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Yeah, that’s one of those deliberately provocative titles of mine. The thing is, the word “culture” has such diverse meanings that it makes it easy to be offended by the claim, Cultures Are Disgusting. I mean, if we talked about bacterial growth on a Petri dish – a culture – few would disagree with it!

Obviously enough, that’s not the case here – I’m not referring to bacterial growth. I also don’t try to attack being cultured, since, equally obviously, the entire existence of Home for Fiction revolves around art, philosophy, knowledge, thought.

Rather, by arguing that cultures are disgusting, I attack the prevalent societal idea of conglomerating thought, boxing identity, (de)limiting expression.

Cultures are disgusting – we can imagine hearing Slavoj Žižek saying that while watering his (?) flowers – because any given culture (and I will attempt to define it more precisely in this post) is essentially an attempt to direct your thought.

What Is “a Culture”

For the purposes of this post, I’ll be focusing on the definition of culture as a set of rules. You can argue whether it should be a “set of habits” instead, but that’s where the… disgust lies, so we’ll get back to this.

According to the Wiktionary entry, culture (in this meaning) is:

• The arts, customs, lifestyles, background and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.
• The beliefs, values, behaviour and material objects that constitute a people’s way of life.
• The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.

I’d say, based on the definitions above, my defining culture as a “set of rules” is at least plausible and likely dominant. In other words, I’d argue a culture expects its members to conform to this set of beliefs, values, etc. or face expulsion.

But even there, there is some granularity.

Cultures are Disgusting because they are Exclusive

An expulsion from a culture can be direct/active (say, a religious group excommunicating and banishing a member) or indirect/passive (for instance, a member finding it difficult to participate in at least some activities of the culture due to their not following the rules, whether explicit or implicit).

I mean, if you’re a metalhead and you start listening to mindless pop (exclusively or even just predominantly), nobody in the metal music culture would stone you or anything, but you are de facto an outsider. The metal music culture indirectly expects its members to listen to metal music and, in some cultural subsets, also dress a certain way, behave a certain way, etc.

But the problematic nature of all this is also revealed once we realize how porous cultural borders are must be.

The Fallacy of Borders: Cultural Appropriation, Purity, and other Asinine Ideas

In the core of the misunderstandings surrounding cultures – and often the reason behind their being disgusting – is that they assume clearly defined borders.

From assumption comes enforcement; from enforcement conformity follows.

In fact, it’s in the very nature of a culture to be fluid, dynamic, predicated on exchange. Cultures that remain static quickly die. Since a culture is supposed to reflect ways of life, a culture that resists change and refuses to incorporate difference quickly becomes conceptually inbred.

Cultures are often Disgusting indirectly

If we asked a random sample of people whether it’s disgusting to chop off body parts from defenseless children, I’d like to expect most of them would agreeThe very same people might then feel taken aback if one mentioned, say, genital mutilation – especially including circumcision. Suddenly it´s different when it´s "your" culture, which makes the whole concept of culture so insidious. . However, things can get messy, quickly.

Is it disgusting to force a person to do something against their will? How about if, by not forcing them to do that, we violate some right of some other person? Does it make a difference if it’s a parent-child relationship?

And if this sounds too hypothetical, let’s make it concrete: If it’s against a person’s religious beliefs to touch another person’s hand, can they be obliged to do it when required by, say, common courtesy or a civil habit? The very same question was posed to Žižek (since I mentioned him earlier) and his response was, We have to be able to talk about this openly.

But, although I agree in principle, talking about it only reveals our inability to accommodate such differences. Naturally, things become even more complicated further along the continuum of being indirect.

I mean, dogmatic cultures can be disgusting, but is it any less disgusting to, say, condition gifts on someone’s behavior holding them emotionally hostage?

Societal Hallucinations: Castoriadis and Exogenous Habits

Cornelius Castoriadis has written (and spoken) a lot about what he refers to as the imaginary institutions of society.

Very simply, Castoriadis argues that not only each society creates its own institutions (you could think of them as all the sets of habits and agreements; from drinking coffee to electing a president to having to work for money) but also considers them to be exogenous. In other words – and I’m now making the argumentative connection to my own topic, cultures being disgusting – not only is a culture something inherently artificial and arbitrary (unlike, say, gravity, there is no necessity in drinking coffee from a mug), but those participating in the culture subconsciously refuse this very idea, assigning metaphysical (or at least external) attributes to the culture and thus emphasizing a fallacious concept of necessity.

You might think of it as something ridiculous – “of course I know coffee is not necessary” – but the line would begin to blur by the time you are asked about habits regarding, say, human rights or (better still) religion.

To use an example mentioned by Castoriadis himself, when you go to the church and light a candle, there are two sets of elements there:

• Rational/pragmatic: You need a match or a lighter (or another candle’s flame) to light a candle, you need to place it a certain way to make sure it stands upright, etc.
• Irrational/imaginary: Lighting a candle is something “God” expects you to do and you must do it (among other things) if you want to go to heaven.

Cultures become disgusting once they refuse to acknowledge the distinction. There is little wrong with habitual, irrational habits as long as we are aware of their being irrational – and, crucially, that they are not exogenous. For example, many of us have silly superstitions – say, we avoid stepping on the sidewalk cracks. In itself that’s not a problem unless they:

• interfere with other beliefs/habits (that are often fundamental). Think of avoiding sidewalks to the extent you’re unable to walk through a certain area. Or, on a cultural level, imagine killing your child because God told you or, perhaps even worse, killing someone because of who they fell in love with.
• blind us to their existence. Not stepping on sidewalk cracks because “ha ha, what a silly habit”, OK; not stepping on sidewalk cracks because “something awful will befall my family if I do”, far less OK.
• are presented as something necessary, created by an external force. Not stepping on sidewalk cracks because it’s something you came up with (likely following some collective socio-cultural habit), OK; not stepping on them because “that’s what God wants” or “we’ve always been doing that”, far less OK.

Cultures are Disgusting; but where Do We Draw the Cultural Line?

One of the first things a person needs to learn in order to overcome their own ignorance is to question themselves. This also includes the language they use and their thought processes.

To say something like “I like the X culture” sounds innocent. But, depending on the size and overall quality of X, things can get muddled and quickly. In any case, our idea of “a culture” is almost always at least partial and very likely outright false.

“I like the African culture” is so generic that is useless. Does “African culture” include both Algerian (a huge group to begin with) and South African? Both handicrafts made by Sudanese farmers (hey, maybe they can double as guerillas) as well as oil products made by Nigerian tycoons?

On the other end of the continuum, to say “I like the late 90s Swedish Gothenburg death metal culture” starts to be so narrow that it approximates that hilarious discussion on genre and the “historical romantic fiction late 1800s western mail order bride” genre.

The narrower the culture, the greater the exclusion, but the wider it is, the less sense-making. To speak of a culture is sort of inevitable, in the sense that human societies necessarily involve such groupings. There’s nothing wrong with finding like-minded people to form communities, share experiences, and overall interact. The problem begins – and that’s when cultures become disgusting – when being a member of a culture forbids you to have other experiences.

In a way, cultures are disgusting when they become prescriptive instead of descriptive.