do I want to be right? or have a family?
in my last two posts, we talked about the human necessity to belong to a group. here I want to expand on that to draw attention to a weird problem that I have recently noticed.
no matter what happens, if you clump a large amount of people together (let’s say a club, a church, a classroom, a military unit), smaller divisions will always form because it is in our nature to gravitate to a group (my last post). (this is also why I think it’s sometimes unreasonable to complain about the unnatural existence of cliques in our groups.) these groups specialize and work (many times subconsciously) to keep people in and push others out. this is what happens when a culture is created. more specifically a subculture. even more specifically, what is called a speech community (a group that is connected by its common behavior ex. a chess club with its own chess jargon). speech communities posses their own specific language, norms, lifestyles, ideologies about what is acceptable/unacceptable, and ideologies about what is cool/uncool. this creation of “the inside”, -which we long and strive to be inside of/kept inside of- gives an incredibly strong sense of group cohesion to the members. things like inside jokes, common hobbies, and second languages glue the members of the speech community together but also create certain criteria by which it is necessary to be a part of the group, pushing outsiders even more outside. thus the creation of culture (for one reason), is the result of a desire for group cohesion and interconnectedness.
part II: personal growth in cultural adaptability
however, the endeavor that social scientists and specifically anthropologists (should) take on is to learn from each culture the facets and desirable ideologies, behaviors, and norms, applying them to our own lifestyle and behavior becoming more and more adapted human beings in the way that we live. my personal goal has been that of a man who walks into an international buffet, choosing the best of each culture to take on in his personal plate, a plate with empanadas from Latin America, sushi from Japan, Fettuccini from Italy, Korean fried chicken, Halal from the middle east, and bubble tea from Taiwan. this may manifest in a person who always gives up his seat on a train to the elderly (a social norm common in east asian cultures like china, korea, japan), who knows how to salsa, can cook halal, takes siestas (like the spanish), does daily morning stretches outside (like the chinese), appreciates and learns from nature the way many native-american groups do, holds asian ideals of family responsibility while also holding western ideals of individual identity, enjoys japanese anime, icelandic post-rock music, chinese kung fu movies, african-american hip-hop, korean dramas, and brazilian bossa-nova. in linguistics, despite there being many different ways of speaking called dialects, there is a word that describes our own individual way of speaking (which picks and takes from multiple dialects) called idiolect. now although we’re not talking about linguistics here, I would like to use the word idiolect to describe one’s own personal way of living (that picks and takes from multiple cultures and their norms) as well.
so why do I put these two points of sense of belonging with this idea of our own lives being a mixture of many cultures we’ve learned about aka this idea of idiolect? well because I believe they have a dialectical relationship. (if you don’t know what Hegel’s theory of dialectics is, check out my post on it here) the problem here is that the further your idiolect becomes refined and perfected into the “perfect way to live”, filled with the best ideologies and behaviors from multiple cultures, the further and further you get from being a member who belongs to a real culture. in a sense, you’re inventing your own “super-culture” or “super-lifestyle” with which you will share with no one (most likely). and if you do become completely refined in your way of living, you will be so unique that you won’t feel like you belong to any group anymore. you will constantly be opposed to others around you when you differ in lifestyle and beliefs. you no longer can be 100% connected by coherence because of your diverse deviations in behavior and belief which no longer fit into any one culture, but come from many. thus your sense of belonging (as discussed being of primal importance) is lost.
so perhaps there is a spectrum of which living a uniquely refined, (my-definition-of) perfect, yet also strange lifestyle while having no sense of community is on one side, and being a someone who is completely and intimately accepted by his/her family while being a complete bandwagon with no real opinions or progressive/creative thought processes is on the opposite side. perhaps we need to learn to balance sacrificing being right for being together, and sacrificing being together for being right.
