Culture and the Human Condition

My grandparents have been lucky enough to have traveled to various locales all over the world. Never having believed this was something they would have done, they concede that the experience was one of the greatest they've ever had. My parents (and my mother especially), on the other hand, have no desire to venture outside the Midwest. I cannot fault them for being content to live where they are, but their desire to evade any sense of cultural discomfort is somewhat disconcerting. This is to say that my parents don't want to submerge themselves within a culture in which they are uncomfortable (ie. the minority). I think that part of this clear fear of culture shock stems from an inability to understand the ingrained cultural conscience that leads a people to hold different values or to see the world differently than you do. My parents, and many others I sure, can't understand how people who could otherwise be so similar to them can almost unanimously subscribe to a worldview that leads them to see things so differently.

I don't regard anyone with this aversion as wrong. It's only natural to seek out those who hold beliefs similar to one's own. Perhaps that's how we end up with different countries in the first place. But I do think that such an approach is too short sighted. Social animals like humans are inescapably shaped by the culture they grow up in. regardless of the values instilled by one's parents, regardless of the independent thinking done by the individual, people are products of their culture and the philosophies in which they are submerged. When, where, and to whom one is born has a powerful effect on the final product that is the human individual and those beliefs perceived to be simple facts of life by the majority ultimately sculpt the worldview to which a person subscribes, indirectly influencing the decisions they may make in life.

This said, I don't think that a tendency to shy away from cultures whose collective beliefs are different isn't a natural response, but I do believe it to feed into an unhealthy ethnocentrism that only hinders global progress in an ever-increasingly globalized community. The human condition hasn't changed for as long as the species has been around. Islanders in the Philippines 1000 years ago (assuming the islands were there back then) are fundamentally the same as the residents of New York City today -and yet they are very different. How is this reconciled? The human being is a standard-sized canvas, and universally white fro the beginning, but it is the cultural philosophies and ideologies that we grow up in that determines the paint job we get. So, I propose that anyone, under different cultural influences, could hold different views about life had the situation in which they grown up been different. Those Bosnians who see nothing more family-friendly than a day at the nude beach could have turned out just like my parents had they too grown up in the American Midwest. Any canvas on which is a Jackson Pollack could very well have been covered in a Marie Cassat under different conditions.

I find it amazing how pliable humans can be.