I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
In his 1993 book The Evolving Self, Hungarian-American psychologist and flow theoretician Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that your brain hides reality from you via three influences or “veils”: genetic instructions, cultural rules, and the “unbridled desires of the self.” He writes, “these distortions are comforting, yet they need to be seen through for the self to be truly liberated.”
Today, I want to look at the second: culture.
Csikszentmihalyi writes:
If ethnocentrism seems to be an inevitable outcome of belonging to a culture, there is probably no other way of being. Survival and self-esteem depend on those among whom we are born. By now, to be human we need the instructions transmitted through culture almost as much as we need genetic instructions. How else would we talk, read, count, think? The genes cannot teach these skills; we must learn them from women and men who speak our language, from the knowledge stored in books and other symbols systems. But in the process of teaching us how to be human, culture begins to make its claims. Just as genes use the body as a vehicle for their own reproduction, a culture also tends to use individuals as vehicles for its own survival and growth.
To succeed in life, one must accept some level of acculturation, but if it goes too far, it limits your individuality:
Excessive acculturation leads one to see reality only through the veils of culture. A person who invests psychic energy exclusively in goals prescribed by society is forfeiting the possibility of choice.
Csikszentmihalyi shares a description of the Gusii society of West Africa. This culture instills three goals in its members: to own as many head of cattle as possible representing wealth, to have as many children and grandchildren as possible to increase social position, and to gain spiritual power by taking action to gain fear and respect from one’s peers. These activities leave “very little room for poetry, romance, or flights of the imagination beyond these goals.” A Gusii tribesman is not just a slave to his drives such as those for food, sex, and bodily survival but also to the demands of culture.
The culture of the West today is similar to how it was when The Evolving Self was published:
The culture that spans most of our society looks up to the likes of Donald Trump, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken because they have amassed large herds of dollars; worships General Norman Schwarzkopf because he bombed the enemy into submission; pays millions to a basketball player because he jumps higher than anyone else; and swoons at the feet of entertainers who serve as symbols of youth, beauty, and a happy life, even though the person behind the smiling mask is more often than not a confused and unhappy wretch.
Csikszentmihalyi doesn’t suggest that you discard your cultural inheritance entirely because it provides a useful set of instructions and ideas for life success and adaptation to the world around you. He only suggests you question it:
[It] is also useful… to take off the distorting glasses that we have grown accustomed to wearing, and look at what is happening from a different perspective. To what extent have I accepted other people’s definition of who I am and what I could be? How ignorant am I of the values held by people of different cultures? Or more prosaically: Do I actually like the highly advertised values of my car? Is the company I work for deserving of my loyalty? Is working seventy hours a week really the best investment of my life energy? Is a slim figure, a youthful look the highest peak of human accomplishment?
And he also suggests you “question the descriptions of reality of one’s culture, and especially those presented by the media.” This is where I think that I, and people around me, fairly regularly fail to see reality. We take our chosen news sources as truthful, objective reports of the world and events happening with in it. We don’t see that every news report embeds a particular subjective outlook.
Tomorrow, in my Tuesday Book Club post, I’ll share the antidote to the veils of illusion that Csikszentmihalyi identifies: seeking a life that increases order instead of disorder, to develop a complexity of consciousness, so that you might contribute to a better future not just for yourself, but for many people.