[Exploring Life] Culture may be viewed as a universal tendency for people within stable geographic populations to create sets of beliefs, values and expectations that serve to create a sense of social coherence. It may be that culture is an offspring of the innate human need to belong. Perhaps culture originated as groups of people sharing the same situations and circumstances found it advantageous to solve the problems of survival. Whatever its origins, culture is built upon an integrated and extensive pattern of assumptions, beliefs, and ideas about how to live. One of the greatest problems with culture is that it tends to be static rather than dynamic, that is, cultural beliefs, traditions, and patterns of thought are resistant to change retrieving the old adage that it is easier to remain in the familiar than to change. We are immersed in culture from the moment of birth and are silently influenced by it throughout our lifetime. In our minds, culture shapes our presuppositions often in ways that lie outside of our own awareness. We are immersed in the code, programs, and language of our culture, which in turn establishes the core medium for all learning. Culture is a total surround, an immersive environment, that shapes our identity and behaviour.
The origin of the word culture lies in the Latin cultura, meaning to cultivate. We are the object of culture, and our lifestyle is cultivated, shaped, and developed by the underlying code of beliefs, knowledge, and behavior, that we are immersed in. Culture is one of the most potent yet hidden sources of influence throughout out lives. It is a compelling and invisible force that shapes our body, mind and spirit. The quality and effects of our cultural assumptions and ideas need to be critically examined through reason and consciously evolved through creative expression. However, we all too often allow culture to operate as a kind of unexamined neural code that executes programs, patterns, and routines throughout our daily lives without our awareness. An addiction to busyness is a major ally of culture in that it helps to ensure we remain distracted and subservient, while creating the illusion that our busyness is meaningful and productive.
What is most difficult to accept is the fact that our own cultural patterns are literally unique, and therefore they are not universal. It is this difficulty that human beings have in getting outside their own cultural skins that motivated me to commit my observations and conceptual models to writing.
- Edward Hall, The Silent Language
Cultural Confinement: Culture is primarily an experiment in how to live; it is a living hypothesis about belief, purpose, intention, meaning, interaction, and fulfilment. There is a rich diversity of culture throughout humankind and therefore a wide variation in belief about how to live. At its worst, cultural differences breed violence. There is no universal or unified culture to which we all belong, at least not at present. Culture is built upon a fundamental contradiction: one the one hand it serves to provide unity and coherence for those that belong to it, while on the other it divides and separates people on a global scale. A pedestrian understanding of the word culture equates it to art and the finer things in life; a more vibrant and useful understanding of culture equates it to a medium or total surround of beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that we find ourselves unavoidably immersed in. We are born into and assimilated by a culture that is not of our choosing, and it becomes so commonplace in our experience that we lose awareness of its presence.
Culture offers a sense of belonging and cohesion to a group people; it creates “like-mindedness.”
There is safety and a sense of protection in belonging to a society. Survival, the provision of basic needs, and an enhanced quality of life are easier to create when people cooperate and work together for the benefit of all as an end unto itself. In other words, remaining sensitive to the happiness and suffering of others is a fundamental building block of cultures that provide authentic belonging and care for its members. However, modern culture has largely been hijacked by the baser human desires of self-absorption, materialism, ownership, and most especially delusional notions of progress and success. The beauty of culture as a place of true belonging is veiled and infected by the stench of greed, want, and ignorance. Embracing the happiness and suffering of people in a caring environment as an end unto itself is no longer the essence of culture. Instead, we have suffered a collective psychotic breakdown that has the potential to obliterate us all.
Cultural relativists would have us believe that all cultures are equally valid expressions of humanity, and that questioning the utility of a specific culture other than our own is perhaps arrogant. Yet it is obvious that there is a wide variation of belief systems in the world, some of which are valuable and constructive while others are destructive and malevolent. Not all cultures are created equal, and one of our most important tasks is to find a way to create a dialogue around the quality of cultural beliefs, rather than shutting them off to reason. Culture reaches a pinnacle of dysfunction when the mere act of questioning and challenging its authority becomes improper. However, the only way to understand and improve culture, like anything else, is to question it in order to initially expose weakness and inadequacy. All meaningful creativity involves destruction and construction and the interplay between the two is essential. We must embrace the destruction of beliefs that no longer serve, as much as the construction of beliefs that help us to improve our relationships with each other. To do anything less is to remain in experiential confinement and lead lives of repressed desperation.
Left unexamined, belief is confinement.
Cultural Influence: Influence is the guardian of culture, that is, culture must have the ability to persuade people to believe in it. What are our beliefs influenced by? Are we aware of the influences that create the beliefs we assume to be true? How much of our lives are shaped by unexamined influences that are imposed upon us by external sources? The word influence refers to the capacity of some force to have an effect on an object. The origin of the word lies in the Latin influere, meaning to flow into. This brings to mind images of water, perhaps a stream or river.
While influence refers to flowing into, confluence refers to flowing or merging together. Culture inspires the confluence of people, a merging of our assumptions, beliefs and ideas about how to belong to and live collectively as a society. In this sense, culture is a kind of collective glue that serves to create a sense of cohesion and unity within a group. Without culture we might wander aimlessly and unproductively through life. Worse, we would not feel as if we belonged to anything and be forced live life in a lonely and isolated manner.
We are immersed in the silent and nearly imperceptible flow of assumptions within a culture, beliefs and ideas about how to live – they shape our identity and compel a specific orientation to life. If we are unaware of these influences we are, in a sense, a victim. If we gain awareness of the influences that shape our beliefs, we escape confinement. It seems as though we have lost our desire or ability to seek an empirical understanding or our experiences in life. Instead we immerse ourselves in external resources and media and denigrate our own ability to learn in an authentic manner. The only thing we will find in these external realms is information, not knowledge, and certainly never insight or wisdom, since these capacities and qualities lie exclusively within each of us. While we can certainly find value and inspiration in reading the thoughts and ideas of another person, transforming those thoughts and ideas into useful knowledge, keen insight or authentic wisdom and then adjusting our lives accordingly to that transformation is not something that can merely be read about.
The basic problem is this: our lack of attention to the development of empirical knowledge, authentic learning, observation and awareness, creating knowledge, discovering insight, and integrating wisdom into our lives fundamentally impairs our ability to live life in a vibrant and compelling manner.
Instead, we tend to treat ourselves as vessels to be filled with often irrelevant information that largely remains unrefined and unprocessed. It is a delusion to call this learning in any sense of the word, though it does adequately describe education. Institutions desire subservience, and perhaps the most dramatic example of that is religion in which we are to embrace a vast “leap of faith” in order to follow external demands that have no meaningful evidence to support them and are clothed in an underlying threat. Corporations are no different in the desire for subservience, and are in themselves an exquisite example of confinement and delusion.
Escaping Cultural Confinement: Culture is inexorably a form of confinement since it serves to condition our thoughts, emotions and behaviors, which are in turn codified in language. The notion of cultural identity is fundamentally a limitation or form of confinement. Anything that serves to influence us and silently shape how we live in specific ways is confining. The essence of confinement is to enclose, limit, or restrict. The quality or nature of confinement can be helpful or something less than helpful. Confinement is not in itself a bad thing; being unaware of how we are confined and therefore how are lives are limited is certainly not a good thing.
The fact is, however, that once people have learned to learn in a given way it is extremely hard for them to learn in any other way… Learning, then, is one of the basic activities of life, and educators might have a better grasp of their art if they would take a leaf out of the book of early pioneers in descriptive linguistics and learn about their subject by studying the acquired context in which other people learn.
- Edward Hall, The Silent Language
Culture asks us to participate in society in manner that is deemed normal, productive, and beneficial to the greater good. At the same time, we are not asked to investigate what is really meant by “normal,” “productive,” and “beneficial.” Nor are we asked to participate in defining what the “greater good” really is – nor, as it turns out, are we encouraged to do so. Edward Hall’s idea of studying the acquired context is essential. All too often we give our attention to content, but we fail to focus on the medium of delivery, or the context in which learning takes place. Our addictive and obsessive dance with technological innovation is crushing our sensibilities and impairing a perceptual acuity. We have, in many ways, become mere extensions of the form and function of our technology. We are, in some respects, digital lemmings.
In order to escape cultural confinement, we must reclaim our powers of discernment.
For example, we assume in our culture that life should proceed something along these lines: birth – childhood – education – career – retirement – death. Not only is this assumption to not only be strange and unfounded, it is both confining and idiotic. Yet we allow ourselves to be tethered to the notion of money as survival, and those that do not seek money have great difficulty surviving. It seems as though our modern technological culture, with all its advancement in knowledge and tools, is, so far, a complete failure with respect to evolving a better overall pattern of living. Yet this pattern of living is deemed normal, productive, beneficial and a contribution to the greater good. In other words, it is the very embodiment of confinement.
Culture is a medium, a total surround, that our sensibilities are unavoidably immersed in. If we remain unaware of its lines of force and influences on us, then we become a victim. If we seek an empirical approach to understanding our “acquired context” of learning, we can begin to discern the underlying assumptions, presuppositions, beliefs, notions, ideas, and leaps of faith, that shape our identity and orientation to life. Once this “silent language” becomes audible in our minds we begin an important journey toward reclaiming knowledge, insight and wisdom, and escape the incessant drone of the status quo.
