Adendum One to Two Cultures

My friend Ron White has an interesting comment on the last post at Facebook. 

Other than oppressive/oppressed..."Culture" is IMAGINARY... it's a disease of the mind... It's an objective distinction...in that we all know who's who. Gender, Race, Tribe, Ethnicity, Nationality are all subjective, malleable, and designed to create "have's" and "have-nots." And (of course) everyone would rather "have" than "have-not."

I replied:

I don't think that "culture" is imaginary. I just think that the only non-arbitrary distinction between one culture and another is the one that I identified. That said, I very much agree that all the demographic distinctions you mention are almost always Nietszchean inventions: they are framed not for understanding but for manipulation.

I think a clarification is in order.  A culture may be non-arbitrarily defined by a trait.  There is a population of dolphins off the coast of Florida who corral their prey by using their tails to fan up circular walls of sand.  So far as is known, this is the only population of dolphins in the world to use this strategy and it apparently has to be learned by each new generation.  That marks out this population as a distinct culture. 

Likewise past human cultures have often been defined by a particular technology, as for example a style or technology of pottery.  This kind of cultural classification can be very useful but it is an altogether artificial classification.  Just because these two sites feature the same kind of pottery doesn’t tell you whether they shared other cultural traits or considered themselves to be somehow the same people. 

This kind of cultural classification is non-arbitrary because it looks for a common feature that can be documented.  It is useful precisely because the classification is artificial: the observer is corralling the phenomena. 

There Are Only Two Cultures

That’s right.  There are only two cultures.  Advocates of multiculturalism and cultural diversity suppose that there are a vast number of cultures but often end up with only two that matter: the dominant, oppressive culture and the oppressed culture to be named later.  That has the effect of compressing all the “others” into one undifferentiated mass. 

I first noticed this when I attended a conference on Ethnic Studies some years ago.  At one panel the chair rose to inform us all of the importance of listening to diverse cultural voices.  He was followed by a Native American scholar, who was followed by an African American scholar and then an Asian American scholar.  Each of them told exactly the same story about coming from a close knit cultural group and being exposed to pressure from the larger cultural at some university.  Each was an interesting, compelling story.  I found myself wanting to sit down to drinks with each of the speakers.  What I didn’t find in their stories was diversity. 

I have always enjoyed literature that plunges me into a world that I cannot otherwise share.  Sherman Alexie’s wonderful stories put me into life on and off the reservation, Junot Díaz has me follow love and loss from the point of view of a Dominican American uber-male.  Isaac Bashevis Singer nourished my soul with tales of Jews in old Europe and New York.  These literatures are treasures beyond price.  They are, however, the stories of the same animal in different circumstances created by the astonishing power of human story telling. 

The problem with arguing that there are many cultures is that there is no non-arbitrary way to distinguish between one culture and another in order to count them.  Is there one “Native American Culture”?  One thing I have learned from my Native American students is that the culture of one tribe is not the same as that of another and that cultural differences emerge even within tribes.  Likewise, Cuban culture is not the same as Dominican culture, let alone Honduran culture.  I learned that from watching Dexter. 

Just as the divisions keep on going downward, all the way perhaps to a single dinner table, so the mixing goes upward.  Are Cuban three generations in Miami the same culturally as Cubans born and bred in Havana?  My friend Ms. Patel from India married Mr. Guthrie from Scotland.  What is the culture of their children? 

If you want to know how many cultures there are, you need some non-arbitrary way to make distinctions.  The oppressor/oppressed distinction is one attempt to do so, but I think it fails in two ways.  One is that it is hard to tell who’s on first.  The New York Irish were on bottom once, then they were on top, and now?  The real power structures in New York may have little to do with what we call ethnic culture. 

The second problem is that this distinction allows the oppressor to define the oppressed.  What does it mean to be an Irish Catholic?  You might suppose it has something to do with the Latin Mass, but you’d be wrong.  For centuries it meant that you were the ones whose land was taken away by the English, who wouldn’t begrudge you the steam off their piss. 

There is a way to distinguish two very distinct cultures.  I first began to grasp it when I read Chinua Achebe’s seminal novel Things Fall Apart.  The novel tells the story of Okonkwo, a tribal leader in a fictional Nigerian village.  We see him before and after his native culture is exposed to, and begins to degenerate in the face of, colonial influences.  This presents in stark terms the collision between the only two cultures that there are.  It is not the fact that the missionaries were oppressors that made them distinct in culture; it was the nature of the distinction that made the one oppressors and the other the oppressed. 

Originally there was only one culture.  It was always centered at some here among some us.  We are the people.  Here is the place.  Everywhere else is out there.  Everyone else is them.  The ancient Greek word for stranger (Xenos) also meant enemy.  It’s us or them.  Our temple is the center of the world, the Middle Kingdom; the history of our people is the history of the world.  This culture, which we may call unipolar, has its own logic.  It goes like this:

Why are these ways the best ways? 
Because they are our ways. 
Why are they our ways? 
Because they are the best ways. 

If that strikes you as circular reasoning it strikes you right.  That is its awesome strength.  In this circle, a human soul can come to rest.  All questions are answered by the stories told by the elders.  The circular reasoning at the heart of unipolar culture discourages questioning.  It doesn’t matter if one sacred story contradicts another, say if one story says that human beings were created before the beasts of the field and the other says that they were created after the beasts.  Each story is true in its telling. 

Unipolar culture is not primitive, except in a purely temporal sense.  It probably required more brain power to manage as many stories as possible and to learn the ways of different things without looking for simplifying principles.  As Leo Strauss observed, one needs to learn that the way of dogs is to bark and the way of women is to menstruate and the way of the people to the north is to burn their dead.  Since the human brain is not unlimited in its capacity, the chief editing device was forgetting.  Over time we forget that hero A and hero B were different people and so hero Abe rises in status. 

How a different culture emerged is not entirely mysterious.  Trade was probably the most important driving force.  It was possible for one people to trade with another without regarding the relationship as essentially from the encounters with herds and the flowering of fruit trees in their season.  At some point, however, it occurred to someone that just as we see the world from here, they see it from there and our there is their here.  Their ways are theirs because they are theirs and ours or ours because they are ours.  When in Rome…

Multipolar culture probably emerges in a lot of different places at different times but it becomes fully conscious first (so far as we know) in ancient Greece.  Herodotus’ magnificent history is the best document of its emergence.  Herodotus recognized that no matter where you go, there you are.  He listened to a wide range of stories told by different peoples and understood that there were just their stories.  When possible, he went to check out what he could see for himself.  The sphinx was carved by the gods?  Okay.  But I notice it has chisel marks.  Do the gods use chisels? 

It was Socrates who used his own chisel to cleave the circular logic of the original culture. 

Why does God forbid murder? 
Because it’s wrong. 
Why is it wrong?
Because God forbids it.

That is unipolar thinking.  Socrates spits it open by simply asking:

Is it wrong because God forbids it,
Or Does God forbid it because it is wrong?

If you answer the question one way, you must go on to investigate why God forbids murder.  Because human life is valuable?  Because murder is socially disruptive?  That way leads where Socrates is pointing: toward philosophy. 

If you answer the question the other way, you hold to God’s command by an act of will (or, one might say, surrender).  Only now you know something that the unipolar culture did not.  You know what you are doing.  You know that the law is not something “we” do the way flowers turn towards the sun.  It is something you do when you are refusing to turn the way other things and other people turn. 

Either you view the world from a single center, with a set of ways that define you and set everyone else apart as other, Xenos, or you recognize that there are lots of points of view from which to see the world and other peoples are maintaining their ways as best they can just as you are.  These are the only two cultures available for human beings.

The one, however and however unfortunately, withers when exposed to the other.  That was the lesson of Things Fall Apart.  A better example, perhaps, is Paul Bowles short story, “Here to Learn.”  A young Moroccan woman is cast out of her family because she is raped.  No, it doesn’t matter in that culture that it wasn’t her fault.  Through a series of misadventures, she ends up in Europe married to an American (if I remember correctly) who promptly dies leaving her a rich widow.  Her plight is made difficult by the fact that she doesn’t know what planet she is on.  She knows nothing about the world, that is round, that Europe is north of Morocco.  Having wealth now, she hires someone to teach her about all this.  She learns. 

She resolves to return home to show her family how wealthy she is.  Wealth is one thing that they respected.  When she gets there, the old neighborhood is gone.  There is no trace of it, the houses or the people. 

I am sorry that I just spoiled the ending, but I did so with ruthless purpose: to illustrate my point.  She was born into one of the only two cultures.  She left it.  She can never go back. 

Nature, Culture, and Action

Leo Strauss distinguished between statesman, legislators, and political philosophers in this way: the first are concerned with political decisions at a particular place and time; the second, with decisions for a political place but with a mind to the future and perhaps future generations.  The last are concerned with the nature of politics across all places and times.  I like that neat account and I think it is generally correct.  Here, doing a bit of political philosophy, I will add another trichotomy. 

We human beings live in regimes.  The regime was Strauss’s translation of the Greek term poleteia.  This term is sometimes translated as polity or republic.  It is the title of Plato’s most famous book.  It refers to a political community and includes its social structure, governing body and institutions, and its culture.  I suspect that Strauss chose it because of its famous use in the phrase “ancien regime,” which indicated the poleteia in France before the revolution.  The most fundamental kind of revolution, as Aristotle and Plato recognized, involves a change of regimes.  The people and the place are the same (mostly, as some may have lost their heads) but the social structure, political powers, and ethos have changed in a profound way. 

Where do regimes come from?  I propose three foundations: nature, culture, and deliberate action.  Modern social-political thought since the 19^th century has tended to focus on the second.  The most influential figures (I suggest Marx, Weber and Freud as examples) tended to reduce deliberate action to a largely derivative role.  Human beings act in strictly confined circumstances and when they are supposedly free to act they only express what their culture, class consciousness, etc., have taught them to express.  Nature was likewise diminished in most of modern social thought, though it at least appears in Marxism in the form of economic history.  Culture has been the dominant theme. 

The Nineteenth Century is, finally and blessedly, coming to an end in the Twenty-First.  At this point, only prejudice or ignorance or both would allow someone to believe that the biological nature of human beings is not the basic foundation of human minds and human lives, individually and collectively.  We are a social and political species because we inherited these traits from our ancestors.  Our political and social lives depend upon a pallet of emotions that were shaped by natural selection.  Culture can only work on the material that nature has provided.  As it is easy to domestic a horse but not a zebra, so it is easy to teach human beings to be nervous about sex but very difficult to teach them to stop doing it. 

No one argues that nature is everything but some do argue that culture is everything.  The latter have long been at war with those who argue that nature is at least something.  There are two ways to end a war: conquest or reconciliation.  They are not mutually exclusive.  Those who argue that nature is a major factor in human social and political behavior are going to win because they are obviously right.  However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the nature/nurture dichotomy was a false dichotomy. 

Human beings are by nature capable of language but they have to learn a particular language.  Infants can tell coherent speech, in whatever language, from incoherent babble and they listen hungrily for the former.  Linguistic culture is a part of human nature.  Children are born with a capacity to recognize moral obligations and a hunger to learn the local rules.  They instinctively grasp the difference between harm to an innocent (bad) and transgression of in-group conventions (bad only for us).  As we are primed for language, we are also primed for both universal moral principles and local law. 

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has demonstrated (to my satisfaction) that the most natural human societies, the ones that we lived in while we became human, were largely if not universally egalitarian.  Living in small groups, individuals formed coalitions in order to defend their personal autonomy against bullies and other free riders.  This required an egalitarian ethos, which is culture if anything is.  Etiquette compelled would be alpha males to suppress their predatory instincts or else they faced ridicule, ostracism, or death.  The emergence of egalitarian cultures among small band human communities was itself the result of deliberate actions on the part of many members of such groups.  They joined together to defend themselves because they wanted to protect their own autonomy. 

This went on for long enough that it shaped human evolution.  Our capacity for morality is largely a result of deliberately making social rules and then gradually, over long periods of time, internalizing those rules.  Those human beings who did this successfully were able to cooperate in a much more efficient way and so they came to dominate the species.  That is how evolution works. 

The relation between nature, culture, and deliberate action is not one of mutually independent spheres.  It is a dynamic.  Each shapes the other over time.  Trying to tease them apart is fruitful, sometimes, but always difficult.  This is analogous to those who try to determine the genes for any given behavioral trait.  At each stage of human development, our nature allowed certain possibilities.  Among these was the development of culture.  Over time, we became as dependent on culture as we were on language, because we were now dependent on one another.  Yet culture was nothing other than the accumulation of decisions made and repeated by individuals interacting with one another.  Occasionally, some powerful personality recognized the power of culture and deliberately set to change it, laying down the foundations for a new one.  Lycurgus’ founding of Sparta is the classical account.  The American founding is a modern one. 

Deliberate founding by one or a small set of individuals is rare; but all regimes are deliberately founded in another sense: they are the result of actions of human beings, responding to disparate circumstances, modifying the cultures that they had to work with.  Human nature changes slower than culture, yet it is shaped by culture and provides the foundation for culture in turn.  I do not hold with those who would abandon the nature/nurture distinction.  You can’t understand a dynamic without understand how forces interact with one another.  Adding deliberate action to the dichotomy can account for the existence and nature of regimes.