The contradiction of cultural heritage and cultural genesis
Those who are proud of their traditions but do not know their origins shirk the responsibility while participating. Those who fail to recognize the differences between the original environment and the current environment dance like puppets on the strings of ancient conflict.
The origins of most cultural practices stem from various needs that were present at the time of their creation. Those needs include needing to survive, needing to understand, and needing to create, communicate, or express experiences, among others. Of interest in this article are the needs to endure hardships through conflict or violence.
Something we’ve observed in almost every place that we’ve traveled is the preservation of cultural practices that originated from times of conflict or violence and those practices being into situations and times of peace.
As a basic example, we’ll share a first-hand experience from Guam, where we witnessed something firsthand that is not for the faint of heart. It was an isolated act of severe violence by three large men against one small young woman. This happened on a practice field for football one evening. An entire team including coaches and a chief of a fire station just stood by. The fire chief even told us directly to do nothing when we got upset. Sparing the details, we eventually convinced a local elder to call the police, since we knew they wouldn’t take us seriously, being from elsewhere. However, the police were slow to arrive and saw nothing, they didn’t even approach the young woman to get her perspective. It was clear that for everyone present, a large cross-section of the community, they regarded it as part of their culture, and therefore their birthright, to commit acts of violence against the women in their families if there was a disagreement or if disrespect was shown.
Perhaps long ago this kind of violence become necessary for maintaining peace due to a lack of understanding of communication or mental and physical health. Maybe this violence stems from some other struggles that are less visible. But we can’t imagine any sane and rational reason for such a violent 3 vs. 1 situation to occur in the modern era. Instead of claiming responsibility for their actions, they fell back on the excuse that it is their culture to commit such violent acts, without providing any reason for why that culture existed in the first place.
We observed a larger scale example of toxic cultural preservation in Japan.
In Japan, the tea ceremony is considered to be a significant piece cultural heritage. However, the stories of the nobleman who created the tea ceremony include details which could indicate that he was autistic although revered as a genius. Specifically, the detail that one author wrote is that “without their specific focus, a genius has nothing else” (translated*) which indicates what would today be called a special interest for a person on the autism spectrum, along with limited social skills. At the end of his life he even sought to destroy the ceremony that he created along with all of his own tools. However, instead of respecting the wishes of their genius cultural pioneer, the people around him disregarded his dignity and maintained the ceremony, upholding it as an accomplishment of Japanese high society.
If the same man were born in today’s Japan, he would be statistically likely to commit suicide as a child. Having limited social skills and being fixated on only one topic, one task, he would be shunned by the school, the businesses, and probably his own family. This is because modern Japan values conformity and corporate productivity over creation and uniqueness. There is even a common modern trend highlighted by Japanese social media influencers that if a woman doesn’t act a certain way then she is not even considered Japanese. This harsh exclusion of any individuality for the sake of worshipping business and productivity has literally killed Japanese culture by driving the creatives who would invent new tea ceremonies into suicide, homelessness, and exile from their families and communities. Japanese culture is rotting.
Modern Japan celebrates culture invented by someone who ended up hating that culture by selling it while crushing the dreams of any new culture that would be created by the new generations. This is a glaringly clear case of the distinction between taking responsibility for one’s own culture and carrying it around like a rotting carcass on a silver platter. The ones who benefit from this are the ones who have long standing investments in the foreign and domestic tourism industry and the ones who suffer from this are all Japanese children and adults who have the capacity and inspiration to create anything new. Once again, old money and old conflict bury the future to maintain influence over resources to starve the stranger. There are only investments in what is old instead of investing in what can be new.
We observe this as being a leftover mentality ignited in the warring states period of Japan and fueled by the second world war. The drive to push and push and push oneself to the point of exhaustion and beyond while disregarding any sense of joy or satisfaction in order to achieve a machine-like efficiency may have been what kept the survivors of these conflicts alive and was therefore ingrained into the minds of later generations as being the key to living a good life. However, what can also be observer is the stagnation of new cultural achievements in arts and creativity, particularly after the peace of the Edo period. Culture that is still celebrated but suffocated from growing further by the corporate demands on personal time. Common Japanese recreational activities are all coping mechanisms for capitalistic grief: drinking, drinking while singing, drinking while gambling, and drinking while doing any community activity. The people of Japan are drunk and escaping life instead of living it.
The USA is far from the exception in this article but there are too many examples thoroughly cover. One of the most widely accepted cultural features across the US population is vengeance. The idea of “it’s ok for me to be violent against them because they were violent against me” is the classical justification for a warfare mentality and it is prevalent in the USA to an extreme. However, as soon as one acts on this idea and commits that secondary violence, the same justification becomes seeded in the original offender. This quickly instills an infinite loop repeating the same idea, the same violence on both sides while each side feels righteous because “they hit me too”. The USA holds a long honored culture of infinite vengeance and uses this heritage through slogans and catch phrases to perpetuate the conflict instead of taking responsibility and accountability for each persons own actions. Thus we have an entire nation built upon the culture of hatred. “I hate because it’s my cultural heritage to hate” is the true American dream and nightmare.
Another certain cultural phenomenon has become prevalent throughout the entire world and across almost every demographic on the planet. This is the worship of money, further discussed here.
A brief history of human culture can be explained with a straight line of causally linked events. Scarcity led to farming, which led to consolidated leadership of the land, which led to war between owners of different lands, which led to religions controlling the warriors**, which led to genocide between religions. Today all of this is ongoing, originating over 10,000 years ago. It is the same conflict caught in a cycle and it all started with farms.
The concept of ownership, particularly ownership over land, serves to feed the owner and starve the stranger, the nomad, the bushman. Farming is a failed experiment over 10,000 years in the making and we all need to take accountability for finding a path without killing the land and killing the stranger. Farms breed over population of pests and underpopulation of anything that had lived or would live on the land.
To put it poetically:
“The farm feeds the king. If you are not the king, you are livestock. The farm does not feed the Bushman. The farm does not feed the Stranger. The land does that. The farm destroys the land, and feeds the king. All others starve.
“Farmers are farm animals as much as any cow or dog. The king sees you as property. The farmers are owned by the king. Whomever the farm feeds, is property of the king. The farm feeds the army.
“If you want to feed your neighbor, cultivate the land with diversity. Gather the food and give it. Invite the stranger and let them forage. The land feeds the people. The farm feeds the king. The king calls for war.”
Life on this planet changes, adapts, and migrates in order to survive and thrive within an ever changing climate. Growing stagnant on this planet is a surefire way to perish. Forcing the land into stagnation is just as deadly. Holding onto old culture and dismissing new wisdom will fill old graves with new bodies younger and younger as events progress away from the climate that formed that culture in the first place.
Common wisdom today points at war and religion for sources of conflict, but it starts earlier, at the farm. Farms are how borders first formed. Exclusion and hatred of the stranger originated when nomads encountered farms on their traditional lands while migrating. The nomads needed the land as much as the farmers but the farmers saw themselves as the owners of that land since they cultivated the products. However, the products had their own dignity, a dignity to feed whomever was hungry, a dignity that the owners disrespected. This is the origin of war, between two claimants of the same land which they both needed while refusing to cooperate and share and failing to respect the natural biodiversity.
Falling back on old culture as an excuse to continue new conflicts will ultimately result in the extinction of humanity. Culture is the responsibility of those who carry it; it is not a justification for selfish conflict. The cultural heritage of every group of people throughout history can be honored while also moving forward towards a more peaceful cooperation between groups and the eventual dissolution of separations.
*We came across this text while studying Japanese but have since lost track of the reference.
**It is our understanding that one reason religions began and why they fueled conflict was because of the actions of Angels intervening in early deaths while the opposing armies each assumed that the Angels were only helping their own side instead of trying to keep both sides alive longer. It may have been intended for the armies to talk to each other and realize that the interventions were happening for everyone but this talk never reached high enough leadership to affect a change and instead fueled justifications for even fiercer fighting on both sides, each believing that they had the favor of their respective perceived deities. This is a case of deception infecting perception and twisting Angelic acts.