Spiritual Spectrum Dialogues, Part II: What Counts as Culture

Part II of the Spiritual Spectrum Dialogues is about how people across the spectrum understand their own culture(s), which is really to say it’s about what culture even is, or what counts as culture, and the answer is: everything counts. Wherever you come from.

A lot of the most frustrating conversations I’ve had about culture online have been with people insisting that they “don’t have a culture,” or their “culture was destroyed,” or similar.

This complaint is distractingly similar to the consumptive default known as “whiteness.”

Hearing that feels like the expectation is upon me — as the culture-haver — to provide the respondent some blueprint for creating a culture from first principles. This resonates quite loudly with the way Jews are treated constantly in the Christian world, so I get triggered.

What I might not have understood at the time was that many people — especially people who are naturally inhibited from understanding culture relationally — are operating with a structural definition of “culture” that is rigorous and has very high standards for coherence.

“What counts as culture” is a lot harder for me to write about online than “Don’t forget culture exists,” because I run into so many people who know culture exists but must have learned about it playing Civilization or something. It tends toward right-wing essentialism real fast.

I end up in this position because enough Jewish cultures meet these standards that right-wing essentialist people tend to assume that is what I’m talking about. Many of the right-wing essentialist people are Jewish. I’m talking to them, too.

Everyone — every THING — has a culture.

As I said in Part I, according to my experience, individuality is a constituent of culture, a distributed being.

I cannot stress enough how literally I mean this.

Your culture does not just include your choice of clothes. It includes YOUR CLOTHES.

Now, I frequently make the mistake of assuming that other people have had even one fleeting experience that suggested reality is like this. I need to find another way to explain it that doesn’t make this assumption. That’s the act of diplomacy behind this whole dialogue.

In doing so, I’m going to provide what feels like a very reductive explanation for culture. I want you to understand that THIS IS NOT MY EXPLANATION FOR CULTURE. It is a model you can insert in your mind in the place of culture that I believe will help with relating to people.

Like, think about one of those awesome sidewalk flowers. Do you look at a flower growing out of asphalt and go, “Man, what a shitty flower, all scraggly and alone. Doesn’t even have a meadow. Loser.”

NO! You go, “Hell yeah. You go, flower. You’re the most beautiful flower ever.”

It’s not like that flower turned out the way it did ✌️“by itself”✌️, right? No, it could only be that flower because of the interaction between its inheritances, its resources, its environment, its adversities, its obstacles, its visitors, on and on and on.

That’s culture.

I’m trying to put a foundation underneath the problem at hand here. The problem is not “some people have more Culture than others.” The problem is that people have different abilities and capacities for relating to people, which is a complex interaction between culture and body.

But that’s just it. Complex interaction between culture and body is the whole ballgame. Your ability or capacity for relating to people is essential to your place in your culture. Relating to people happens, you know, fairly frequently. That obstacle is PART OF YOUR CULTURE.

I want you to LOVE THAT ABOUT YOURSELF.

You can love that about yourself the way someone you see as Having a Culture™ loves those things about themself.

You don’t believe me, do you?

Let me demonstrate.

Get ready, though. I’m going to ask you to imagine something weird.

Imagine you’re me.

Imagine you walk around the default world feeling super weird, but you have a place to come home to, where people share many of your assumptions and mannerisms, and you feel mostly happy and safe to be yourself.

Oh, that’s just still you with the people you hang out with online. Oopsie.

No but seriously, imagine you’re me, a Buddhist Jew dad astrology guy, and you’re going along, and you run into someone with a spidery mustache wearing a trenchcoat, a plaid fedora, and a fucking monocle on a chain, and they tip the fedora to you and say, “Milord?”

Remember, you’re me, so you’re like, “Hi! I’m תַּעֲלֻמוֹת. I’m on my way to go meditate at the planetarium under the Full Moon and burn incense consecrated to the Seven Planets to bring about favorable weather for my tomato plants. Wanna come?”

And the fedora guy says, “Why?”

Now, you’re me, right, so let me just give you a hint about what would arise in me in this situation, to help you imagine accurately.

I would prepare myself for an encounter that happens like 90% of the time I say something like that, and my interlocutor doesn’t say, “YEAH!”

This might be the hardest part to imagine is you, but let me just try to stir it up in you.

I am too proud to back down and get out of the situation unless I feel physically endangered, but assume I don’t. I would need to answer in a way that means, “Because this is who I am.”

So I would say something like, “I do these things because they’re important to me and help me live my life, and I’d be happy to tell you more if you’re interested.”

The fedora-monocle wearer rocks back on their heels, pondering the invitation.

Your heart rate begins to rise.

What you’re expecting is for this person to start laughing, or else to respond in a totally flat affect, saying, “Those irrational behaviors are incapable of achieving your objectives.”

But instead, they say, “Would you be willing to say more about what that’s like for you?”

Ok, end of imagination, sorry, that was just as difficult for me as it was for you, I promise.

Now, we love that guy, right? What a beautiful response. We would answer that question enthusiastically, wouldn’t we?

What I’m wondering is, does it sound unrealistically nice to you?

Is it possible to take a shortcut to that kind of curiosity using the above few moves?

Remember culture exists, remember culture is the conditions in which anyone grows, remember YOUR conditions are DIFFERENT from someone else’s, and assume THAT’S what doesn’t make sense.

I just hope reasoning about THAT sounds more interesting than the unreasonable.

Just because someone’s culture is different with regard to the place of reasoning, and what is and is not amenable to reason, doesn’t mean they don’t do things for reasons.

There is plenty to be learned about the reasons people do things, and I find people love to share them.

The problem, as usual, is that someone spammed humanity with the idea that “beliefs” are super important for some reason.

I have only one Take™ here, really. It’s that “beliefs” aren’t the reason people do things. Culture is.

There’s more to gain being curious about that. 🙏