Tag Archives: culture

War of the Worldviews

Let’s deal in oversimplifications for this argument. Imagine an extremist Christian man and an extremist Muslim man talking about their beliefs in a living room somewhere. Their discussion grows more and more heated, and, depending on the men’s temperaments, might even come to blows. 

Meanwhile, their wives are in the kitchen, fixing tea and a snack. Are they discussing religion? Most likely not. They’re talking about men, maybe even about the challenges of living with true believers. The men in the living room are fussing. The women are laughing. The real difference in this (terribly stereotyped) scenario, I respectfully submit, is not between the Muslim couple and the Christian couple, but between the men and the women. 

Any time you try to talk about culture you are forced to generalize. If you constantly qualify your projections by acknowledging the wide spectrum of behavior in any one culture, you can’t reach any conclusions at all besides the fact that people are strange, which holds true everywhere. When it comes to human behavior, there are more exceptions than rules.

In general, though, there are two cultures in conflict in the world today. One is dominant, but unstable. The guardians of this culture tend to be “alpha males,” that is, men with a need to be on top of their worlds, who are aggressive, self-centered, ambitious, and willing to resort to violence. This culture has encouraged certain kinds of material progress but results in constant struggle and increasing divides between haves and have-nots. 

The other culture is submissive but stable. This culture is maintained and propagated mostly by women. It is other-centered, conciliatory, patient, and prevents or tamps down violence wherever possible. This culture keeps the human world going, for without it, the dominant culture would tear everything apart.

I’m going to call the dominant culture male, though it includes many biological females. I’ll call the complementary culture female, though it includes many biological males. There is no question about which culture is uppermost today. Anywhere you find hierarchy, whether in a capitalist, nominally communist, or oligarchic society, the male culture rules. Wherever you find egalitarianism, cooperation, and collaboration, the female culture is in charge.

Not every society in history has been ruled by alpha males. Sophisticated justice systems; decisions by councils of elders; inclusive mores that provide for and protect society’s outliers; peaceful agrarian societies: all of these indicate the primary influences of women’s culture.

On the other hand, violence; the heedless destruction of human and other natural resources; the oppression of the lower classes: all these are sure signs that the male culture is running the show. 

Clearly women’s culture evolved around the need to protect children from men’s aggression. If some sector of society did not propagate the values of caregiving, altruism, and sharing, that society would not survive two generations. 

In a world of many languages, where communication was difficult, male culture evolved to settle disputes through physical violence. It would be up to the males whether a tribe’s territory expanded or contracted. The more territory, the more access to game, water, and fuel, the better the tribe’s chances of survival. If you see the world as belonging to “us” or “them”, you want the biggest, baddest guys on your side. 

Our world today hangs in the balance in more ways than one. Scientists tell us that our behavior over the next decade or so will determine whether global climate change continues at a pace likely to doom our (and most other) species, or whether it will moderate to a manageable level. Nuclear proliferation proceeds at a rate where unstable regimes and non-state actors have access to weapons that could render the planet uninhabitable except by cockroaches and rats. Water pollution and over-use is at the point of making entire countries vulnerable to death by disease or famine.

Whether our species survives these crises depends upon another balance: the balance between male and female culture. Male culture has ruled, nearly planet-wide, for centuries, cementing its hold though tyrannies and then through the spread of capitalism, which values and rewards selfishness, aggression, and greed. But the destruction that attends these values is catching up with us. More and more people realize that we could very well do ourselves in if we continue on our current path. 

Meanwhile, female culture has begun to strengthen in ways unimaginable a century ago. Women’s liberation has barely begun, but its effects are threatening male dominance in every society. Some ancient techniques (violence against women and LGBTQ people, veiling, double standards on sexual experience) and some new ones (high heels, sexualization of younger and younger women, co-optation of women leaders) work against women’s rise, but the trend continues. Women have gotten the idea that they should participate fully in public life, and they are insisting on their right to do so. What has given this idea such strength and persistence?

I believe that deep in our collective unconscious, we know that women’s culture must assume dominance if humanity is to survive. We must stop hurting one another and start taking care of one another; we must stop wasting resources, and learn to conserve; we must clean up the messes we have made; we must stop rewarding greed, and place more value on sharing. Only women’s culture carries the tools and techniques to bring about these changes.

This necessary revolution, which seems so radical, would actually require only a shift in the balance of cultures. We just have to listen more closely to what Jung called the anima, the feminine side of our consciousness. The center in us that corresponds to female culture – the center of nurturing, caring, sustaining values and behaviors – must gain our respect, as it is the key to our species’ survival.

The movement toward women’s liberation arises from the deepest place in ourselves: the part that wants to live, and wants our children to live. Right now, many of the stories we tell ourselves are generated from our fear that survival is not possible. Even though every one of us contains the seeds of a new world, we despair of the possibility that they will grow and thrive.

When we choose our leaders, we should ask ourselves which culture they embody. We need more representatives of female culture to set public policy, whatever their gender. We need more women in positions of power, not because women are that different from men, but because they have been the custodians of the set of values around which our species must reform its behavior.

Those women laughing in the kitchen do not need to come into the living room and argue with the men. No: it’s the men who need to come into the kitchen, drink the tea, eat the cookies, and learn to laugh with the women. 

Intersectionality

Sometimes, in our culture, it seems the individual is all that matters. Life is about me: my career, my wealth and status, my history. We talk about intersectionality, the many identities that make up one person. What about intersectionality among people, rather than within them? Isn’t that our most important circumstance, as a species?

Say one person is gay, male, white, urban, and Jewish. Another is straight, female, Asian, suburban, and Buddhist. According to what is usually meant by intersectionality, one might expect them to have little in common. But they both love dogs; they’re both poets; and they’re both passionate gardeners, though the guy’s plants are all in pots on his balcony. How different are they?

Ethnicity, gender, religion – these are aspects of the self that help us feel part of groups larger than our immediate friends and family. These aspects are endlessly fascinating. They take up most of our public discussion. Yet they represent a fraction of what a person actually is. More of our couple’s thoughts and daily activities are likely to concern their dogs, their poems, and their plants than any of the supposedly more significant aspects of their identities.

Ethnicity, gender, and religion are stories we tell ourselves. These histories are important and yet, to a degree, imaginary. They help make individuals what we are. But how have they come to outweigh other aspects so much that we sort ourselves into such narrow categories?

This sorting is far from accidental. A very few people have accumulated most of the economic and political power on this planet. So long as Black and white, male and female, Hindu and Muslim, are convinced we are significantly different, we can’t get ourselves together to challenge that power. One only has to look at Trump, Xi, Putin, Modi, or any other authoritarian to see that they deliberately foment enmity among ordinary people.

Imaginary boundaries keep us fighting one another, instead of taking charge of the planet, which the current culture is ruining for everybody. Preventing ordinary people from organizing is a short-sighted strategy on the part of elites, since their grandchildren as well as ours will have to inhabit this poisoned planet. But the elites, being human, are not good at taking the long view.

The internet gives us new opportunities to take down the walls we have built. Rapid and radical climate change gives this project new urgency. Online, people can identify with other dog lovers, poets, or gardeners. One’s ethnicity, gender, and religion can begin to appear less relevant in these circles. Old associations give way to new. Meanwhile, racist, ethnic, and anti-LGBTQ violence reinforces the old boundaries. Hate crimes are committed by people who depend on those boundaries for their whole identities. The increasing violence points to the degree that such people feel threatened. Whenever there is peace, the old boundaries erode.

The Black Lives Matter movement drew in white as well as Black people, not just in the US but globally. The (nearly all peaceful) demonstrations centered on the suffering experienced by Black people for no reason except that their skin color put them on the wrong side of an imaginary wall. Earlier, the Occupy movement also spread around the world. Wealth is another imaginary wall that causes great suffering to people on the wrong side of it. In addition, the environmental movement and the #MeToo movement are global or in the process of becoming so. All these movements indicate that at least some people are beginning to see ourselves as human first, with every other aspect of ourselves being less significant than that primary, leveling, identity.

Every human is clearly a unique world unto themselves. Every human is also 99.9% exactly like every other human. If we focus only on the individual, we just see the actions of one person, subject to chance, a sort of Brownian motion, like the movements of a particular molecule. If we’re interested in the larger movements of our species, we have to consider that most obvious and invisible thing: our culture.

The paradox of being human is that the essence of our personality provides a through-line in our lives; we carry that essence with us, like a smell or a sound that only we can produce. Yet we change constantly. Every day brings us new experiences, and every experience changes us, becomes part of who we are, whether or not we think about it or remember it.

Imagine if we could see the connections between us. Every meeting would form a line. More meetings would make a stronger line. There would be lines between clerk and customer, police and criminal, writer and reader. Instead of a universe of separate points, we would see a dense network in which no point existed in isolation. The loneliest individual, after all, would not have survived infancy if someone had not fed them and wiped their bottom.

This dense network of connection, though impalpable, is who we are. This is the reality of our species. Like the individual, humanity has through-lines. The constant is human nature. The flux is culture, which never stays the same, one day to the next.

We can’t change human nature. We can, however, change culture. Everything we say or do changes the culture, as well as everything we buy, or boycott, everything we listen to, argue with, dismiss or support. In such small increments, the body of humanity moves. In what direction are we moving? Tiny cells in the body of our species, we can hardly tell. All any of us can do is move in any way we are able toward peace, sustainability, and justice. And hope.

How we’re feeling

How are you? Fine? Really? I don’t believe it. Nobody’s fine right now.

I wanted to communicate some good news today, but I couldn’t find any. Some things do give me hope for the long term. Short-term, with Trump doing all the harm he can, the world ignoring climate change, and the virus running rampant through the US, I got nothin’.

It’s not my personal situation. I’m way luckier than most Americans: so far, so good. I just get panic attacks several times a week and fight depression every day. But money is no more of a problem than usual and nobody I love is sick. We’re all just having panic attacks and fighting depression.

If a household didn’t depend on my health, I’d have been in the street with Black Lives Matter for a month. There is joy and uplift in a crowd like that, gathered for a righteous purpose and determined to be peaceful in spite of the worst police can do. There is community, creativity, relief in taking action together. I’m very grateful to all those who do show up, and a little envious. I miss that feeling.

I miss a lot of things, a lot of people. I’ve been missing peace of mind since the 2016 presidential election. None of my friends has slept well since then. Now it’s hard to escape the feeling of nightmare while we’re wide awake.

So how do we get back to feeling okay? Counting blessings helps; so does counting breaths, and slowing them down when we’re anxious. Communicating with people we love. Being in nature, which remains beautiful. Making things, whether it’s music or masks or gardens.

What helps me most is remembering that the real problem is not individual people but the culture we have created. And culture changes all the time. We each change it, with every word and act, everything we buy or avoid buying, our tones of voice and our body language, even what we click and like on social media.

What becomes of humanity is up to humans. We can move toward destruction, or we can move toward sustainability and loving-kindness. We know what we must do. I believe we might yet even do it.

Magical thinking

I believe in magic. I’ve seen it happen. Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, said: “Magic’s just science that we don’t understand yet.” In this case, the science is mob psychology. I’ve seen ugly crowds turn beautiful.

Once, long ago, I was at a huge outdoor rock concert. It was a hot day. Then it rained and the wind came up. People got cold. Some started to tear down the arena’s concession stands so they could make bonfires of the wood. The most aggressive vandals surrounded the fires. The mood was violent and mean.

Then a friend of mine stepped up to a fire, warmed his hands, and loudly praised the people who had built it. “This is so great, thank you! We’re all freezing and this feels wonderful! What a terrific idea!” He kept shouting this sort of thing while more people crowded around the fire. Now the original vandals began to feel like heroes. Others helped them take the stands apart and build more fires. Tension evaporated. Once again we were brothers and sisters enjoying the music together.

Late this spring, after a Minneapolis policeman murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the black community erupted in protest, releasing tension that had built up over lifetimes of racist abuse. As crowds demonstrated against police brutality, the police demonstrated their brutality. Some people at the fringes of the protests broke into stores; some set fire to police cars and a station where police had fled the scene.

Newscasters predicted riots. Trump clearly hoped for the start of a race war. But over the next few days and weeks, some kind of magic happened. In spite of, or maybe because of, the protesters’ justified rage and the horrific over-reaction by most police, the protests became not wilder but calmer. They grew. They focused. They spread worldwide.

These big, diverse, articulate crowds cannot stay in the streets forever. They have, however, inspired shifts in public awareness, media coverage, and even state budgets and laws that should, that must, result in deep and permanent change. Fighting racism is a battle with many fronts: jails and prisons, schools and workplaces, neighborhoods and legislatures. The work ahead of us is enormous. But our society seems to be ready to take it on, at last.

“Magical thinking” is defined as the belief that our thoughts can cause changes in the real world. When our thoughts have no actual consequences, such a belief is delusional. Yet I have seen people’s thoughts change the world, not just once but many times.

There is such a thing as magic. There is evil magic, like the spell the fascist far right has cast over too many people in too many countries. The worst kind of magic has convinced many people that we have no power to make a difference, that only the very rich or famous can affect our culture. But there is also good magic, the magic of our shared ideals. Let us never give up hope of changing the world together. Magic is in the hearts of the people.

Infectious Dose

Americans are dealing with two deadly diseases right now: COVID-19, a brand new virus, and racism, which has infected this country for 400 years. Both are contagious.

“Infectious dose” means the smallest quantity of infectious material that regularly produces a disease. Scientists don’t yet know how many viruses it takes to create a new case of COVID-19. They know masks and distance help cut the number that reach another person. Nobody can tell us the lowest amount of racism necessary to create a new racist.

There might not be a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 for another year or more. There is, however, a vaccine to prevent racism. It’s called education. People of color don’t need to be educated on what racism is or how it operates. Most white people have been ignorant. It has taken video after video of police killing unarmed black people to begin to educate white Americans.

Signs of this disease are everywhere in popular culture. Often racism is so unconscious that it manifests in advertisements which have to pass in front of many (white) eyes before they run. A 2017 Dove ad showed a smiling black woman turning white. In 2018, H&M ran an ad featuring a black child in a hoodie with the motto “coolest monkey in the jungle.” Gucci sold a blackface sweater in 2019. In May of this year, according to CNN, a Volkswagen ad showed “an outsized white hand pushing a black man away from a parked VW Golf, before flicking him into a restaurant called Petit Colon, which translates from French as the Little Colonist.”

In the 1921 Tulsa massacre, white mobs killed as many as 300 black residents and burned a thriving black business district to the ground. Most white Americans never heard of it until Trump tried to hold a rally there on the anniversary of this atrocity. My own kids’ middle school history text spent 17 pages on the Civil War without once mentioning slavery.

We will not see the end of either COVID-19 or racism in the foreseeable future. We do have the tools, however, to get the presence of these killers below the infectious dose.

Gold chains & high heels

Going crazy, but comfy

One very small positive aspect of the COVID-19 crisis is that we don’t have to dress up while we’re stuck at home. Everything we wear still makes a statement, although what it states might not be what we had in mind. Sweatpants say, “I believe science and I’m home until the infection rate drops.” Outside the house, an unmasked face like Trump’s says “I’m fine, screw the rest of you.”

Praying GOP will lose

When Reagan established that “Greed is Good” in 1980, fashion, which had been full of wild colors in the ’60s and ’70s, turned black. It stayed black for more than a decade. The Reagan era was when all the wealth Americans created began to go to the richest, and working people started sliding backwards into poverty. Fashion went into mourning.

Take me seriously. Seriously, take me.

Women have spent a century fighting for equal rights, equal pay, and equal respect. Women’s fashions have not always cooperated. Wearing pants: a big win. Skirts so short you should sit on a towel; heels so high you can hardly walk; necklines so low you can’t pick up a pen you dropped or your boobs might pop out: not helpful. Unless we’re actually hoping to pick somebody up before the bar closes, let’s try not to send that message.

I’m free. Sort of.

Some fashions worn by people of color stem from irony, bitterness, and anger. Small wonder. Pants falling off a man’s butt threaten to moon a world that has disrespected him. Iron chains used to mean black people were slaves of white people. Gold chains don’t mean slavery is over. They only say that the new master is Money. They might be costly; the wearer might be rich; but he is still wearing chains.