Culture for me is somewhat like the ancient philosophers view of the aether; it’s an invisible medium through which we all move, mostly unconsciously for a large portion of our formative years. It includes race, ethnicity, shared history, and much more, including the things I’ve named above – economics, philosophy, law, are all a part of, influenced by, and largely determined by the culture in which they occur. Let me be explicit because the implications of that can be missed. Economics, philosophy, law, etc., do not have an independent existence, except in theory, outside of the cultures in which they occur. Much like mathematics does not have an independent existence outside of our minds. These things, as amazing as they are, are inventions of the human mind. They are like maps.
One of the great lessons of my time with the military – and in other government service – is that maps do not tell the whole story. Sometimes, they flat out lie. I’ve had roads that for certain “went through” at a particular point on a map, suddenly dead-end when I was there on the ground – and always at the worst possible moments, I should add. We learned, as young platoon commanders, to always, always walk the dirt first if you can. There are tiny little depressions and swells known as microterrain, that never show up on maps simply because of the scale. Hell, sometimes even aerial photographs don’t show reality in ways that are critically important (think underground tunnels in Vietnam).
Economics, and even the “hardest” of sciences, are only about models. Namely, these sciences strive to provide models with predictive power, better than would be attributable to mere chance. Everything else is not science; it is speculation, or (more often than not) – outright bullshit and chicanery. To perhaps tip my hand a bit – and piss off some of my more left-leaning friends – this is why communism is such a complete crock of shit and should be openly mocked in academia, yet it is celebrated and still promoted by many seemingly “smart” people. Communism can’t be said to be a serious political theory judged by the dictates of either reason or science. The minute someone says, “well, it would work great in theory” they should be laughed at. Because what they are saying is, “I have a politico-economic system in my head that only works there and never for the entire domain for which it is intended: namely, homo sapiens.” In other words, it works exactly fucking nowhere on planet Earth. Thank you very much for that contribution. The set of conditions under which it works is the null set. That alone wouldn’t actually be so bad – in the case of communism, worse yet, it inevitably leads to human suffering and death by the millions, but only in every. single. case we’ve tried it out so far. Awesome. Maybe you could invent, I don’t know… another plague while you’re at it, and unleash that on humanity, just for good measure.
So, let us not mistake the maps for the dirt and keep that in mind as we trundle along.
Language is also a critical component of culture – it is one of the principle ways that we communicate culture to our children, or others who are seeking to join or be a part of any culture or sub-culture, be it immigrants coming to the United States, a kid trying to make the varsity hockey team, Hell’s Angels, or a person finding www.CrossFit.com and deciding to begin changing their fitness and health through that online community. In each and every one of these examples, a “noob” – usually voluntarily, though not always – begins a process of assimilation. Even as adults, our cultural assimilation is done unconsciously the vast majority of the time. We do not generally stop and think to ourselves, “Here I am joining this gym and now I will begin my process of learning the language, the specific diction of this place, the values of this group of which I am seeking to be a part, the acceptable ways in which I may behave, where I fit in the social hierarchy, and how I will manage the process of fitting in.” We simply do it, some with amazing alacrity and skill, some…not so much. We even have terms, we consider them psychological disorders, for people who lack these skills, ranging from autism to Aspberger’s to sociopathy and sadism.
Of course, where it all begins, the Alpha and the Omega of culture, is the home. The family is the principal and single most important unit of cultural transmission. (If this were an actual class, this would be the point in the lecture where I stomped my foot, cleared my throat, and otherwise indicated that this is a test question.) Everything else is in second place, and it’s not even close. The most difficult, challenging, rewarding, infuriating, and gratifying – and painful – (and many other adjectives) endeavor I have ever undertaken is parenting. If I could leave behind only one message to be found by an archaeological dig a thousand years from now, it would be this: American civilization collapsed because of bad parenting. Period. Parenting is the single-most important activity in the entirety of human undertakings and we treat it with complete disregard and disdain.
*I should note I am also including every possible variation of family unit as a “home”, including orphanages, adoption agencies, whatever place or location is the “home” for that child while they are still helpless and unable to fend for themselves; I don’t care if it’s Mowgli in “The Jungle Book” being raised by wolves – which is an interesting novel itself, if read with that in mind.
Another point with respect to language and culture – I am also including all of the non-verbal and meta-linguistical ways in which we convey meaning to one another: intonation, facial expressions, hand gestures, etc. That “stuff” – while equally as invisible – is crucial in conveying not just the desired information, but it also teaches others the ways in which we communicate in that culture. For example, when my daughters were young, infants really, like between 3-5, they might be playing together in the living room and I would be watching from the kitchen. Occasionally, the older one (yes, you, Becca) would poke or push or do something shitty to one of the younger ones and then look up to see if anyone had noticed. I would lock eyes with her and stare– hard, as if I had X-Ray Laser-beam eyes of Superman – and I’d furrow my brow and squint at her, but not squint like I couldn’t see, more like I was Clint Eastwood right before he offs those five guys because they won’t apologize to his mule. I’d just hold her eyes until I decided to either come into the living and room and make sure her sister’s were okay or until she (sometimes, bless her precious little heart) would just begin to cry. She very well understood what I was thinking and I never had to say a word.
Now all of you who don’t yet have kids and are bummed out at me about this, please think of what the other possibilities were. I could have yelled at her – and given the size disparity and how loud I might be, I likely would have terrified her. (There was a great public service announcement that pointed this out years ago using 7’4″ NBA player Mark Eaton.) I could have done that more modern form of acceptable emotional abuse in which you lecture your child in that horrible Stepford wife voice about “just-how-hot-nice-it-is-that-you’ve-done-something-bad-to-your-sister-and-you-won’t-do-that-again-now-will-you?” God forbid, I could have spanked her. And all of these actions convey not just my immediate displeasure and direct moral lesson, but also tons of meta-information to her incredibly-spongey-little-brain about how we communicate, about acceptable ways to communicate displeasure, about the level of response to the given offense – these are all incredibly important pieces of cultural-linguistic information that kids subconsciously process.
Most of us are aware in a general sense of the impact our parents have on us, but it is in our nature to imitate how we were raised. This ranges from things like diet and hygiene habits down to clothes, manners, how we behave in public, religious affiliation, “politics,” sense of humor, and on and on. Everything – culturally – begins at home. While other adults and friends may exert varying influences over time, it all begins at home. By the time the kids are shipped off to school for what we should all be honest and admit is largely a tax-based babysitting service so that we can continue to work in order to meet our – and their – basic needs, most of us figure we’ve had a significant enough impact on our child’s moral, intellectual, and even physical development that their school is not suddenly going to turn them into raving lunatics or completely different moral creatures than the ones we’ve raised or make them fat. In reality, though, many people simply default to the school, typically one set up by the State and over which they have little or no say over its content or suitability for our particular child’s unique needs, other than by geography. And the State, rather than us, has twelve years of time – typically 8 hours a day, five days a week, for roughly 40 weeks a year – to acculturate our children.
When viewed through that lens, it’s a bit scary. Especially if you spend more than a passing amount of time talking to your kids about their schoolwork, their teachers, administrators, and how things run at the institution of state learning. And then at the end of that, the kids are supposed to go to college and get another four years of acculturation there – again almost certainly without parental input…yet no one can figure out where things might be going wrong as a society.
As my previous post alluded to, a society that cannot preserve its essential cultural values is doomed to become extinct. This is not always a bad process, by the way. It is cultural evolution. It is a good thing that as a species we have (mostly) culturally evolved away from cannibalism, slavery, or honor killings, as just a few examples. Much of this has been done with force, unfortunately.
Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a lesson in cultural honesty. Any serious student of ethics, civilization, or history, has to look at the 20th Century and wonder: what in the fuck were we doing as a species? The death toll alone is staggering. (And that website I linked to does as good a job as I’ve seen of simply trying to do an honest accounting of the numbers, although it doesn’t even include the Korean war, Vietnam War, or the subsequent “killing fields” of communist Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). The 20th Century dwarves all prior centuries of human civilization combined for loss of life. We slaughtered each other like it was a varsity sport and we all needed to get our letter. In the 21st century, we really have no concept of the horror. Our current wars – with no disrespect to veterans, of which I myself am one – look like picnics by comparison. Again, individuals have suffered horribly and I am in no way trying to diminish it, but in terms of the scope and nature of the carnage, nothing today is even in the same breath as what we saw in the 20th Century – and thank whatever deity or philosophy you wish to for that…
… which brings me back around to the point of this endeavor: culture – and ideas – matter. Everyone points to Hitler, but it’s not like ol’ Adolph, who was never more than a corporal in the military, did it by himself. Nether did Mussolini. Neither did Stalin. Neither did Mao. They convinced ordinary people – just like you – to join the party and start a-killin’ and a-rapin’. And everyone did.
That’s the part that no one likes to talk about. The uncomfortable – and, in my opinion, vastly understudied – part of that history is trying to understand exactly how average people sent their neighbors to gas chambers, or to re-education camps, or to rape camps. A decent part of our deployment on the 24 Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) in summer of 1995 included floating in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Bosnia-Herzegovina. I couldn’t believe the horrors the Bosnian Christians and Muslims were inflicting upon one another. I was particularly troubled by the actions of fellow “Christians” in country, as I got briefed-up by our intel folks for our possible intervention to help trapped UN forces. The Bosnia Serbs and Yugoslavs had surrounded five UN enclaves that had been set up to protect the Muslims from the ethnic cleansing campaign of Radovan Karadzic and his generals, with help from Yugoslav Slobodan Milosevic and his generals. When Srebrenica fell, we got real time reporting from our intel officer on the atrocities. In case anyone’s wondering, yes, satellite imagery will in fact show the scarring in the earth from, for example, bulldozers that have plowed up ground for a mass grave. Then, when the human source reporting comes in claiming that all women have been separated from the men (which includes boys age twelve and up) – and the men have all been marched north toward the bulldozer scar… It wasn’t something that lent itself to dinner conversation with the wife and kids after returning from the deployment. I was always shocked that years later people acted like there was some difficult case to be made regarding the war crimes against those responsible. I heard and saw enough from the ship to have concluded that our intel guys were – for a change – not completely wrong. Everything I’ve read since has only confirmed those initial reports.
Now, what in the hell does this have to do with culture?
Well, as depressing as this news may be, this technique – many times called by the term “genocide” – is neither novel nor a recent invention. It is actually a technique for exterminating another culture. A cursory look through history finds many examples of human attempts to wipe out other “tribes.”
Scholars of antiquity differentiate between genocide and gendercide, in which males were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and women were incorporated into the conquering group. Jones notes, “Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire’s root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his ‘Melian Dialogue'”. The Old Testament documents the destruction of the Midianites, taking place during the life of Moses in the 2nd millennium BC. The Book of Numbers chapter 31 recounts that an army of Israelites kill every Midianite man but capture the women and children as plunder. These are later killed at the command of Moses, with the exception of girls who have not slept with a man. The total number killed is not recorded but the number of surviving girls is recorded as thirty two thousand.
“Genocides in History,” Wikipedia.
What is worth noting in that first sentence is that the eggheads are struggling to understand what is really going on. In calling these actions “gendercide,” they’re missing the true intent of the conquerors because they’re focused on data and not intentions. The intent isn’t to kill men simply because they’re male – it’s not a hatred of males qua male that motivates the conquerors. In many cases (not all), young boys were spared. In other cases, the conquerors kept the women alive and in many cases raped them, so this wasn’t a “racial purity” purge. They weren’t trying to destroy the “gene pool” of their enemies. These kinds of killings didn’t attempt to entirely wipe out ethnicity. The conquerors wanted to assimilate the women and children into the culture. To do so, they needed to destroy the families, specifically the patriarchal figure, as both the cultural head and the “military unit” of that culture. The conquests by Islam were perfectly illustrative of this.
Men were routinely killed, women were taken as wives by the conquerors, and young children would be raised as Muslim. It was convert or die. In one generation, the children might be Muslim by edict, but their children would be Muslim as a matter of faith and rearing. i.e. Cultural assimilation. It would be extremely difficult to maintain the underlying culture – including its religion and even ethnic identity. While there were certainly cases of complete genocide – the Monghols were infamous for this in their march across Europe – the point remains that there were many cases of what appear to “culturicide.” That’s what was going on in Bosnia in 1995. It has been referred to as “ethnic cleansing,” but that term can’t account for the rape camps and children who were born of that.
The conclusion to this rather lengthy ramble is an attempt to define culture broadly for future discussion, illustrate its historical – and singular – importance in human societies, and provide a framework for the coming discussion of economics, law, politics, and philosophy over the next 12 pieces or so. Those disciplines exist in a symbiotic relationship with their culture. It is my hope to demonstrate the historical changes in these disciplines, argue for specific forms of each, and discuss how cultural forces can be used to move these things in the “right” direction.