We live in the information age. The age of information. This means that our economy and much of our culture is defined by the exchange and manipulation of information. Wisdom may be another case entirely, but the amount of information available to us is increasing exponentially. The problem with this much information is that useful information is lost among irrelevant information. A database full of numbers or a library full of books is useless if you can’t find the one you need. As an experimental scientist, I have a responsibility to discover the truth among competing theories. As an academic in my field, I also have the opportunity to help make information widely accessible, intuitively retrievable, and self-organizing. In this space, I will be doing neither of these things. I will be spouting off about things I am largely unqualified to speak about, increasing the total quantity of irrelevant and unhelpful information.

Actually, I hope I have thought about these things a bit more than the average person. Also, for the sake of my own sanity, and for the sake of building community with those around me, there is a need for me to spill out some of the ideas I have stored up inside me. I have spent a ridiculous amount of my life to date in thought, and it’s time I let my people see some of its fruits, if they choose to do so.

You have to be more cautious when criticizing another culture than when criticizing your own. It is easy to criticize other cultures foolishly, and quite difficult to understand another culture well enough to offer well-founded criticism. Humans are imperfect, and thus the cultures we create have imperfections, flaws which individually and collectively we should strive to correct. Yet it is all too easy to project your ideas of normal behavior onto other cultures and conclude that those cultures are gravely flawed in some arena, or even inferior as a whole, when the differences are merely different conventions representing similar value systems. For example, contrasting conventions about how far apart to stand when speaking with another person, how loudly to speak, timing of eye contact or amount of physical contact likely stem from subtle differences in values of individuality vs community, productivity vs personal relationships, authority vs equality, tradition vs progress, etc. However, through the colored glasses of another culture, these contrasts are exaggerated and even twisted to reflect lack of humanity. Valuing individuality and productivity becomes selfishness and lovelessness. Valuing community and personal relationships becomes laziness and a lack of personal responsibility. Valuing authority becomes subservience; valuing equality becomes irreverence. Valuing tradition becomes mindless primitivity; valuing progress becomes soulless mania. In order to accurately evaluate the flaws of a culture, you have to be intimately familiar with it. This generally means that the only culture that we can confidently criticize and strive to change is our own. On the other hand, cultures and subcultures come in varieties and sub-varieties, and we are members of one humanity. Just as insights into our own cultures can come from observing others, we can gain insights into other cultures based on observations of our own, and it is occasionally appropriate to work to change cultures besides our own.

My home culture is rather idiosyncratic and poorly defined. I don’t identify very well with American culture in general, nor with any of the various sub-cultures defined by their music, religion, sports or other entertainment. I am becoming acculturated into academia, but otherwise any comments I make regarding social or cultural change mean I am advocating changing a culture I cannot wholly claim, and probably do not properly appreciate. I hope, however, that my lack of home culture and my experience with many different cultures, along with my penchant for thinking too carefully, give me a small soapbox to stand on and thump vigorously.