Culture

I would like to say someething about multi-culturalism.

Most of my friends and acquaintances who consider themselves multi-culturalists really aren't. For them, multiculturalism means that they have a prejudiced affinity for non-dominant cultures. Thus, it becomes okay to decry ones OWN culture, but not okay to be negative about Other cultures. It's sort of this extremist disconnected patriotism, and has all of the faults of a normal excessivepatriotism, just displaced and transferred onto Other cultures.

Eastern philosophies and South American/African tribalism seem to be quite appealing, especially aesthetically, to a lot of liberally types. But if you start talking Nascar hamburgers SUVs etc., they become offended, angry, and may even use the word 'evil,' especially if you mention Bush. These people have a massive gap in their understanding: What they don't realize is that they are experiencing a cultural dissonance, a cultural distance. They are condemning and judging members of another culture just as much as Fred's "those habibs are all the same" girlfriends. The thing is, I usually agree with them. There's a lot wrong with that, shall we say, mainstream Southern american culture, or mainstream American pop culture. But there are also a ton of things wrong with a lot of Other cultures, be they Islamic or African or Asian or tribal or cultist...We have JUST AS MUCH right to denounce the practices and perversions of those cultures as we do have a right to lambast lazy Deliverance-creepy idjuts.

So let us move forward, understanding that ALL cultures have their particular deficiencies, their debaucheries, their defects, though some may have more than others. And let us remember that the most important thing about changing or improving the defects within a culture (and I believe this should be the mission of all of humanity...either our own culture, or, yes, other cultures) is to understand that culture as deeply as possible. This is why it's usually not an intelligent thing to get involved with changing other cultures unless there is a drastic need to, and when we do, we need to approach these situations with as much care, caution, and understanding as possible. This is obviously about Iraq, in some sense. Yes, Western Democracy is a far superior government and culture to theocratic dictatorships, fundamentalist Islam, and most forms of Communism. And 'spreading democracy' should be something that we are interested in, it should be one aspect of our mission to improve humanity. Obviously, however, spreading democracy must be done in a manner that takes into account how democracy will interact with and be accepted by a certain culture. War usually isn't the best way to do this. I remember the Repubs had a commercial during the elections about how (I don't know the exact number) there had been 100-some new democracies formed since 1978 (or some similar year...) And then went on to brag about how we'd added Afghanistan and Iraq to that list. But, last I checked, we didn't go to war with those other 100+ countries who became democratic. Good ol' Pope John Paul did a lot more to spread democracy than this president will ever know how to. He's also on my hat. My hat rules.

Of course, we didn't go to war to spread democracy. That's why we're there now, but it's not why went. That's a whole other bag o' worms. Die worms, Die.

I don't mean to get on a three-year-old tirade about Iraq. I was hoping to use it as a specific example of a larger idea to do with culture. More importantly for us as individual people who don't make massive decisions that affect the lives of incredible numbers of people on this planet, we need to think intelligently about that which is good in a culture and that which is not, and take upon ourselves that which is good, and disrobe ourselves of that which is not. Now, of course, we need some basic underlying system of defining what is Good, but I think at the bottom of all of this are basic assumptions: love better than non-love, joy better than non-joy, sincerity better than non-sincerity, being better than non-being, harmony better than disunity, freedom better than oppression, and on and on, something coming from a mixture of Christian surrealism and Buddhist Logic. The problem most people have is that they are used to strict, dogmatic, Ethics-less definitions of these terms, and so they become hyper-relativistic and slippery-slope-tastic. "well, maybe if someone's sincere that'll hurt someone else, and hurt is worse than non-hurt, so it all comes tumbling down into a vast abyss of meaninglessness I need cry. Who's to say what 'good' is"

I Am. Bitch.

Perhaps the most frequent objection that people have is the diversity/unity connundrum. If we define unity as good, then we'll be like Hitler, forcing everyone to be the same and killing Jews and gays and gyspies. Well, no. Unity is good. Killing people shows a lot of disunity, but let's move beyond that. Here, let's say we have to sacrifice 50000 babies to gain perfect cultural unity. which doesn't mean sameness, by the way, but tends to be helped by sameness. Well, we have to realize that killing 50000 innocent babies is bad, and probably not worth gaining a leg or two up on vague 'unity' concepts.

what a bad analogy. Maybe a a discussion I've had with non-existent girlfriends in my head from time to time will illustrate my point better about loyalties.

I want to meet up with a long lost friend who's only in town for one day, and then he's going to go back to Mongolia where he will die of cancer within the next year. My girlfriend wants me to stay home to watch an episode of the
OC and transcribe it. I say "sorry, hun, I'm going to go see my friend.' She says 'that means that you are more loyal to him than you are to me...that means he's more important to you than I am.' No, says I. Seeing him once more before he dies is more important to me than your OC transcription.

See why 'absolute loyalty', to a girl or a moral, is dumb? Obviously, I'm not advocating cheating. Why'd you even think that? I guess because 'loyalty' somehow gets caught up with sex within the context of relationships. But it gives us another example: Which is more important, having sex with your highschool girlfriend, or keeping your sexual relationship with your wife pure and sacred, and keeping yourself from guilt, and keeping her from hurt? Obviously, that second list wins out if we are thinking reasonably. Now, your ex-girlfried from highschool will say 'aren't you loyal to me? Don't you like me? If we're friends, you should give me what I want.' But then you'd say 'you're an idiot,' and go and masturbate, because she's still hot. And your penis might get angry at you, and say 'but daddy, I wanted to go back to that place we went on vacation 7 years ago, it was nice and warm and smooth, and going back will have the comfort of being home mixed with the excitement of travel. please, please, please...' And you'll say, to your penis, 'no, little fred, being faithful to my wife is more important than meeting your desires.'

I think one of the Main deficiencies of our school system, culture, and politics, is that we have ceased to be ethicists. We are mostly all moralists. We do not weigh loyalties, we do not consider consequences, we do not recognize that inherent to trying to find goodness will be times when one good is in conflict with another. Sex with ex-girlfriend may be good, but it comes up sharply against a more important good of faithfulness to wife, or, in my case, faithfulness to mental-health and the linguistics of physical interaction.

We have become lazy, and only stick to our moral guns, believing in a black-and-white universe. Even the Lefties do this much of the time. There is no place for reason in these debates, no place for consideration or discussion. We are either pro-environment OR pro-business, pro-health-food or fat-angry-Americans...We approach a particular issue with an idea pre-set in our minds, seeking to take the factual knowledge therein to use it to fit our pre-decided side. Notice that I use the word 'we' in this paragraph to try to even out the unintended arrogance coming from the use of the word 'they' in previous paragraphs.

It's just sad that liberals usually get caught up in the false binaries that they pretend to condemn most of the time. We have lost the Potter Box in our minds. Come back, Potter, come back.

Also, I just read an article about how rudeness is increasing, and it quoted a lot of old people who said that things had gotten ruder. As if it hasn't Always been the case that old people think young people are rude. And, again, this is often due to a difference in culture. 'rudeness' on a general level is often the clash between cultures. The problem with where we are in human history is that cultures are not nearly as static or segregated as they used to be. We are a huge mish-mash of people from different backgrounds who grew up in COMPLETELY different times. Used to be that the world a ten-year old grew up in was much like the world a 50-year-old grew up in. not so anymore. Not so at all. Salient cultural changes, pushed forward by technology, now happen within 5 or 10 years, and that time-period is increasingly becoming lesser. This means that there are More people interacting with More people who come from a different culture, and so clashes of culture happen more and more frequently. I don't necessarily think this is Such a bad thing, especially if we recognize it and approach every interaction we have with people who come from a different culture as if we were in a foreign country...

My biggest fear, however, (and this is something that has been supported/pushed forward by artists over the past 40 or 50 years) is that we are now so caught up with trying to understand and deal with all of this information and varying cultures that we do not have time effort energy ability to seek the 'still point' as Eliot says, or that which is essential to the human condition, or that which is beautiful or Godly/goodly. Instead, art becomes about the experience of being black or gay or female or male and white or a LANGUAGE poet or it becomes about poetry or about technology or yada yada yada...it ceases to be about being human, or about creating an emotional experience or finding an idea with universal implication. The other problem is that many of these baseline truths were known how to be expressed by certain cultures and with certain languages, but those structures have been abandoned and, in a sense, are inadequate to the times. But we are too dumb to learn from them, and now we don't have the time as a society to reaxch the heights of a certain expression of the human soul or heart or mind or whatever inside of our cultural systems.

People like to chastize the literary canon because it's full of 'dead white men.' This is not only dumb and silly, but stupid and wrong. The canon is the canon, not because those poets were dead white men...that thinking doesn't even come into play. Their poems weren't about being white and male, they were about being Human. And just because some people may not relate directly with the setting, language, and culture within that work immediately, doesn't mean that that work is somehow unimportant to us or has no impact, or isn't Better than most work being produced today.

It is the world of surfaces that we are now dealing with, and it is why things have become so disparate and segregated and either hyper-specific or hyper-not-good: If it does not relate to me and my experience directly, it is somehow not real, or I can not relate to it. This thoughtpath thrives because so much has been Just about those simple surface-level ideas, or about destroying old patterns of being. For the language poets, it's poetry about language, for the marxists, it's poetry about marxism (or viewing all poetry through a marxist lens. Gag me with an ugly rooster) for the School of Quietude, it's about being quiet, for Queer poetry, it's about being queer, for angry white men, it's about being angry white men.. Postmodern bullshit all of it.

My eyes are probably grown red by now. I should sleep. This may just mean that I'm going to walk from my chair to my bed, laptop still in hand. Mmmmmmm. laptop.

it froze today, perhaps from overheating. Has me a little worried that the fan inside is broked.

don't go dyin' on me my brand new beautiful Mac!!!