As a confirmed and committed outsider I’ve never understood
the attractions of fitting in with the like-mes. Is that arrogance because I
think I’m so special; or the Groucho Marx thing of distrusting any club that
offered me membership; or more likely an aversion to being stuffed into
labelled box?
Not everyone lacks
social glue. Kids growing up in urban ghettos get tattoo-ed into a gang, giving
them a sense of belonging. Similarly the English upper-crust cling to a clique
defined by school, marital and family connections, and, for the male of the
species, business and leisure clothes cloned like military uniforms.
Nations also confer
their own stamp of acceptance. The French are belligerently proud of their
national traits and history, as are the Scots and many other races. Traditional
kinships and attitudes are not easily given up even in the melange of a
globalised world.
Which is a problem.
If your identity depends principally on being an insider in – take your pick –
your racial background or the Double Trey gang or the Eton Bullingdon Club then
everyone else is an outsider. Clashes are inevitable as cultures and values
don’t mesh.
And ‘culture’ has
become one of these precious, trigger-sensitive words flashed up as a warning
if anyone is foolhardy enough to criticise the actions and behaviour of ANother
group.
So here goes. We (as
in UK-ers) used to have a culture of hanging, drawing, quartering people and
sticking their heads on pikes, sending little boys up chimneys, trading in
slaves, never mind supressing women. The
French publicly chopped heads off. We stopped doing such things, got more
civilized. It’s called progress.
Cultures change over time, usually painfully slowly, but sometimes
accelerated by convulsive pressures. 
What sparked this
line of thought, well to be truthful detonated it to the forefront was a
twitter exchange this week about whether a Niger man marrying a 12 year old
bride should be condemned as a paedophile.
One bright Brit spark wondered whether in so saying we were imposing
Western moral and cultural values as an act of colonial oppression. NO.
Underage marriage and pregnancy shoots up the maternal mortality rate and for
those poor girls who survive it can cause serious internal damage (fistulas).
Go read Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone. It’s barbaric, inhumane and
mediaeval. It’s a human rights issue and wrong. 
Cultural
appropriation has become another buzz word as usually minority cultures object
to their heritage being stolen and used in disrespectful ways - advertising
sports teams or in fancy dress outfits. The fear being that the indigenous
culture will be diluted and destroyed.
History matters,
but I’m stuck in a dilemma going two ways at once. Many of our fashions, like
three-piece suits were evolved from the styles of faraway peoples. We eat a
global cuisine. In England the Romans came, left good roads behind, then the
Germanic Anglo-Saxons invaded and the Druids disappeared over time. There’s
always been a fluidity of beliefs and lifestyles which ebbed and flowed with
the tides of time. The Tibetans were exiled from their homeland and spread
their faith, suitably adapted to Western tastes, throughout the free world.
Being ousted from their landlocked existence gave them more influence.
Western culture is
slated for being too me-centric, partly a result of the growth of a more
psychologically oriented mindset and in Europe because the carnage of two World
Wars broke up the old extended family system. But it does mean identity resides
to a greater degree than elsewhere in the individual rather than in the group.
Which has its pluses and its minuses. On the downside there’s a lack of
cohesion. But there is a greater degree of tolerance for individual expression;
and along with it an intolerance of more restrictive lifestyles, perhaps
because it reminds us of where we once were.
My wish is for a
world like a Kandinsky painting, a glorious hotch potch of different colours
and shapes, all swirling around to create an engaging whole – greater than the
sum of its parts. More unites us than divides us. Remember ‘everyone smiles in the same
language.’
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