In Other Words

The colour of Culture

Culture is like colour. No one colour is better then any other colour. Yes, you might like a colour better then other colours and many people around you might agree, but that doesn’t change the fact that your colour preference is opinion and nothing more.

To impose your cultural preference on somebody else is the height of arrogance. It is saying that another people’s mental faculties are weaker then your own and that therefore they should be altered to suit your thought pattern. It is saying ‘you are wrong, I am right’ when so many things aren’t about wrong or right but about personal preference.

I do not deny that there are certainly some things that are ‘better’ about one culture then another but who are we to decide what those things are? Have we toppled perfection from its perch and taken its place?
We judge everything.

‘This is good, that is bad and what you do shouldn’t be done, instead do what I do, for I know better, for I am wiser.’ We judge others by our moral code and act surprised when they don’t measure up. Of course they don’t measure up, they scale is different, based on other ideas, created with different principles.

When we alter another culture to our own and take away their beliefs, subsuming them with what we believe we are committing one of the most atrocious acts believable. We are destroying history. We are taking the learning of thousands of generations and millions of people and erasing it from our collective unconscious. Rather then learn from their ideas we erase them so that if they did have an essential lesson to teach us we can’t learn it.

Western thinking has only been around for a few centuries, half a millennia at most and yet we continue to crush belief systems that have existed for millennia after millennia.

Why do we get to impose our will? Because we have bigger guns? Because we are better at stripping the resources from mother earth and leaving less for the next generation? Because we consume so ferociously that alarm bells are ringing everywhere?

If we are so much better then how can you explain rising obesity, growing wealth gaps, nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, extinct species, hunger, AIDS, drugs, alcoholism, thinning Ozone, Serial Killers, Suicide, stress, prejudice, Napalm, Racism, Slavery or Poverty?

How can we believe that other people will not resent our intrusion into their lives? How can we be surprised that people will reject our ideas as superior and ask us to butt out of their lives? Is it really that surprising that when we don’t leave them alone they retaliate?

Wouldn’t you do the same if the roles were reversed?

Think about it.

posted by Symbol @ 8.9.04