Have you questioned your cultural conditioning?
Ok, what is culture.
Here are a few general quotes from various internet sources:
“Culture (/ˈkʌltʃər/) is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.”
“Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person’s learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more briefly, behavior through social learning.”
“Culture is a collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.”
Why would we want to question our culture?
You may ask, ‘well why would I want to question it anyway? Why wouldn’t you just get on with living your life and accept our conditions?’
That’s a fair point, however there is a ever-growing mass of human beings that suffer, cannot adjust to the world, cannot connect to other human beings and have meaningful relationships, that feel alone, disconnected, isolated, alienated, depressed, anxious or all of the above.
This leads us to assume that something about our conditions is the root cause, and is producing these problems which appear to be linked.
We share a deep urge to live a meaningful life, then it makes sense to want to know what the foundational aspects of ‘being human’ is.
Culture creates subjectivity. It fluctuates in its norms, morals, modes of behaviour.
If it fluctuates, we are living according to norms that may not even be norms in the (near) future.
I don’t know about you, but that unsettles me.
Questioning our culture is a way of finding what is truly meaningful in the human experience. getting behind the curtain we may not have even realised was there.
Time and place are the two factors that determine what our cultural messaging is.
Know your history!
It’s good to look into history because we see how there have been different societal norms. This illuminates how culture is not something to be held onto, but questioned.
What NOT questioning culture does, is leave you unable to see that what we are engaged in might be missing the point. We may be off track. We may be walking a path which gradually lessens our sense of truly being human, and this is inevitable if we ignore how things have changed over time.
Ok, confessions time.
Yes, I used that explanation, that logic, to lay the groundwork for the view that our current culture, our messaging, our norms, feels like it’s taking us away from what which it is to be human.
Fragmentation. That’s one word I would use to describe things about our culture. And I would use that term in contrast to that which seems to be ‘where it’s at’ when it comes to being a human which is to be CONNECTED. To be ‘whole’. To be fulfilled.
The culture and way of thinking is a product of maybe thousands of years of a way if thinking which if I was to try and put in a nutshell would be described as how we have learned to separate things in the external world, to categorise, to isolate everything, to put boundaries on everything. This culminates beautifully in the scientific enlightenment.
With its roots in Greek thinking, which considered the basic building blocks of life as separate atoms that make up matter, the enlightenment was the flourishing of that way of seeing the world which we could now call ‘atomistic’. It has become the bedrock of our culture. We take our way of thinking for granted about how we view the world and ourselves, as fragmented and separate, and we forget to question it. We forget to realise that this is once again a determination of time and place and is transient.
That’s not to say that the mode of cognition from which science evolves will disappear again or become irrelevant, or that it is false.
The two hemispheres, and two energy centres
In Iain McGilchrists work, this mode of cognition is given a clear distinction as the mode that results from aligning ourselves with the right hemisphere of the brain. The holistic, contextual mode of cognitions, that sees connections, wholeness, patterns is attributed to the left hemisphere. His first book is entitled ‘The Master and the Emissary’ and this provokes the narrative that the right brain has took on the role of the master but really it is subject to the more all-encompassing powers of the left. There is an allegory whereby the ‘Master’ who sits back with wisdom delegates to emissaries what needs to be done, but then the emissaries, who perform all of the work needed, take the credit, become drunk on power and then overthrow or cast out the Master.
Philip Shepherd in his work ‘New Self New World’ and ‘Radical Wholeness’ goes one stage further and attributes the work of the emissary to the cranial brain itself and cranial intelligence, whereas the Master is the lower centre of energy in the abdominal space. The intelligence there is the one that incorporates the cranial intelligence, whereas the cranial looks to go it alone, sever its roots and separate.
Know your mythology!
This is poetic language of course but with good reason. This is characterised and mythologised endlessly throughout all of history in all of our tales and fables.
They all in some way show the tragedy of the tyrannical intelligence of the cranium, the male principle, trying to overcome the powers of nature, the female principle.
Right now, we are at the height of the madness of a cranial intelligence cut loose and run wild, or using McGilchrist’s idea, the right hemisphere run wild.
Once we know we are part of time and place, that our norms may not be the mast to tie ourselves to, that our cultural messaging may not be adequate for all we need, this gives us the confidence to question it. We can be certain there are features that deserve scrutiny and deserve to be replaced.
In a very practical sense, there may be ways that we act, how we behave, how we understand things, that may require attention.
How much of your life, decisions, actions, thoughts do you think could be questioned on this basis? For me that is definitely worth reflecting on.
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