Culture

"Traditions decay when the reality facing the new generation changes. "

                                                                                      --Charles Murray

We Chinese have a reverence for education. When I first came to the U.S., I had high school classmates that had to put themselves through college. One of them was working at a grocery store to earn money to pay for his tuition and living expenses. This was an alien concept to me at the time. In a Chinese family, it was an assumption from day one that the family would somehow scrape together the money to pay for a kid's college, no matter how poor. Such is the power of culture, things just get passed down and you intuitively know that you have to do it, even if you don't understand the reason. If you ever looked down from a high place and the fear of falling pulled you away, it was not an analytical or deliberate sort of decision, it was your gut reacting. It was hardwired into your brain. In a way, culture is like that. We accumulate culture because things worked in the past and it enhanced our survival. By following the successful habits of our forefathers, culture allowed us not having to analyze everything we do and still get it right most of the time.

Least we think that our culture and morality represents a permanent and fixed set of values, nothing can be further from the truth. Two sets of people, under very different circumstances, will come up with cultures and moralities that are very different. For example, If I go to another man and proposed that I share his wife, he would most likely be outraged. In Western culture as well as most of the world, this is the morality that we live under. You don't share your wife with another man. However, there are at least two places that I know of that have different outlooks, and for good reasons.

In the rugged mountains of the Himalayas, people practice polyandry. Two or more men will marry the same wife. They live in a farming community, but the environment is harsh. A family consists of the couple, two or three of their kids, and one or two grand parents live in a farm, one out of a handful of farms. The farm is barely able to sustain the people currently living there. There is no place to expand since they are surrounded by mountains. For the next generation, if they have two or more males and they each take a wife, the farm will have to be split. Both families will starve to death. Marrying the same wife allows the farm to be kept in tact and limits the number of offspring. It also concentrate all the labor on the same farm to ensure success.

In northern Siberia, the Inuits that herd Reindeer have the tradition of offering their wives to other men in exchange for access to their wives. A sort of wife swapping. In some instances. they will even offer their wives to strangers traveling to their homes. Reindeer herding supports a very low density population as a small tribe will need a large territory for their Reindeer. A problem associated with this is inbreeding. Chances are, the husband and the wife are genetically related. Sharing wives minimize genetic related illnesses for the next generation. The husband does not mind as much since he already share many genes with the wife. It is far more important that the next generation be healthy giving the high likelihood of genetically related illnesses due to inbreeding.

In each of the two cases above, if we impose our morality on them, all else being equal, they will perish. Their cultures and moralities, very different from ours, served a vital function for their survival.

Many people, mostly Western liberals, will say that all cultures of the world are equally valid. No one single culture is superior to another. This is patent nonsense. We wouldn't say Albert Einstein and Charles Manson are equally good human beings. Cultures should be judged the same way. How much does the culture contribute to humanity. A little common sense would say that Western Culture, which invented everything from double ledger accounting to space flight, has contributed far more to humanity than, say, the reindeer herders in Siberia. In nature, genetics of a specie go through violent selection. Only the fittest survives. Cultures are also under going the same selection. Only when some cultures are more superior and displace the inferior ones would there be progress.

Since we have accumulated our culture over a long period of time, there are parts of the culture that no longer work very well. If they are relatively harmless, they sometimes stay on long after they ceased to be useful. A friend of ours had a kid a few years back. Following the Chinese tradition that was passed down to her, she ate a concoction that was pigs feet and eggs cooked in ginger and vinegar. She also did not bath for a full month. Now that ginger and egg thing is a great tradition. You take what would have been a low cut of the pig, the feet, and cooked it in vinegar. The acid in the vinegar leach out the calcium from the pig feet and the egg shells, softens up the tough tendons, and turns it into vital and absorbable nutrients in great need by the mother and the kid. What about the part of not bathing for a month? This probably came from back when the Chinese lived in the northern plains of China. In a bitterly cold climate, malnourished and with less than ideal sanitation, bathing after a woman gave birth and sustained trauma might cause infections that could be lethal, either to the mother, or the kid. If it saved the lives of just one in a hundred people, then it is a tradition that is worth carrying on. In the hot San Jose climate with first world sanitation and modern medicine, this tradition had outlived its usefulness. While it won't kill the mother or the kid, it had became a drag to the ones carrying the tradition.

Sometimes, what started out as a good culture can go bad if people take it to the extreme. Back to our reverence for education, this tradition helped lifted the Chinese (from China and abroad) out of poverty. With the tiger moms now controlling every moment of their kids' lives, pressing their kids until many had nervous break downs and in some cases, suicides, what was once a good thing has now gone out of control and became a drag to the family that carries this tradition as well.

We need to constantly evaluate our culture to remove the bits that no longer apply, like not bathing for a month after giving birth, otherwise our culture will act as a anchor and weigh us down. Even for the parts that are working, we should constantly evaluate it and see if it could be improved upon. In some cases, as conditions change and there is no precedence, we may even have to create new ones.