The unexamined life is not worth living.
-Socrates
Conscious Culture
So, what exactly is conscious culture?
Good Question. We talk about it often.
Setting the stage...
Basically, in today's 21st century world, we have a lot more choices than most of our grandparents and great-grandparents had. We can eat from a different cuisine every day of the week, flip through different genres of music at our fingertips, travel anywhere in the world, can choose to be religious or secular with no social stigma either way etc... The sheer number of choices we enjoy would have boggled the minds of previous generations.
Choice is certainly empowering, and requires responsibilty to use it for the good. The power of choice modern humans face on a daily basis demands a degree of consciousness that was not as necessary for our ancestors. In the old world, culture was generally geographically limited, and social structures were more rigid. People had customs, wisdoms and traditions that were handed down to them, which dictated to a great extent how they conducted their affairs. In many cases, these customs were culturally enriching, and protected people from making bad life's choices, but sometimes had the opposite effect. The task at hand for our generation is to carefully scrutinize these customs and historical knowledge, keep those that help us, leave behind those that don't, and even create new ones that take us to a new level of human flourishing.
In the past, primarily because it was harder to travel and communicate across long distances, cultural similarites tended to go along with a certain geographical region. Although this is still true today to a certain extent, the world is more mingled than before, and people with entirely different cultural backgrounds and values can find themselves living on the same block. Our grandparents' social circle often did not even leave their neighborhood, whereas today many communities bond over commonly shared values rather than merely geographical proximity. In our day, the world is going through a transition in the way communties are built, and in how we live our everyday life. The task of the consciously cultured individual is to gracefully steer this social transtion toward richer lifestyles and stronger communal bonds between people that ultimately result in true human flourishing.
Powerful tools, unintended consequences...
The enlightenment and industrial revolution brough unprecedented knowledge and power to the world in the form of modern science and technological innovation. While this has brought society forward in many ways, there are also a lot of unintended consequences that accopmany these advancements, and the consciously cultured individual needs to study them carefully, to avoid taking society in the wrong direction. This is more urgent today than yesteryear, because of how rapidly social change can take place in the modern world.
The consequences of science and technology can be roughly placed into two groupings:
Here are a few examples from various cultural categories to illustrate:
Music
Over the last hundred years, we have learned how to capture sound and replay it with a device. This is a briliiant invention which has been contiually perfected over the years. At the flip of a switch, we can listen to any music we want, anywhere we want. This opens up a vast amount of cultural material to every member of society, which has amazing power to do good for people. But it also has at least two unintended consequences that make us poorer instead of richer.
Farming
No industry has changed over the last 100-150 years as much as agriculture. Farm yields have multiplied many times over since the turn of the century, as a result of both scientific advances and new farming technologies. The modern farmer has tools at his disposal which his great-grandfather could never have imagined. It used to take 1/3 of the population to raise and grow food for society. Today, it takes about 2% to do the same job. While this is a masterpiece of human efficiency, the same two conseqences come to play here:
Eating
Like farming, the foods we eat and the ways we prepare them are a far cry from the traditional norm. Most food used to be prepared on farms, gardens and in kitchens by one or more family members, and they didn't have much choice about what they ate, or whether they wanted to participate or not. If you wanted to eat, you had to go buy/raise/grow the ingredients and make it for yourself. Today, an astounding variety of fully prepared foods stand ready and waiting for all classes of society at restaurants, supermarkets, fast food joints, convenience stores, and can even get delivered to your door. In addition to the incredible convenience this affords, the two unintended consequences that follow are:
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that we have to be more careful today than ever before, and use all our amazing modern gifts in a responsible way. If we do, we can make the world a better, happier, more meaningful place to live. If we don't, we will lose skills, values, and other cultural riches handed down and perfected for generations. A good image to illustrate this is somebody with so many gifts thrown into his open arms, he doesn't have time to look at them all, and can't tell which ones are worth keeping, and which ones are better let go. As we make our decision, here are a few principles we try to live by to keep things in perspective.
Good Question. We talk about it often.
Setting the stage...
Basically, in today's 21st century world, we have a lot more choices than most of our grandparents and great-grandparents had. We can eat from a different cuisine every day of the week, flip through different genres of music at our fingertips, travel anywhere in the world, can choose to be religious or secular with no social stigma either way etc... The sheer number of choices we enjoy would have boggled the minds of previous generations.
Choice is certainly empowering, and requires responsibilty to use it for the good. The power of choice modern humans face on a daily basis demands a degree of consciousness that was not as necessary for our ancestors. In the old world, culture was generally geographically limited, and social structures were more rigid. People had customs, wisdoms and traditions that were handed down to them, which dictated to a great extent how they conducted their affairs. In many cases, these customs were culturally enriching, and protected people from making bad life's choices, but sometimes had the opposite effect. The task at hand for our generation is to carefully scrutinize these customs and historical knowledge, keep those that help us, leave behind those that don't, and even create new ones that take us to a new level of human flourishing.
In the past, primarily because it was harder to travel and communicate across long distances, cultural similarites tended to go along with a certain geographical region. Although this is still true today to a certain extent, the world is more mingled than before, and people with entirely different cultural backgrounds and values can find themselves living on the same block. Our grandparents' social circle often did not even leave their neighborhood, whereas today many communities bond over commonly shared values rather than merely geographical proximity. In our day, the world is going through a transition in the way communties are built, and in how we live our everyday life. The task of the consciously cultured individual is to gracefully steer this social transtion toward richer lifestyles and stronger communal bonds between people that ultimately result in true human flourishing.
Powerful tools, unintended consequences...
The enlightenment and industrial revolution brough unprecedented knowledge and power to the world in the form of modern science and technological innovation. While this has brought society forward in many ways, there are also a lot of unintended consequences that accopmany these advancements, and the consciously cultured individual needs to study them carefully, to avoid taking society in the wrong direction. This is more urgent today than yesteryear, because of how rapidly social change can take place in the modern world.
The consequences of science and technology can be roughly placed into two groupings:
- They give power to know and do things we couldn't know or do before. This can be used for both good and bad purposes.
- Because of this new knowledge and power, they tend to replace previous social structures which they render obsolete.
Here are a few examples from various cultural categories to illustrate:
Music
Over the last hundred years, we have learned how to capture sound and replay it with a device. This is a briliiant invention which has been contiually perfected over the years. At the flip of a switch, we can listen to any music we want, anywhere we want. This opens up a vast amount of cultural material to every member of society, which has amazing power to do good for people. But it also has at least two unintended consequences that make us poorer instead of richer.
- It makes it possible to expose ourselves to music that glorifies sub-optimal lifestyles
- The sheer accesibilty of recorded music reduces the incentive for people to make music themselves
Farming
No industry has changed over the last 100-150 years as much as agriculture. Farm yields have multiplied many times over since the turn of the century, as a result of both scientific advances and new farming technologies. The modern farmer has tools at his disposal which his great-grandfather could never have imagined. It used to take 1/3 of the population to raise and grow food for society. Today, it takes about 2% to do the same job. While this is a masterpiece of human efficiency, the same two conseqences come to play here:
- Agricultural knowledge and technologies make it possible to farm in ways that don't enhance our common earthly home.
- Because it takes so few farmers to feed society, most people grow up disconnected from the process of growing their food.
Eating
Like farming, the foods we eat and the ways we prepare them are a far cry from the traditional norm. Most food used to be prepared on farms, gardens and in kitchens by one or more family members, and they didn't have much choice about what they ate, or whether they wanted to participate or not. If you wanted to eat, you had to go buy/raise/grow the ingredients and make it for yourself. Today, an astounding variety of fully prepared foods stand ready and waiting for all classes of society at restaurants, supermarkets, fast food joints, convenience stores, and can even get delivered to your door. In addition to the incredible convenience this affords, the two unintended consequences that follow are:
- It is now very easy for anyone to consume foods with ingredients they cannot pronounce, and which aren't good for their bodies.
- It tends to discourage people from making food for themselves in their own homes, and sharing their creation with friends and family.
The Bottom Line
The bottom line is that we have to be more careful today than ever before, and use all our amazing modern gifts in a responsible way. If we do, we can make the world a better, happier, more meaningful place to live. If we don't, we will lose skills, values, and other cultural riches handed down and perfected for generations. A good image to illustrate this is somebody with so many gifts thrown into his open arms, he doesn't have time to look at them all, and can't tell which ones are worth keeping, and which ones are better let go. As we make our decision, here are a few principles we try to live by to keep things in perspective.
- Take a positive approach rather than negative. Instead of rejecting thechnology outright, or constantly complaining about the direction the world is heading, try to see the part of the glass that is half full, and keep on filling it up. Technology has amzing power for both good and evil, and it's up to us to choose and use them wisely. After all, it takes a lot of technology for these words to show up on your screen! If you don't like the direction the world is going, it's going to take a lot of energy to turn in around. Complaining takes energy, and generally doesn't acomplish much, so be like Ghandi and "Be the change you want to see in the world."
- Always try to see the unintended consequences outlined above, and figure out how we can use our modern advantage to steer clear of them.
- Understand that we are part of a big story, and the story unfolds in our own lives every single day. Social changes don't happen in a vaccum -- they happen because of real events, and problems, and ideas etc. It can be a bumpy ride, and it's not unusual for society to expereince a number of "hiccups" along the way to real lasting change for the better. The more we are ware of our won history, and where we came from, and why, we can be better oriented moving this great story forward.
- Everything you do matters! We are all part of this story, whether we want to or not, and the choices we make every single day determine the culture we live in. "Culture" is nothing other than a word to describe the ways that people have chosen to live their lives. The way we live our lives defines our culture.
- Although it is completely necessary to look to the past to learn from our predecessors, we shouldn't want to recreate the past. History is dynamic, and it is just unrealistic to try to freeze it in time. We should take what is worth keeping, leave the rest, and be reay for the fact that even those same values might take a different twist in a modern world. For example, we can expect to see cultural customs being determined less on a locality basis, and more on a household basis. The fact is that we live in a more diverse world than days past, and although this can occasionally be a barrier to forming local communities, it can also be a source of richness, and widened understanding of others. Different families are going to draw from different cultural heritages, and within any given city, there will be households celebrating the very same holiday in different ways. Our task is to take these differences, learn from them, weave them together into many beautiful harmonies, appreciate both our differences and common values, and still continue to form strong local bonds with our neighbors in spite of cultural differences.
"Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. ... Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love."
-Hans Urs von Balthasar