Ch. 4: Culture and Perception

So we’re talking about the way culture shapes perception.

If we go back to Hall’s “iceberg model” for a minute, specifically values and judgements and the stuff below the surface. You know, why is something cool in France cool in France but not cool in, I don’t know… Japan. Why is something beautiful in Saudi Arabia but not in Brazil? Why is something taboo in one place and not in the other? How do we get to those conclusions?

We talked about food, didn’t we? And people don’t like to eat puppies because they’re cute. Right? But lambs, little baby lambs, are also very cute. And they’re delicious. So what is it in our culture that determines what’s a pet and what’s dinner? Or both? So we’re going to talk about that a little bit.

So we’re going to talk about perception, about how we see something and why we see it in the way we do. About the way that we contextualise things. And the process of doing all of that, which is actually really cool, because we don’t notice that you do it. We just do. We see something, and we have or make or recognise an association with it, and then we act. Then we do something with that association. And it’s just reflexive. It’s just immediate. And what’s interesting is taking apart that process to see how it works. And why does it work differently depending on where you’re from and who you are?

Going back to my Oxford English Dictionary definitions of perception, which is always a nice place to start.

perceive verb become aware of, see or notice
perceptible adjective able to be perceived
perception noun perceiving, ability to perceive
perceptive adjective having or showing insight and sensitive understanding

Earlier we talked a little bit about the idea of “phenomenology”, and I hope you remember that - kind of the contextualisation of experience and the agreement of reality. The idea that “reality” itself is subjective and changes and is negotiated. And I know I keep talking about that, but I think it's important to our whole understanding of culture. One really simple but really usefule definition of culture is, basically, enough people share the same definition of “reality” at any one time.

I don’t know if you know the idea of Empiricism, but what we're talking about is anchored in this idea that John Locke came up that the way that you understand the world is, first and foremost, through your primary and personal experience with the world, if you know what I mean. You taker all the raw data that exists outside of your head, then you bring that raw data back to the laboratory inside your head, and you come up with a conscious reality. But that reality - even though it's built on the stuff outside of your skull - only exists on the inside of it.  

I don’t know if any of you guys have ever spent much time around babies, but when you have babies... I mean all they are are just like empirical scientists. All they do is check things out. Can I put this in my mouth? What happens if I hit the cat? When they get a little older and you have them in a chair, and one of the things they do is they drop things on the floor. And then you pick it up and you put it back and they they drop it again. And they can do this forever. You realise you’re essentially their dog, and that you’re more or less playing fetch. But they’re doing a couple of things. They’re checking out response and they're checking out cause and effect and they're checking out the nature of their relationship to you. They're also checking out the consistency of gravity. It's all new to them. Basically they’re trying to gather information about the world that they’re in.

What Locke was doing was endorsing that idea of “conscious experience”.

And then, and this is a continuation of that, for us as a species language is the way we assign a shared meaning to experience. Right? I mean, once upon a time somebody pointed at a tree and said “Tree”. And then somebody else said “tree?” and the first person said “tree!” and everybody decided that that tall green thing they were all looking at was in fact now a “tree”. We used language and gave it a name. Which again is why the two Matt Damons and the turtle on Mars can’t have a culture. Or Silverback Gorillas don’t have “culture”.

They have reality, but they don’t have culture.

So the process of assigning meaning and (interpretation) to our experience constitutes our shared “reality”. If you remember, we looked at a dollar bill. And we said that the reason this works is because I perceive it as something, and then you perceive it as the same thing, and we have an agreed value to that thing. And I trade you this piece of paper for a Coke and the reason you do that is because you trust that somebody else - your landlord or your banker or whatever - is also going to recognise the value of that piece of paper. And that trust is what we’re calling reality.

But you know, shared reality changes when meanings and interpretations change. The value of a dollar, for example, changes all the time. A dollar is a dollar, but the value of a dollar… and there are good reasons for people to have different opinions about the value of a dollar. A rock is a rock, right? It’s always going to weigh the same amount, it’s always going to stay the same shape, but the value of a dollar is always going to fluctuate depending on circumstances. So the reality of that dollar is entirely subjective.

And, before I get into the next point, I think it’s important to realise that there are people who are ahead of cultural consensus, and so are ahead of the agreed "reality". Or behind that cultural consensus, for that matter.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a very long train, but if you're sitting somewhere in the middle of the train sometimes it curves around the side of a mountain or something and you can see the front of the same train you're riding on. It's basically the same idea. The culture keeps moving, but every once in a while it curves. It changes direction. It turns, but the front of the train turns first and the back of the train turns last. And the cultural consensus is somewhere in those middle cars.

So you take something like homosexuality or something, which - forty years ago when I was growing up, when I was in high school - kids used to get beat up for that all the time. Homosexuality was seen as a complete anathema to the culture. It was considered sinful and awful and illegal. Alan Turing - the English guy who broke the Engima Code and kind of invented the computer and to a considerable extent won the War in Europe - killed himself when it was discovered he was gay. Well, actually, it's worse. He endured chemical castration first and then he killed himself. And the British government only "pardoned" him in 2013. He killed himself in 1954.

And now the way we think about homosexuality has kind of changed in mainstream culture, in popular culture. People don’t really think about the gay kid in high school the way they once did, at least not where I grew up. But there are people that still do have serious issues with homosexuality, and that doesn’t mean they're all evil. It means that, on that issue, they’re at the back of the train. And they may stay there and they may not, but the train keeps moving regardless. And the people who were openly gay and the people that were fine with people being gay sixty or seventy years ago, when it could still get people arrested, get people fired from their jobs, all of that? They’re at the front of the train.

And then, of course, there are some people whose reality is just so completely different from everybody else’s reality to the point where they’re insane, basically. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam... his neighbour’s dog told him to go out and shoot dark-haired women in New York City in the 1970s. And so he did, because the dog told him to. And that’s insane. But the thing about somebody who’s insane is they don’t know they're insane, or even if they do it doesn’t change the reality they have to work with. David Berkowitz evidently struggled with the reality of his situation. But the situation won. One one level he might have rationally known that the voices he was hearing weren’t real, but that didn’t mean he didn’t hear them anyway.
    
By the way, I don’t mean “insane” to be offensive, I just don’t know a better term. So I apologize for that. What is “sanity” if it’s not an agreed reason? I was teaching a class one semester with a substantial number of of evangelical Christian students, for some reason, and out of the ten students in the class, seven of them believed in angels. And I don't mean as some abstract, metaphorical idea, I mean angels as real as the chairs in the classroom. And so, for all intents and purposes, as long as a majority of the people in our little community - our little classroom - believes that angels were real, angels were real. If you believe there are angels in the room nobody else does, you’re “insane”. If you believe there are angels in the room and everybody else agrees with you except for that one guy - me, the specific time I’m thinking of - then I'm insane. That seems fair.

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Which brings us to personal realities. Realities are not necessarily shared. Is my red your red? I mean, we THINK so, but I dare you to go ahead and prove it. We could spend all afternoon in front of one particular Mark Rothko painting hanging on one particular wall in London arguing about how “red” it is. I don't know if you remember the "is this dress black or is this dress blue" thing that was buzzing around on the internet a couple of years ago, but there was no right answer. No objective right answer.

     

Is “sin” real? Is there such a thing as “sin”? And sin’s an interesting one, because that means there’s an absolute and objective moral code of “good” and “bad” somewhere. And if there’s an absolute moral code, that means there’s necessarily a God - or at least something external from us but which has programmed all of us - who (or “that”) determined what was good and what was bad. And so if you’re not religious and if you don’t believe in God, does the concept of “sin” still exist in any real way? It requires an after-life that I personally don’t buy into, an “effect” for the “cause”. Is there an absolute good or bad once you take God - presumably the author of the set of rules - out of the picture? Once upon a time we had a very specific and uncontestable list of sins, and we all believed in that afterlife. Gluttony was a sin. Homosexuality was a sin. Adultery was a sin. You did those things, knowing you were doing bad things, and knowing you were going to pay. But if ultimately there are no consequences on the other side of death... I don't know, eat all the kitten you want. I don't judge.
     
But now… Does God exist in any provable way? Who knows? You see a black dress and I see a blue one. I think the sheer and passionate unambiguous certainty of the believers made me go the other way. Religious faith is such a leap that, if you take it, you can’t afford to look back. Once you’ve left your old reality, and lept on to a new one, what do you have if neither of them work?
     

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Shifting “Worldviews”

These things I think are really useful. In 1961, these two sociologists, Kluckhorn and Strodbeck, basically argued that, yes, ok, realities are different in every culture. However, everybody has to deal with the same fundamental existential questions, regardless of where they are. I mean, if you go back to the patterns of human migration and the “Eve Theory'' that we talked about, before we all started spreading out from East Africa to and to Asia and to Australia, we all started off the same species with the same ways of making sense of the world. And, according to Kluckhorn and Strodbeck anyway, we all had to deal with these five questions.

The first one, logically enough, was... You know, who am I? What am I? So, the "Human Nature" orientation

And then... Alright, maybe I know who I am, but what am I in relation to you? Who am I, and then who are we? This is "Relational Orientation." Are we colleagues, are we competitors? Is one of us dominant? Which one? Is one of us submissive? Why?

And then OK, well I’ve figured out who I am. And I’ve figured out who we are. Now I’ve got to figure out who we are in relation to where we are. What is our relationship to nature, for example? Do we use it? Are we a part of it? And some of this branches out into religion and some of this branches out into economics. The invention of agriculture was huge in this, and I think we talked about this before, because we weren’t just living on the land anymore, we had figured out a way to manipulate it so that it could feed us. Which is the beginning of dominion over nature. Of ownership. And this is "Man-Nature Orientation."

And then the next one is “time”. The temporal focus on life. So, for example, "Time is Money." In Western, individualistic, industrial cultures, “time is money”. Time is regarded as a finite thing, you only have so much of it, and when it's gone, it's gone. You're out of time. So it’s valuable. You can sell it. You can buy it. You can save it. You can waste it. And if you think about Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, they have a time-line. They have a plot. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You go from Moses to Jesus to Mohammad. In Christianity, "there's a little baby and he grows up and he preaches and he gets a following and he angers the Romans and they kill him and he dies and then he comes back to life and then he goes to Heaven." That's a story. It's got a plot.

Whereas, at least as far as I understand it, in Buddhism or Hinduism, it’s a more circular sense of temporary existence. There’s a cycle.

And this ties in with our relationship to nature as well. I mean, for thousands and thousands of years, we were agricultural animals, and we tended to stay on the same piece of land. Your great-grandfather worked on the farm, and then he died. And you grandfather worked on it, and he died. And then your father worked on it, and he died. And now you're working on it, but one day you're going to die, too. And your kids will work on it and when they die, their kids are going to work on it, and... People come and go, but the land is constant, the Sun is constant, and every October you bring in the harvest. Time is circular and kind of relentless. But in cities, or even in industries, it doesn't really work that way.

And then “activities”. What is the value of work? Again, in the more individualistic Western cultures work is a value in and of itself. So in America, for example, traditionally if somebody works that means they’re a good person. Good people work. And if you worked, the way you showed that you worked is that you’d have money and you'd buy stuff. So in America there’s been this idea that if you’re rich it’s because you deserve to be rich, and you are a good person. You’re a better person than somebody who isn’t rich.

Of course, the flip-side of that is that if you're not rich, it's your own fault. If wealth equals virtue, poverty equals... whatever. Lack of character. Laziness, vice. So you have to factor that in, too. I think we’re starting to move away from that idea, but that fundamental idea that “you make your own luck”. That’s the core myth of the American Dream.

And realities shift, which means our answers to these five fundamental questions shift, too. And I just wanted to look at some examples of that. 

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So, “Who Am I?”

We talked about Darwin before, and we'll talk about him again. This is Albrecht Durer's idea of “Adam and Eve” in 1504. And it wasn’t a metaphor, it wasn’t some kind of allegory, it was literally “Adam was created by God and then he got lonely and then he took out one of his ribs and then he made Eve and everything was great until the serpent comes along and they ate the apple and that's what happened.” That event was as real in the collective memory as the Second World War. I mean, I wasn't around to see it, and you weren't around to see it, but we both know it happened.
     
But over time, and recently, we started developing new ideas of where we came from, and this is from the the Field Museum in Chicago in the 1920s. By then, they had very different ideas of where we came from and what we looked like. The reality shifted from this idealised “God-Vision” thing to a much more recognisably, if entirely less flattering, animal origin. And to be honest, I've seen a lot more people walking around looking like the Field Museum version hat the Durer one. I think on some level we want to be the ideal because fundamentally we understand that we're not.

The Second one. “Where are we?”

This was the Galileo thing. Pre-Galileo, where are we? BANG, right in the middle. “First it’s us. Then it’s the Moon, then it’s Venus. THEN it’s the Sun. And THEN Mars…” And then Galileo and Copernicus showed up and they said “Well, actually... the Sun’s in the middle and we’re a distant third.” Again, less-flattering, but… “We’re just this rock. This kind of grassy rock. Not even the biggest rock. The third rock, spinning around the immovable...” 

And I think we may have talked about this before, but again the fundamental importance of Galileo wasn’t the fact that he showed us that the Earth spins around the Sun - although that was certainly important. The fundamental importance of Galileo was that he had a non-religious explanation for looking at the World. For looking at Nature. And that’s a very big deal, because before Galileo if you had any questions as to why things were the way they were, you would go to the Church. And that’s a lot of power. And the church would come back to you and say, basically, “Well, because God.” And they would follow that up with a long and complicated answer you couldn’t follow, but you didn't need to follow it because the Church said "God" and you trusted the Church. They were the end-all and be-all of explanations.

So when Galileo shows up and says “Well, actually... if you just take a look through this telescope…” not only is he explaining something not through the filter of God or the approval of the Church, but he’s also explaining something that you could do or I could do. You know, "If you have a telescope, and you have the education to tell you how to use it..." So it takes away from the power of the Church, and that’s why they were so pissed off for so long. You remember Alan Turing being pardoned in 2013? He died in 1954? Galileo wasn't "cleared" until 1992, and he died in 1642.
     
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Avignon, but if you have, you’ll come across the “other” Vatican. Because for a little while there were two competing Popes, one in Italy and the other in France (if you remember that Terry Eagleton thing about the difference between “Culture” and “Civilisation”, one of his hallmarks of “Civilisation” is Chateaneuf-du-Pape, which literally means “New Castle of the Pope”, and those grapes are grown right outside of Avignon). They were franchises, essentially. The Burger King Pope and the McDonald’s Pope. Anyway, the point is that when you go to the other Vatican, the Burger King Vatican, you see the Pope’s Residence, and then directly across from it, you see the Pope’s Treasury. Which seemed - the afternoon that I was there at least - which seemed at least as big as the Pope’s Residence.

So there was a lot to be gained from being the world's explainer. I mean, we laugh at Southern TV Evangelicals, in part because of their funny accents and stupid hair, but what’s the real difference? Same model, almost exactly. People who need answers go to the sources of those answers, whether it’s Galileo or the Pope or Rick Warren or Tony Robbins. I’m not going to mock their needs, even if I can’t agree with them.

The third one is really about how we relate to each other. Which changes all the time. You’ve probably read Adam Smith, at least some of you? Wealth of Nations? The political and economic driver’s manual of Western thought, kind of. Thomas Hobbes's concept of a “social contract” because basically the only way that man could survive each other was by submitting to a social contract. And then the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engles. Again the idea of who we are in relationship to each other but then who are we in relationship to the economy and who are we in relationship to work and all of that. But essentially, who are we in relationship to each other? And, you know, we've talked about this. It depends on population, it depends on resources, it depends on how we make our money... and it changes over time.

And then, why are we the way we are? Which I suppose is unanswerable, in a way. I know a lot of people have problems with Freud, and I get that. And I think we’ve moved on beyond Freud’s basic theories. But once upon a time, people believed we were the way we were because we had too much bile in your system. Too much phlegm. The four humours. And we were the way we way we were because of demons, and you had to carve holes in their skulls to let the evil spirits out. And then people believed that we were the way we were because of these odd lumps in the shape of your head. we were the way we were because of…

And then the psychiatrists showed up - it wasn’t just Freud - and said “Well, actually, no. There are deep-rooted psychological reasons why you respond to things the way you respond to them and they had to do with the way you were raised and the way that human culture developed and because…” In a way, and kind of like Galileo really, another step away from some kind of metaphysical magical "God" answer and towards a scientific one. Again, going back to what we were saying before, once you take God out of the set of possible answers, you've got to go back and start all over again.

And that was a radical idea. And kind of a terrifying one. It’s still a radical idea, some century and a half later. But the main idea here is that this is all relatively new. It was the Ancient Greeks that came up with the idea of the Four Humours, and people only stopped believing that in the 1850s. Freud was practically yesterday, I think he only died in 1938. Darwin was only the day before yesterday, he only died in 1882. Most of these guys just showed up a century ago and radically changed the way that we look at our place in the world and the world itself. You think it's permanent because you're in the middle of it, but it's moving all the time.

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And then one other gratuitous thing, and I’m not sure it ties directly with Kluckhorn and Strodtbeck, but the way we look at things. Art, for example. Visual representation.

This is… that thing I was talking about before, if you’re at the front of the train or the back of the train or sitting like most of us in the middle. This is one really interesting and recent example of why we look at things differently, in this case about the changing way we look at art because of the invention of photography. I mean, before there was a camera, one of the major functions of a picture was to at least kind of reflect life the way that life looked. I mean, it could be literal or it could be allegorical or it could be fantastic, but it needed to be recognisable as a thing.

These are two pictures of the two artists’s daughters, OK. So on one side you have Repin’s Young Girl with a Bouquet and this is Picasso’s daughter Maya over here in 1938, Young Girl with a Boat. So this example from Repin in 1875, and yeah, the camera was around by then, but not much, and if you wanted to know what a little girl looked like… had to have the Repin picture before you could have the Picasso picture.

You also had to have film. If Picasso had painted his painting a hundred years earlier, in 1838, everybody would have just thought that he was insane. And, in the context of that time, he would have been insane. So the way we regard art, and the way we regard literature and music and all that, develops and changes, and builds on the advances of the guys that went before.

     

So before the invention of the camera, the role of the picture was to sort of reflect what the world looked like. But after you have a camera, you don’t really need a painter to show you what the world looks like. The artist will never do it as scientifically well. So what became increasingly important was to show you what the world looked like from the perspective of the artist, from the impression and from the interpretation. Which I guess in a way goes back to what we were saying about John Locke, about taking the raw data from outside your brain, but using it to make a reality inside your brain.

So, for example, Van Gogh. I’m sure you know the painting Starry Night, which is hanging up on a wall in New York. And, look. If you want to know what an actual starry night looks like? I wouldn’t recommend that painting. It’s a really beautiful painting, but if you want to know what a starry night looks like, it’s not going to help you. But if you want to know what a starry night looked like to Van Gogh from the bedroom window of the asylum he was staying in June 1889? In Saint-Remy-de-Provence? After he’d cut off half his own ear and never sold a painting and only a year before he shoots himself and dies at 37? Then that painting hanging up on a wall up on 53rd Street is the only place you can go.

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Sense and Sensibility

I just wanted to go over this a little bit.

We all basically have the same senses, right? We all smell things and we all taste things and we all look at things and we all hear things and we all touch things. And again, going back to the Kluckholn and Strodtbeck thing everybody has those same senses from Japan to France to Australia, and - going back even further to Locke - everybody has to use those senses to make sense out of their experience of the world. So why do our judgements and our conclusions vary so much? Not only do you have those five existential questions to deal with, everybody, but you’ve also got these five senses to help you answer them. We hear the same thing. But what that sound means to us is different. We look at the same thing, but what we end up seeing is different, and that depends on who and where we are.  
 
So, going back to my Oxford English Dictionary…

I can't tell you how relieved I am to find "sanity" in the definitions, by the way.

Anyway, I want to break this down a little bit, because even though we have these five senses I think we tend to think about them differently. I think we process them a little differently. I'm not saying there's a heirarchy, exactly, but... So for example if you are learning something, at least traditionally, you're looking at a powerpoint and you're listening to the teacher and you're writing your notes and you're reading your book and you're very aware that you're doing that. Sight and sound. You're reading and you're listening, and you're very aware that you're doing those things. Ans so I thing we tend to be more reflexively analytical with those senses than we might be with what we smell or taste or touch.

You have sight, but you can’t always trust it, because you have to pick and choose. If I ask you to look out a window and tell me when the first red car passes by, no problem. “OK, red car”. But then if I ask “OK, but what color was the car before the red car?” you’re not going to have any idea. Because you were only looking for red cars. So there’s a deliberate selection.

With sound, yes to an extent that is just physical. As you get older, the hearing goes. You can ask my kids. But I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience where you’re in a crowded room and somebody across the room says your name? Again, that's selection, and it's important that you hear your name. You've been conditioned - you've been educated - to select that.

And then you have these subconscious senses, right? And I think these are more interesting to an extent because they are more immediately and viscerally judgemental and they’re more subjective but you don’t know why. Why's Quentin Tarantino cool? Because! Why's eating kitten bad? Because!

This is deeper down towards the bottom of Hall’s Culture “Iceberg”. For example, taste. Why does something taste good to you but disgusting to somebody else? Some cultures, they don’t like sugar. Some cultures, like mine, don’t like anything else. Salt, maybe. Sugar and salt.

Or smell. I don’t know if you know this old real estate trick about selling a house but if you want to sell a house, bake cookies before people show up to look around. People walk in and they go “Mmmm, home.” They can't help it, their defences are down. A couple of years ago I was standing on a corner in New York and maybe it was just being back home or whatever but this woman stood next to me and she was wearing the same exact perfume as this girl I knew back at NYU and I was back in 1986. Boom. I mean, I was right there. Just defenceless. And there’s a lot of emotion in that. And, not to be cynical or anything, but there's a lot of money to be made in triggering those emotions.

So, a while ago I was working in a building here in Dublin and the building rented out classrooms to different schools. So school X would use the room from six o’clock to eight o’clock, and then school Y would take over. This is here in Dublin. And so from six to eight, there was this night class in - I think - accounting and all the students were Irish. They’d come in after work and sit in the room for two hours and leave. And then the next group that came in, I don’t know what they were studying but most of the students were Indian. And they hated studying in that room. They couldn’t stand the room because of the left-over smell of the Irish students. And I asked one of them why, because the students all seemed OK to me. And the Indian guy said “Because it smells like MILK in there. It’s disgusting!” And then - inevitably - later I was telling this to one of the Irish guys, one of the teachers, and he was really offended. "Whaddya mean, we smell?! No we don't. Those guys are the guys that smell, and...." Yadda yadda ya.
     
There’s a factory in New Jersey and what it does is basically produce smells. So when you buy dish-soap and it smells like lemons, there’s no lemons in your dish-soap. It’s some guy named Bill who’s standing in a factory hitting a button in Edison, New Jersey, and all of a sudden it’s lemons. Or coconut oil in your suntan lotion or whatever, it’s all chemical. And about five years ago there was some sort of explosion in the factory and there was this cloud of maple syrup smell, and it floated over to lower Manhattan, which is like twenty miles away. And it just sort of lingered over lower Manhattan. And for the first day or so everybody was like “Oh, this is nice. This is kind of nice. It smells like Vermont.” And by the third day it was like “Oh, Jesus God, this is awful!”

And then “touch”, which again is interesting for a few reasons. One of them is because… well, if you have kids, for example, one of the things you do is change diapers. And after a little while you get really used to the idea of having shit on your hands. Or in your hair. Sometimes you end up walking around with a dollop of it on your jeans for a while. You didn't even notice. It seems at first like a horrible repulsive thing, but after a while you just deal with it.
     
I had a student who went on to Medical School here in Dublin, and I was talking to her about it and she told me about the first class - one of the first classes she had - where they bring the medical students in to the cadavers and they all stand around an open cadaver and the professor says “OK, reach in and take out the heart” (which was apparently cold, by the way, and heavier than she’d expected). And for most students it’s not a problem but for some students, it really is. They can’t do it. They just can’t bring themselves to reach into a dead person’s chest and pull their heart out. They know they should, they know they’re supposed to, they know they’re failing if they can’t, but they can’t. All that school-work and all that money and all that parental pressure and then you hit a moment and you can’t do it. And the reason that’s the first class - my ex-student was telling me - was so they could find out for themselves. “OK, my friend, I don’t think medical school is for you”. 

So you’re told by your family - as a baby, a little scientist - what is good to put into your mouth and what isn’t. I mean, it’s all precognitive, right? And guided along by people who love you. We talked about this before. You’re told by your family what to put in your mouth and what not to put in your mouth and you take it from there. Don’t eat poison, right? Which goes back to the racism thing we were talking about before. And so sensory subjectiveness, which goes back to John Locke - who said we can never experience the world directly, that there’s no…

     
That you have to see the thing or taste the thing or feel the thing or hear the thing or... and then contextualise the thing to experience the thing.

You see a tree, but then you have to name the tree in order to experience the tree, which makes it real. Which brings it into existence. There’s no way to really circumvent that process of understanding of the “tree”. If I can control the way you experience tree, or money, or black guy, or freedom, I've got a lot of power...
     
What’s interesting is culture’s role in that process. Between the seeing and the naming, that’s what’s culturally determined. The separation between the property and the thing. The property here is the unnamed thing. The pointy green thing sticking out of the ground. The experience is the representation - in your head - of the idea of “tree”, and that is culturally determined. Right? Which is easy enough with “tree” but a little harder with abstract ideas like “beauty” or “freedom” or “love”.

And culture affects and determines that perception. No two individuals’ senses are (provably) the same. I can’t prove that my “red” and your “red” are the same. You see a blue dress and I see a black one. And so no two individuals’ internal representation is exactly the same. Not in a provable way. The experience of existence is conditioned by culture and experience.

Remember the street? Remember you're walking down a crowded street, but that the street only “exists” because of all the pairs of eyes taking in that street at that one moment, and that everybody’s idea of what that “street” is is shaped by so many different and irreconcilable set of experiences. That each pair of eyes is like a pair of flashlights? And that if there were no eyes, there’d be no street?

I guess this goes back to phenomenology.

Well, so maybe you used to walk down that street as a student, and that street is one thing. Maybe the person you’re passing used to have a job she hated on that street, and so that street is another thing to her. Maybe that guy saw somebody get attacked by a seagull on that street, or maybe you fell in love on that street. It’s not the same street to any of those people, it’s an entirely personal street. Well, the street itself is completely indifferent. The street doesn't care. The tree doesn't care. In fact, going back to the idea of phenomenology - that street doesn’t even really exist without all those people walking down it.

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But I’m pretty sure that universally a red light is a red light. Right? You see it, you name it, you respond to what you know that it means. Red means stop. You name it and you act. And that’s the three stages of perception, it’s that easy.

The first stage is “selection”, find me the red light. When you’re driving, there’s a lot you could be looking at. There’s a lot out there. There are other cars, there are people walking down the street, there’s bicycles and buildings and cars honking and people yelling and signs flashing and all that sort of stuff. But hopefully you’re looking for the red light, because it’s important that you see the red light. - which goes all the way back to “my security depends on your security” thing we talked about in the beginning - if you don't see the red light, Republican or Democrat or whatever, you get into an accident. It’s the same thing as when you hear your name across a crowded room. Selection. You need to hear your name, and so you’re selecting that. If I say “where’s the red car?” you’re selecting the red car.
     
The next stage is "organisation". You’re looking at the red light and you go “A-HA! That is a red light!” And again, this happens so fast that you don’t know that you do it, and you do it all the time. "Tree" "Street" "Money" "Apple". You’re doing it right now. I say "Tree" and you see a tree. But there's no real tree. I say "Street" but show me that street. But it's all about cognisance, right? I mean, give it a name and then it exists.
     
And then the third thing is the interpretation. Acting on the information. Attaching meaning to the thing you’re looking at. “Red Light Means Stop!”

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Perception Variables

Judgement and self-protection. We talked about this already, but what is “Cool”? Right? I mean, where do you even find that? No wonder it screws kids up so bad. What is “Ironic”? What's "cool"? "Am I cool?" "Why not?" How come the Turkish rapper is cool but the white suburban rapper is ironic?  

Instead of a red light - which is hopefully universally acknowledged and understood - you look at a person and you go “now that person is cool.” Well, why? I don't see it. How did you get from looking at that person to naming that person to deciding that that person is “cool”? And why does that decision vary from culture to culture?
     
I always think of youth culture in Japan as way ahead - or maybe not ahead exactly, but… they’ve always got these very distinctive and specific subcultural fashion things… sometimes it's gigantic platform shoes or extreme makeup or whatever, and I’ve got no contextual reference for any of it at all. So it’s not cool to me, to me it’s just strange, but that’s because it’s culturally determined. And I suspect if I were to think it was cool, it would lose all of whatever made it cool to begin with. Because if I think it’s cool, it’s decidedly not.
    

The book that I used to use when teaching this course was very good in a lot of ways but it had this tendency to skate over uncomfortable topics and so it wasn’t always that useful. When it came to cultural variables in perception. You know, why different groups have different responses to the same stimuli. And the book said something along the lines of “When the police arrive in the neighbourhood they act as a calming influence and everybody is happy to see them” or worse, "Everybody is happy to see them except for the bad guys" and that just seemed a little naive. I mean, it really kind of depends. Right? It depends on what the police mean in your neighbourhood. In São Paulo in Brazil, just last year, the police killed something like 1,850 people. Almost entirely poor. Almost entirely in the favelas. So I’m not really sure how much of a calming influence that is. I don't think I need to go into the problematic relationship between cops and whole swathes of minorities in the United States. Same in Paris, at least that's what I'm told.

     
Anyway, the point is that cultural variables depend on the subculture’s phenomenological relationship with the police. What is the shared experience with the police? Also, and as importantly, the police’s phenomenological relationship with the neighbourhood. With the subculture. Which is one strong argument for requiring the police to be from the community they’re policing, right? As opposed to an outside force. Policing your own community does a couple of things. You're able to read the territory in a way an outsider wouldn't otherwise be able to. The people you're policing are also able to read you. But then, there are also pretty good arguments on the other side, too. In Ireland they used to make a point of moving police as far as possible from where they were from. If you're close, you're vulnerable. Your family's vulnerable. So, I don't know.

And then finally, “limits of offensiveness”. Who gets to decide what’s offensive? And I don’t mean deliberately in the free-speech “this is going to piss you off” political satire Charlie Hibdo kind of way that we talked about before, I mean that more in a “you can’t wear that, it’s offensive” or “that smells offensive” kind of way. Farts. Farts are offensive, but who determines that? And, believe it or not, they’re not offensive everywhere.

Remember, there’s a lot of power in deciding the culture, and deciding what’s offensive - just like deciding what’s cool - is one way of deciding the culture.

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OK. Which brings us nicely to food.

     

OK, let’s go back to the “red light means stop” thing for a minute. We all look at the red light, and what we determine the red light means is decided by culture. Red light means stop. Only instead of a red light, we’re going to talk about food, which is a really interesting way of testing your own perception variables and of looking at your own responses.
     
So, The Joy of Cooking. It’s like the classic American cookbook and rite of passage. I remember my mom gave me a copy of this when I moved out of the house. I tried to get as many recipes as I could out of this for the purposes of this class.
     
So, apples and eggs. We all see an apple and we all say “apple”. It’s universal. You look at an apple in Japan, you look at an apple in Venezuela, you look at an apple in Canada, and we all have an association with “apple” and it’s all pretty much the same association. I mean, this goes back to Adam and Eve. Everybody understands "apple" like everybody understands "tree."
     
I would say the same thing with eggs, pretty much. Maybe not everybody, some people might not like eggs, or might find the whole ova thing disturbing, but on a universal scale of repulsiveness or offensiveness, if an apple is “zero”, then an egg might be “one”?

     

So we go from the egg to the chicken. OK? I like chicken. And I know there might be some vegetarians out there, I get that, but roast chicken is pretty good on a Sunday afternoon. Some olive oil, a little salt and pepper, some rosemary. Chop up a lemon and some garlic, put it in the cavity, and throw the thing in the oven for a couple of hours. The skin gets nice and crispy, the kitchen starts to smell really good… delicious. Some potatoes. Maybe some rice.
     
And then from the chicken to the duck. Here’s a picture from San Francisco of duck hanging from the window. Maybe not quite the same as chicken, but I don’t know. It’s pretty good. Now, unlike the chicken, you've got to work around the bones a little more. The vertebrae. And unlike the chicken, it's still got its head attached, so it's still got a face, but... Peking Duck, it’s delicious. They chop it up, put it in the white box, you bring it home. That’s a good dinner. That's a good San Francisco dinner.

     

OK, so now we have pork. Now, this might be a religious issue with people, of course, but of course that's also a cultural determination. Or it might also depend on how it’s prepared, right? I mean, you guys are French, you do some brutal food preparation. When it starts to more like the animal and less like "food", maybe it’s slightly different for some people. Again, when it’s still got a face.
     
I’ve never actually had a suckling pig, I’ve only ever seen them in movies and political cartoons. It always looks kind of good but kind of disturbing at the same time. Eyes, ears. Curly little tail. Teeth. But I’ve eaten plenty of pork. Yesterday, as a matter of fact. Here’s the recipe, in case anybody is looking for a recipe on suckling pig. 

You can probably see where we’re going with this…

     

OK, dog. How to cook a dog. Now I realise that a lot of cultures don’t eat dog, but a lot of cultures do. And have been eating dog (my spell-check doesn’t even want to recognise “dog” as a meat and keeps suggesting “dogs”) for the same amount of time that other cultures have been eating pork. So who’s to say that pork is right but dog is wrong? And if you say the pork is wrong and the dog is wrong but the chicken’s alright, why? How do you determine? Dog is wrong but lamb is fine. Why?

It's interesting. People won't eat things that are either too ugly, like garden slugs or whatever, or too cute, like kittens. So you want to get that sweet spot, a little bit of both but not too much of either. Chickens. Cows. Cute enough to name, maybe, but ugly enough to eat.

By the way, if you want to cook a dog, and I couldn’t find this one in my mom’s old copy of The Joy of Cooking, apparently you have to soak it for a while because there’s a real earthy flavor to it. Stew, but you can also roast it, apparently. Or you can serve it cold, as a sandwich meat. Apparently puppy meat is better because it’s more tender than older dogs, which run a little chewy.
     
In America, CNN did a report on the dog markets in northeast China, where dog meat is traditionally still popular. And what’s interesting about the CNN story wasn’t so much about the dog meat, but the subtext of the story. Well, actually, what was interesting about the story itself is that younger people in China aren't eating dog so much anymore, and the reason they’re not is because younger people are starting to think of dogs more as pets than as food. Because they see American TV and American celebrities with their dogs. So the subtext of the story was sort of the westernisation of food and pets. Because it’s suddenly “cool” to have dogs as pets instead of dinner.

And, look, everybody already knows that there are places where people eat dog. So the CNN story wasn’t telling me anything that I didn’t know already, but what was interesting about it was the way it was filmed. They would show you cute little puppies in cages, and then cut to the butcher hacking up dog meat with a cleaver, the CNN reporter, a Chinese-American woman, gagging and rolling her eyes. And then cut to the people putting the food in a bowl, and then cut to the person eating it. And as a viewer your response is “these are horrible people”. And so I think the subtext of the story wasn’t “they eat dog in China” but these people eat dog in China.

We talked about hegemony before, right? So, there you go.

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Gaslighting

I wanted to talk about “gaslighting” a little, in this whole spirit of “fake news” and what you can believe and what you can’t believe. Gaslighting is essentially is lying. But it uses people's trust in their own perceptions against them. The title comes from a 1944 movie, starring an absolutely beautiful Ingrid Bergman, where she marries this guy played by Charles Boyer and Charles Boyer is trying to convince her that she’s insane. So what he does - and this is before electricity, when houses used to have gas lights - is lower and raise the gaslight. Ingrid Bergman would say “Oh, look, the light is changing in the room” and Charles Boyer would say “No, it’s not”. And she would say, “no, look, it’s much darker than it was a minute ago”, and he would pretend to keep reading the paper or whatever and say “It’s exactly the same, my dear.” He'd put things in her purse and then accuse her of stealing them. Mind-fucking, essentially. And it worked. And so she began to question her own sanity. 

There’s an old line in a Marx Brothers movie: “Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own lying eyes?”

   
Gaslighting is essentially abuse. It’s psychological abuse. Gaslighting somebody is basically convincing somebody that what they see with their senses - Locke’s “conscious experience of the world” - isn’t actually “real”. You make people question their own perception, their own memory, judgement. Cognitive dissonance.
 

The reason that it’s important now is that - without getting into politics, but I’m going to - right now the idea of “reality” itself is constantly contested. On a culture-wide scale. And it is in people’s interests to get people to believe something regardless of how “true” that thing may or may not be. "Maybe we didn't go to the moon. Maybe Bill Gates really is behind the Covid pandemic. Maybe these 5G masts really are controlling our thoughts. Maybe the President really is a giant lizard." I'm not making any of those up, by the way.

Now, that’s not new, people have always done that, but what is new is the efficiency by which you can manipulate an anxious population, and the technology you can do that with. From television to smartphones, which can dictate individual “realities”. Every one of those people is getting their own information, and you can’t necessarily trust that information.

I remember I was teaching a class years ago, and this one student was doing a presentation on the unreliable nature of the internet. And during his presentation he showed a slide of Abraham Lincoln next to a quote along the lines of “The problem with the internet is you never know what is real and what isn’t” signed by Abraham Lincoln, 1864. And one of my students - this girl from Texas - was shocked because she had no idea that Abraham Lincoln even knew about the internet. And then, after everybody laughed at the poor kid, she realised that she’d said something stupid. And she wasn't stupid. But, and I think this is an important lesson from that story... well, two important things. First, she instinctively believed the guy presenting because he had already established his credibility with her. Remember the rhetorical triangle? He was up there in front of the class, he was well dressed and everything he had said up until then made sense and seemed reasonable and true, so... The other thing is that she resented the hell out of the guy who put up the slide for making her feel - and more importantly, look - stupid. We’re going to talk about the importance of “face” in a minute, but nobody listens to you after you humiliate them.
     
But again, like seeing the red light, your response is immediate. You see the slide and you assume it must be true. If somebody in authority said it - and the authority comes from giving the presentation - she believed it. Because that’s what she was conditioned to do.

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Another reason I’m moving away from the course book is that the book talks about how you shouldn’t make sweeping generalisations about people depending on where they’re from, how you should avoid stereotypes, and yeah I agree with that. But then the next chapter said, basically, “Asians are high-context and Americans are low-context”. Which seemed like a sweeping generalisation.

The generalisation the author was making is that “Eastern” cultures end to be more collectivist and "Western" cultures tend to be more individualistic. And I get his general argument. It seems a little reductive, though, and I think you can find a lot of gradations within that. I don’t think it’s quite that basic. And I don't think it's that neat. Collectivism and individualism, and so to an extent high-context and low-context environments, depend on a lot of external factors beyond basic geography, right? It depends a lot on population, and area. Do people tend to stick around for generations or do they come and go? Is the economy based on industry or is it based on agriculture?

And even then, it's not so neat. Cities tend to be more collectivist than the country. In cities you have a lot of people who don’t know each other but basically need to be on the same page, culturally speaking, so that people don’t get pushed in front of subway cars all the time. But at the same time, cities tend to be low-context environments where all the rules are neatly laid out. "Mind the Gap." So if you live in Paris or New York or London, there's a kind of a communal agreement. Rural environments tend to be - on one level, anyway - a lot more individualistic, but everybody knows everybody and everybody knows who your people are.

And, of course, every once in a while somebody gets pushed in front of a subway car.

So , in a very basic way, in a high-context environment, the message’s meaning is determined by the context. Things are left unsaid because they don't need to be said, and there's a lot of emphasis on other non-verbal cues. You don't wear a red dress to a wedding, unless you're trying to say something. Everybody understands the message because of where the message is being relayed. And the communication works as consensus and engagement. Communication basically holds people together. And silence in a high-context society means everything’s OK. Nobody’s saying anything because nobody needs to say anything.

In which case I’m a very “low-context” guy. Silence makes me nervous. If I call somebody and I don’t hear back from them I get very paranoid. I remember once I texted my wife about something - I can’t remember what - and by the end of the day I was … I would text, nothing. I texted again, again nothing. A third time, nothing. And by the end of the day I was thinking “Oh my God, that’s it. We’re getting a divorce. It’s over.” And I got home and she just didn’t have her phone, that’s all. But me, being neurotic, I managed to fill in the blanks with all the worst stuff that you could possibly put in there.

In a low-context environment, on the other hand, nothing is presumed. The message is explicit, clear, and repeated. Nobody expects you to know the rules. Which kind of assumes a more transitory population. It's real "insider/outsider" stuff. The context is low, so the explanation is high. There’s very little contextual meaning, you depend on the explicit. And the function of communication is to explain ideas. And so in low-context environments, the people we respect, the people we want as our leaders, are the people that can articulate those ideas. The power's in the rhetoric. You know, Winston Churchill or whatever. I mean, the English especially go in for this stuff. "The King's Speech." Shakespeare. " Henry the Fifth. Richard the Third. Their heroes are eloquent, their villains are eloquent...  

"We will fight them on the beaches..."

If you’ve ever heard the BBC News when they play back the Prime Minister's Questions in the British Parliament, in the House of Commons. It’s usually funny as hell. One guy will get up and say something that’s very funny and cutting and mean about the opposition, and then some guy will get up from the other side of the house and say something that’s equally funny and cutting and mean about the first guy. And everybody’s cheering their guy on. And it’s all about who can say the sharpest thing? Who has the sharpest sense of humour?

And so the rhetorical model that we talked about before; the speaker and the encoding and message and all that - highly highly valued in a “low-context” environment.

One of the reasons I wanted to move away from the whole “East vs. West” thing is that I think we all operate in both high-context and low-context environments all the time. A family dinner is very high-context. You know where to sit at the table, you know what to say and what not to say, you don’t need instructions because you’re part of the collective.

The “permeable self”, which I just wanted to get in here for a minute in terms of collectivism and high-context. Basically the idea that the delineation between the “self” and the “group” is pretty thin. In a Western Individualistic society, the idea of the “self” is essential. “I am the self within the society but I am protected from this society by my sense of who I am.” In a collectivist model, there’s more a sense of, well… When you think about a family, for example. What’s the delineation between “me” and “my family”? As opposed to, say, “me” and “the other people on the bus”? That delineation is much clearer - unless something happens to the bus. Until a taxi slams into the side of the bus, and then suddenly that delineation isn't so clear anymore.When we become a kind of temporary community.

In an airport, on the other hand… Unlike the family dinner. It’s almost impossible to get lost in an airport. And it doesn’t matter where you are. It doesn’t matter if you speak the language or not. In Dublin airport, the signs are in English and in Irish, and I’m guessing you don’t speak Irish, but you’ve got a sign with an American flag, an arrow, and a plane taking off. You know where to go to get on the plane to New York. 
   

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of going to dinner in your boyfriend or girlfriend’s parents house for the first time? And you’re nervous and maybe you bought a bottle of wine or something and you go in and you don’t know where to sit and everybody there knows exactly where to sit and you want them to like you. And one of the people at the table says “Oh, Frank called” and everybody’s laughing and “A-ha, ha, ha, ha. Frank” except you because you don't know Frank. Who’s Frank? And why's it funny that he called? You are a stranger in a high-context environment. It’s the same basic dynamic, the same awkward little shuffle between high-context and low-context.

   

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OK, we're almost done.

So, returning to Edward Hall for a minute. The iceberg guy. His basic argument here was that we are all constantly confronted with so much more sensory input than we could ever hope to process. Right? That if you paid attention to every sound, every sight, every smell, every touch that is bombarding your senses right now, that you’d basically explode. Well, you wouldn't explode, but you wouldn't be able to contextualise or process or act on the information because you'd be too busy taking it all in. You know, the idea that it's the white space around words, for instance, that give the words shape and so give the words meaning. Hey, you're just looking for the red car. Otherwise, it would be too overwhelming.

And so what Hall argues is that our culture prioritises what’s important for us to take in and what’s not. It filters out what's not important, but what's not important varies from culture to culture. You hear your name across a crowded room because you need to hear your name. You see the red car because you were told to look for the red car. You see a red light because it is vitally important to see a red light. It isn’t so important to see the color of the shirt on the guy on the bicycle before you see the red light.

And so what Hall says is that in a high-context setting, the screens are designed to let in the implied messages. In a low-context setting, the screens are set up to direct attention towards the message itself. Literal meanings, and less the context. Dad comes down the stairs in the morning and he's not saying anything and you just know he's angry about something. You can feel it. Because you know him, and you know how to read the room. Whereas some stranger in the house wouldn't see it. Wouldn't be able to read it at all.

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And so finally the idea of “Face”.
     

Again, in a high-context situation, you need to - not exactly be an “equal” because there’s a real need for hierarchy - but you need to look worthy of your place in the society. You can’t afford to look bad. You need to “save face”. You need to, basically .... there was a story from about a year ago, I guess there was an accident on a train in Japan, and the guy whose responsibility it was killed himself because his reputation was shot. And his reputation was the most important thing he had. And it wasn’t going to come back.

It’s very important when you’re communicating with somebody, in a context where face is important, that you don’t say something to them in front of other people that is going to make them look bad. You don't humiliate them. Or, if you do, you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. That that’s what you’re doing.

So, for example, this is probably a dumb example, but if you were a teacher and you have this student who’s always late - and I’ve been in this situation, I've been on both sides of this situation, and there’s a couple of things you can do. You can embarrass the student in front of the other students, you can shame them. Something I I try not to do. For one thing, because they absolutely hate you from then on, you know? You do this whole snide “Oh, late again, Mr. Johnston?” and all the other students laugh - in part because it’s not them you’re picking on - and the student looks at you like “You’re a dick”. And he’s not wrong.  You remember my student from Texas? The Abraham Lincoln and the Internet story? Making somebody feel stupid is not a good way to get that person to trust you. And if they don't trust you, why would they listen to you?
     
Whereas another thing you can do is you ask “can I talk to you after class” and the person doesn’t entirely look bad in front of the other students, but everybody knows what's coming and nobody's paying attention to the lesson because they're all thinking about what's happening after the lesson. Or you can say nothing when they come in, just let it go until class is over, and then - if you’re very subtle about it - you ask them to stick around after class and then you say something along the lines of “I need you to do me a favour, because a lot of the other students kind of respect you, and I need to make sure that everybody is here on time.” So now you’re giving them a responsibility.
     
They know what you’re really telling them, and you know that they know what you’re saying, but you don’t have to say it and they don’t have to feel stupid. Basically. They don’t have to feel ashamed.
     
In fact, it’s a habit now when I teach. I’ll say “can you do me a favour and…” And I’m not actually asking them to do me a favour, I’m telling them to do their work. And I’m not even consciously doing it anymore, I do it all the time. But what I am doing is saying “OK, you have some power over this, would you please meet me as a colleague and do your goddamn job?”