The Power of Culture
What is the effect that the culture that a man lives within affect the content of his character? This was a question that might repeatedly assault the reader of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel or other all-compassing books and studies that seek to have a theory of everything to explain human flourishing. Diamond, in his book, certainly has created an engaging and thought-provoking piece of work trying to answer a large question about why some peoples conquered and why some were conquered. However, despite compelling answers about how geographic variables ultimately provide the required societal ingredients to form dominant political entities, it certainly does fall short of precisely answering the question of why.
In the last chapter of his book, Diamond does even engage with the shortcomings of his theory by contrasting that China did not come to assert the same force of empire in geopolitics and culture that Europe has asserted over the world over the past several hundred years. China – a nation that possessed all the societal building blocks that Europe possessed and perhaps was beating all other principalities in the race for global domination, in terms of technology, society and food production, for thousands of years, ended up falling behind at a certain point. Diamond even concedes that the reason that China fell behind had to due with cultural factors stemming from the administration of the empire. He ultimately chocks these cultural factors to geographic factors such as mountain ranges – this is not just ridiculous; it is a cope. One thing that is hard for scientists to quantify or even recognize is the human soul, the culture that soul swims in provides the building blocks of the spirit in the same way that geographic location determines the building blocks of society.
So, the most important question that one can take away from books and studies concerning themselves with the rise and fall of societies is this: how is my culture affecting me?
Our culture should engage the better angels of our nature, not beat them into submission. Individuality should be valued and ingenuity allowed to breathe – however the cost of society being too lax could also prove deleterious, the same way that a house with no walls would very quickly have a collapsing roof. Homer wrote Epics that have come to define humanity in a society that is primitive to ours, while much of our poetry today is surely to be tossed into the dustbin of history. How is it that someone today, who is so much smarter and more enlightened in terms of liberal sensibilities, could not hold a candle to an ancient author who probably did not know that space travel was possible? Did adequate food production and domesticable animal species create The Iliad, or was it just likely to happen as society advanced and stratified to create writing systems that someone would write a timeless tale to encapsulate the human condition in such a unique way? This assertion is similar to the validity of the idea that a monkey with a typewriter would write the works of Shakespeare over an infinite period of time. The answer is technically true while being wholly ridiculous and not helpful. Certain factors led to people making a certain society in a certain way that led to a certain individual being doing a certain task that was to create The Iliad.
We do not need to rob the past of it’s agency to make the present feel better about it’s successes and failures. Trends and graphs are useful tools but what does that mean to the individual soul that reads them? Hearing that 60% of marriages end in divorce is startling figure, but what does that mean for your own marriage? Remember that you are not the bird’s eye view that is reading the pages of history as a study, you are on the pages yourself as well! Not a trend, not a statistic, but a soul. Your culture will nurture or deplete that soul, perhaps both. However – it is one of the chief factors to concern yourself with, make sure that your culture is enriching your soul. If it not, seek to change that. Eventually your whole existence will be chalked up to a trend or movement or something that you cannot predict in a study that will be published in 100 years – but that means nothing about today, the day that you exist. Today, the wind blows and you must choose to raise or lower the sails in a way that carries your boat to shore. Your life has a destination, making getting there a priority.