Does America Not Have a Culture of Its Own?

Maybe. Or maybe folks aren't even talking about what a culture is.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

This talk been talked for the last uh decade or so about there being a culture war happening here in America. And it actually got me thinking when I heard one accusation that said Americans and p possibly white people in general don't have a culture. Well that got me thinking then. If a culture is what other people have, but what we don't have that we took from everybody else, the real question is, what is a culture? And I'm sure that you could go back and look at the etymology of the word and find out that it comes from basically it just means culture. The word culture is culture. It's so what's it all involved? I mean I think that this is important to understand so that you know what you're either what you're defending or what you're attacking. Otherwise you're just gonna be shooting at shadows and hitting everything else too. So what is a culture? Well, I had to ask myself, gets smaller. What's a cult? Well, cult is a collection of people with certain beliefs and behaviors. Now, the word cult, of course, has bad connotations and for very good reasons. It often has to do cult often has to do with not questioning the thing and not like not accepting that it might have flaws, and many cults are in fact based around personalities rather than realities. But I'm gonna work with the general thought that a culture is like a large-scale cult of people doing things a certain way. Now you there can be a lot of different ways to do certain things. There can be different ways to dress, there can be different colors that you like, there can be different sides of the road you can drive on, and all these things are of course based on a variety of different factors. How you dress is gonna be dictated a lot by where you live, what side of the road you drive on is gonna be dictated by the ancient paths and how people would organize the roads all the way back then. How you organize when two trucks are coming at each other or two horse carts and who's gonna go to what side? Well, it just makes a good idea for everybody to shift to their right, and so you are on the left side of the road. So little cultures can come like that. You can have cultures influenced by simple designs, like arches, curves, mythological figures, such as we see on the large cathedrals in Europe. It can be even something as simple as one person made a little thing and they liked the look of it, and they displayed it, and it was simple enough to do, and other people looked at it and said, Hey, I'm gonna do something different, but with my own variation, which is how barn quilts got started in the Midwest. Here I'd always thought there was something we ported over from Norway, but nope, uh started here in the Midwest. So what is a culture war then? Well, I will say this, not every culture is compatible. Let's say, as simple as the driving on the road phenomenon, somebody comes from a society where they drive on one side of the road, somebody from the other side. Well, now these two cars are barreling at each other, and the question is, which one should have the correct right to drive that way? The answer is obviously the person whose culture this is, the person whose culture dominates that land. It might be that we are in the land of driving on the right hand side of the road, in which case the person driving on the left hand side needs to get themselves over. And there can be a little bit of accommodation because some things are just confusing. You know, a fish doesn't know what's in water, and you don't always know the culture you're in until you're in a different one. But then there are some things which are more incompatible, such as when you have greater strength than somebody else in any regard, such as business, politics, man or woman, bosses, fathers, sons, etc., how do you deal with abuses of that power? One culture is gonna have a different answer than another culture. They might not be compatible. And so when those two cultures are then competing for the same space, one person wants to run their household this way, but they are on land where the culture is that you run your household another way. Well, now there's gonna be a bit of a bicker and a disagreement, now isn't there? And what happens when a culture is born inside of another culture and wants to go to war with it? What are you gonna do? The two may very well not be compatible. So now you gotta figure out. It's not just a matter of who is invading on whose space, but whose culture is better for the people and the space and is more likely to be helpful if adopted. I will also say this some cultural values lead to greater human flourishing. The easy answer to that one is you look at private property. If a person is responsible for themselves, whether their house is fixed or in decay, whether they are responsible for themselves, whether they eat that day or not, whether they are responsible for themselves in any way, more people are more likely to take greater pride in ownership in doing more with their own stuff for their own stuff when it requires them. Now, if your stuff can be taken from you at any time, or you could take someone else's stuff from them at any time, well that don't lead to particular good flourishing because most people spend a lot more energy than trying to take from other people or stop other people taking from them. Which is where you can have cultural enforcers, such as the policy people, police, lawyers, governors, mayors, etc., who say that within a certain area this is the culture that we are enforcing. If you do not participate in that culture or you behave contrary to that culture, then you are out. And that can either mean forcefully put out, or it can mean that you are put in time out until you can be brought back to the straight and narrow of that particular culture in place. So in a culture war then, who deserves to win? That's a greater question to which I do not have an answer. Because it's gonna vary from place to place. But I tend to be of the mind that if the culture of the area has led to the greatest amount of flourishing for the people under its auspices, that might well be the uh culture that, if nothing else, deserves home take home field advantage. Because ultimately, culture should be run for the benefit of the people underneath it. And if it ain't being done that way, that's a legitimate problem to discuss. So, maybe Americans don't have a culture if you just look at how similar it is to other peoples, or look at how similar how we borrowed one thing from one nation, one thing from another nation, and made them all big part of America. Or maybe, just maybe, everybody's got a culture. The question we have to answer in America right now is which one is good for America? Cheers.