Clay Feet: Weaponizing Culture

SIETAR Europa is in the process of seeking volunteers for leadership posts in the organization. To be a leader you need to know where you want to go and have some ideas about how to get there. Not easy. We find ourselves today in the throes of a deadly breakdown, in the grip of a multifaceted collection of crises. Many are not new or unfamiliar, but the horrors of the old normal have become strikingly evident in the light of the Covid pandemic. This breakdown inevitably calls into question how we think about, define and use cultural knowledge and where we go from here.

Let’s start with cultural values. It has become very clear that cultural values as many interculturalists have explored and applied them, are ways of describing certain identifiable shapers and facets of human thinking and identity creation that have been developed and are being developed by human groups. Ultimately, they are socially constructed stories we tell ourselves about who we are that construct us individually and socially and so shape the dynamics of the worlds we live in. Currently, our intercultural perspectives (along with many other traditional philosophical, religious, and common understandings and beliefs about human nature) are not only failing us in the current crises but are being challenged by neurological research and cognitive science. We are becoming aware of several aspects of cultural values that demand our attention because they are as difficult to deal with as they are necessary to survival.

First, we have long known that cultural values are at best probabilities or clues to how people in various groups may be likely to believe and behave as we observe and interpret them. These generalizations start to unravel when indiscriminately applied so that they become stereotypes that turn into embedded biases or mental frames whose application may be at times useful but also fraught with dangerous consequences. The extent of their validity is always questionable and ever more so in a world of intense globalized connectivity and AI.

Secondly, neither life nor culture is static. Cultural values are complex in the sense that they operate in diverse ways even within culturally defined groups. Essential to cultural understanding is seeing the contexts in which the values are applicable, irrelevant, or even destructive. Culture is an embodied flesh and blood living reality in which so-called values are articulated and embedded to assist those who hold them to survive and flourish in their environments. Without a framework of agreed ethical standards for their application, what is perceived as useful and good may be equally applied in a way that is selfish or harmful. Despite our many attempts to define human rights, to impose what we feel to be right or wrong, there is no universally accepted framework and thus a need for ongoing dialogue and revision.

Thirdly, the values attributed to cultural identity can be and are being manipulated, producing everything from inequities to wars and genocide – “us-versus-them”. Cultural mediation, the ability to speak to the embedded values of a group of people in such a way that they unconsciously or consciously identify with the ideas, ideals, or products that the mediator wishes to sell, whether we are dealing with political dictatorship, commodification, or the various brands of political “correctness”. Repetition is the mother of learning, whether mathematical tables, conspiracy theories, conservativism, propaganda, populism, identity politics, or anarchy. An age of stark truth, as well as widespread deepfake, is upon us.

Finally, this leads us to the awareness of how culture is being both deconstructed and weaponized. On one hand, we find ourselves now flooded with shocking findings as our cultural histories are being soberly examined, rewritten, and retold whatever their toxicity. Gone is the sterile, proud identification of ourselves with “heroes” and as “the winners”. On one hand, this is an important and salutary step for understanding our present condition, but it is also generating a painful tsunami of blame and judgment directed at self and others. We try to exculpate ourselves to avoid the pain, while at the same time establishing a cancel culture, a relentless search for feet of clay, eager to topple the monuments of the past and destroy the powers that be and those that want to be. Will this new us-versus-them perspective free us from our past or continue to echo its dynamics? Will the intercultural profession provide explorers and guides and the processes for how to rejig our future?

This is challenging. It Is not surprising that the culture of interculturalists has been one of conflict avoidance rather than one of passionate debate or speaking one’s truth to power and addressing flawed systems and assuming our responsibility for maintaining them. Rather than avoiding conflict, this can be done with vision, civility, and careful listening. Likewise, we can as a matter of course apply what we know about the dynamics of culture to our own intercultural professions and professional organizations and our own lives. We frequently debate what our values should be and we often attempt to create an ideal profile, to set standards that we believe we should maintain and exercise, even enforce for the members of our group. But do we ever carefully explore our own cultural demographics to understand and deal with our own diversity? Rarely.

Make no mistake about it. We make our living by providing others with the resources of our profession, but essential to those resources is also teaching the users how to question them and use them as well as questioning them and how we are using them ourselves.