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The Way I Think > Chapter 9: Cultures and Different
Temporal Ages
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I don't experience culture shock in the usual sense. When I began crossing cultures, I braced myself against culture shock, and was underwhelmed. I didn't find the other cultures to be any goofier than my own. Depending on how you look at it, I either never experience culture shock, or always experience culture shock.
I strive to be in this world but not of it in a religious sense; there is also a secular sense in which I am in this world but not of it. I don't perfectly fit in any of the cultures I've encountered.
C.S. Lewis said, "The traveller has lived in many villages, and is therefore rendered to some extent immune to the errors of his own local village. The scholar has lived in many times, and is therefore rendered partially immune to the great spout of nonsense that flows from his and every age." As per Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, each culture is a cave as in Plato's allegory; he says that moving to another cave does not allow one to see the sun, but I would suggest that having a variety of differing mistranslations of a particular text will permit one to tentatively understand the original better than if one only has one mistranslation. Therefore I reccommend exposing yourself to different cultures and ages. Travel and live abroad, if you can. Read works such as medieval romances and the Tao Te Ching.
I would like to issue a note about multi-culturalism. What I am advocating here is worthy, in my eyes, of the title of 'multi-culturalism'. Most of what goes under that rubbish is not. Current multi-culturalism gives much too brief of a contact with a culture to learn anything worth learning; it's kind of like Monty Python's competition to see who can provide the best 15-second explanation of the works of Proust. It is more informative to say, "This doesn't work," which is exactly what was done by announcing an award to "the girl with the biggest tits." I am much happier to have lived for 2 1/2 months in Malaysia and 4 months in France, than I would have been to have spent one day in each country of the world. Furthermore, the cultures are unnecessarily distorted to serve as mouthpieces to the orthodoxy of the left; hence Travels with Rigoberta as described in Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education. It is something like trying to illuminate a forest at night by shining light on it with a slide projector with a slide of a car, so that people are led to the conclusion that if you really look at the forest, what you will see is a car.
As a part of education, I would encourage the reader to move about in cultures and ages. I myself live partly in the Middle Ages, partly in the Early Christian Era, partly in academia, partly at IMSA, partly in Malaysia, partly in France, partly in contemporary America, partly in the Renaissance...
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The Way I Think
The Way I Think > Chapter 9: Cultures and Different
Temporal Ages
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