AN EPISODIC LIFE & CULTURE CRISIS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
March 2022
PROLOGUE
Culture is one of those
equivocal terms that punctuate the rhetoric of academics, politicians, commercial
advertisers, members of the clergy, and media as if everyone understands what
they are driving at when clearly they do not.
According to
sociologists and social psychologists, “culture” is a potpourri of implicit
values, beliefs, and inculcated interests that people come to consider
reality. These norms come to guide them
to their day-to-day intercourse with others triggering their subsequent
behavior. The distillate of these
indices becomes the subliminal value system that guides their moral choices and
commitments and constitutes the reality that their mind takes to be
reality. Such a mind latches on to the
symbols of these belief norms failing to see that they also constitute their
explicit biases.
When we are born and
the circumstances that permeate that world and influence our parents directly
and our society collective, differ from generation to generation as the stimuli
differ and the prevailing promulgation of information changes. We see evidence of this in everyday life as
codes of manner, dress, language, religion, rituals, and what is considered art
in music, literature, history, and philosophy change with the mind of the
time. An indication of this is the story
we tell ourselves along with the learned and acquired behaviors.
Samuel P. Huntington’s
(1927 – 2008) “The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order” (1998)
anticipated what is happening today in 2022.
But this is a far less grand treatment of culture relating specifically
to an individual who experienced “culture shock” when leaving the insular world
of his Irish American Catholic world to enter that of his dominant Protestant
and Republic society of his community of 33,000 by becoming a high school
student at Clinton High in Clinton, Iowa.
“Culture Shock” refers
to feelings of uncertainty, confusion, and anxiety when moving from a new
country and surroundings where the new culture and environment seems not only
beyond his comprehension but his ability to cope adequately.
The feeling of
disorientation experienced was subtle although poignant that now with the
perspective of age I can better understand how the unfamiliar culture, way of
life, and sets of attitudes experienced clashes with the expected and familiar
while shaping me into the person that I would become.
While what follows may
seem naïve, immature, and self-righteous, which cannot be denied, it made me
into the writer that I would become writing books that had little commercial
value and clashes with the prevailing corporate norms of my society. If the reader can identify with some of these
meanderings, fine, if they cannot, that is also okay as I am writing this and
the end of my blessed existence in which by the grace of God I was born in a
time and place where struggle, pain, failure, and regret were necessary to grow
up, an absence of which lie suggest that maturity is not the prevailing norm.
We don’t usually think
of our lives in terms of a series of unanticipated shocks, but those who
venture out of the norm be it the values, beliefs, and culture of their early
existence, or indeed those whose early existence is outside the norms have
experienced the bumpy road to maturity.
We live in an age when
it is not fashionable to admit the trauma and dysfunction of existence early on
to take risks, experience failures pick ourselves up to move on knowing that we
are the architects of our lives and can blame no one if things don’t work out
as expected.
Life is a combination
of curiosity and discovery to penetrate the arbitrary props society and indeed
civilization creates to protect us from ourselves imprisoning us in cages of
cultural constructs of man. Our age is
not much different than others only the absurdity is generational and
time-specific. Wealth, power, celebrity,
beauty, and possessiveness of the haves versus the have nots are seemingly
endemic to every age liberal idealists notwithstanding.
No attempt is made here
to suggest this an academic reference to psychology, sociology, economics,
anthropology, law, science, religion, or engineering although they pervade this
story. It is my story written as honestly
as my memory allows in this late stage of my life. Lying is a hassard of existence, and we are
all liars, me no less than anyone else.
Also, the exaggeration of one’s achievements minimizing one’s defeats is
likewise common.
The reader will have to
draw their conclusions to what makes sense and has some validity to their own
self and experience. Critics have
suggested that I write with anger. A
psychiatrist once told me it was my primary motivation.
It will start with my
birth in THE GREAT DEPRESSION and move inextricably to now where I am an old
man who hopes he has the energy to write this outline of a story of a time and
circumstances of society that goes blindly forward on the back of progress and
technology creating the world that now is our God that owns and controls us
with apparent no way out, or is there?
It was for me. Stay tuned. My life along with culture shock has one
constantly enriched with serendipity.
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