No new posts until November

We will be out of the country and out of reach of internet connections until early next month, so there will be no new posts until early November.

The importance of cultural context

There is a myth in the world that important things can be studied in the abstract. For example, there is a prevalent myth in the scientific world that scientific subjects like physics or mathematics or molecular biology can be studied in a “pure” form, unaffected by culture. The field of economics has been laboring for decades to build complex models that largely ignore culture. Our foreign policy in recent years has been pursued largely in ignorance of cultural effects.

I would argue that no human endeavor is free of cultural effects, not even pure science. Culture has significant effects in steering scientific research toward some areas and away from others – science is as driven by fads and prejudices and dominant “schools” of thought as any other human activity. Religion is certainly all about culture. And politics is all about culture, as is economics, which is why we are having such difficulty in exporting our political and economic systems to some other parts of the world.

Of course cultures are not synonymous with nationalities or ethnic groups. Families have unique cultures. Companies and corporations have unique cultures. Religions have unique cultures. All sorts of human groupings – teams, play groups, bridge clubs, army platoons, etc. – have cultural aspects. Newcomers to these groups have to learn “the way things are done” before they are fully accepted and integrated. Any married couple knows that the two sides of the family have cultural differences – for example a story that might be funny to one side of the family may be offensive to the other side, and woe betide the couple that doesn’t learn this quickly.

Indeed, I expect that most of the difficulties in cross-religion and cross-nationality marriages come from differing cultural expectations – on the proper roles of men and women, on the way to raise children, on the manner in which money is handled, on the acceptable ways to express closeness or anger, and thousands of other cultural aspects, most of them unspoken and even invisible to those within the culture – its just “the way things are done”.

So my argument is that the study of culture is fundamental to the study of just about anything else, and an awareness of these important cultural influences is central to understanding just about anything that matters, from science to economics to religion to politics to history to literature. To ignore the cultural influences that shape these enterprises is to miss the most important driving and shaping forces.

The Wisdom of History

The Teaching Company has put out another brilliant lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears (see my book list on the sidebar) entitled “The Wisdom of History”. Professor Fears argues that most of the really terrible things that have happened recently, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and our current mess in Iraq could have been avoided had the nations involved only had leaders who had understood and learned from history. Or as Colin Gray has put it in the introduction to his book “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare”: “[I do]…not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” And of course the famous quotation from George Santayana also applies: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Working his way from Ancient Greece forward to the modern day, Rufus Fears shows that each age thought that “things were different” in their age, and the horrors of history couldn’t possibly be repeated in their time – an argument one hears yet again in our time. Surely democracies don’t fight wars with each other (in fact they do, and they are generally longer and bloodier than wars between tyrants), surely modern weapons have made all-out world warfare unthinkable (the same was said of the machine gun and the crossbow in their time), surely if we are all interconnected in a global economy we won’t have such wars (it has happened before, more than once). As usual, we all live in the midst of myths unsupported by history.

In fact, Fears argues, history shows that individual freedom is not a universal value, despite our current political rhetoric. Throughout history, the Middle East has been the graveyard of empires, a fact apparently unknown to the neoconservatives. History shows that nationalism (national self-determination) and religion are far more powerful and universal drivers of history, and that the lust for power is probably the single most durable and dependable human value across all societies. This will offend many who hold sacred our current American idealism, but his arguments and the lessons of history that support them deserve serious attention, if only because the history-blindness of our current political establishment will no doubt sooner or later put America on the “trash heap of history” along with all the great powers and empires of the past.