The Dark Side of Culture (10): Success

 American success (source: here)

When I was 23 years old, I worked as a wooden shipwright on a Baltic Schooner in the US Virgin Islands. The ship, Elinor, had been damaged in Hurricane Hugo in September of 1989. My job – as part of a team of boatbuilders – was to restore Elinor to her former glories.

One morning when I was working on the dock in Christiansted, St. Croix, a middle-aged American in expensive shoes, crisply ironed shorts, and a brand-name shirt walked in my general direction with a magazine in his hand. He glanced at me as he walked past. After a few steps, he stopped, turned around, and looked at me for a while with a hint of a smile playing on his lips. Then he walked up to me and handed me the magazine with the words,

“You look like the type who’d enjoy this”.

It was a porno magazine.

I don’t remember what I said or I did other than hand him back his magazine, but I do recall very vividly how I felt. I felt demeaned, incredulous, angry. I was unable, in that moment, to put a finger on why those emotions were welling up inside me. What was it about this man that made me feel humiliated? I had no hang-ups about pornography. In fact, one could even construe his gesture as a kindness of sorts, offering me a gift.

With time, I have come to understand that my anger did not stem from anything he did, but how he did it, how he looked at me, how he spoke to me, and the assumptions he must have made when he offered me his smutty magazine. He would never have offered a porno magazine to someone from his own class. And certainly not with the same air of smugness. He acted the way he did, because he looked down on me, considered me his inferior. He was arrogant, presumptuous, supercilious.

Because I was a manual worker and he was rich.

What I experienced that day is what countless women, gays, ethnic and cultural minorities, disabled people, over-weight people, ugly people, and myriads of other social sub-groups experience on a daily basis, namely plain old prejudice. My experience was fairly harmless as far as prejudice goes, especially compared to the awful discrimination other groups suffer. Still, it was my first time to be made to feel like a second-rate human being. It shocked and appalled me.

But something else had also taken place between me and Mr Fancy Shoes that morning on the dock in Christiansted. Something to do with culture. A clash of cultures, to be exact. My outrage was not just caused by his prejudice, it was also brought on by my own sense of inadequateness in the face of American culture, my cultural naïveté. I had no understanding of what was acceptable behaviour in the US, so I was unprepared for anyone to behave as he did towards me. I had been caught off-guard. And it made me angry.

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Being from northern Europe, I come from a culture in which class is largely unimportant, where skilled manual workers command the same respect as other professions, and where treating countrymen equally is more virtuous than being richer than them. Where I am from, no one would ever have treated me with the arrogance I encountered in Christiansted.

But I was not in Denmark! I was in US territory, a place where behaviour of the kind he displayed towards me that morning is entirely within the bounds of reason. American and European cultures are underpinned by radically different values. I could not see that at the time, but I can see it now.

Clear as day.

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My run-in with Mr Fancy Shoes illustrates how easily cultural differences can give rise to tension. Ours may have been a very minor clash, but culture clashes are often far more serious. Culture lends itself to political manipulation, which is why cultural differences lie at the root of so many major conflicts.

Because conflicts are so devastating to human welfare, I have often wondered how the incidence of culture clashes might be reduced. The obvious answer is to enhance cross-cultural understanding, but this seems an almost insurmountable task. After all, cultures are incredibly complex. It can take a life-time to understand just a single culture, so what hope in hell do we have of bridging gaps between multiple cultures?

Actually, I believe there is a short-cut to bridging cultural differences. We do not need to know every facet of every culture to make progress. Instead, we need to know only a small number of core values for each cultures. And the good news is that they are surprisingly easy to identify; you simply ask about the culture's greatest virtues and taboos. Once these have been established, the cultural pressure points become quite self-evident, which means that behaviours and opinions that may give offence can be avoided or at least expressed with greater delicacy.

Respect for core cultural values and sensitivity around cultural pressure points can reduce the risk of culture clashes dramatically. They will also make it easier to conduct business across cultures and lead to rewarding and meaningful interactions with people on, say, holidays or in culturally mixed communities.

Looking back on that day on the dock in Christiansted, it is clear to me now that I failed to appreciate that America’s highest virtue is success and that Mr Fancy Shoes felt entitled to his arrogance, because he was more successful than me, at least based on appearances. While I actually despise the aspect of American culture that grants elite status to wealthy people, it is nevertheless a fact and something it would have been useful for me to know before I met Mr Fancy Shoes.

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Success, in American terms, is measured in money and fame. Those who attain great wealth and/or become famous are worshipped by the rest of American society. It does not matter how they got rich or famous. Nor does it matter how they carry themselves after they have become rich or famous. Having ‘made it’, they have earned the right to gloat, brag, look down on other people, and treat their fellow human beings as they see fit. That is how much value Americans assign to success!

The most prominent contemporary icon of American success, a true cultural hero, is of course Donald Trump. So great is his success that he has been elected president twice despite being profoundly corrupt, emotionally stunted, socially toxic, intensively selfish, garish in the extreme, a coup-monger and convicted rapist, and surely one of the most primitive men ever to grace America’s highest office.

To their credit, many Americans disagree with Trump, loathe him even, but they nevertheless understand why he made it to the presidency. Because they know their own culture. By contrast, Europeans for the most part struggle to comprehend how a rich and technologically advanced nation, such as the United States can put a buffoon like Trump in the White House. Europe’s incredulity is proof that culture is central to the understanding of American politics. Most Europeans know nothing about America’s culture, so it follows they are also clueless about its politics.

To Americans, Trump’s rise to power is no mystery. Trump is obviously bold and charismatic, which are useful characteristics in a politician, but Americans know those skills alone will not get anyone to the very top in US politics. You also need to be rich and famous. In the minds of the average American voter, Trump must be smart and he must a good leader, because his wealth and his fame prove his success. His success trumps all flaws. How he behaves and how he treats other people is irrelevant, perhaps even a positive, because arrogance shows entitlement to power. Even Trump's pedophilia is not enough to dent his status as a true American hero.

When success is elevayed to the status of a country's highest virtue, the flip-side is not so pretty; losing is not cool in America. America turns its back on losers. According to the American Dream, anyone can make it as long as they work hard. Losers must therefore, by definition, be lazy and undeserving.

Social factors play little or no part in determining success or failure according to American values. Religion does, though. A description of American cultural values would be seriously remiss without mention of religion. The United States is to Western Christianity what Saudi Arabian Wahabi Fundamentalism is to mainstream Islam.

American society not only divides its people into ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, it also places heavy value judgements on each due to the prominence of religion. Simply put, success is seen as product of hard work, which pleases God, so the richest and most famous Americans must be the best Americans, who, as God’s favourites, deserve everything they can get. By contrast, the poor lag behind, because they don’t work hard enough. Their laziness makes them unworthy of the love of God. They become bad Americans.

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These values would be rather academic if it wasn't for the fact that they profoundly influence all areas of US government policy.

Take government policies with respect to inequality and social problems. Europeans believe social problems originate from within society itself and can be remedied through policy. Americans, on the other hand, believe some people are born good, while others are bad seeds. Policy cannot do much to change that. The reason why Europeans think America is the world’s most selfish nation is because America neglects its poor and vulnerable. However, Americans see the US as a fair place, a giant meritocracy, blessed by God, in which everyone will gravitate towards their rightful station, the good and hardworking at the top, the bad and the lazy at the bottom.

Thus, Americans have little enthusiasm for universal healthcare, because they believe only the lazy and the undeserving require a social safety net. Why should good, hard-working Americans foot the bill for scroungers?

Cultural values also underpin government policy towards gun ownership, which is another topic poorly understood by Europeans. Americans feel justified in owning guns to defend their wealth and property. Remember success is measured in wealth and property, so accumulation of materialliterally defines good and virtuous living. Those who violate property rights violate the will of God and deserve severe punishment. This is why the death penalty and conditions in US prisons – both barbaric and medieval in the eyes of most Europeans – are entirely acceptable to the majority of Americans.

Cultural values underpin most other American government policies too, as indeed they should, but in the interest of brevity let me now move on to my final observation, namely that values and behaviour are obviously not the same thing.

The truth is that few Americans live in strict accordance with the values that underpin American culture. Cultural values are an ideal, and cultural hypocrisy is at least as rife in the United States as it is in other cultures. Interestingly, however, in the US the biggest hypocrites of all are the rich and powerful, who also happen to benefit most from America’s cultural value system!

What an amazing coincidence!

Take American national politics, Congress and the presidency, the seats of American power. No elected official in the United States in Congress or the presidency serve the interests of ordinary American voters. America’s parliamentarians are drawn from the country’s wealthiest class and take turns at running the country through a cosy political duopoly called Democrats & Republicans. As soon as one of the two parties assumes office, its multi-millionaire members begin to enrich themselves by gaming the stock market and passing pork-barrel legislation for corporates. An election eventually boots them out and puts the other party in power, but everyone knows it is only a question of time before the first party returns to power. The system itself never changes, because the two-party electoral system does not leave room for genuine political renewal.

America is locked into its tyranny of success.

How can such an exploitative political system be allowed to exist, let alone thrive? Again, it is all down to culture. It is no small irony that the great respect for and authority granted to the political class by ordinary Americans are precisely why the rich and powerful are able to continue to suck the lifeblood out of everyone else in America.

The End