clash of cultures 4

Yes you are right, Phineas and Apu are both hypothetical, I wasn’t familiar with Phineas so I wanted to introduce my own metaphor where there wouldn’t be any distracting details, like where she was educated at.

Maybe a guy dropped into the Kwik E Mart and told Apu about savage killers living in a swamp way up north and suggested that maybe he should investigate. You never know.

I don’t think I can define culture very closely, it’s one of those things like intelligence or pornography where we know it is there, but it’s hard to define. Let me say it’s where we get our ideas of right and wrong, generally from the people we are living around. Not everybody in an area shares all these values, but they are just stuff that’s generally agreed upon with little debate necessary.

Way back in the day when we were just tribes we all invented our own little religions and whatnot and we didn’t have to worry about the culture of another tribe because we would just be clubbing each other anyway.

But when we started mixing we ran into problems. The Romans were pretty good about it all you had to do was pay them money and give lip service to their gods and you could go along as you pleased. That’s what made the Jews and later the Christians, such a pain in the ass. They would not go along to get along. They had the one true god, and he was telling them what to do, and be damned if they were going to listen to a bunch of puny mortals.

I guess religion is the strongest component of culture and I guess that is really what I am talking about here. You may not like that immigrant’s stinky food, but when they start telling you that their god is the only true god, that’s when we get into fisticuffs.

I know you remember The Enlightenment, when Europe shed itself from a lot of religious superstition and petty localism, and stepped onto the path of rationalism. Well this is kind of what I mean, call it recent western civ, call it the secular society, something like that, not that it is free of religion, humanist and philosophical versions of the religions are welcome, but stoning is forbidden. The rule of law, equality for all are endorsed, education is valued. This is what I think of as our culture.

It includes most of north America, though we do have our snake handlers and gangbangers who I don’t think are properly members of that culture, and most of Europe has it and some of the rest of the world, mostly in enclaves of the more educated.

Even though I don’t believe in good and evil as root realities, and I rather like some aspects of that cultural relativity thing, I have to admit, that I think our culture is superior to other cultures, and I will get into that in the next posting.

You know you could set Beaglesonia on Kelvin temps, then you would never go below zero. I think you are kidding about the year 0, but you have to wonder about the foresight of those in the year oh, 5,432, who knew the redeemer would show up exactly that many years later. But then they threw it off by four years, just to be a little coy.