It’s crucial to step back and examine culture

Comment: We often follow practices without questioning why. They were just handed down from one generation to the next, with no one questioning their reason or purpose. Certainly we should have a healthy respect for ancient wisdom, but at the same time, it is important to evaluate the usefulness of a practice. There are many behaviors that, if examined with a clear, objective mind, would not make sense and could even be harmful. -- A.Z., Las Vegas

Response: This brings up a delicious paradox: Human beings, at once, shape culture and are shaped by it. Yes, we can "step back" and observe culture, but even the way we observe it and what we will see is greatly determined by the way it has shaped us. This creates the blind spots, the habituations of practice without examination.

This is why I'm always intellectually impatient of people whose goal it is to "rid the world of bias." Bias is the only possible outcome of cultural beings. A better goal for educators is that we should know our biases. Then we have at least a chance to sort out which biases contain usefulness and beauty, and which biases have outlived usefulness and now perpetuate suffering and injustice.

Your comment itself contains the energy of cultural prejudice: To wit, that it is important to question assumptions. While that has always been a scientific mandate, it has only been a social mandate quite recently.

The desire to examine culture extended itself into absurdity during the 1960s. Human beings thought it possible to become so enlightened, so hip, so cool, that they could lift themselves right out of culture and "find" themselves as separate individuals. Nonconformity at all cost was the abiding value.

Yet, the hippies from Greenwich Village to Haight Ashbury all looked the same. Acted the same. Used marijuana like a sacrament in a new religion. Despised materialism -- and wrote songs about that on jeweled guitars costing thousands of dollars.

It all seems like an extended commitment to group adolescence. A membership in the Collective Peter Pan Society.

(See, A.Z. -- I'm examining culture.)

Yet ...

The '60s weren't merely a 10-year cartoon. I credit the '60s for at least three cultural shifts that, while uncomfortable and threatening like any cultural shift, seem to me to be good things:

* After the '60s, Americans would never again be collectively comfortable with war. The American Revolution, World Wars I and II -- in these conflicts we had a clear and collective vision of oppression and despots and evil. Equally did we share a felt responsibility to stand against that darkness, despite the horrible cost of war. But the assassination of JFK and Vietnam cost us our innocence irretrievably. We no longer share a clear vision of The Enemy.

* In the '60s, we decisively rejected the idea that any leader deserved our unexamined obedience. A healthy cultural being understands the necessary duty of practicing obedience to fair and just authority -- we pull over, for example, when the police officer behind us flashes red lights -- but would equally value civil disobedience in the face of unjust authority and abuses of power.

* In the '60s, we began the overthrow of unexamined cultural/religious mandates about sexual practice. I admit that I have mixed feelings about this one. When we examine the statistical categories of teen pregnancy, disease, abortion, divorce, pornography, etc. since then, it's pretty easy to make the argument that the Sexual Revolution accomplished little more than to make us revolting. The irony of this culture is its self-image of being sophisticated and hip, sexually speaking, yet leading all developed nations in virtually every category of socially negative sexual consequences.

But not so fast. I still fiercely maintain that, in and around the absolute chaos of the Sexual Revolution and its aftermath, the '60s did somehow manage to confront the mortal enemy of healthy sexuality -- shame. I don't mean healthy shame, which is the acknowledgement of limits. I mean the toxic shame that insisted that sexual desire itself was probably sufficient evidence that your character was suspect.

So, my response to you is that I, too, value and consider it a moral duty to examine culture. But the idea that I can ever possess an identity apart from culture, or that I can rise above that identity into an autonomous, separate self -- well, those ideas are themselves a cultural bias.

And utter hubris, to boot.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions for the Asking Human Matters column or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@reviewjournal.com.