It started off from our little discussion about culture during the recent Swiss vacation. The discussion had centred about the question that do, we as a society, need to put in a conscious effort into preserving our cultural heritage. Of course, very soon we ended up discussing what constitutes cultural heritage. Is it anything and everything that we do in our leisure time? And when we say 'we' is that we as individuals or is it 'we' as in a community? These were difficult questions for little group, given our pathetically poor grounding on all things cultural. I was hugely enjoying all the confusion these questions were creating when suddenly someone asked me what I thought were the right answers to these questions. And it set me thinking. Honestly, what I called culture vaguely referred to anything related to performing arts. But then as someone from the group had already pointed out, anything we did in out lesiure time was 'culture'. I thought that was a bit weak. We, as individuals, have so many different hobbies and interests that fill up our lesiure time. Does that mean there are just as many cultures and sub-cultures that we were talking about here? I didnt think so. I think it was the activities we angaged in as a community could in some way be said to consitute culture. And then why limit ourselves to leisure activities. What we do for a living, how we raise our families, what we consider as good or evil, all of these constitute culture provided we do these things as community. The key question was, with the breakdown of the smalled social unit called family do we really have anything today that even closely resembles a community? Most parts of the developed world has already seen this happening. And now the malaise has even spread to the developing countries. The blame for splitting the community is very conveniently put on the pressures of earning a living. People drift away from their near and dear ones because they have jobs to do and often these jobs will often take them away to other town, cities even countries. As we celebrate the phenomeon of 'global village' is it worth taking a step back and considering what we have lost on the way : our little communities that provided a social support system and that little something we could call our 'culture'. We'd had a heated debate about the belief that culture should be allowed to evolve organically, not needing to be guided by any particular belief systems or philosophies. We should be free to do anything that pleases us as long as it doesnt harm anyone else and treat it as a part of our culture. There were some of us who believed that there had to be something a little more than this to culture. We used to hear so much about the cultural heritage of India, so was it all based on this seemingly mundane definition of culture.
And then I heard about the Amish community. I actually saw a movie prominently featuring an Amish community living in Americal. The move was 'Witness' with Harrison Ford playing the lead. It had even won an Oscar at one point of time. The Amish way of life was shown to be amazingly different from the rest of the Americans whom they call 'English'. Inspsite of living in one the most advanced technological nations, the Amish apparently have a deep resistance to anything related to modern technology. It would be easy to dismiss them as yet another primitive tribe living in a remote third world country. Except that neither are they a primitive tribe nor do they live in a poor third world country. In fact, some Amish communities live nextdoor to average American families. They dont use Automobiles, electricity or phones. They dont subsribe to the benefits of the social security system, they dont buy insurance, they dont pay taxes and they are totally non violent. And amazingly enough, the American government has laid down special laws that respect them for their belief system and help them preserve their way of life. And why is it that these people are so different? Is it because any old religious scripture says so? In fact, they do follow the teachings of Christianity literally to the last word. And their interpretation of it is that the ego needs to be suppressed to achieve closeness to God. One of the important ways to do this is to subordinate the needs of the individual to those of the family and the community. So they deliberately adopt a way of life that makes all individuals dependent on other members of the community. The avoidance of all things related to modern technology is a key part of this strategy as they believe, perhaps righlty so, that technology weakens the dependence of the individual on his community. It wouldnt be fair to say that they totally avoid any contact with technology. They do adopt technology where it is seen to not violate the basic principle of interdependence. And these decisions are taken collectively by members of the community. The way they support their families, educate their children, take care of their elders, etc everything appears unique and perhaps truly defines their culture
