Paradigm Spectacles - How Culture Affects How You View Other Cultures

 

 And why that's not a bad thing....

 

First a little story to show you what I mean. For about a year our landlords who live across the catwalk from us, hosted a young Chinese exchange student named Kate. She had come to the United States to complete high school and to get a college education. Her father is a physician and helped her get permission to study outside of China. She was a very hard-working student and quite intelligent. She didn't just drop out of Chinese high school. She rejected Chinese high school and chose precisely where she wanted to be educated thanks to a class in Western Lit.

I had the privilege of helping her write her essay that went with her application to NYU so I got to know her story. The fascinating thing about her educational journey was how she came to choose a U.S. education over a Chinese one. She told me that over the years in Chinese elementary, middle school and high school, she had become frustrated with how her teachers taught and evaluated their students. At first she didn't think anything unusual until she took a class in Western Literature - a subject liberal American universities have lately toyed with the idea of eliminating from their curriculuums. Having talked to Kate, I am beginning to see where the "Woke" Inquisition is going with the silencing of opinions not their own. China's politburo is expert at this sort of thought control.

Kate's teachers in Chinese schools taught a series of facts and statements of "acceptable" ideas to students she explained. Tests were all multiple choice and there is only one "correct" answer. In a Western Literature class in one of her schools, Kate learned, while reading the classics of English lit, that there is not just one answer to every question. She discovered she liked open-ended questions. She liked being able to think about a set of facts and come to a conclusion that is the product of her own reason and not the edicts of a group of politicians intent on controlling every aspect of the lives of those they believed they had a right to rule over. 

We experience something called "cognitiive dissonance" when what we know or what we believe clashes with something we're being told. It's a big part of why progressives have such a visceral reaction to conservative ideas and why conservatives don't understand how progressives can be so enamored with socialism when hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of socialist governments during the 20th century.The burgeoning information system has contributed heavily to the fracturing of American and world society into basically two warring camps. The bad news is that it's not likely to get better. 

 

The picture above is of one of those decorative sculpture things you nail to a tree. As you pass by, this one looks like a bear climbing a tree. It's on a tree beside our quarter mile long gravel driveway. You see it on the way out on the road that circles behind our houses. One day Kate noticed our little bear as she was on her way to school. She was puzzled that we Americans would attach an image of a bear to a tree.

Curious she asked my landlady if the little bear were some sort of good luck talisman or some traditional thing Americans practiced. We told Kate, "No, we just thought it was a cute thing to do. Kate told me later she didn't quite understand why Americans would do something like that if it had no meaning. For a Chinese person, from a land steeped in tradition, most things had some sort of ancient tradition behind it. The use of colors, styles of dress, types of poetry, painting techniques, and the preparation of food has ancient history behind all of it. That Americans do things without having any tradition behind them set of a kind of cultural dissonance for her.

American cultural practice, unlike culture driven practices and tradition in nations with long histories, is the product of oura melting pot culture in which the cultural practices from all over the world were promiscuously poured into our new and increasingly blended, uniquely American culture. It took Kate a while to get used to that about Americans. We do all sorts of odd things, some of which has tradition behind it that we liked and adopted (I'm thinking of the breakfast burrito and pizza parties here).  Many of our habits and practices, though, are simply things that we do just because we want to or because we think a thing is fun to do. We saw 'em in the window and bought 'em so to speak.

 Americans have always been cultural appropriators. It's one of our great strengths. Our first Thanksgiving drew the menu from English cuisine and Native American cooking and some stuff the ladies made up from foodstuffs that were available in the new world. In the Southwest United States, the food, music, and cultural practices of Mexico seeped into the culture of the American settles. It's what gave us the glorious Tex-Mex tradition in cooking. Italians gave us pizza and pasta. Greeks gave us gyros and sub sandwiches. The Cajun French gave us Jambalaya and Zydeco. The Irish gave us Boston and the railroads. The Chinese gave us the other half of the railroad, Chinese food and the Americans in a kind of reverse cultural appropriation, gave chow mein back to Chinese food. 

Think of all the wonderful American things we wouldn't have if the recent anti-appropriation thing had happened long ago. Half the stuff I wore back in my hippie days was appropriated from some other culture. I wore moccasins, stars and stripe bell bottoms (patriot/sailor), an Elizabethan poet shirt, a buckskin vest, a sombrero and carrying a banjo. If you had taken away all the culture I was appropriating, I'd have been left naked. Antifa would have me set on fire if I showed up dressed like that on a "woke" college campus in today's Puritanical leftist snowflake culture.

The point is that much of the strife we see in our world is more about clashing cultural paradigms than good versus evil. Not that there isn't good and evil, but much of our instinctive dissonance in our interaction with people we perceive as "other" is more about the fact that it doesn't feel right when we run up against something we are unfamiliar with. We see through the spectacles of our own culture and upbringing. This prism of culture we peer through affects how we see and do a lot of things we do. But sometimes, especially in the American melting pot, the point is, as with this tree "face" in the picture is to startle people walking in your hundred acre woods rather than about some ancient cultural imperative.

To overcome the problems generated by this cognitive dissonance we experience on contact with another culture, we have to do what we Americans have always done when confronting this kind of feeling that something is off in our encounters with other cultures. We see what we like about it and borrow it, weaving it skillfully into the fabric of American life. The more we adopt the best bits and bobs from one another's cultures, I think the better we'll understand each other. 

If we continue in the error of mistaking cultural differences for deliberate evil, we'll only continue to drive a wedge between the left and right, between city people and country folk, between church folk and the unchurched, and between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Americans and everybody else in the world. The good news is that Jesus warned us long ago that mankind would one day be divided into sheep and goats just before time runs out for this world. You can argue all day long about who is in which group, but ultimately, Jesus will come with Earth-shattering suddenness and answer that question once and for all.

 Just one man's opinion.

© 2021 by Tom King