Understanding American culture crucial

A politically active generation requires knowledge of shared set of values

ALAN OUELLETTE WROTE an interesting article in this past Wednesday’s Collegian, in which he expressed his concern that “in the face of the many challenges we are being called on to help solve, college-age people are becoming increasingly apathetic and averse to the idea that they can contribute to any tangible sense of change on a macrocosmic level.”

The preceding generation, he claims, has left us with “a culture of terror” and “deconstructing this emerging culture of fear, while countering our own passive acceptance of the world, should be our top priority.” Once we make these actions our top priority, how can we effectively make change?

He proposes that “we should make strides toward understanding those intent on being our enemy — their culture, the effect of our foreign policies on their existence, and what common ground, if any, we’ll have to work with… In this way, our generation’s solutions have the potential to be much broader in scope than those currently in political office.”

His diagnosis of the problem is excellent, but I worry that his solution isn’t quite strong enough to activate a new generation of politically conscious Americans.

It is in our best interests to understand foreign cultures, particularly those cultures that are so inimical to our own that the friction between them leads to conflict and violence.

Isn’t it also important, however, to start understanding our own culture? It seems to me that there is an underlying framework of shared values among most American people, a truly American culture that we often fail to notice and criticize.

How can we find common ground with other cultures if we don’t understand American culture? How can we unite or at least politically activate an entire generation of young Americans if we don’t understand the basic assumptions and value judgments upon which they operate?

Let’s start asking what American culture really is. To start, American culture is apart of Western culture.

Those forces that have moved men and women of the West to the great and terrible feats of history remain today as they were in the days of Churchill, Washington, Charlemagne and Caesar.

In fact, we would do well to look at Pericles’ funeral oration from Thucydides’ “History of the Peloponnesian War,” one of the most powerful documents in Western literature and a testament to what makes the West great. Pericles, a great leader in the Athenian democracy, was chosen to deliver the yearly funeral oration for those soldiers who had been the first to die in the war with Sparta, and he took the opportunity to explain why Athens and its democracy were worth fighting and dying for.

The Athenians, he says, enjoy all the fine things of life, from exotic goods and exciting sporting events to delightful home furnishings and local cuisine. Sound familiar?

The desire to acquire, to create, and to enjoy fine things is central to Western culture, and American capitalism has made such enjoyment possible on a scale unprecedented in history.

Even higher pursuits such as artistic and academic achievement require the firm economic foundation that consumer culture provides; quite simply, if everyone has to be working in the fields, nobody can be painting, philosophizing or teaching in a university.

He says Athenians hold a deep respect for the law, though in social life they are free and open. We might not notice it sometimes, but I would say that most Americans have a very deep respect for the law and for one another.

Most people unthinkingly obey traffic lights and other safety rules, and many people are shocked and outraged if they hear that someone’s rights have been violated.

At the same time we can all be who we want to be, and, even if we live in a manner that the majority doesn’t approve of, we can be confident that society on the whole will accept us and honor our individual rights.

I could go on, but let’s try to tackle the problem just using these few ideas about American culture. I have said that Americans are selective consumers, respectful of the law and generally accepting of one another.

We can use these observations as a basis of comparison with other cultures that might not have the same economic structure, understanding of human rights, or level of tolerance that we do.

This is not to say that other cultures might not have some components that are better than ours. We are certainly lacking, just as an example, in our artistic appreciation (one of our biggest attractions in one of our biggest cities is “Cats,” a musical about cats).

Without an understanding of ourselves, we can’t make real comparisons with and attain a full understanding of other cultures. Our solutions won’t be “much broader in scope” if we simply make concessions to other peoples; we will only have shifted our perspective from our interests to theirs.

A real breadth of scope will come from a well-educated generation who can understand and appreciate the real differences between American culture and foreign cultures and a politically active American youth will be one that fully appreciates just how rare and powerful a thing American democracy truly is.

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