Embrace Culture?

Culture is our identity in a way; it makes us who we are based of its values, morals, and rituals. Yet in the modern world we are losing who we are to conform and fit in. If we do not conform we are hazed, ignored, and given more road blocks in society. I personally think losing our culture is a major issue but it is only the surface problem. If we keep our culture we remain ourselves but we also stay closed off to all others. If we are clsoed off to other cultures we premote either the current conformity or a conformity to the culture we practice. So I believe we should embrace all cultures that we encounter. As Jedi we are taught to learn and gain wisdom; which I believe can be done by practicing many cultures. This means we dont dress to fit in but wear trinkets and cloth of the culture to show our true selves. We can not just talk they way we are told to but the way cultures ask us to. We must live, breath, and embrace culture in the modern day to protect it from a conromed world filled with price tags on each indivual. This is something I have thought about alot lately and would love to know your take on it, thak you.

I do not personally support cultural ideas as necessarily a part of the self. They are interesting, intellectually and aesthetically; I can enjoy Chinese architecture, for example. But to me, associating yourself with some specific culture, saying "This is MY culture", is just another form of attachment, and from attachment comes suffering.

This is a thing that I'm not sure I fully understand, but I will contribute from the perspective I think you try to express.

How does one participate in culture? These days I see a lot of talk of culture. But I'm not sure people as a whole really know what it is. I would think that it is everything you do, socially at the least, and that it is always changing and adapting. There is no death of culture, there is only evolution. To say that an individual should practice culture is a strange idea to me. Be who you are, and while I am not telling you to conform to unfamiliarity, one should be true to one's self and thereby the culture they are a part of. IE, you are raised by culture. You are submersed in it. To stray from your rearing to preserve a foreign idea for the sake of preservation seems... I would personally not recommend such a thing. Now, it is different if another idea set is truly influential to one, but... It's a slipperly slope.

Just be true to yourself. Everything else will be OK.

we are the beneficiaries as well as being the stewards of it

what we are as individuals would not exist were it not for our respective cultures

culture is where our knowledge comes from,its where we learned the values that we hold and its what we mean when we say "make the world a better place"

its not just trendy clothes - its language and ideas
art and expression, as well as sports and games and internet forums where we discuss philosophy and ethics and cartoons

these are all aspects of our cultures

so, culture is awesome!

its a sort of wellspring which creates us, enriches us (in the happier instances) and then is enriched BY us

we dont just recieve our culture, we also contribute to it enhance it

watts and lucas are the whispers of culture just as much as fergie or twitter

we inheret from all these sources and improve what we can and pass it along to those who come next

Trying to genuinely understand from an outside perspective can sometimes be a gateway to being invited to develop an inside perspective. I wonder if that invitation is required to differentiate a true insider perspective from an outside perspective... when it comes to cultures, which are inherently communal and social, AFAIK.

Dude, you're thinking of a rainbow gathering. People come together and build their own culture, dress up as an expression of themselves, use names they like for themselves, etc. Eventually a common culture emerges among the many varied cultures and there's no imposed culture other than sanitation, waste, health, peace, etc.

Anyway, it's an interesting topic and there are lots of people engaging in experiments with this sort of thing.

Yea, so let me kindly be the jerk again who disagrees, because what other use is there to me even, really?

The central premise of your idea is that our culture, what ever nebulous force that is, informs us of our values and morals and rituals and thus forms our identity. Without this premise everything else falls apart, because if our identity comes from any other place, no use is left for culture and no respect is left due.
As it so happens, I reject said premise. While I do not acknowledge a notion of free will in any strict sense, I do subscribe to the opinion that, irrespective of motivation, the individual bears sole and full responsibility for their attitudes, choices and actions. It is true that many will say when questioned over something, that their culture forbade or demanded it, and I am ready to see that they are sincere; I would still hold that this is cowardice, either against admitting the true motives or acting upon them in spite of cultural pressures.
Which ever it is, people who claim their culture as their identity are apparently unwilling or unable to form one of their own. I am not one to force them, of course, but I feel no obligation to respect either their choice or the culture they picked for it. Most certainly I feel no obligation to embrace it either. If particular tenets or rituals are incompatible with my own, I am most free to reject and even to condemn those for that reason, and my willingness to debate some of them is courtesy of my generosity, arguably also curiosity, yet not at all of my respect for them. I can surely change my mind on many things during or after a reasoned argument, but no sooner.

Gisteron wrote
Yea, so let me kindly be the jerk again who disagrees, because what other use is there to me even, really?

I actually find your perspective helpful and agree with a lot of what you say.
The beauty of this place is the differences in how we view things at least for me.

Not a jerk but a valued member of this community.

Gisteron wrote: Yea, so let me kindly be the jerk again who disagrees, because what other use is there to me even, really?

The central premise of your idea is that our culture, what ever nebulous force that is, informs us of our values and morals and rituals and thus forms our identity. Without this premise everything else falls apart, because if our identity comes from any other place, no use is left for culture and no respect is left due.
As it so happens, I reject said premise. While I do not acknowledge a notion of free will in any strict sense, I do subscribe to the opinion that, irrespective of motivation, the individual bears sole and full responsibility for their attitudes, choices and actions. It is true that many will say when questioned over something, that their culture forbade or demanded it, and I am ready to see that they are sincere; I would still hold that this is cowardice, either against admitting the true motives or acting upon them in spite of cultural pressures.
Which ever it is, people who claim their culture as their identity are apparently unwilling or unable to form one of their own. I am not one to force them, of course, but I feel no obligation to respect either their choice or the culture they picked for it. Most certainly I feel no obligation to embrace it either. If particular tenets or rituals are incompatible with my own, I am most free to reject and even to condemn those for that reason, and my willingness to debate some of them is courtesy of my generosity, arguably also curiosity, yet not at all of my respect for them. I can surely change my mind on many things during or after a reasoned argument, but no sooner.

seeing as i come from a culture which promotes the ideals of individual autonomy-personal freedom, tempered with personal responsibility, and i dentify with academic culture, which values and even demands not only originality in work, but a high degree of critcal thinking and objective reasoning

its only natural that i agree with all of this