Week 2: How Then Shall We Live?
This is a summary of an adult education class at First Alliance Church in Lexington, KY. It will run for 6 total weeks discussing issues of race and the church in American society. If you’re local, come see us! This space will be used to expound upon some of the questions brought up by the class.
Keep up with the series: Week One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he shares a story about airplane safety and that a disproportionate number of plane crashes happened with Korean pilots. He goes on to attribute this, in part, to Korean culture, emphasizing the language, which tends to be indirect, and that the hierarchical nature of the culture dictates that subordinates would not override a superior’s orders, and thus avoidable crashes weren’t avoided and tragedy struck. On the surface, it comes across as pretty sound and I’ll admit that I was persuaded and I walked around with that nugget in my back pocket until I writing this post. In reading up on it, I found a few that would beg to differ with Mr. Gladwell.
He is challenged here and here by two authors who, at the core of their argument, assert that Gladwell does not truly understand Korean culture and it leads him to a false conclusion. Sure, there are bits of truth in there, but his status as outsider means that he does not see the picture clearly as a Korean might interpret the behavior of those pilots. So, who is right?
Dealing with one’s own culture can be a challenge. Crossing cultural lines can be difficult. Routine occurrences can escalate to either hilarity or heated exchanges depending on the situation, and it’s not always clear where the mines are before you step on them. My friend Sarah runs a terrific blog, A Life With Subtitles, documenting all manner of things in her cross-cultural marriage with her husband, Billy, who is Guatemalan. Most are hilarious, but this one has stood out to me ever since I read it:
Once Billy and I were with a group of non-Latino U.S. friends. In the course of conversation, someone asked for Billy’s help on a project, and he happily agreed. When we left, Billy was livid.
He was appalled that he had been asked to help in this specific way, and he listed the reasons, which were common knowledge among this group of people. I was dumbfounded. “Um… if you didn’t want to do it, why didn’t you say ‘no’?”
“That would be so rude!” he bemoaned. I was even more confused. Finally, he got to the crux of the matter. “I am not supposed to have to say no. They were supposed to know not to ask given what they already know about this situation.” Oh dear. “A Guatemalan would never have asked me that,” he added.
I immediately identified with the offending party. That easily could have been me, but for Billy, he processed the exact situation from a completely different angle based on his Guatemalan culture.
How then shall we live?
Dr. Christine Pohl, speaks here of John Wesley who:
seems to have understood that if the hold of complicated misery was to be broken, it would require change at multiple levels. He discovered that significant change occurred at the level of sustained interpersonal relationships. Here, attitudes and behaviors could be challenged, status boundaries could be addressed and transcended, and people could understand and enter each other’s worlds. At this level, formerly voiceless persons could learn to speak, and socially blind persons could learn to see and to feel.
Making those connections is a personal endeavor. Reading can help, but each person must choose to make the leap into another’s world be the bridge to unity rather than force all who are different to come to them.
Question from the class: If every culture has its own weaknesses, when is it okay to call out the errors in another culture?
It’s true that no culture is perfect, but we must also tread lightly here. Let’s start with our own culture, maybe a small one. Take your group of 5 closest friends and think “would I accept criticism about our group from someone outside the group?” In most cases, the answer is no. Expand that to a larger culture, let’s say Christians. how well do Christians respond to criticism from non-Christians? The track record’s not so hot on that one.
For my money, I think it ends up boiling down to a couple of key points:
- It assumes that the members of a culture don’t know the strengths and weakness of their own culture, but I, as an outsider know better than them, based on my cultural responses to the situation. It might be true, but it feels a bit too ethnocentric for me.
- It assumes that a cultural trait is a binary thing: good or bad. Oftentimes, it is multifaceted and the thing that may be harmful in a situation, may also be beneficial in others. In the southern US, politeness is frequently a high priority, even if it’s saccharine. It’s nice at times, but anyone who’s spend any time in the south knows you shouldn’t believe every “bless your heart” is as genteel as it sounds.
Just like the section above, building relationships is key. That was Jesus’s bread and butter move. He consistently went outside the predefined cultural parameters to reach out to to others. It’s still a good model today.
Don’t corner a stranger and talk about their culture’s weaknesses. That’s not going to turn out well. But if you have someone you’re already close to, start with questions: “I noticed this situation frustrated you. Can you help me understand why?” or “How do feel about [broad topic]?” I think you’ll do much better trying to continually understand a culture than looking for opportunities to point out its flaws.
When was the last time you accidentally stepped on a cross-cultural mine?