A friend of mine was telling me tonight that the writer James Baldwin, upon growing up in Harlem and then subsequently moving to Europe and seeing other parts of the world, observed that Americans have possibly the most uncommunicative culture in the world.
Now that's a curious observation. Of course it isn't easy traveling to every end of the earth observing every culture in existence and objectively weighing out these differences. But it at least seems relatively accurate to say that as a culture we don't do communication too well. Where else does the great power of Hollywood come from? We communicate with carefully constructed images. And each of us in some point in our lives has altered ourselves in some way to attempt to harmonize with those images, in the hopes of achieving communication. Those images are the bridges that tie us together when the communication fails.
And so we carry on these behaviors in our daily lives. I don't know how many times I still catch myself contriving my own behaviors to line up with some artificially constructed ideal of myself, only to realize that those behaviors are contradicting what my human self is simply trying to do of its own accord.
This is partially where the oppression of a cultural hegemon comes in. The most powerful cultural ideology is going to be the ideology with the most material power to project that ideology. In this case, movies and TV shows get made that are carefully constructed to express that ideology. Many people worship these images, and relate to those that worship and attempt to harmonize with the images as well. For those of us slightly different or aberrant when compared to the images, well I guess we are shit out of luck aren't we?
And so why is it that we insist on relying on these constructed images and fabricated ideals? There is something in our culture that is being transmitted across generations, that is for sure. We have these traumatic experiences as children and are taught that it is better to paper over these experiences and carry on with a smile without addressing the trauma head on. Most people are anyways, or that is how things work when we enter actual institutions. We breathe it in. It permeates the culture. We absorb it without even knowing.
Where in the world did it come from? This stuff? This tight fabric? Well, in the formative years of this country there was great upheaval around the world. Revolutions everywhere. This would seem to be an ideal place to come to for those breaking away. And so the flaming fragments touched down here and there along the East coast perhaps. I'd imagine that people were pretty terrified of each other at that point in history. Security would come through material accumulation and the exertion of wits to further that goal. But now I'm getting into serious complexities that I should probably leave alone for now. Another day will come for such an analysis.
So I guess we are finding out that wits and material accumulation can get you security for a little while, but that gravy train must come to an end eventually. Population saturation, resource depletion, the end of imperial expansion, all of these complications spell trouble for the project of ego enrichment. Now we have a mass of people that has access to less and less things, a mass of people that are going to have to fall back onto those communication skills we have sort of let atrophy. Now we are back to communication. Relationships.
See the problem with constructing an image to communicate with is that to make it intelligible, you have to necessarily amputate a lot of information. So you are left with a limited model that only works with a range of human behaviors.
Setting that aside, what does it take to really establish a relationship? To communicate? We of course have to interact with each other emotionally. And the problem with our emotions is that they reside in a part of our brain that is not directly accessible by our analytical language centers. Such structures evolved to sit on top of the emotional engines, so to speak. So far we've perpetuated an over-reliance on the analytical structures; we have forgotten how to handle our emotions.
To truly establish a relationship with someone, you have to connect emotionally. And to connect emotionally, you have to form an understanding of the other person's emotional make up. Something you can't directly access with language and analysis. Besides experiencing emotional pleasures of another intelligence, you also have to discover the boundaries of that other person, often through trial and error and mistake, which can be very difficult. Especially in American culture, where we are taught to avoid those confrontations.
Those boundaries exist beyond a veil in that emotional engine. With each mistake you make, every time you hurt someone or make them angry, you are discovering a new contour, a finer definition of this shape you are trying to understand. Scary stuff, to be sure. But worth the trouble. As you form an understanding of that person's emotional outline, you know more and more how to interact, and how to communicate with that person. Hopefully, relations smoothen. Less mistakes are made, or at least less catastrophic ones. You experience what approaches harmony. Waves of dissonance subside, the wavelengths growing longer, and the cycles of negative feedback growing shorter.
This will take more time to flesh out. And I think I am out of glucose.
