We don't need no stinking labels

In this protracted season of slinging, swearing, smudging, slaying, smearing, and separation--distancing--here is where I guess I am. You?

And will your score prevent us from talking and reaching agreements on proceeding some way somehow? that is, making progress?

Or will you refuse both yes and no and just sit there impervious, ignorant . . . stupid?

Vote the obstructionists out, I say. It's the left-leaning libertarian's way, if this label has not also lost its meaning in the needless frays.

Penetration revisited

No, this is not about that.

Abstract.

To see and understand a culture one must move below the surface of things from one's own perspective to the inside as seen and understood from the position of the other. Experience of and in a culture can aid this movement to the inside. Cultural informants, broadly defined, can help interpret things observed, and not observed . . . such that useful insights are confirmed or uncovered for the observer.

Over ten years ago, I proposed

a model for penetrating a culture beyond its surfaces and how it might be used to structure thinking and discussion in cultural studies. Steps involved in thinking and discussion are finding more precise language for phenomena (defining), discovering why people do what they do (explaining), and discerning what their behavior means for them (understanding). As observer-informant interchanges produce better stereotypes using these steps, new formulations may change the levels and types of generalization. The object of using models like the one proposed and the suggested inquiry procedure is to realize fresh interpretations of cultural phenomena in and beyond the classroom.

I wish to revisit this model.

Penetration into the culture is a function of the depth of information and insights the observer has access to. What may sometimes be tacit and difficult to articulate can be loosened from its embeddedness by more careful observation and persistent inquiry. Some of the most useful but most difficult roots of behavior lie at the core, in strata of bedrock as it were, not readily available even to the most astute observers and insiders. What is needed is more information and knowledge, or perhaps dramatic events, to shake loose the unconscious and inarticulate ground. With these, and perhaps in crisis times, what a person or a people characteristically does can be more easily seen, and why they do it may be more easily understood.

The above model assumes there are behaviors and products, or artifacts, of a people that we can observe and describe. Of these, there are some that we can readily explain; others can be explained with the help of those who are informed, or are themselves insiders. As a product of interaction, the meanings given by insiders in their words can help us understand why they do what they do.

There are, no doubt, behaviors and products we cannot see clearly, or do not see at all. Perhaps even resident natives cannot see some things about themselves clearly or at all. And there are interpretations that elude even the most able and embedded resident native, leaving the cultural observer with but surface observations, unmediated insights, and best conjectures.

Objections to the use of the word _penetration_ and the up-down, height-depth language/visualization aside, the model still works for me personally.

The article was written while residing outside my own country and culture, and for most of the past ten plus years, I have continued living abroad. I am a student of culture and cultures (my focus is ways of living versus the study of high culture, art, literature, etc.). Sometimes the insights I get are dramatic and at other times mundane. So be they.

More importantly today, the model suggests greater care should be taken in the current discourse about huge groups of people living their particular and unique mores seemingly in thorough opposition to our own (your _own_ being yours and not this writer's).

We need better ways of stereotyping* as we cope with violations of the "live, let live" injunction I recently wrote about.

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* For a copy of the unpublished paper from which this statement and summary derive, please request.

Flash--Liberland, live

If there is no life (consciousness) after death, that's all she wrote for the atheist and the theist. Nothing there and no one to witness.

If there is an afterlife, the theist will have one belief confirmed and surely then know what injunctions for the good life were for and what they should be/have been. These will not necessarily be confirmations of known earthly devotions. But perhaps these won't be the concerns of the re-awakened. In the case of a waiting room for the next reincarnation, the concerns may involve what choices there are and pleas to the prime mover: "Oh, please not that." If there is a singular cause, one might be occupied with how to communicate news to the ones left in this vale of tears. No matter, in short, the theist will be in good shape. The great steamroller will have left all "arguments" smoothed into one in its infinite wake.*

The atheist will have at least reason to know one way or the other, if rational thought was incorrect and there is a someone/-thing to believe in, a then moot question because there he/she/it/they--that other--will be revealed right there, right? If the life after affords the atheist correction, fine, but the default choice will be not belief but knowledge certain for which the true atheist, and agnostic,** will be pleased because persistent curiosity is now satisfied.

Can the two, believer and nonbeliever, coexist in this life with the prospect of nothing or something after? The atheist _believes_ this is possible, even preferable, and does not need to proselytize that singular view. Same goes for the believer. We must assume here that this life now is intended for the believer and all others no matter how people are working through it in their own ways and traditions.

Thus, discord in this life over one view or the other stems from fervor and acts of moral superiority. Would that the proselytizers and doomsday accelerators just live and let live.

I wonder if the new state of Liberland can survive its state motto, because this too is a value, a stance, a belief above the fray, "To live and let live." History has not been kind to the kind and considerate, but both of these can be embraced in a time and a place and a society. Look carefully here and there. We have it, we have seen it, and some have experienced it and lived in the hope and trust that such a state is good for all regardless of differences.

Our condition, no matter persuasion, is secular. We are of this world. Given that same starting point and condition, we can shelter the family and persuasions of humankind. If there is something to spread the word about, it is that you can have what you want for you if you leave others alone and they leave you alone. Failures to do that are against the golden rule, a rule no one human or group, faith-based or rational, can lay exclusive claim to. It is for and of humanity which we have been thrown into this vale without our choice and without incontrovertible evidence as to which ways other than these--kindness, consideration, do-unto-others--are best. We know these work. We know them as good.

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* A monochrome afterlife must be one about which we must inquire.
** Some decry the agnostic as a kind of cowardly lot. A defense of this position may be in the offing.