A Culture of Cognitive Dissonance

For years I have contemplated what it means to have a culture. Ethnically, I’ve felt somewhat out of place in the conversation, as, though my last name is German, my bio-geographical roots extend across a much larger portion of Western Europe than just the Rhineland and also some parts of Canada. In a practical sense, however, the only note I have made of my ethnic background playing a part in my cultural development was the sauerkraut served at Thanksgiving. For the most part I feel like my cultural upbringing was one based out of the moral and philosophical ideologies of my parents, the local area in which I grew up, and the societal ebb and flow of the late 20th to early 21st Century American landscape out of which I derived some basic personhood.
I use the particular word personhood because my parents’ philosophy on raising me and my sister centered around the idea that their job was not simply to raise us to be good kids but to be good adults someday. My house was always full of books and art supplies growing up, stories and imaginations very strongly encouraged. But above all else was the idea that my parents loved me, that God loved me, and that I was to love others. The golden rule, treat others as you want to be treated, was strongly encouraged, and every Sunday, we would find ourselves at the Sunday morning Church service. Christian morality as it relates to the treatment of the other, as well as a uniquely encouraging viewpoint on creative expression and individual intellectualism led to a strong ideal that God gave us a brain for a reason: to grow, to learn, to think deeply and uniquely, and, above all else, to help others. Even though there are inevitably parts of anyone’s childhood that are definitely self-centered, this was an upbringing which purposefully encouraged a selfless outlook.
Caring for the other is especially important when growing up in an area where, for the most part, strangers don’t talk too much. There’s something I learned at a young age, which, in other parts of the country, is often referred to as the New England bubble. There’s a distance that folks stay away from other folks in the South Shore, a polite ownership to one’s own business and respect for another’s that isn’t necessarily unique to this area so much as a staple of many urban/suburban communities that played itself out in a very specific way to my childhood mind. Whereas in some parts of the country, everyone knows everyone’s business and it’s a town-sized family of sorts (at least that’s the stereotype), in my experience growing up in Quincy, I found there to be specific connections, such as family friends, church folks, people with whom my parents worked, and blood family to be, in varying degrees, those with whom we shared a friendly and open connection of trust. However, people we didn’t know were strangers, not necessarily in a dangerous kind of way, but there was a distance between myself and the other, a respectful, impersonal distance. Coming back here for college, I’ve realized this is much more a lenient idea than I once thought, but it still stood to my young self as a starkly contrasting (to my inner life), though unquestioned, reality of the outside world.
What was this outside world? To me it appeared to be a world somehow synchronized with, though in great friction to, the Christian subculture in the background of my life. Until I was about twelve or thirteen and confronted by bigotedly anti-patriotic Christians my own age, I was convinced that the Christian moral structure and blatantly American nationalism were hand-in-hand bosom buddies. Flag day parades and Fourth of July fireworks rip-roared their way into Church ceremony, accompanied by the sight of American flags in the sanctuary. When finally I was confronted by the stark contrast between many of America’s policies and behaviors and the Gospel of Jesus, I had already spent pretty much all of my childhood indoctrinated, if not by the politics, by the underlying, overwhelmingly consumeristic culture that is contemporary America.
This is what first came into my head when I began thinking about my “culture”—a fast-food-fed, celebrity-centered, shopaholic society driven by the desire to fill up empty lives with the newest trend, the newest fast-paced entertainment, brain-washed by a media more concerned with rumor than truth, where leaders are expected to be liars and “broken family” seems redundant. I grew up in a culture where any intellectualism led me to cynicism, any faith led me to despair, and any question led to more and more questions. Spending Saturday mornings learning about heroism from a colorful super-powered being just too good to be true on TV and Sunday morning learning just about the same kinda thing from a pulpit, I would then have to go to school and learn all about real life, the harsh, melancholy, mediocre kind that forces you to box up your dreams and write paragraphs in cursive. For some reason this dichotomy struck me more and more as I grew, of the fantastically or morally heroic starkly contrasted with the apparent villainy of the every day suppression found in structure and institution.
It was this tension, lessons from stories and lessons from the story-killers, that taught me to walk in a strange bipedal balance. One leg walked the world of that which I was taught from the words people said and the other from the way people actually acted. Very little, if anything, was innately mine from birth; I was given (or took for myself) all things I know and am. In this certainty, I would say for all people that culture is something we gain more than anything from the tension between word and deed in those around us. The closer they are to us, the more influence this tension has. The more the synchronicity, the more we can form a symbiosis with that cultural pattern, otherwise we must deceive ourselves to the point of living as “one of them” or find a different place, group, or way. Still today, I grasp at the threads of this tension, growing through the ripping of seams and the tightening of knots, hoping and praying that the right stuff is held and the right stuff is lost. Until my strings all snap, there will be a continuous cultural influence on my life and heart, as I myself try to balance word and deed in the ebb and flow of understanding and existence.