The Rebirth of Culture
In 2012, Nobel Prize-winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa proclaimed “the death of culture.” According to Vargas Llosa “Culture, in the meaning traditionally ascribed to the term, is now on the point of disappearing. And perhaps it has already disappeared, discreetly emptied of its content, and replaced by another content that distorts its earlier meaning.” What do we mean by “culture”? T.S. Elliot observed that culture may “be described simply as that which makes life worth living”. But what is “that which makes life worth living”, and can it, as Vargas Llosa asserts, die?
What differentiates Andean cultures from those in the Caribbean, or Himalayan cultures from those along the Ganges River? How do we distinguish ancient Egyptian culture, from ancient Babylonian culture? Is it language, or diet, or their mode of dress, architecture and building materials, or their music and art? Do European cultures (French, German, Italian, Spanish) hold together as a family of cultures? Does the U.S.A. have a distinctive culture, or is it nothing more than a “melting pot” of the immigrant populations that make it up? And what of the First People’s cultures of the Americas that predated the invasion of Europeans into their territory? Oddly, becoming a grandparent has afforded me insight into these questions.
Before becoming a grandfather, I imagined my soon-to-be-born grandson emerging as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, upon which the family and his culture would write his book of life. Experience piled upon experience would scratch indelible lines onto the surface of his mind. Like his grandfather, I expected to be one of those calligraphers, leaving my mark on his awaiting chalkboard. This blank state idea originated with Aristotle, but was made popular by the English Philosopher John Locke when he wrote:
“Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: — How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.” Locke, John, and P H. Nidditch. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.
Completely blank, virgin paper, according to Locke, is the human condition at birth. The mind begins blank. Experience, guided by the will, crafts the finished product of each individual’s soul.
But our grandson emerged on his birthday more than blank paper. His biological systems were primed, in ghost-mode if you will, poised to come online upon exiting the birth canal. No sooner than his Dad severed the umbilical cord, their newborn switched on the use of his lungs. That same day he fired up his lips, sucking as if life depended on it. In sequence, his stomach and digestive system found their way in the parade of talents. Within days, he discovered light pouring in through holes in his face while the motions in which his eyes detected correlated with stimuli entering other holes on either side of his head. In short, humans and other mammalian babies, arrive on this earth ready to breathe, eat, digest, see and hear, and each of those systems becomes operational in the first minutes and days of their existence. While these abilities are universal and show no hint of “culture”, they suggest more agency than the blank slate metaphor.
Rather than a slate ready to receive culture, our grandson proved more like a living sponge, actively absorbing experiences as they washed over him. Embracing that metaphor, the family and our culture could be viewed as chemists in a lab, mixing up concoctions in the form of experiences in which the newborn sponge-like infant would bathe. Language, diet, dress, dance, dwelling space, music — he would soak them up, filling with cultural elixirs, as they perfumed his path with magic and charm.
While better than “blank slate”, the image of child-sponge absorbing cultural concoctions suggests too much passivity. Even as he grew, something was growing in him. What if we viewed the formative metaphors of self-actualization as more biological than chemical? What if the newborn is more than a sponge, passively receiving cultural formulas or static slate marked up by the hand of experience? How would the curriculum shift if we viewed the infant as a field of fertile soil into which many seeds could be planted? There are the seeds of literature, and music, and dance, and the love of nature, and the fun of cooking food and sharing. How about the seeds of generosity and unconditional love, of gratitude and compassion? I began to imagine this grandfather farmer planting humanity’s best open-pollinated cultural seeds into a fertile infant soil through a planned education. I would tend those seeds as they germinate, caring for them as they grew into a mature forest or a productive garden. My job as the grandfather-farmer, by this metaphor, would be to select the best seeds culture has to offer, tending them with care. Not too much water, no weeds, just the right fertility.
Each of these metaphors serves as a lens through which to view the newborn child, as well as the function of culture. The choice of metaphor dictates not only a unique pedagogy but also an orientation towards discipline, diet, exercise and so much more. While pondering the important role of culture and family, it hit me. My grandson (and every other newborn) is — neither slate nor sponge, not even soil — s/he is the seed itself! Our job as parents, grandparents, and as society and culture as a whole, is to prepare the soil and the overall environment for a new life. Make it fertile, full of rich organic matter, sunny and moist. For the seed to reach its full potential, we must provide an eco-system teeming with beneficial microorganisms, while sheltering, as much as possible, from parasites and life-threatening spiritual diseases, (take commercial advertising as one example). Our little seedlings need companion plants and animals, all of which interact to establish a stable environment. Culture, by this metaphor, is the growing medium, the climate, the watershed, the very ecosystem into which each crop of seed is planted.
Healthy cultures supply their germinating seed-infants with the necessary conditions for a creative life to flourish. Sadly the for-profit corporate “culture” that emerged during the last century plays a deleterious role vis-a-vis the emerging human seedlings. The multi-national corporation has a solitary agenda, one that bears no resemblance to the requirements of an authentic culture. Call it instead, an anti-culture. For its purpose of profit maximization, the corporate anti-culture seeks to render adults, our children, and grandchildren alike, little more than consumers and spectators. It respects no regional differences or limitations as dictated by soils, seasons, climate, water resources, or building materials. Instead, it pretends that universal conditions apply evenly across the globe. The unique role of the consumer-individual in the corporate anti-culture is to have needs and to consume products and services that “satisfy” those needs. Where little or no needs exist, corporate advertising serves to exaggerate or create feelings of lack, leading to more consumption. The relentless message coming from corporate anti-culture advertisers is: “You are not enough. Buy this product or service and your life will be made (temporarily) whole.”
Contrast the anti-culture to a healthy, authentic culture? Healthy cultures emerge out of, and function within, an earth-defined eco-system, with unique soils, weather patterns, wildlife and natural resources, each of which shapes people as they blossom into creative mature adults. Authentic cultures express folkways that have grown out of the constraints of place. Near the Arctic Circle, the Inuit people developed a culture in which men hunted from igloos, dressed in furs, and ate blubber and raw animal flesh. On tropical islands, palm frond thatch protected people from sun and rain, with ripe fruit and seafood filling their bellies. Mountain cultures build with stone and conserve soil behind terraces into which they plant their gardens. A productive culture is one in which surplus allows for leisure, grounded in the fruits of the regionally specific labor, and out of that leisure comes art forms such as music, dance, and the visual arts and architecture unique to their place-specific constraints. Even those cultures constrained by an extraordinary lack of resources, forge creative solutions to meet their most basic needs. Harsh weather, minimal rainfall, poor soils, and limited energy sources determine the options available to shape a culture’s capacity to support its population. Constraints are as important to the evolution of culture as sources of abundance.
What happens to a culture when the constraints disregard climate, soils, energy, fibers for clothing and materials for building? What happens when the only constraint is financial? How does culture evolve when choices, whether individual, familial, or society-wide are based solely on how much money is in the bank account, or how unmanageable has become the credit card debt? And what happens to the social cohesion of a culture where 99% of the population is constrained by fiscal limitations dissociated from the place, as they witness a 1% constrained by absolutely nothing, not even gravity or, as in the case of corporations (now deemed people) death? Has the post-modern dream — to have it all — led to, in Vargas Llosa’s words, the “death of culture”?
Becoming a grandfather has taught me this about culture: (1) Authentic culture is that way of living which emerges in response to constraints imposed by the natural world — altitude, climate, soils, energy, building materials, fiber, and water. (2) Cultures, as a way of life, can die. They die when their seed goes extinct or when their bio-regional determinants degrade or disappear. Ask the Neanderthal people. Melt the Arctic Circle with its permafrost and the Inuit culture loses its foundation. (3) Cultures can also be absorbed or transformed. Evidence of the Mayan and the Inca cultures. Their traditional way of life has been altered through the encroachment of modern technology. (4) Cultures can be hijacked or lose their way, becoming unhealthy for those shaped by it. Symptoms of cultural disorientation include high rates of morbid obesity, anxiety, suicide, broken families, drug addiction, and violence such as the incidence of mass murder. The U.S. suffers from all of these. (5) Adults in every culture owe it to the next generation to pay attention, protecting the young from toxic, anti-cultural influences, exposing them to the bio-regional forces that shape their existence. In the words of the Persian poet Rumi “The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.”
As a grandfather, I intend to study how best to constrain the soil into which our grandson puts down roots, and out of which he will send up moral and intellectual shoots and blossom. He will grow up understanding which needs are real and which manufactured. His will be an environment in which the natural world of his watershed plays a meaningful role in defining what is possible.
Is culture dead? Perhaps we should say that the pre-modern culture of Vargas Llosa has fallen into a coma, nearly suffocated by exploitative corporate greed, with excessive and unregulated science and technology playing a contributing role. But like the flowers in Springtime, an authentic culture will be reborn when the illusion of unlimited economic growth and the hubris of unrestrained human power run up against the very real constraints of the Earth’s limited non-renewable natural resources and its once stable atmospheric protective envelope. Perhaps, out of these global constraints, a culture will be reborn, for the first time, a global culture of cooperation and conservation — a regenerative culture that restores what previous generations had nearly destroyed. Who knows. Our grandson may carry that banner.
