Posts Tagged cultural myths
Hyperbolic Exceptionalism
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing, Mother Culture on September 10th, 2010
The myth of progress expresses itself in our culture in numerous ways, some more subtle than others. One of these is a hyperbolic focus on exceptionalism. I thought of this when I saw a sign in a grocery store:
Now, some may see this simply as an example of hyperbole in marketing, but I was bowled over by the degree to which the sign took that premise. “Uncompromised” quality? Really? Because I’m willing to bet you compromised quality at least a little bit in the name of, for example, price. Realistically, you contracted with Boar’s Head, and whatever they deliver, you sell. “Uncompromised quality,” by itself, might be chalked up to everyday advertising hyperbole, but the sign-maker took it one step further. Not only is the store’s quality uncompromised, it is uncompromised Every Single Day. This is, of course, redundant. Quality that’s uncompromised, except on Tuesdays, is compromised, isn’t it?
Why doesn’t the idea of “uncompromised quality” invoke the same reaction in the reader as the idea of an “airborne submarine”? The reason, I think, is that neither the sign-maker nor the reader are taking the sign literally. The expansionist myth tells us that growth and expansion are good and stasis or contraction is death. From there, we extrapolate that everything in the world must constantly get “better.” Ultimately, this touches off an arms race of exaggeration in marketing, which leads to “the best” being the only thing that is even “good enough,” and something as mediocre as a grocery store deli counter needs to offer “Quality Uncompromised Every Single Day” just to move lunch meat. This sign is the marketing equivalent of the male peacock’s feathers: evolved to a preposterously impractical extreme, but expected by its intended audience, and so required.
Here’s a slightly less extreme example of the same idea. Coffee cups made “without compromise.”
These goldfish crackers invite you to “Never Have An Ordinary Day.” Setting aside for a minute the preposterous notion that goldfish crackers are what separates an ordinary day from an extraordinary one, the fact is that most days are ordinary, that’s what makes them ordinary. Again, this is not intended to be taken literally, but isn’t it interesting what direction the symbolism has gone?
The Myth of Ideological Consistency
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 22nd, 2010
In a previous post, I gave a particular definition of “culture,” described the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths, and concluded that:
The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.
If culture is, “The things we tell ourselves about ourselves,” then when I talk about a cultural shift, what I mean is that we change the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, we could replace the cultural myth of, “growth is progress; stasis or contraction is death,” with, “living in balance with one’s environment is life; over- or under-consuming and over- or under-populating is death.”
This is not an easy task. Our culture is incredibly resistant to fundamental changes. Your first thought may be to disagree with that claim. After all, the world has been through some drastic changes in just the last few hundred years. Surely some of them count as a fundamental cultural shift? No. I’m talking about really fundamental cultural myths: the ones that are buried so deep that you usually can’t even see them.
By way of example, the expansionist drive seems like one of these fundamental myths to me. For as long as our culture has existed, we have striven for: growth of our population; increased land-base under our control; increased consumption of resources; and increased technological complexity. No matter what other cultural changes you can point to over the 10,000 years or so that the dominant culture of the world has been developing, this one has remained steadfast. At different times and in different locations, the expression of the expansionist drive has waxed and waned, but it has never wavered.
I think of the ways that culture resists the changing of its myths as cultural defense mechanisms. One of those is the myth of ideological consistency. It goes like this: “Total ideological consistency is morally superior to ideological inconsistency. People whose ideals are in any way inconsistent are at best hypocrites, and at worst liars. Either way, their ideas are dismissable.”
Let’s say that I believe that the petroleum economy is fundamentally immoral and that the world would be better off if petroleum use was dramatically curtailed or even eliminated. But I also drive a car. “A ha!” the myth of ideological consistency shouts at me. “You don’t really believe that crap! If you really believed that crap, you wouldn’t drive your car! You’re a hypocrite! You’re a fake!” Now I’m faced with three choices:
- Stop driving my car.
- Maintain my belief and keep driving my car. Live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
- Ignore or abandon my belief about petroleum being immoral.
Option one amounts to martyrdom. Remember that culture defines how we meet our basic human needs. If “driving a car” is a fundamental aspect of my culture, and “not driving a car” represents a meaningful challenge to that culture, then “not driving a car” means threatening my access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth. Even if I take the step of not driving a car, my ideas are still open to challenge under the myth of ideological consistency. Do I have electricity at my house? Does it come from petroleum in some way? Do I eat food that was harvested and transported using tractors and trucks? If I have a belief that is inconsistent with my culture’s myths, I have to totally excise myself from my own culture in order for my actions to be totally consistent with that belief.
Option two is very difficult for most people. Not only is cognitive dissonance psychologically painful, but others may quickly dismiss your ideas due to your “hypocrisy.” Additionally, because you have been programmed with the myth of ideological consistency, you view yourself as morally inferior to those whose actions appear to be consistent with their beliefs (cultural myths).
Option three, of course, is the easiest out. Forget the challenging belief and go with the flow. Who can blame a person for doing the only thing they know how to do in order to get access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth? And this is how the myth of ideological consistency helps to preserve the existing cultural myths.
As long as you buy into the myth of ideological consistency, you cannot fully participate in changing cultural myths that you disagree with. The cultural myths that you wish to promote do not yet exist within your society, so you cannot practice them within your society. If you choose to act in a way that is totally consistent with your beliefs, you must excise yourself from your own culture. I think that there is a very valid question as to whether this is even possible. First, to do so would very likely deprive you of all of the mechanisms that allow you to meet your basic survival needs. Second, the pervasiveness of our culture means that there may, literally, not be anywhere on earth you could go to escape it.
There is a fourth option: abandon the myth of ideological consistency. This doesn’t mean that you stop evaluating whether a person’s (or your own) actions are consistent with their stated values, just that you understand that people (and yourself) can be in a position where they (you) hold values that are in conflict with each other and where they (you) care about all of the values too much to abandon any of them.
Derrick Jensen laments the salmon populations that have been destroyed by dams that block access to their spawning grounds. He knows where the dams are, and he hasn’t blown any of them up. Does that make him a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that he values not-being-in-prison and not-being-dead as much or more than he values removing the dams? Who can blame him? Prison has been constructed to be as awful as possible specifically for that reason!
Would I like to live in a world where I could eat food that was raised totally without chemical pesticides and fertilizers? Absolutely. Am I willing to stop eating anything except that food, today? No. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that I value access to food as highly or more highly than I value pesticide- and fertilizer-free food. Read that sentence again: “I value access to food.” Well, shit. Who doesn’t, when you put it that way?
The myth of ideological consistency is a sham, and you should work to excise it from your reasoning as thoroughly as possible.
Who To Blame For Deepwater Horizon: Our Culture
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 21st, 2010
I had some good conversations with friends this weekend, in which we discussed the outrage and horror that people are feeling over the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I’m horrified too, at the scope of the environmental disaster, but I find it hard to muster up too much outrage.
It’d be one thing if I believed that this was an aberration—that something had gone wrong in the system to allow this to happen—but as near as I can tell, the system was working exactly as intended. The oil rig was cutting every corner they reasonably could to boost the profits on the oil. The Minerals Management Service was pretending to regulate the oil companies, while actually letting them do whatever the hell they wanted. The politicians were maintaining plausible deniability on the lack of oversight, while accepting massive donations from oil companies so as to grease the wheels that make the whole thing possible. And Joe Public was shouting, “Drill Here! Drill Now!” and complaining to said politicians when gas got near $3 a gallon. We were all doing our part to ensure that, eventually, a disaster like this would happen. And “eventually” isn’t even the right word, because this is far from the first time a disaster like this has happened. It’s just the first time it happened close to Americans’ home. When thousands of leaks from decrepit pipelines pollute land and water in the Niger Delta, it doesn’t merit a mention, but when it threatens our economy, suddenly, people get mad.
To understand situations like this, I think it’s helpful to examine the role that our culture plays in our relationship to the earth and the resources we extract from it. When I say culture, I don’t mean art, music, or snooty restaurants. I mean the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, here are some of the things are said by many (all?) modern cultures:
Progress and success is defined as growth and expansion. Growth and expansion are associated with life and vitality. Lack of growth and expansion is a failure, and is associated with death. Things that support growth and expansion are good and things that hinder growth and expansion are bad.
The culture in which you exist (civilization) is the only way that you can have food, shelter, safety, comfort, and entertainment. People who lived outside of your culture lived an a brutish, dangerous, scary, barbaric world that you wouldn’t want anything to do with.
When I think about the the framework of choices and values that made the Deepwater Horizon disaster inevitable, it seems obvious that there’s a link back to the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths. If lack of growth and expansion equates to cultural, national, and ultimately individual death, then it makes sense that corners would be cut in order to acquire the ever-scarcer petroleum that fuels, literally, our growth and expansion. No matter what the damage done by a leak, it’s better than dying!
It’s really hard to challenge these cultural myths, because we have had them whispered into our minds every day of our life, and also because the very existence of the culture that provides us with the necessities of life depends on belief in the myths. But the veracity of the myths is easy to challenge. For example, it should be obvious from examination of nature that few, if any, species expand and grow for any length of time without a corresponding contraction. Species that expand and grow excessively, such as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia, create enormous problems, both for themselves and for the other species that have to share an ecosystem with them. So, the idea that contraction equates to death and expansion equates to success is easily falsified. And yet you show me one public company who wants to announce that its profits have dropped. You show me one government official who will cheerfully report that the GDP is down, not up. You show me one financial analyst who’s happy that the stock market is down. Nope. Up, up, up. All the time. Forever. Or it’s bad news. That’s the power of the cultural myth of the expansionist drive. Even though it’s demonstrably false, or at least incomplete.
Where should we direct our horror and outrage at the disaster that’s occurring in the Gulf right now? BP? Minerals Management Service? Politicians? All of these and more share some part of the blame. But focusing solely on those actors is just playing whack-a-mole. Deepwater Horizon is the most prominent (to people in the USA anyway) example of the inevitable outcome of the collection of stories that our culture tells us about our relationship to the environment and the resources it contains. The really scary thing is that every other system that’s operating within that culture is operating under the same premises. While some rigs are certainly safer than Deepwater was, at the end of the day, all rigs and pipelines and other facilities operate within the cultural myth that supporting the continued expansion of civilization is, literally, life-or-death. They have historically also cut corners and taken risks, with resulting environmental damage (thankfully, only to brown-skinned people who don’t really matter because they are far away and also poor). They will continue to do so as long as our shared culture contains the myth of the expansionist drive.
The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.
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Love Live Grow- Goes All the Way to the Environment May 22, 2012The latest magazine ad to catch my eye: “THE ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS CAR THAT GOES ALL THE WAY TO THE ENVIRONMENT. A gas-free commute is great. But sometimes you want to get out of the city and actually see some of that environment. With the Chevrolet Volt, you can drive 35 miles gas- and emissions-free and up to 375 miles with a full charge and a full tan […]
- These are the Fat FAQs May 17, 2012I just couldn’t resist that title. Say “Fat FAQs” fast a couple of times! Thanks to those of you who replied in the “rude questions” thread. I’ve taken ideas from that thread, cleaned up some of the concepts from the rude comments the other night, and pulled ideas from other conversations I’ve had and questions I’ve been asked privately. I’ve strung them all […]
- Why I Call It Fat-Hate Plus An Invite to Ask Rude Questions May 9, 2012When I talk about various topics related to fat acceptance, I often use the phrase “fat-hate” to refer to the harmful attitudes that people have. Some people might think that’s a bit hyperbolic when it seems like the topic on the table is just dieting, weight loss, nutrition, health, etc. It seems clear to me, though, that the public opinion on those topics […]
- Goes All the Way to the Environment May 22, 2012
