On Culture Shock

WHAT IS CULTURE?
Cultural Travel sounds very educational and informative, but how much can you really learn about a culture in a few days or a few hours? Having visited both Turkey and Greece on my trip, I formed opinions about each culture, but they certainly can’t be validated by a few days’ experience. I was first introduced into the wider world of cultures as a sophomore in college when I spent a summer in Hawaii. What culture shock! I worked at Dole Pineapple Company among peoples of diverse heritages from the Philippines, Guam, Japan, China, England, native Hawaiian, and haole. I remember watching in fascination as the English boy ate his poached eggs with fork in left hand and knife in the right. And, it worked!

My second taste of culture shock was a semester spent at sea on the World Campus Afloat (now Semester at Sea) program in the spring of 1967. (A photo of the current Semester at Sea vessel, the MS Explorer, appears above. It was docked in Athens next to the Nautica.) After departing from Long Beach, California, and crossing the Panama Canal, we spent 4 months travelling from port to port on the Atlantic Ocean: Trinidad/Tobago, Caracas, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Lagos, Dakar, Cadiz, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, London, Dublin, and New York. What a trip! The culture I learned most about on this trip, however, was the bizarre culture demonstrated by the California students. To a conservative Texas girl, they were as strange as cannibals were to Montaigne. That trip just whetted my appetite to live abroad and actually experience a foreign culture.

BENEFITS OF LIVING ABROAD
Living abroad was another experience entirely. Living in another culture provides the opportunity to become familiar with how it operates on a day-to-day basis; living abroad teaches you to make considered judgments about cultures based on experience, not stereotype. Living in foreign cultures ultimately teaches you that human beings are pretty much the same all over; they exist in equal amounts of good and bad both individually and collectively. I have friends and acquaintances who spent a couple of years in the Peace Corps or studying abroad. It’s clear that those years abroad were formative. Every young American should live abroad and experience another culture first-hand.

CULTURAL RELATIVISM
It’s a complex world, and sorting out the good guys from the bad guys isn’t an easy task. Cultural relativism, however, which holds that all cultural responses are equally valid, cannot be justified. It should be shelved in favor of a considered, educated political discernment. Such discernment would allow for value judgments against cultures which discriminate against women or otherwise have characteristics which miss the mark in a world which has thankfully given up slavery, extreme patriarchal hierarchy, and the tendency towards gratuitous violence. That educated discrimination comes from experiencing a variety of cultures in a variety of ways.

I often hear complaints about America and our culture of possessions and obsessions. Were the British riots caused by a slow decay of moral culture as PM Cameron claimed? Were they caused by a culture of classism and elitism? What makes for a healthy culture?