CS1: Culture Studies One

From post-9/11 emerged the language and rationale for culture wars. The Islamic jihad became the promotional gimmick of the fundamentalist imams, which delighted the fundamentalist in Jesus’ haven to no end. With the collapse of the Evil Empire, and the emergence of the Axis of Evil, nothing short of bringing about the onset of Armageddon tempted the core policies of GWB Neoconservatives.

The history of Europe is studded with the cyclical occurrence of the unmanageable differences in life’s understandings and the accompanying clash of symbols that tugged at the deepest chambers of the Indo-Aryan soul.

What we now refer to as religion is the organizing force that Latins call religare, “to fasten loose parts into a coherent whole.” Cultural anthropologists view comparative religion as a tool of determining the development of fundamental life responses. We also have the interaction of people and the environment from which certain behavior had evolved. Cultural geography is a discipline that tracts the varied cultural nuances that formed civilizations in specific geographical locations and ethnic groups.

Sixth grade students learn that the production of surplus food triggers the rise of a civilization. For 8,000 years, empires have risen and fallen, and contemporary cultural geographer Jared Diamond contends that the collapse of civilization results from the neglect of the ecological environment from which it derived its support and sustenance.

This series identified the basic drive for survival and the processes that extract value from resources, produce goods and service, and distribute the same in response to perceived human needs and wants, are the economic dimension in life.

The drive to be social, to bring order where there is chaos, to promote justice where there is adjudication of differences, and to ensure well-being/well-doing for everyone where access and benefits in rights and responsibilities are inequitable, is the political domain.

The drive for meaning bleeds significance to both the economic and political dimensions of society. This is about consciousness, how children are led to rites of passages and elders are honored into their sunset years with the drumbeat of life and death. Art, icons, paintings, songs and dances hold communities together. This is the cultural dimension, the glue that cements the whole social process together.

Three drives and their corresponding dynamics constitute the economic, political and cultural dimensions that is universal in every society, the subject of this weeklong reflection before school opens.

“It’s our culture,” has been a convenient excuse used by some of our wayward youth to justify their chewing betel nut with tobacco and lime, and even smoking Mary Jane’s reefers. We mean something broader than that. We do not, however, wish to imply that culture is separate from economics and politics. Instead, it is culture that injects meaning and intentionality into economic and political commonality.

When a social unit seeks wisdom, educates and nurtures its young through family and community, and touches the depths of life through stories, art and symbols, it effectively and easily keeps the economic and political processes in balance. Sought wisdom consists of the useful skills, accumulated knowledge, and expressed final meanings drawn from past experiences and conveyed into the future through many forms of transmittal means and methods.

A social unit develops communal styles that define roles, preserve learning and research the new. Marriage has been the communal form that maintained covenants and determined sexual mores, injected the sense of intentionality through common vision and mission, and provided rationale for the creation of budgets and expenditures.

Language, social art and religion have freighted the values and beliefs that bound social units together. People communicate through words and images; social art mirrors a community’s experience and creativity; religion, or any organized form of seeking the depth, height and breath of the human spirit, unifies the common task of survival (economic) and imbues the social organizations of extended families and communities their raison d’être (political).

A bunch of industrious bees in a well-organized beehive does not a culture make. It is the bees being self-conscious of itself, or humans conscious of their consciousness that makes culture, and gives birth to spirit. In our time, this self-consciousness has come to be popularly expressed as experiencing the awe as the awed-ones savoring an awesome reality, which supports, sustains, and nurtures life.

The radical awakening ushered by the paradigm shift occasioned by 9/11 has made it clear that every culture in the planet is undergoing a profound transformation. Those who think that we can preserve the idyllic innocence of the “primitive” are whistling in the wind. Indigenous cultures are not as interested in conserving a pristine state as they are eager to participate in the affairs that determine their destiny. The paradigm shift in technology, settlement, communications and transportation have transformed the universe of our experience.

Two symbols within the last 50 years have captured our global imagination, particularly in the United States. First, there was the moonwalk. One can look at this simply as an advance in rocketry and non-gravitational technology as some have done; we can also look at it as a liberation from age-old constraints that focused on our limits and fed the fires of our cynicism and despair. We discovered new possibilities of the human spirit. We realized that the future was open beyond the either the apocalyptic and/or utopian determinisms of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels.

A second symbol is the earthrise, that photo of the blue planet rising above the lunar landscape, seemingly oblivious of all the divisions and conflicts we have etched on it in mapping its reality into our common minds and societal consciousness. We awakened to a real common cause, the survival of the planet itself as a prerequisite to the survival of the human race.

So, guess who is coming to dinner? This paper’s front-page picture the other day of the Moslem faithful after their ablutions in abject ritual of supplication not in the Middle East but in our neighborhood is driving the ecumenical reality beyond the boundaries that even Pope John XXXIII would have imagined. The perspectives of the strange bedfellows of GWB and the Pew Trust Foundation aligned against the equally strange soapbox of John B. Joyner, Ph.D., and the federalization-beleaguered Capital Hill administrators made today’s Chamber of Commerce meeting interesting.

There is a love feast of a global culture in the making that the Taotao tano/Refaluwasch, Taotao tasi/Remetau is hosting on Saipan. It would be a pity if we engage in that process from the perspective of fear and defense, rather than of hope and celebration. That is our choice, and making conscious choices is what culture is about.