Baruch's Blog

What is culture? How does it affect us? How much of what we value and believe comes from culture "whispering in our ears"? How much of what culture tells us ends up being the impetus for conflict? And to what extent and in what forms do humans need conflict as part of our inspiration and motivation? I've spent some time with a friend whose conversation is always fascinating. I came away with some thoughts.

I've been working on this concept of peace, of disparate peoples finding peaceful ways to co-exist, and questioning how this can be possible. I was taught to value life, to see violence as wrong, to see killing as wrong. But what does it say about our spiritual beliefs about life and death if we avoid death? Or maybe we are avoiding cruelty but not death. Certainly in the west there is much fear of and denial of death, even in societies where the dominant religions promise paradise, or heaven, or some such afterlife.

I know this is a bit of a mishmosh, but bear with me.

I was impacted by a news story I read about a family in Iraq that had pimped out their 9 year old boy so they would have money for food, and then the boy was executed by enforcers of sharia law. I was horrified. When I discussed this with the aforementioned friend her response was "That's a mercy killing." I really had to think about that. I said "I don't think it was intended as that" but she said that it was a mercy killing anyhow, just think about that boy's life.

Whether I agree or not isn't the point. The point is that what culture whispers in my ear is different than what culture is saying to the people who killed that boy.

If you are raised to see this life as just part of existance, then what's the problem with this part coming to an end? How many people joke about sending a mosquito on her karmic way when we slap them? Is it true for humans as well?

One of the benefits of traveling is that I do get to see how culture is imprinted within me, and how different culture imprints the people in the places where I go. This awareness is coming upon me in some new way, because I have this sense of culture as an overlay that we are all subject to, and which directs and guides our lives far more than we are generally aware of.

The values I hold, of kindness, non-violence, peacemaking, honoring life; I like these values. They feel good to me. They allow me to see myself as a "good" person in the world, someone who avoids causing suffering. They allow me to see the world as a place where it is possible for kindness and love and pleasure and community to thrive. But what if culture is really a discrete set of beliefs that has no bearing on any kind of objective "truth" or "reality"? Furthermore, even if our values are the product of culture, that does not necessarily invalidate them or make them less congruent with who I (or anybody) is as an entity, a self.

My thoughts on all this are far from organized, I feel like I just had a veil removed and am taking in the different view.

Different topic...or is it?

I just learned that bush signed an executive order making it illegal to disagree with or question the administration's Iraq policy. Here's an article that describes in detail this latest turn of events.