Culture

The current infatuation with multiple cultures in America seems enlightened on the surface. However, it is important to bear in mind that cultures often stand in the way of greater human progress. Idolizing a culture without a critical and analytical eye is childishly naive.

I was aghast yesterday as I listened to an NPR quiz show. The guest celebrity was a rap singer who was overtly and unabashedly bragging about his American subculture of violence, robbery and drug abuse. The audience seemed to find this quite humorous. I found it disturbing and symptomatic of a sick society.

Similarly, the recent fascination in America with Islamic cultures seems a natural reaction to being aggressively attacked on September 11th, 2001 by a wealthy Saudi madman and his minions. However, the equivocation of cultures which behead women for adultery and hang young men for being gay to American culture is just plain stupid. Many Americans seem unable to take the critical step to investigate a culture's full spectrum of positive and negative traits. I speculate that this is based in intellectual laziness or a delusion that smiling at everything about a culture will keep people from that culture from creating mayhem.

Human cultural development follows patterns which can be readily discerned by studying history critically and analytically. This implies the use of science, a foreign culture indeed for many contemporary Americans, it seems. Science isn't about being blissfully ignorant. It isn't about denying the unpleasant in hopes that it will go away.

Multiculturalism in America can serve a wonderful purpose to enrich the greater American culture. However, the present approach media and politicians are taking toward multiculturalism is shallow and inane, generally. Blanket acceptance of any culture as "great" or "cool" is counterproductive. Fostering the elements of any culture which advance universal human rights and world peace is common sense. Learning the difference takes time, study and openness to truth.

Universal

Universal human rights would be the same civil rights for every human being, no matter how they look or what they believe or whom they love or where they were born. Everyone, everywhere.

This requires a change in human perception. Rather than granting people respect based on their looks or how they sound, it requires granting all people the same respect on first look. This challenges an instinctual human tendency to classify. It is a survival instinct. Is this object safe or dangerous? Life experience shapes the form this instinct takes as people age. Education, ignorance, love or trauma can shape this instinct, for functional good or dysfunction.

For people old enough to have been shaped by life, learning to disregard the tendency to classify people as safe (good) or unsafe (bad), based on very superficial criteria, is nearly impossible. It requires tremendous practice and mindfulness. And, even then, the mind reverts to old habits easily.

Meditation in Buddhism is a tool to overcome the dysfunctional mind, the cluttered mind. As a humanist, I find meditation helpful. However, I find that I have been able to develop my own little instant-replay system. As I go through my day, I evaluate my responses to people and my interactions with them. I try to keep that more objective consciousness running, like a surveillance camera, which I can replay after an interaction or an experience.

I have learned a great deal from this practice. I have been able to use some of what I have learned for the better in my life. I have also learned how deeply judgmental and prejudiced I tend to be towards people. Decades of dyed-in-the-wool habits, which are exhaustively relentless, just under my conscious mind.

Prejudice is simply stupid. Judgment is not in itself a bad thing. As a nurse in an acute psychiatric ward, I was paid for my preformed understanding of certain dysfunctional behaviors. I was also paid to make professional judgments about dealing with these behaviors to avoid violence or unnecessary pain. I want an experience cop around if I am in a dangerous situation. His informed classification of a behavior, based on training and experience, could lead to a judgment which could save my life.

Universal judgments about racial, ethnic or sexual groups are counterproductive and unsafe. They lead to violence, war and social regression. Perhaps the current political correctness of certain social classes and arenas is a good form of behavioral therapy for nonconstructive prejudices and judgments. However, the tendency of the politically correct to condemn all judgment, even when based on experience and knowledge, as bad or wrong is simply stupid, in my opinion.

My practice as a humanist is to promote universal human rights in any way I can. I see this as a process that occurs with one situation or relationship at a time. I think the political advocacy of specific special-interest groups in the American political system is currently an anachronistic method to achieve universal human rights. I feel the process is in itself divisive. I would prefer to see all groups who feel disenfranchised joined in a universal human rights coalition, which could approach government and demand comprehensive legislation on human rights for everyone in society.

Opinion

I am concerned about a current tendency to confuse privately held opinions, shared between correspondents or confidantes, and public declarations. I am noticing frequent, slow-newsday pieces in the media about leaked emails, which were never meant to be public information. Usually, these emails have something to do with gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality.

A person thinks such-and-such about gay people, for instance, as expressed to a friend or colleague in a private message. Someone gets hold of this by someone else pressing "Reply All" when responding to the email or by some other thoughtless mistake or by some malicious intent to settle a score. Suddenly, the person who wrote the email or made the comment is subjected to public shaming by a press conference held by some anti-defamation group, to whom the email has been sent or comment repeated.

If we all start having the same opinion about everyone and everything, there will be no room for constructive criticism in our culture. Without constructive criticism, we will stagnate and get more stupid than we already are. This is the nightmare of political correctness, which seems to be endlessly encroaching upon society's tolerance for varied or eccentric opinion.

The issue which does not get addressed often enough in these instances is the total lack of ethical accountability on the part of the leakers of private information to public media. In an era when most people rail against privacy violations when it is inconvenient for them, I find it rather hypocritical that these same people salivate over the opportunity to throw stones at someone whose private correspondence is exposed and found to be politically (conformistly) incorrect.

This is all very immature and unconstructive. If you wish to encourage sound, progressive dialogue on issues of difference between people, this type of mob shaming through politically correct media press conferences, based on purloined documents which violate a person's right to privacy, is as offensive, in my opinion, as saying the "f" word or the "q' word or the "n" word. It is the adult form of school-yard, "gotcha" bullying. It accomplishes nothing positive.

Identity

I believe that all I am and may become in this life will end with my death. There is no evidence to support any other understanding of death, as far as I can tell. Therefore, it is useless to even ponder the question or behave in any way based on an imaginary afterlife. We are like other material objects. At death, our atoms will simply be redistributed into the Universe from which they came.

This perspective is very liberating. By accepting the immutable and inevitable, I am freed to concentrate my energies on being the best version of me I can be in any moment. Unlike religious people who base their behavior on codes, based on the elaborate dictates of an imaginary super being, I am free to look around me and base my behavior on the real world, subject to civil, natural and physical laws. It is my responsibility to make the best ethical decisions I can.

This consciousness stimulated those behaviors in my life which have been most humanitarian and socially responsible. I believe, if all people realized that all we have in this Universe is our common humanity, we would be less divided by religion, race and ethnicity.