Forever in draft

In the late 1980s Assad Shoman, a radical Belizean politician, reckoned that the national cultural policy should be forever in draft. This is because the national, cultural reality is in a perpetual state of flux. Other influential Belizeans felt the need to prevent traditional culture from slipping away. They would carve the cultural policy in stone and would suffer cognitive dissonance at the mere hint of change.

As with national cultural policy so with personal cultural reality. This is a matter of ‘what is’ rather than ‘what should be’. It is a fact that a new born human baby is ill equipped to survive in their natal culture on their own. However, over the course of 25 supervised years nature, nurture and serendipity serve to enculture them. The process is variously named education (informal, non-formal and formal), training, tutoring, apprenticeship, conditioning, conscientization, enlightenment, schooling, brainwashing, programming, instruction, indoctrination, enculturation. The essence involves ‘changing minds’ and developing an overall world view (Weltanschauung) linked to a series of smaller points of view.

The forces of nature, nurture and serendipity are perpetually busy with reacting and responding to changes in the internal and the external environments – physical, biological and socio-cultural. When the sperm meets the egg the process begins and continues till death. Confucius and the Jesuits are famous for their assertion ‘give me the child till he is five and I will give you the man.’ However, recent thinking about neural plasticity suggests that the human brain does not reach full maturity till about 25 and even then it is capable of radical revisioning till over 100. Think of the impact of propaganda on the demonising of ‘them’ as a preparation for war.

Technology has been with us for millions of years but for most of that time there was not much change to our tool kit - a stone axe in a basket? Language has been with us for 150,000 years and that helped spur the rate of progress. Something approximating to science has been with us for 5000 years and this led away from foraging into more complex ways of being in the world of chat and tool kits. I am a baby boomer now in my late 60s and there are many other people who are 70 and over. We golden oldies have lived through massive environmental and socio-cultural change such that our overall world view has been revised many times.

My natal enculturation was upper working class, rural, Scottish Presbyterian (NE of Scotland flavour). I graduated as a biology teacher and then lived and worked in Scotland (2 years), Jamaica (2 years), Zambia (3 years), Sudan (4 years), Belize (4.5 years), Lesotho (3 years) Tanzania (several short stays) and Geneva (short visits for the ILO). Early on I was a school teacher, later I was an Education advisor and, before retiring about 10 years ago, I was a plain language editor.

SO – my personal cultural reality is particularly idiosyncratic.

SO – can the ‘real’ George (Dod) Gordon Clark please stand up

Which one? Who asks? Why do they ask?

How will they expect a reply to be structured?

The only constant thing is change.

‘I’ am forever in draft