Battle Royale, Part 2
I ended my last post with this quote from intercultural guru Milton Bennett:
Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” In M. Paige (Ed.) Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1993, p. 21)
When I first read this I was taken aback: How could one of the most famous exponents of intercultural communication take such a pessimistic view of humanity? As I read on, however, I came to see that Bennett was hardly a pessimist. The essay became famous for what it contributed to the field: an inspiring vision of how human beings can move beyond our lizard brains and embrace human difference by endeavoring to see the world as others see it — not necessarily to choose “their” way as better, but to see other possibilities as legitimate alternatives to our own views. The opening words of the essay were meant merely to set the ground: to describe, starkly, a key aspect of the natural state of human affairs, so that we can know the magnitude of what our inner poet is dealing with in its efforts to create openness and understanding through the noise and tenacity of its lizard counterpart.
And it is a lot to deal with. I am speaking here less as a social scientist than as a human being whose lizard brain is always at the ready, in many areas of my life, but most pertinently in experiences with China, even today, over 20 years after my first visit.
A classic example is my completely predictable reaction to getting bumped into by another person. As an American, I am accustomed to a certain spatial cushion, and when people violate the cushion, they say “excuse me.” If they don’t, it’s rude, and I’m culturally licensed to get angry. China, though, crowded as it is, doesn’t allow for much of a cushion. People bump into each other a lot, and they rarely say “excuse me.” They take it in stride.
When I get bumped, though, every single time, without fail, the indignation follows instantly. I can’t control it. Over the years I have gained some mastery over how I respond outwardly, and how quickly I regain my calm, and the meaning I make out of the incident. But the reaction itself can’t be helped.
When people refer to “culture” this isn’t usually what they are talking about. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who is sometimes credited with founding the field of intercultural communication, distinguished between “Culture” with a capital C and lower-case “culture.” Capital-C Culture refers to “the arts”: what we mean when we speak of a city’s “cultural” offerings, or say that a person is “cultured.” Lower-case culture is what we mean when we talk about psychological and behavioral patterns shared by a group of people. I am talking here about lower-case culture.
Even within this sub-category, most scholars who study culture aren’t referring to the kind of moment-to-moment piecing together of reality that I am describing here. To oversimplify: anthropologists often focus on complex rituals, or kinship relations; linguists talk about “scripts” and “frames”: highly schematic templates for human behavior and thought; sociologists amalgamate statistical regularities. Only psychologists, really, have taken seriously the notion of culture as moment-to-moment reality.
Yet even most psychologists over the years have treated culture as a sort of cognitive add-on, or as a kind of window-dressing: there is an objective world which humans all perceive the same way. Perceptions function as an “input” into some kind of cognitive processing mechanism that includes cultural influences, and the resulting judgments and actions are therefore cultural in nature.
In a recent post I gave a quick overview of a refutation of this notion by one psychologist, David Eagleman. Perception is not a "filtering" of any sort of "objective reality." Eagelman's point is not put in a cross-cultural context, but other psychologists working in the field of cross-cultural psychology have similarly questioned the old orthodoxy, and have found evidence that even the way we perceive the world is at least partly a function of culture. I reviewed an astonishing finding in this post.
What's the point? We have work to do. Parts of our brain are constantly doing battle with other parts in an effort to control our actions (another brilliant insight of Eagleman's). Some of those parts of our brain, if their orders are followed, lead us down a violent path toward a world few of us would want. Other parts, if listened to, promise a world in which we can be our best selves. Those are the stakes, and if we truly want to create a more peaceful world for ourselves and for our children and theirs, we'd best know what we're dealing with.