Marin Voice: Questioning cultural assumptions in adaptive times

As author Yuval Noah Harari so clearly points out in his best-selling book “Sapiens,” every culture is built on a set of fictitious stories that are treated as truths or realities by people in that culture. Considering that, perhaps our president’s actions feel so scary and assaultive because they deny or reject some of our own cultural truths, our collective reality.

Cultures choose what fictions they will make true. Our mercantile democracy is one of many ways to manage power, authority and conflict. Other ways, experienced as equally valid in their place or time, include monarchy, communism, socialism and social democracy, autocracy, feudalism and consensus. Other fictitious stories made real are: laws, which we mostly accept and abide by; money, which we all agree can be exchanged for goods and services; and individual human rights, an extraordinarily recent and radical concept.

When someone with extreme power and authority disregards such cultural assumptions, members of that culture may legitimately feel shocked, disoriented or angry. But some members of that same culture may feel elated if they experienced pain from the cultural assumptions.

For example, the ruling class, and eventually commoners, felt relief when the absolute power of the monarch was progressively curtailed, starting with the Magna Carta in 1215. Enslaved people rejoiced when society let go of the belief and norm that slavery was inevitable and legitimate. Beginning in the 1970s and ’80s, many Americans were increasingly disappointed and frustrated as their expectations and assumptions about their jobs, incomes and social position went unmet.

If you feel that democracy has treated you unfairly, you are probably delighted to see it undermined by a leader who gives society the finger, violates conventions and disobeys the laws that support them. If, on the other hand, you are satisfied and fulfilled with your life in the existing culture, you’ll probably be enraged when a leader disregards the cultural myths underlying your satisfaction.

This is where we seem to stand today, with a more or less 50-50 split in our culture – half voting for continuity, half voting for change; half shocked at the leader’s behavior, half thrilled by it.

I believe that our cultural assumptions around democracy and the laws that support them are more or less OK as is. What needs reworking is how these assumptions play out individually, particularly with human rights around inclusion, equity and equality.

Internationally, we seem to be economically on track as vast numbers of previously impoverished people continue stepping into the middle class. However, the well-publicized transfer of trillions of dollars from the bottom 50% to the top 1% is destabilizing trust in our mercantile democracy.

There are hurdles to publicly discussing these equity and equality topics. Powerful people benefitting from the system resist change unless they gain. We built a global industrial consumer culture whose core value, profit, does not comfortably embrace humanness, equity and equality. Our legal system pushes such complex cultural topics into a simplistic for-and-against, black-and-white, win-or-lose format. U.S. politics has tribalized so that many people’s personal identity is tied to one side or the other. All of this does not set a welcoming stage for understanding and agreement.

It seems particularly human that every generation believes it is on a uniquely rocky road. Having lived several generations, including through World War II, today’s media-magnified dramas seem relatively ordinary to me, certainly nothing to panic about. We have jumped higher hurdles. I’m expecting another success.

It is possible that we are beginning a major cultural shift, perhaps at the scale of what happened following the birth of industrialization and its troubled allies: consumerism and nonsustainability. Accelerating technological change, along with the currently collapsing global birth rate, may be a recipe for a brighter future, hopefully more tuned to people than to industry.

One thing is sure, cultural evolution, how we respond to our self-created rapidly changing environment, will be a surprise. As the wag said, and as our fast-paced technology validates, “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”

I’m hopeful and excited. We are a remarkably adaptive and creative species.

Barry Phegan, of Greenbrae, is a frequent author of Marin Voice commentaries. He can be found online at companyculture.com.