Culture // Music of the Week / Aug 22, 2021

Culture isn’t the language you speak. It isn’t the colour of your skin or the kind of clothes you wear. Culture is what culture does. Culture is holding the door open for the person walking behind you when there’s nobody on the other side to prostrate over your generosity. Culture is living within your means. Culture is attempting to buy respect or love or loyalty when you can’t be arsed to earn it. Culture is these things: not Indian or American or Arab or European. 

Despite millenia of evolution, the human brain famously finds itself reverting to simplified models of thought. Of the many books I’ve read this year, almost a hundred percent seem to refer either in depth or in passing to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky: work that alludes to the inherent incompleteness of the human mind’s maps. It’s this low-energy thinking that means we find it easier to stereotype or generalise than to treat each individual as an individual: to treat culture not as clearly defined and neatly segmented, but as intersectional, morphing, ill-defined. 

Perhaps I’m generalising right now. Perhaps I’m projecting the weakness of my mental models on all of humankind. Or perhaps human beings, as a consequence of having evolved from ancient hunter-gatherers (another theme that’s been over-represented in the books I’ve been reading), have had to develop this oversimplified mode of thinking to have energy left over for high-focus activities like hunting and gathering. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.