Culture Shock

Do not drop from a great height.

I have lamented recently here the dangers of postmodernism.

But there is another pressing problem we are facing, probably more important, and it just recently occurs to me that it is far too little noticed and too little understood.

Culture Shock.

In fact, postmodernism may only be an expression of culture shock.

People who have not had the experience of living in a different culture are often not aware that it even exists. But it is very real, and very powerful. More real than most things most people have ever in their lives experienced.

I have lived as an expat for perhaps more than twenty years, in eight different countries around the globe. I have felt it very personally, and I have seen it in others. It is the routine thing.

We all rely to a great extent, more than we ever realize, in our general perceptions of life, the universe, and everything, on a lot of assumptions that we never examine. We just take them for truth, reality, the way things are supposed to be. We do not even know, usually, that they are no more than assumptions, or at least that they are open to debate. We don’t know why we think these things. It has just always been so.

A tiny example: pedestrians in Korea pass on the left. In North America, on the right. Newcomers to Korea are always shocked at how rude and hostile the Korean are, always deliberately walking in to them on the street.

I have learned to always hang back until I see which direction the other person will go.

And I was berated for this, by another Canadian, recently arrived in Qatar. Don’t I know you’re supposed to pass on the right?

You often cannot win, when two cultures collide.

Others are amazed at how stupid the local Koreans are. You ask them whether ducks can fly, and they all insist they cannot.

There are no wild ducks in Korea.

Do not suppose for a moment that Koreans have fewer unexamined assumptions. I once was asked if I knew any Korean, and I answered with “sarang hayo.” Meaning “I love you.” A girl was in earshot, even though it was not she who had asked, but a man, and I was later berated a typical evil foreigner when it became clear that I was not romantically interested in her. I had apparently been toying with her affections.

Another time I was berated as filthy for taking my unsuitable dress shoes off to dance in a large auditorium. They do not know about sock hops.

And so often, when we encounter another culture, or when we encounter an individual from another culture, we discover with a shock that they do not share our assumptions. And this is profoundly disorienting. Suddenly nothing makes sense. Are they crazy, or am I?

It throws many people, I think most people, soon after moving to a new country, at the point when they realize they are not just tourists, into at least a period of depression. It throws a significant number into straight psychosis. In any posting I have been in, there were stories about this. There were always recent memories of someone who had gone mad at that workplace.

Another very common reaction, perhaps worse, is for people to decide that there are no rules here, since the rules they knew clearly do not apply, and begin to act outrageously. All is permitted! One guy at one school suddenly stripped to his underwear in front of his class. They share the closed-circuit video there as a bit of local folklore. Others, of course, get into drugs, and fistfights, and alcohol, and lots of casual sex.

Many sink into a permanent depression. They stick around expat bars, staying drunk and complaining about how the locals are all stupid, or insane, or evil. Welcome to the enterprise of empire!

Violence is always a possibility. Less so for a lone individual in a new culture; more so for a larger group, or for the majority against a culturally different minority. When your basic assumptions are challenged, a kind of mental auto-immune system kicks in. Your thinking shuts down, you mentally batten the hatches, and all your emotions rush to battle stations. You can feel as though you are personally under siege, because your self-image can be involved. The natural self-protective strategy seems to be to redefine the newcomer or newly met as radically other, with whom you may have nothing in common, and whom, for your own safety—really your sanity, your mental safety, but you may feel this is your physical safety—you must shun or worse. From this immune response you can develop weird suspicions that those blacks are raping all the local women, say, or planning to, or the Jews are poisoning the wells. It’s delusional, classically delusional; but this is where it comes from.

This is an issue that must be considered if we are going to have globalization. As we inevitably must. Even leaving aside the matter of mass immigration.

It is probably just such culture shock that has led over the centuries to pogroms and anti-Semitism and spasms of ethnic cleansing. The problem with the Jews is that they patently do not share certain assumptions that are so fundamental to the Christian majority population of Europe, or the Muslim majority population of the Middle East, that it is shocking if you are not prepared for it. It looks like being in league with the Devil. I recall with remorse my own childhood fistfight with Bobby Steinberg, who had shocked me by saying, generously, that Jesus was as great a prophet as Moses. And so it goes.

I think the First World War as well as the second were probably mostly prompted by culture shock at globalization. Nazism was a nativist reaction, championing traditional German culture against the sinister forces of globalization. We tend not to be aware of it, but some at the time were warning of the same nativist tendency in Germany before the First World War. It was certainly involved in Turkey’s participation in that conflict. More generally, this is what was being expressed by the growing nationalist sentiments across Europe. I suspect the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars probably sprang in large part from the same roots, even though this is rarely supposed. And the Russian Revolution too. Each came just about as that given culture was opening up to the world, and can be explained as a nativist, fear-based reaction to the process.

Bad news: China is now at about that same point.

And this is not the worst that culture shock can do. When he wrote The Descent of Man, Darwin remarked on the strange fact that, when a much less developed culture came in contact with the more developed European culture, the native population tended to collapse. He could only speculate as to why.

Now, of course, we are much wiser. We know that it was because of the spread of new European diseases.

Or was it? More recent research has shown that tuberculosis, the second greatest killer of the Native American population, was present in the Americas all along. Even more recent research has concluded that the first definite outbreak of smallpox in Europe happened well after Columbus. Europeans should have been just as vulnerable as native Americans; but it was the latter who died in droves—supposedly a fatality rate of 90%.

Darwin noted that, in fact, the rate of reproduction always plummeted after first contact. And he had figures.

That is not physical disease. That is depression. That is culture shock. Because the cultures were so dissimilar, it was usually fatal. And many native people have not recovered and adjusted even today, centuries later.

The current problem with Islamic terrorism looks like exactly the same thing. The Iranian revolution was the same thing. It is a fear response to globalization as a perceived threat to fundamental local assumptions about right and wrong, what is real and what is not.

Note that, contrary to the media narrative, those who join ISIS or blow up churches are not Muslim “extremists.” They are always Westernized, secularized Muslims. It is not Islam that has made them crazy, hate-filled, and violent, but culture shock, from the conflicting demands of two cultures.

In fact, again contrary to common prejudice, it is exactly those who are best-grounded in their own religious traditions who suffer the least from such culture shock and such violent reactions. Missionaries, for example, travel and integrate exceptionally well. It is the secular sorts who go mad. This is because it is the religious who have consciously examined, and are aware of, their own assumptions. They know what they believe, and why they believe it.

At the same time, you see culture shock emerging in the majority cultures of America, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, all over Europe, now, as a result of globalization and, more specifically, mass immigration.

It is wrong to demonize these people. This is not to say, either, that current fears of new immigrants in very large numbers are unjustified. One dangerous mistake we seem to make is to think that only white people ever experience culture shock. That the only problem is to get the local whites to accept the newcomers. Or that culture shock is just a case of stupid prejudice, easily fixed by a few facile slogans about respect and inclusivity. It is a real mental health issue, and not an easy one to deal with. Many of the new immigrants are indeed going to go crazy and become violent. Just as Europeans or Canadians do when thrown into their culture. Yet we make no allowance for that whatsoever.

This is not a great threat to the existing population if numbers are small. But if the incoming groups are large enough, they may feel more able to act out their culture shock against the locals.

Here’s a match. Here’s some nice kindling. Hmm—I wonder what’s going to happen if I put them together?

I have read somewhere that the rate of mental illness is much higher in immigrant families than in the general population. There it is again: culture shock. What Mom and Dad say at home simply does not mesh with what you hear at school, from the media, from your friends.

A Somali living next to us in Windsor one summer snapped and spent each evening going up and down the block breaking everybody’s windows. Culture shock.

We are generally not aware of, and do not think of, culture shock, because most of us do not realize that much of what we think is only arbitrary assumptions we have not ourselves examined. And so we are not aware of the danger. And this lack of awareness increases the danger, both for society as a whole and for ourselves.

Postmodernism and multiculturalism may be good-faith attempts to allow for the friendly mixing of people from disparate cultures. But they are painfully naïve. If all cultures are equal, on what basis can we share any values at all? On what basis can we even have any values? That is not a solution to the problem: that simply describes the disease. Now your life has no meaning, no direction, you have nothing in common with your countrymen, and there is no right or wrong constraining your or their actions. Why not just rape and kill?

All. Hell. Breaks. Loose.

What we urgently need instead is genuine study by all of us, or at least by those with any important social responsibilities, of all cultures. If we are going to have a lot of new Asian neighbours or business partners, we had better all be basically cognizant of what Confucius taught. We had better know the shariah law, the Laws of Manu, the Dhammapada. Instead, those who advocate multiculturalism or postmodernism themselves never seem to go back before Mao, or Marx. They have no interest in either Western or any other cultures. Their agenda is to ignore or even reject culture generally. That is the madness, not the cure.

We need to be working not toward multiculturalism, but to an emerging integrated world culture. Not postmodernism, meaning no culture, and not a retreat to “Western culture.” And it is a matter of life and death to do so before more go mad and die.