, cleaning up their lives as they trusted and believed him.
"So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too? Don't we believe that we are saved because the Master Jesus amazingly and out of sheer generosity moved to save us just as he did those from beyond our nation? So what are we arguing about?"
There was dead silence. No one said a word. With the room quiet, Barnabas and Paul reported matter-of-factly on the miracles and wonders God had done among the other nations through their ministry. The silence deepened; you could hear a pin drop.
James [the younger son of Mary, the bother of Jesus] broke the silence. "Friends, listen. Simeon has told us the story of how God at the very outset made sure that racial outsiders were included. This is in perfect agreement with the words of the prophets:
.....After this, I'm coming back; everyone
..........I'll rebuild David's ruined house;
.....I'll put all the pieces together again;
..........I'll make it look like new
.....So outsiders who seek will find,
..........so they'll have a place to come to,
.....All the pagan peoples
..........included in what I'm doing.
"God said it and now he's doing it. It's no afterthought; he's always known he would do this.”
................Acts 15:1-18 (The Message)
_____________________________________________________________
| The long and short of it.... Culture is a tool, invented by people to make sense of their world. It is highly structured, divisive, subjective, manipulative, volatile, catalytic and shrinking all the time. Culture is a function of humanity, yet we often act as if humanity is a function of culture. |
The Hive
Culture is powerful. Originally I thought of culture as a layer used to process and categorize reality, a way to relate to others quickly and easily while holding tightly on to our own sense of accumulated identity. It's something much more elemental and powerful than this, though. Culture is not the accumulated body of traditions and beliefs that make a people unique among other peoples, but rather it is the need for that collective identity that is ingrained within us, perhaps down to the DNA level. This need to belong to a pack of others like us in some way, any way (even in invented ways) shapes and defines how we think of ourselves and influences our every decision. It is this relationship of self TO others in a relative sense that binds us. We are not merely a singularity but we are rather part of a collective. Perhaps this hearkens back to our distant evolutionary cousins, the insects.
I drove down to the hardware store the other day and noticed that a bee was trapped in the car with me. I let it out, but the freedom I gave it was an unhappy one. That bee was doomed to die in separation from the protection of its own hive, and any other hive would only see it as an invader. Too far and disoriented to ever make it home, it would die an intrusive outcast to its own species. Bee destiny can be cruel too.
Human culture is not so instinctively locked as bee culture (I hope), but our history is full of such displacement and isolation. The Jews lost Jerusalem, lost all of Israel in 73 A.D. and were doomed to wander the Earth as outsiders to every culture with which they lived for nearly 2,000 years, homeless, hated aliens. What is this thing we call culture, and why does it have such power?
There is a distinct and huge difference between humans and our tiny, six-legged brethren. Bee hives in New England and termite mounds in Africa operate fundamentally the same as they did 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago. If I stepped back 100 years, I could fit in with some effort, but to step back to 1692 would be impossible. The cultural differences would make me completely un-integratable. Step back 1,000 years, or 1,000,000 years and forget about it.
Culture for humans is both solid and fluid—it impacts with the force of a solid, but it also bends and flexes with the fluidity of a river. It has always been this way (we trade, we intermarry, we war), but this melting and mixing is accelerating at an exponential pace. The walls of geography and tradition are disappearing as the Scientific and Information Revolutions make the world smaller and smaller, less and less mysterious. Those strange and mysterious far easterners aren't convenient and manageable stereotypes anymore, they are coworkers.
A dichotomy exists within human culture that cannot exist within animal culture. You cannot separate the bee from the hive. The individual and the collective are one. Humans transcend this structure.
| Though it can be a struggle, we can transcend our culture. We can choose to respond to outsiders irrespective of the programmed response of the hive. I can choose to move to another culture, and the other culture can choose to accept me, and herein lies the difference between mankind and every other social creature on Earth—we have choice, animals do not; I can move to India and survive, but the bee dies if it is carried away to far from the hive. |
Here is the nature of my underestimating culture—even though I routinely choose to rise above the constructs of my culture, it routinely pulls me back inside. I am like that electron, zooming around noticing stuff. Sometimes I am here, visible, streaking, sometimes I am gone, but always I am somewhere around the dense nucleus of my culture—my family, my church, my town, my country. I can notice it, conceive of it, think beyond it, accept it, reject it, embrace it, ignore it, I can even escape it with much effort, but it exerts force on me, it binds me, it influences me, it draws me back. What is this thing, and why does it matter to me? More importantly, how do I resolve within this force, and how does it affect how I resolve?
Invention
First and foremost, the varieties of human culture are purely human invention. The human culture in which you exist now only exists within your consciousness here and now in this temporal moment of time. It was invented by you and others around you, and when you die it will die with you.
Any given culture is not a natural thing, like an element on the periodic table or termite mounds, universal and unchangeable. As the world changes, so culture within your consciousness changes in order to continuously provide useful meaning; it is a tool we constantly reinvent to give meaning to what constantly changes. Japanese culture in 2008 is different than Japanese culture in 1938.
Humans are wonderfully creative, and we use this creativity all the time to build meaning around the baffling complexity of our universe. Some of that wells up inside us as music, then comes spilling out as percussion, rhythm, melody, verse, chorus, harmony, sung and hummed together, cherished, recorded, passed down. Some of it provides names and shapes to the mystery of creation, the terror of destruction, and the meaning of existence. Culture is the shovel we continuously invent to move this mess around. The moment we cease to exist, so does our particular brand of culture. Cultures have gone extinct through the centuries just as readily as anything else.
Hierarchical
Culture is all about structured organization. It’s all about filtering the inputs of the world so they have meaning, so those inputs can be more quickly acted upon, so they can be absorbed and understood by self within a context that makes the information more readily meaningful. This does not mean that the meaningfulness of the input is “true” or “false”, only that it is more readily exploitable. For instance, if I am a Muslim Fascist, I don't simply see the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City as an act of terror, of cowardice, cruelty and horror (e.g. through an American, or Western cultural, or a civilized filter); the incident is filtered by my cultural world view, and the sight of the towers burning and crashing to the ground is a vision of bravery and sacrifice. To the Muslim Fascist there were only 11 people who died on September 11th, 2001. All the rest were soulless infidel meat. That's culture in action.
It works like this.
Three things in this structure are constant for all cultures—I is the green center, various levels and flavors of “US” surrounds "I", and we are surrounded by that dangerous and mysterious red ring of "THEM." Everything is variable in the US layer-—the number of inner circles between I and THEM, what each circle represents, how thick each layer is, how permeable each layer is, and especially how permeable the US layer is. “US” and “THEM” are natural and ancient and instinctual. Bees are all about US and THEM. There is no higher, global, all inclusive “WE” in the world of bees.The hierarchies are also a matter of scale. US and THEM applies to family, (sister and non-sister (everyone else)), and replicates at every level you move up in multiple directions. For instance—-my family vs. not my family; my neighborhood vs. not my neighborhood; my town vs. not my town; my state vs. not my state; my country vs. not my country; I, me mine vs. everything not I, me, mine. We view ourselves relationally within the universe-—we are at the center surrounded (preferably) with what makes us safe. This is the central dynamic of Self-to-Other-—somehow I need to relate to you.
Divisive
Division is safety. People are dangerous, and I need to protect myself. The self is wrapped in layers that increase in density, and the increased density provides protection. The layers around me act as filters, not only affixing meaning to inputs as they approach the core self, but also allowing that input to only come as close as I perceive as a reasonably safe distance. In this regard, culture is like a blanket that we use for protection, and this mechanism makes culture incredibly important to us. Like all creatures that can respond to their surroundings, we gravitate towards what feeds us and we pull away from what hurts us. It is in this context that the layers between I and THEM become US.
Culture becomes the defining filter system that weeds out the danger and draws in the nourishment.Because culture is closely associated with what makes us "US", it takes on a life of its own. Because we draw our life from this US, it must therefore be full of Life that can be drawn. I feel safe in my house for many reasons-—locks on the doors, rules for my home, expectations as to my role and the roles of my family members. All of these things combined allow me to sleep safely at night. Whatever unknowns are out there, they are safely locked outside the walls of US.
Subjective
There is no such thing as collective objectivity. There is no socio-cultural embodiment of a peoples' past, present and future. If this was so, then we would not have choice, we would not have our uniquely subjective ability to choose our destiny. Because we have this freedom, culture is necessarily a thing of the moment. If you take a baby girl from China and raise her in America, she will absorb the collective beliefs, preferences, filters and tools used in America to organize, prioritize, understand and manipulate the world around her. Chinese culture will be, to her, an alien platform. If she goes back to China she will only have the cultural context to relate to little more than the similarity of body features.
Is this alienation from her Chinese roots a bad thing? It depends on how you want to slice up the cultural pie. She has a culture, it's just not temporal 2008 Chinese culture. “But she should be with her own people”, a Chinese nationalist may argue. But she is with her own people, other human beings. How do you dice it? If you want to define her “people” by the color of her skin and the shape of her eyes, then so be it. But be aware that her heart could be transplanted into the chest of an African boy. Where is the line between nationalism and racism? When does the act of protecting one's culture become an act of mere bigotry?
Consider your own community. At what point do your neighbors draw the lines between their collective similarities and their individual differences? The color of their skin, the smell of their cooking, the sounds of their music and accents, the texture of their hair? If these things get in our way, what then makes us a good neighbor, a Good Samaritan? Blindness? The loss of hearing, taste, smell, and feeling? Losing all of these is death. We can only come together when we resolve from within our collective that the collective is not as important as others around us. That Chinese girl is more important the Chinese culture's obsession with only having male children. The Jews were more important that the Nazi culture of racism and violence that tried to exterminate them. As a race we can only come together when we chose to shed the differences (color, texture, rhythm) and embrace the similarities (hunger, love, self).
Manipulative
Every community is a kind of cultural collective. Community is, at a minimum, self plus one other. Every community has its own set of rules, it's framework that makes meaningful the events happening within and to the community. This accumulated communal framework is a cultural collective, or simply a collective. Each family within a community, and even each member within each family, is both a part of and separate from the larger community collectives that surround and infuse them—-work collectives, religious collectives, neighborhood collectives, friend collectives, nationality of origin collectives, “race” collectives, class collectives, gender collectives, body type collectives, etc ad infinitum collectives. These associations drive us, define us, exert influence on our decisions every second of every day, and yet they are an illusory force. I agree to learn and follow the rules for work, but I don't have to. I have simply agreed to follow them. If I break the rules, I pay a price, but the ability to break the rules is there. If the price is high (say, my life) and the punishment is defined and enforced (others in the collective will follow through on the punishment), then suffering the results of my decision is the decision I make. The force is an abstraction, agreed to on mutual consent from within the collective, but it is not immutable law. The force changes with the times. Teenage pregnancy of unmarried girls used to be shameful in Western Culture, but now it is viewed as just another kind of "normal" to the point that some girls plan on getting pregnant to fit in. The force is illusory and abstract, but it is powerful.
Catalytic
Because culture is an invented, subjective, organized and divisive abstraction it is necessarily volatile and catalytic. Culture can change dramatically, explosively in one generation. The chain of 100 generations of tradition can be snipped and ended in a single generation. Consider the Mayans. They had a culture that thrived for 1,000 years that was ended in a few years by invasion and disease. Times change.
Culture is not a force of stability, it is a force of catalysis. Because humans learn, cultures modify. Because humans move, cultures combine, compound, transform, mutate. To be a Latina in 2008 is different than it was in 1908 and different still in 1808. But it was more similar between 1808 and 1908 than it is from 1908 to 2008. The reason is that the mixing and mutating and changing are hyper-accelerating. As information and people mix more and more widely, the layers that surround us become more and more diluted with different perspectives. The very encasing of culture starts to swirl around us like multicolored clouds. As the world shrinks culture becomes less an exercise in “Who am I” and more an exercise in “Who am I becoming”. This is the chemistry of the inner rings, but what of the outer layer? Friction.
As society becomes more and more globally integrated, there is a kind of cultural super-charging that occurs. Tension builds between “Who am I” and “Who am I becoming” as the layer of US gets thinner and thinner, as the layer of Them gets thicker and heavier. The various prejudices and beliefs passed from generation to generation are challenged, changed, abandoned. As the outer rings of culture collide the friction heats up that was once a comfortably warm, safe center. The comfortable boundaries of time and space deteriorate as we can now see and feel and smell and touch those dangerous THEMs who were before simply part of the distant abstraction. In the heat things start to change, they start to melt, to absorb and breakdown. The very structures that once kept us warm--common love, joy, laughter, song, language-—start to burn.
For the most part it is the good things, the things that nourish us that most readily get passed down through time. Survival is the closest thing to a filter for the system that there is, but in truth there is really no filter system for the filter system. Either a culture survives, warts and all, or it dies, beauty and all. Good bye Athens, hello Sparta.
Thinner
The world is shrinking. What was once hard and fast meaning is becoming unmeaning as I way them against the myriad of perspectives I am bombarded with every day. I find that the legends and myths told to me by my parents are exactly that—legends and myths. The magic fades. What was once ME and US surrounded by a distant THEM becomes an uneasy, scary WE. The walls are getting thinner, I can hear the neighbors, and they sound more and more like me. Like drops of oil on water, we are floating nearer and nearer to each other as the pool shrinks, as the curse of Babel is reversed. We bump up against each other and the membranes shudder for a moment, then disappear was we bleed together.
In the end, culture is a decision
Culture is a beast that protects, but it also destroys. It creates the illusion that humans are so many locusts, a cloud that swoops down and devours the land, driven by patriotism or religious fervor, but in reality we are not driven by the beast if we choose not to be. All too easily we try to hide under the blanket of culture, disappear in the cloud of bugs, vanish in the ripples of oil, but we can't. At the end of it all we are faced with decisions, and we are held accountable for those decisions. The guards at Auschwitz tried to hide under the blanket of the Nazi culture of fear and obedience, but in the end they were held accountable for their actions and paid with their lives. In the end we all are accountable. Unlike the locust, unlike the oil that obeys the immutable laws of physics, we choose. You are one self, and once you are done living your life, when you are laid into the grave, the security blanket of culture will not keep you warm.
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