You Are Not Entitled to Your Culture

My friend Nick wrinkles his brow. We’re talking about immigration policy, in Greece, in Denmark, in the US. A throughly brow-wrinkling subject.

“Okay,” he says, “this is gonna sound bad, but… you’re not entitled to your country, you’re not entitled to your culture”. He goes on to explain what we all know but still have a hard time wrapping our heads around — culture is fluid, it changes, it adapts. It doesn’t conform to our ideas about the lines between nation states, or generations, or ethnicities, or….well, anything really. Culture will not conform to our definitions.

When we try to define culture what we’re really doing is trying to put the infinite interactions of humans, all of us, throughout history, into something we can make sense of. And of course it doesn’t work. It never could work.

What we’re left with instead are a bunch of stories we tell ourselves to try and draw some lines, somewhere. To give ourselves some bearing.

Take my great grandfather. He wrote in the diary he kept on his journey immigrating to the USA from Denmark that “Denmark is a land founded as a home for the Danish people. America is founded on an idea, the idea of freedom”. To my great grandfather, that was the difference between Danes and Americans. Our founding ideas were what separated our cultures.

Frankly and honestly, both of those founding ideas are bullshit. Or, put a little more politely, they’re myths. Denmark was founded out of feudalism because of a rich guy. The USA was founded out of colonialism because of a few rich guys.

But that doesn’t sound as good, now does it?

So instead we tell ourselves stories. We tell ourselves that what makes American culture American and Danish culture Danish has something to do with….well, something to do with our own experiences.

When I am sitting with someone at a bar, talking about what Americans do vs what Danes do, or what young people do vs what old people do, or whatever story we’re both trying to tell about our culture, it doesn’t feel like we’re trying to sum up a couple million people’s experiences each with a myth. It just feels like we’re shooting the shit, talking about our own experiences. What we do, what we’ve noticed that other people do.

It feels like we’re talking about our own experiences instead of millions of people’s experiences because of the obvious — we are. For my great grandfather, Denmark was a land for Danes and America was a land of freedom. For me, the US is a land of fearful people and Denmark a land of trust. And they both are and they both aren’t and there are millions and millions of Danes and Americans and Greeks who would all tell their own myth about their culture.

It’s completely impossible to even begin to put that many myths into words. So we don’t. Instead we talk about ourselves, or our friends, and we have our experiences stand in for the millions of people whose cultural identity we share. Every time I’m sitting in a bar, chatting about cultural differences, I’m practicing metonymy writ large, American style.

It’s the idea that I’m not alone, that my experience is both unique and mine but also a part of something bigger. That I get to have your very own thread on the tapestry of life, but also, you know, that there is a tapestry in the first place. That I can have my own experience but that my experiences have context, that they can stand in for something bigger.

Back to Nick. You are not entitled to your culture. He’s right. You’re not entitled for your life and your experiences to always be able to stand in for the whole. What I’ve experienced isn’t always going to be able to stand in for American (in fact, it doesn’t even really now) and my college experience won’t always stand in for college (again, it kind of doesn’t now) and I have no right to expect that any of it ever will.

I have no right to expect my one experience to stand in for millions because no one experience has ever satisfactorily stood in for millions. Ever. We like to pretend it does, pretend it can, pretend whatever we need to to wrap our heads around it, but it never can and it never will. We have no right to expect our mass human delusions to actually conform to reality.

But for a whole lot of human history, people did have that expectation. A lot of people still do. Because even if it’s never been true that one thread can count as the whole tapestry, for a long time you couldn’t see the tapestry. All you could see was your thread and your friend’s threads and that was it. Now, with mass media you can start to see the whole tapestry. All the colors, all the shapes, all the complexity. And it’s really really hard to wrap our heads around.

We are not entitled to our culture. And we never have been. But we’re just now starting to realize that.