How to move culture
Culture binds a person's identity to the meanings that surround them. This is a dueling affair. Meanings come from activities of the mind and body that evolve over time - actions, relations, habits and purposes. Identity comes from the fixed stories around our radius of concern - family, friends, groups, communities, nations and worlds. Culture becomes a persistent snapshot of this confluence.
Culture binds a person's identity to the meanings that surround them. This is a dueling affair. Meanings come from activities of the mind and body that evolve over time - actions, relations, habits and purposes. Identity comes from the fixed stories around our radius of concern - family, friends, groups, communities, nations and worlds. Culture becomes a persistent snapshot of this confluence.
By definition, cultures are hard to displace. The coordination requires scale, time and resilience.
Some of us will create new culture by infusing new meanings into the current culture. This arises from natural extensions and elaborations of the periphery - activities that are allowed, but not commonly encouraged, appreciated, or looked upon as worthy of our attention. Humanities and Arts lead in this way, but with difficulty in the extreme cases.
It is far easier for most of us to simply take our identity from the culture, and change ourselves over time to fit well into it. What starts in childhood learning becomes a silent adaptation and alignment, hard to disengage without a change of habit. This is mostly fine, since we shouldn't be spending effort in resisting our nearest neighborhood in the universe of meanings.
But some of us move to a different culture by way of ideas space, work, travel or social factors. This can happen by push (necessities) or pull (drives). When we thus migrate from one culture to another, we see new and different windows of meanings and identities. We get multi-cultural identities over time. After a while, we start comparing our lives before and after, translating between one and the other.
Over time, we realize that most of our cultures have failed, and continue to fail. The long arc of time and the rate of change we ourselves bring to it cannot be easily stopped.
Some cultures embrace the fails. Their core is not a center, but a swirling constant movement, like foaming beaches that portend larger geography in the making. Failures in such cultures are a result of extending the reach of our activities. These are positive failures, cultures in the making. These are places where you are adapting to new identities and meanings, updating a corner of your identity and deriving/defining new meanings.
Most fail by refusing to let go.
These have had their heydays. They have relegated to the mist of memories the fact that someone else before them gave them what they have, by changing something that didn't work well. The old tinkering at the margins is no longer remembered in an active way - "things are good enough here. This is the deep calm sea, and you take your position and bob with the tides". There's a justified pride in such places - "our way", "our religion", "our identity", the eternal and unchanging.
Some of us will create new culture by infusing new meanings into the current culture. This arises from natural extensions and elaborations of the periphery - activities that are allowed, but not commonly encouraged, appreciated, or looked upon as worthy of our attention. Humanities and Arts lead in this way, but with difficulty in the extreme cases.
It is far easier for most of us to simply take our identity from the culture, and change ourselves over time to fit well into it. What starts in childhood learning becomes a silent adaptation and alignment, hard to disengage without a change of habit. This is mostly fine, since we shouldn't be spending effort in resisting our nearest neighborhood in the universe of meanings.
But some of us move to a different culture by way of ideas space, work, travel or social factors. This can happen by push (necessities) or pull (drives). When we thus migrate from one culture to another, we see new and different windows of meanings and identities. We get multi-cultural identities over time. After a while, we start comparing our lives before and after, translating between one and the other.
Over time, we realize that most of our cultures have failed, and continue to fail. The long arc of time and the rate of change we ourselves bring to it cannot be easily stopped.
Some cultures embrace the fails. Their core is not a center, but a swirling constant movement, like foaming beaches that portend larger geography in the making. Failures in such cultures are a result of extending the reach of our activities. These are positive failures, cultures in the making. These are places where you are adapting to new identities and meanings, updating a corner of your identity and deriving/defining new meanings.
Most fail by refusing to let go.
These have had their heydays. They have relegated to the mist of memories the fact that someone else before them gave them what they have, by changing something that didn't work well. The old tinkering at the margins is no longer remembered in an active way - "things are good enough here. This is the deep calm sea, and you take your position and bob with the tides". There's a justified pride in such places - "our way", "our religion", "our identity", the eternal and unchanging.
This is not to say that these cultures don't have the capacity to change. They get here by failure of imagination, not of adaptation. In fact, we are all from that place. The people from failed cultures have more adaptability than the culture itself - it takes more to adapt to a static limited idea space than to swim freely in the universe of meanings.
Even those of us who do swim freely between identities have a core that is built from our initial imprints. We can branch out, but not let everything fall out. Over time, if you have transformed, how do you find meaning and identity in the culture where you were born into, without being an outsider?
You take two avatars - the external, pliable, compliant self that honors the old, and the internal multi-lingual self that can reach to every culture, draw out the best, and keep the change machine swirling.
When we see that our core is not just ideas and meanings, but a capacity for resilience to uncomfortable change, we can dance with this duality.
When cultures fail, it is up to us to remake our internal identity, take the differential disparity between the external and the internal as a positive force, and start living by example.
You take two avatars - the external, pliable, compliant self that honors the old, and the internal multi-lingual self that can reach to every culture, draw out the best, and keep the change machine swirling.
When we see that our core is not just ideas and meanings, but a capacity for resilience to uncomfortable change, we can dance with this duality.
When cultures fail, it is up to us to remake our internal identity, take the differential disparity between the external and the internal as a positive force, and start living by example.
This is what Buddha did. This is what Adi Shankara did. This is what Jesus did. Likewise for all the other greats - Gandhi, MLK, Dalai Lama and many more than we can count here.
As great as they are, as large as their impact is, they all worked the long term.
You should start small.
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