Everything We Are
Culture is everything we are — and nothing less.
Belief in some universal spiritual reality — implying that cultural particulars are just some incomplete set of anthropological curiosities — is a particular cultural belief, and it’s one that arises in cultures who relate to other cultures as inferior and subordinate. That is a necessary implication of the belief that cultural practices are narrow or limited, and that one’s own culture has transcended them and can now access universal truth.
Why would that belief in the value of transcending cultural forms — which, obviously, people who practice particular cultural forms do not share — be different from any other particular cultural form if it did not imply supremacist values? What other exception is available for that view?
If it were true, the colonial project of exterminating cultural particulars in favor of one universal (well, planetary) cultural system would have worked, rather than producing this cop planet we have now.
To someone whose culture values its own particulars, those are not separable from some “big picture” where they are only true or valuable in a contingent and limited sense. They are part of reality. They are embedded in every behavior and action and word. They are environmental factors. And every intentional human enactment of them is an expression of pure human nature in its efflorescent diversity.
Now, they can be questioned, because human beings are capable of embodying new perspectives.
Getting stuck in a fixed perspective is a lower-level problem. A biological problem. Sedentariness is eventually fatal. It makes one susceptible to disease and predation. And it can spread through a culture because social life forms take their cues from one another. If someone is sedentary, there must be no urgent need or danger, so we can all be sedentary.
That is how individuals and cultures die. They stay vigorous by moving, looking around, getting new perspectives on their situation.
This is how cultural forms remain vital. They are shaped and sharpened by the needs of the situation.
Someone who is not in that situation making suggestions — let alone suggestions to everyone in every situation — is not helping. They are trying to simplify their own situation, a particular perspective from which they believe diversity and complexity is causing them problems. That is, a managerial, colonial perspective.
If your perspective requires cultures to concede to this? Notice that.
Now, does that mean all formal practices are integral cultural practices? Hardly. Discrete actions and concepts are phenotypic expressions of culture. They can’t be assessed in isolation from their cultural roots.
A human being can perform a visible operation from a place of integration or a place of alienation. The next-most-visible part of the performance, which reveals much more about its roots, is what its value is to the performer.
Not its declared value. Its revealed value.
It is possible to be alienated from one’s own culture and perform its forms by rote, without integration. In that case, some possible revealed values would be conformity, non-confrontation, non-visibility. These values, which I state neutrally, cannot be separated from the performer’s culture.
Local problems caused by this stagnant perspective on cultural forms can be resolved by revitalization on a social level, by doing the work to ensure individuals are valued as part of the whole.
It is also possible to be alienated from one’s own culture in a way that motivates one to seek more satisfying forms from other cultures and attempt to graft them onto one’s own. This is a natural thing cultures do over time as they encounter one another, which prompts healthy shifts in perspective. But individuals can be so alienated from their own culture that they believe it will be fruitful to attempt this project for themselves, with little to no cultural coordination of perspectives.
Such self-directed adventure in cultural extraction reveals a value system that puts one’s own individual perspective at the top of a hierarchy, a projected shadow of the inadequacies of one’s cultural perspective at the bottom of it, and the cultural perspectives from which one is extracting forms for one’s own purposes somewhere uncomfortably in between.
The thing is, these are — inescapably — culturally inculcated values, whether they’re instilled through indoctrination or negligence.
A culture that teaches its individual constituents to place their own perspectives in a superior position has bound itself to a sedentary perspective.
As all Earthlings can plainly see, this produces sickness and weakness in the cultural body. But this sickness and weakness can be compensated for with enough accumulated material power over other bodies.
This position is intolerable. Cultures who want to live must make their perspectives seen, heard, and felt.
To see, the human body must move.
