Referring back to a quote from Milton Bennett, pillar of the field of intercultural communication:

Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” In M. Paige (Ed.) Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1993, p. 21)

Bennett’s agenda in saying this isn’t to have us throw in the intercultural towel and give up on getting along. His point is to help us understand the scope and scale of the obstacles we humans confront in the task of getting along, so that we can get better at it — in much the same way as a coach, in order to be effective, has to point to a player’s shortcomings.

The above quote leads off Bennett’s most famous article. The “developmental model” referred to in the title has since become one of the industry standards in intercultural communication. Here we’ll take look at the ethnocentric side of the model.

Bennett argues that, as human beings spend more time in intercultural environments, they trace out a roughly predictable developmental path. He divides the path into six stages, the first three of which are “ethnocentric” and the latter three of which are “ethnorelative.” Here is how the stages are represented:

The ethnocentric side of the diagram is defined as “assuming that the worldview of one’s own culture is central to all reality.” (30) Stage 1, Denial, is the most basic form of ethnocentrism: no other groups even exist that are worthy of attention. In a world as interconnected as our is in the 21st century, it’s hard to maintain this illusion. The only way to do it, really, is through “denial” in the psychological sense: pretending that something doesn’t exist, even when it should be obvious that it does exist. One example is the ways in which expatriate communities isolate themselves from their surroundings, trying to create, for example, a “little America” on the outskirts of Beijing.

Defense/reversal is stage 2. In pure Denial, the non-existence of the “other” means there is no threat. In Defense, there is open acknowledgment of difference, and along with it a sense of threat. We defend ourselves against the threat by insisting that “our way” is better. Denigration is the hallmark of the Defense stage.

Reversal, the mirror image of Defense, occurs when we denigrate our own culture, having become immersed in another culture which we have decided is superior. This happens frequently with Peace Corps volunteers, according to Bennett.

Minimization, stage 3, is further along the developmental path, because not only is cultural difference recognized, but it is no longer denigrated. What unites all humanity is put at the forefront; cultural differences are presumed to be less important that what we all share.

You may ask: Why is this still considered ethnocentric? Bennett points out that a kind of universalism underpins this viewpoint, and that universalism might not be shared by all cultures. Bennett puts it this way: “…in general, people who have experienced cultural oppression are wary of the ‘liberal’ assumption of common humanity. Too often, the assumption has meant ‘be like me.’” (42). In other words, we might think we’re all one big, shiny, happy human family, but beneath the surface are some more sinister, ethnocentric tendencies in ourselves that we are pretending don’t exist, but without which we wouldn’t be claiming that “we’re all the same.” The sentiment that “we’re all the same” sounds much better if “they” are the same as “we,” but not vice versa.

When using Bennett’s ideas in my consulting work, I usually focus on Defense, because I see it as the default state of humanity. Most of us spend enough time exposed to those with obviously different beliefs from us that we can’t be in Denial, and Minimization won’t hold up to scrutiny on most days. So on bad days, or in bad weeks or months, we end up in Defense…a lot.

Have you spent much time around Western expatriates living in developing countries? I’ve been one for a good part of my life, and I can tell you firsthand that I’ve spent a lot of energy complaining about how “they” do things here, and that I’ve heard plenty of the same from other Westerners around me, most of whom I like and respect a lot as human beings. We’re not bad people for wishing “they” were more like “us”; we’re just standard-issue human beings stuck, for however long—hours, days, weeks—in a stunted stage of intercultural development.

Bennett is clear that he doesn’t intend his model to describe the static state of any single human being. Each of us at any given moment can find ourselves in any of the stages. What we want, and what we work for, is a steady, stubborn push toward the right side of the diagram.

I’ll take up ethnorelativism next time.

In November 2009, President Obama announced the 100,000 Strong initiative, “a national effort designed to increase dramatically the number and diversify the composition of American students studying in China,” under the Department of State. Recently a separate initiative, Project Pengyou, signed on to manage the vast alumni network of 100,000 Strong.

On December 10 in Beijing, U.S. Ambassador to China Gary Locke led a celebration to mark the formal kickoff of this effort by Project Pengyou. I was invited to deliver some remarks at the event. Soon the video will become available. My remarks were somewhat off the cuff, but there is also a written version of the speech which differs somewhat from the actual speech I gave. I have posted the written version here and would love your comments.

What an honor it is to be here with you, with this group. Kindred souls, out to craft how the populations of two of the world’s most influential nations will work together from now on.

I’m Jason Patent, and I am American Co-Director of the Hopkins–Nanjing Center. The job title says it all: I am one of two. The Chinese Co-Director, Huang Chengfeng and I, are jointly responsible for carrying out the mission of the Center, which is in narrow terms to provide top-flight graduate education to Chinese and International, mostly American, students. In broader terms, though, our mission is none other than enacting and living Sino-U.S. relations.

Two visionary university presidents founded the Center: Nanjing University president Kuang Yaming and Johns Hopkins University president Steven Muller. They began talking almost immediately after normalization in 1979, and in 1986 the Center opened. Their founding vision? That there would come a day when the U.S. Secretary of State and the Chinese Foreign Minister would walk into the room, shake hands, and recognize each other as alumni of the Hopkins–Nanjing Center.

It’s a powerful vision that guides all that we do at the Center. At the Center, U.S.–China cooperation is a no-brainer. The common doubts we hear in news media, those are things we know exist, but which do not shape our day-in, day-out existence at the Center. We live and breathe Sino–U.S. cooperation in all that we do.

It often isn’t pretty. In fact, it’s rarely pretty. Sharing living quarters, classrooms, a dining hall, a lounge, and on and on, with people who, by default, are so different from each other, generates a lot of discomfort and strong emotions. What kind of response is appropriate for an American looking into the eyes of his roommate, who says with great sincerity and passion that the Chinese Communist Party has been good for Tibet? What is appropriate for a Chinese student whose American roommate insists that Taiwan isn’t a part of China?

These kinds of conversations happen dozens of times each day at the Center. And the nature of life at the Center removes the standard human option of running away. We have to stay and work through it.

This day-to-day, often moment-to-moment work, sustained over time, yields a subtle but profound transformation of the human heart: where once there was scarcity, there is now abundance; where once there was deficit, there is now surplus; where once there was fear, there is now hope. We have been forever enriched.

I have had the great fortune of being able to choose a life of cultural discovery. My grandparents weren’t so lucky. My paternal grandmother and grandfather were each forced by a series of dire events and circumstances to move from their childhood homes in Iraq and Siberia, to Shanghai, one of the few safe havens for Jews in the 1930s. There they met, fell in love, and were married. My father was born in 1939 — not in Shanghai, but in Hong Kong, so that he could reap the benefits of British citizenship.

Growing up in Shanghai in the 1940s, my father lived through the Japanese occupation (when suddenly it wasn’t such an advantage to be British) and the Communist revolution. From his balcony, he witnessed Mao’s troops leading away KMT troops at gunpoint.

By 1950, life for foreigners in China had gotten uncomfortable, and my father’s family emigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco.

In 1972, when I was four, my family settled in Missoula, Montana, where I was to spend the rest of my childhood. We often visited San Francisco, and on trips to Chinatown my country-boy eyes, ears and nose were piqued at the sights, sounds and smells of Chinatown. I resolved to begin studying Chinese when I got to college. I majored in East Asian Studies, graduated in 1990, and shipped off to the wilds of Heilongjiang (Qiqihar, to be precise) in 1991, with Princeton-in-Asia.

If you were ever to film a how-not-to video on U.S.–China relations, you would have gained a rich harvest following me around that year. Sure, I did plenty of things right, but also in many ways I was the quintessence of the arrogant, self-satisfied, complaining American. A stereotype, of course, but one, a little bit of which, I suspect, each of us occasionally manifests signs, even after we have spent years living in China.

After a year of teaching English in Guangzhou, in 1993 I arrived at Stanford, where I met my wife-to-be, Colette Plum. We entered separate graduate programs, she in Chinese history at Stanford, me in linguistics at UC Berkeley. We spent a year in China here and there. In the summers of 1998, 1999 and 2000, we, along with our dear friend Matt Bartels, led twelve American high school students on back-roads experiential education travel through remote parts of China, with a U.S.-based company called Where There Be Dragons. This was the most intensive learning any of us had been through, and the most intensive work.

Which is the point. This takes work, and our work is never done. The human body is conditioned to fear those who are different from us. Our higher mental functions must do constant battle with our baser instincts — instincts which served us and serve us well in warning of threats to our safety, but which are of limited use here in the 21^st Century, as our increasingly interconnected planet has us working and living with more and more people who are, in the simplest of terms, “other.”

One way to look at China and the U.S. is as two fundamentally incommensurable societies, so radically different that we could never hope to see eye to eye. But if we pivot just slightly on that idea, another picture emerges: it is a picture of two societies whose differences provide an untold abundance of resources for solving the problems we humans face. When we view China and the U.S. from this perspective, we can view the “other” not as a competitor or as a threat, but as a source of knowledge and wisdom, as a counselor, an advisor, a guide, a teacher, a coach — a partner. Somebody we are with, somebody who has our back, and whose back we have.

Recently a colleague and I were having lunch here in Beijing with a Chinese alumnus of the Hopkins–Nanjing Center. He works for a leading U.S. mining safety company. After telling us about his business, he mentioned that his company works closely with a Chinese company. The person in the position opposite his is an American alumnus of the Hopkins–Nanjing Center. Not surprisingly, they work exceedingly well together. Things happen fast, and as a result China’s mines are getting safer faster.

Why all this talk of learning, and of alumni? Alumni of 100,000 Strong are the context of our being together tonight. When it comes to alumni I like to think of magic and mystery. The magic happens at the moment a participant becomes an alumna: she enters into lifelong fellowship with others who, together, constantly make and remake what it meant and what it means to have participated. Alumni represent the limitlessness of learning.

The mystery is inherent in our never knowing how or when we will be transformed by our experiences. Transformation happens again and again. Some students leave a program as practically new people, they’ve changed so much. Others may not realize until months or even years later just how profoundly their experiences have remade them. When leading the trips with Where There Be Dragons, whenever one of us trip leaders was feeling impatient with one of the students, we would remind each other that we never knew when or how that student would grow.

I have more skin in this game than I’ve let on to this point. I’ll now pick up my personal story in 2002, when Colette and I were living in Chengdu, where she was doing archival research and I was writing my dissertation. Days before we had left San Francisco for Chengdu, we had turned in a giant pile of documents to an adoption agency that we had been working with for months. In doing so we joined the ranks of families waiting to adopt a child from China.

In June of 2002 our dream came true. Some dear friends drove us down to Chongqing, where we met Mariette Xiaofei Plum Patent, and became her mom and dad. Two and a half years later, in Nanjing, we met Francesca Xiaorui Plum Patent, and became her mom and dad. Mariette and Francesca are now the fourth generation in my family to bind the U.S. and China together even more tightly.

Each of us forms just such a bond. And through those we know and whose lives we touch, we weave bond after bond after bond. Each thread — a hundred thousand strong, a million strong, a billion strong — each thread makes our present and our future that much brighter, brings us that much closer to a world of peace.

Thank you.

With this post the blog turns 100…in blog years. Or blog posts.

To observe my 100th post I’m offering a quick tour of what I consider the “greatest hits” of the blog: the five key posts that get at core issues around intercultural communication, especially regarding China.

The sentimental favorite has to be Post #1, “Cars and Cash,” which began to lay out some key U.S.–China differences from my research findings.

“High Context, Low Context” examines a fundamental communication challenge for Westerners in China.

“The Trouble with Words” takes a quick but deep dive into key linguistic issues facing anyone crossing languages and cultures.

“Making Strangers Less Strange” asks: What if “we” have more of “them” inside us than we think?

And finally, “Eye of the Beholder” reviews one of the most shocking and insightful research results I have ever come across.

See if any of your perspectives on “others” change once you’ve read these five posts. Please leave a comment so I’ll know.

I ended my last post with this quote from intercultural guru Milton Bennett:

Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide. (Milton Bennett, “Towards Ethnorelativism: A developmental model of intercultural sensitivity.” In M. Paige (Ed.) Education for the Intercultural Experience. Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1993, p. 21)

When I first read this I was taken aback: How could one of the most famous exponents of intercultural communication take such a pessimistic view of humanity? As I read on, however, I came to see that Bennett was hardly a pessimist. The essay became famous for what it contributed to the field: an inspiring vision of how human beings can move beyond our lizard brains and embrace human difference by endeavoring to see the world as others see it — not necessarily to choose “their” way as better, but to see other possibilities as legitimate alternatives to our own views. The opening words of the essay were meant merely to set the ground: to describe, starkly, a key aspect of the natural state of human affairs, so that we can know the magnitude of what our inner poet is dealing with in its efforts to create openness and understanding through the noise and tenacity of its lizard counterpart.

And it is a lot to deal with. I am speaking here less as a social scientist than as a human being whose lizard brain is always at the ready, in many areas of my life, but most pertinently in experiences with China, even today, over 20 years after my first visit.

A classic example is my completely predictable reaction to getting bumped into by another person. As an American, I am accustomed to a certain spatial cushion, and when people violate the cushion, they say “excuse me.” If they don’t, it’s rude, and I’m culturally licensed to get angry. China, though, crowded as it is, doesn’t allow for much of a cushion. People bump into each other a lot, and they rarely say “excuse me.” They take it in stride.

When I get bumped, though, every single time, without fail, the indignation follows instantly. I can’t control it. Over the years I have gained some mastery over how I respond outwardly, and how quickly I regain my calm, and the meaning I make out of the incident. But the reaction itself can’t be helped.

When people refer to “culture” this isn’t usually what they are talking about. The anthropologist Edward T. Hall, who is sometimes credited with founding the field of intercultural communication,  distinguished between “Culture” with a capital C and lower-case “culture.” Capital-C Culture refers to “the arts”: what we mean when we speak of a city’s “cultural” offerings, or say that a person is “cultured.” Lower-case culture is what we mean when we talk about psychological and behavioral patterns shared by a group of people. I am talking here about lower-case culture.

Even within this sub-category, most scholars who study culture aren’t referring to the kind of moment-to-moment piecing together of reality that I am describing here. To oversimplify: anthropologists often focus on complex rituals, or kinship relations; linguists talk about “scripts” and “frames”: highly schematic templates for human behavior and thought; sociologists amalgamate statistical regularities. Only psychologists, really, have taken seriously the notion of culture as moment-to-moment reality.

Yet even most psychologists over the years have treated culture as a sort of cognitive add-on, or as a kind of window-dressing: there is an objective world which humans all perceive the same way. Perceptions function as an “input” into some kind of cognitive processing mechanism that includes cultural influences, and the resulting judgments and actions are therefore cultural in nature.

In a recent post I gave a quick overview of a refutation of this notion by one psychologist, David Eagleman. Perception is not a “filtering” of any sort of “objective reality.” Eagelman’s point is not put in a cross-cultural context, but other psychologists working in the field of cross-cultural psychology have similarly questioned the old orthodoxy, and have found evidence that even the way we perceive the world is at least partly a function of culture. I reviewed an astonishing finding in this post.

What’s the point? We have work to do. Parts of our brain are constantly doing battle with other parts in an effort to control our actions (another brilliant insight of Eagleman’s). Some of those parts of our brain, if their orders are followed, lead us down a violent path toward a world few of us would want. Other parts, if listened to, promise a world in which we can be our best selves. Those are the stakes, and if we truly want to create a more peaceful world for ourselves and for our children and theirs, we’d best know what we’re dealing with.

We all know how fear feels. And most of us probably don’t have to think too far back to remember the last time we felt fear. Maybe the boss was acting funny that day and you felt in danger of losing your job. Or maybe you were driving, thought you knew where you were going, and suddenly found yourself lost. Whatever the cause and whatever the setting, fear involves a high degree of activity in a particular part of the human brain, called the amygdala, often referred to colloquially as the “lizard brain.” Every human has one, and while some people are more conditioned than others to have an active amygdala, every one of us owes our existence in large part to this tiny part of our brains, for it is here that our survival instinct gets the most “air time” in our brains, and, by extension, our bodies.

At the other end of the spectrum is the cerebral cortex, the site of our inner poets. Here is where all of humanity’s refined judgments and accomplishments of the imagination are mustered: our dreams, our hopes, our plans. Our tolerant “best self” is here: the part of us that sees subtle shades of complexity and wants to understand more clearly. The part of us that listens, understands, forgives.

It should come as no surprise that the survival instinct lacks subtlety. It’s easy to forget that we all got here because our distant ancestors outcompeted a lot of rivals, and that while our higher-order thinking no doubt contributed immensely to our success, it must have come in handy for us not to have to empathize with, or contemplate the complexity of, whatever just made that rustling sound in the bushes. Smartly, our lizard brains taught us to…run away! Or stay and fight. Neither of which involved a meaningful meeting of the minds or talking out of our differences.

Yet we find ourselves now early in the 21^st Century, in a world of immense complexity, coming into contact day in and day out with people who look different from us, talk different from us, dress and act and eat different from us. More and more, we live near and work with “different” people. Fleeing or fighting are still options, of course, and we often take one of these routes. Some political careers are built on actively advocating for one of these options.

But the lizard brain is not our salvation as a species. It has served an indispensible function for us, and will continue to have a vital role to play in keeping us alive in situations where it’s needed. True progress for our species depends, though, on honoring our poet.

Every last one of us has both. Who among us hasn’t had the experience, in calmer moments, perhaps with just the right music playing, or in just the right kind of light on a spring day, of feeling that anything is possible, that the world is expanse upon expanse of possibility, that there is hope for the world, and that everything might just turn out alright? And who among us hasn’t lived the precise opposite: doom, darkness, hopelessness? What we experience is largely a function of whether the lizard or the poet is running the show at any given moment.

This fundamental duality of humankind has provided fodder for philosophers, theologians, and artists of all stripes down through the ages. In the last decade of the 20^th Century, a scholar by the name of Milton Bennett brought this duality powerfully into the budding field of intercultural communication. One of his most famous essays opens with:

Intercultural sensitivity is not natural. It is not part of our primate past, nor has it characterized most of human history. Cross-cultural contact usually has been accompanied by bloodshed, oppression, or genocide.[1]

Ruminate on that, and I’ll be back next time with more.

I wanted to share an interesting thought thread that I came upon last Friday. I was in Shanghai, participating in a gathering of a new, informal body called American and International Universities in China. The event was sponsored by the Harvard Center Shanghai. Around two dozen representatives of American and International universities with a presence in China spent a day discussing plans, goals, challenges. The topic of China’s educational system was central to a few of the discussions.

One colleague related a thought he had when listening to President Hu Jintao’s speech at Tsinghua University’s 100th Anniversary celebration earlier this year. My colleague noted that he heard the word “innovation” (创新 chuàngxīn) time and again throughout the speech, but heard nothing, at this event hosted by one of China’s very top universities, about the sort of system of free inquiry that has generated the bulk of the world’s innovation.

The question of innovation has been front and center in China for years, especially as China’s strategic planning has begun to shift emphasis away from a model that is overwhelmingly dependent on low-cost, export-based manufacturing, and more toward value-added services. China wants desperately to “move up the value chain,” and one avenue is to move from “made in China” to “invented in China.”

Where, then, is China’s Steve Jobs? Could there ever be a Chinese Steve Jobs?

It’s probably worth mentioning that the world has only ever seen one Steve Jobs, so why single out China as a place lacking a Steve Jobs? But the point is well taken: there is a growing sense in China, especially in the wake of Jobs’s death, that something fundamental might be missing in the Chinese cultural milieu that would allow for the creation of someone like Steve Jobs, who can bring unthought-of, life-enhancing, and massively wealth-generating technologies to the world.

This article, in some ways, says it all. In particular, the following two bits:

…[M]any Chinese Apple fans query when a Chinese-version of Steve Jobs will emerge given China’s comparatively weak creativity in its cultural industry and electronics sector.

 

(Quoting Meng Jian, vice dean of Journalism School of Fudan University): “If China’s economic construction is to pursue common enrichment, the cultural construction aims at pursuing social consensus.”

This hits my colleague’s point right on the button: engineering social consensus is at diametric odds with cultivating a culture of innovation.

The point is made perfectly in this blog from the WSJ, which quotes a few Jobs-mourners on this very question.

Finally, two caveats. First, there is no single cause of a lack of a Chinese Steve Jobs, or of a lack of a culture of innovation generally. Second, whenever we talk about a culture “lacking” something, our skeptical ears should perk up: the entire notion of “lacking” presumes a mental framework in which one culture is being compared favorably to another. It is an inherently normative, evaluative conversation. There are time, of course, when we want to be normative; we just need to be sure that we know that’s what we’re doing.

I’m about a third of the way through a fascinating book that has a lot to teach us about why mindset mismatch between cultures is such a pervasive — and pernicious — fact of life. It’s called Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and it’s by David M. Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine. The book is a tour through the mountains of psychological evidence of how utterly detached our subjective realities are from anything approaching an “objective” reality. It could strike one as nihilistic, and it is at times quite jarring, but to me the message is extremely empowering, because it gives us a realistic lay of the land in coming to terms with the magnitude of the challenge of communicating effectively between and among any human beings, let alone people from different cultural groups.

In an earlier post I reviewed some shocking findings from the rod-and-frame test, showing that Chinese and Americans actually see the world differently. As I make my way through Eagleman’s book, those findings seem less and less shocking. Despite our intuitions to the contrary, there is not a fixed, perceivable “reality” that is “out there” for us to perceive. What we perceive as “reality” is completely constructed by our brains from the outset. Eagleman writes that “You’re not perceiving what’s out there. You’re perceiving whatever your brain tells you.” (Ch. 2)

Eagleman introduces a distinction first made in 1909 by Baltic German biologist by the (excellent) name of Jakob von Uexküll, between umwelt and umgebung. The umwelt is the part of the environment any given organism can perceive; the sum total of what is perceivable (if there is such a thing) is the umgebung (Ch. 4).

What first crossed my mind upon learning of this distinction was the contrast, also discussed elsewhere in this blog, between low-context and high-context cultures. The subtle cues of high-context cultures, such as Chinese culture, are lost on untrained low-contexters like Americans, because these cues lie outside of Americans’ umwelt. They are not perceptible to us without a great deal of learning over time, and even then are often lost on us — thus the “nervous laugh” indicating discomfort gets mistaken for a regular old, mirth-induced laugh; a promise to “look into it” — clearly a “no” to a native — is misinterpreted as an actual promise to do further research; and so on.

Just scratching the surface here. There’s sure to be more on this book in later posts. Meanwhile go get it on Amazon or iBooks.

If God is lurking everywhere in the American responses to the Rich Person question, God is nowhere to be seen in the Chinese responses. The concerns of the Chinese respondents are much less complex, and much less fraught, than the American responses. The one overarching theme of the Chinese responses is the same as the theme of their responses to the Fallen Tree question: an abiding pragmatism. And just as the Chinese speak more about the “would” of the Fallen Tree question than about the “should,” moralistic concerns are completely absent from the Chinese responses to the Rich Person question.

The standard Chinese view is best summarized by three words, uttered by one of the Chinese interviewees: “Money makes money. (钱生钱)” It’s so plainly obvious on some level that what you do with money — the quintessentially useful stuff called money — is invest it, so that you can get more of the stuff, creating the ability to solve more and more problems, and to deal with more and more of life’s nitty-gritty practical issues.

After the moralistic agonizing of the Americans, the absence of any sort of moralistic tone in the Chinese responses created is, in turns, alarming and refreshing. Alarming because my American mind is trained to think of money in moral terms. Refreshing because there is no pain in the discussions, no agonizing, no navel-gazing about what people should do versus what they actually would do.

Not only is the moralism absent. In two cases the Chinese participants actually claim that the question itself is moralistic. Here’s the first case:

C-17 Saying a person has money, how should he use his money, that give you a completely generalized sort of feeling.  Its seems that as for you…

C-16 He should have a lot of ways to use his money, and should choose a way for him…a way of using his money that he likes.  If the money was made through normal, suitable means.

C-17 If you answer this way it’s like speaking about morals or preaching…which ways of using your money are better ways.

C-16 Right.

C-17 But I can only answer how I want to use my money.

C-16 The premise is that we’re rich. [laughter] I don’t have enough money to pay rent.

C-17 Also, for this part, “How should he use his money?” should, this word, maybe I’m a little bit uncomfortable.

C-16 Awkward, right?

C-17 Right.  “Should” has a bit of a feeling of morals, or preaching.

C-16 We should let everyone choose for themselves…how they should use…not should, let everyone choose how to use his money.  We can only say if I were rich what would I do with it?

C-17 Right.

They are essentially saying: We’re on to you, self-righteous American researcher, and we aren’t going to play your game. We are not interested in your moralistic pursuits. Please leave us alone to discuss for ourselves how we might imagine our fictional selves enjoying our fictional money, unencumbered.

Another pair of Chinese respondents have this to say on the matter:

C-18 This, I think…this question is different for each person.  Your saving or spending money depends on your own world view, on the direction of your ideas about value.

C-19 I think this question should ask, “If you were rich, how should you spend your money?”

C-18 Yes.  In reality you’re just expressing your own view, right, about how to use this sum of money.

C-19 It should be asked this way.

Just as we saw in responses to the Surprise Arrest and Tax Hike questions, once again the Chinese are looking like the individualists and Americans are looking like the collectivists. And just as before, if we add some nuance to our analysis, we can make sense of this by looking at where Americans and Chinese draw their ingroup/outgroup boundaries.

For this we have an interesting bit of data: in no Chinese interview is charity mentioned without the qualification that one should take care of oneself and one’s family first. In six of the nine American interviews, though, the idea of philanthropy is offered up before the suggestion that one meet one’s own material needs first. And in a seventh interview, even though philanthropy is ultimately rejected, it is at least addressed by them, while taking care of one’s own financial needs isn’t even raised.

It once again seems that the Chinese ingroup is relatively small: oneself and one’s family. For the Americans, members of “broader society” qualify as ingroup members. That is, at least, in theory: Americans like to think of themselves as caring for everyone in society, even though in reality their actions might not match this ideal. Hence the agony and self-doubt expressed by so many of the American interviewees.

Picking up on the “God’s eye view” theme from the last post: In her seminal 1946 study of Japanese and American culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, anthropologist Ruth Benedict popularized the distinction between “shame cultures” and “guilt cultures.” To oversimplify: shame cultures, like Japan (and China, though China wasn’t her focus), regulate behavior through negative public and collective responses to undesirable deeds. The fear of being shamed is the primary disincentive to carry out certain actions. This check on behavior is external and collective.

In guilt cultures, such as the United States, behavior is internally and individually regulated through fear of judgment by some form of deity. Punishment for transgressions could come in this life or after death.

One aspect of the psychology of members of guilt cultures is that there is no freedom from internal assessments of actions and possible actions. In a shame culture, as long as a person is reasonably sure of not being caught, there can be some measure of peace of mind. In a guilt culture, no such luck: God is always watching, assessing, judging, and ultimately, we fear, punishing.

This gives tremendous energy and power to our thoughts: if God knows even our thoughts, then “bad” thoughts alone can be grounds for punishment, as in Jimmy Carter’s famous quote in his 1976 interview with Playboy magazine:

The Bible says, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” Christ said, I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery. I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times.…This is something that God recognizes, that I will do and have done, and God forgives me for it.

The former President believes he has been forgiven, but the fact that he has to say so only provides further evidence for the belief that unsavory thoughts alone can be punished.

The knowability of our thoughts by a perceived omniscient deity has a significant consequence when it comes to answering questions like the Rich Person question: it matters not only what we might and should do, but also what we might and should think about what we might and should do.

Two of the American interviewees address this at length:

E-9 A common answer to this question would be, you should give to charity, you know, but there’s the problem of, if someone goes to help somebody while if they help them, you know if someone goes to a soup kitchen or something like that to help out and serves them food, no matter what their motives are in doing so, the person gets to eat, right?

E-10 Right.

E-9 But you know then there is the idea that if you go there with the idea that you’re helping them only so that you can feel good, that’s not necessarily the best idea, versus if you go there with the intent of helping someone.

E-10 Sincerely help.

E-9 Right.  So I have a rich godfather who is highly rich and gives a lot of his money to charity, but he always tells me, he’s an absolute capitalist and he thinks I’m not exactly, I don’t know I’m not really a socialist, but we always have this discussion and he tells me that, I’m not bad, and, capitalists aren’t bad, see I give my money away.  And so, I don’t know.  I believe they should give it away, but the motives behind it…

E-10 Yeah, yeah.  I don’t know, it’s like they justify all their bad things by giving away part of something and not, I don’t know, there’s no sincerity in it.

E-9 I mean that’s not good, however…

E-10 It does help someone.

E-9 It helps someone yeah.

E-10 I don’t know.  Well like this question though, it’s not the motive for doing whatever, it’s what you should do with your money.

E-9 Yeah, but I mean, what I’m saying is, what you should do with your money is, in theory you should give it to charity…

E-10 But do it for a good reason.

E-9 But do it for a good reason, and if you don’t do it for a good reason, like I was just saying, should you do it or not? So, if the person’s motives are good, then they should definitely give them to charity.  If their motives are not good then I think maybe I don’t know, maybe you should give it to charity, maybe you should be selfish with it. I mean you’re being selfish anyways, I don’t know exactly what a person with bad intent should do with their money.

As an American I can understand and appreciate the logic here. Hypocrisy is awful. Intentions should match words, which in turn should match deeds. It makes complete sense.

On the other hand, I’m offended by the logic: at the end of the day, if someone has food in their belly, or a roof over their head, what does it matter what the intentions are of the person who provided the food or shelter?

The tension between these two logic systems is palpable in the discussion. We saw another version of this tension earlier, in the American fascination with the “should”s of giving away or not giving away money, or of moving or not moving the tree that is blocking the road. This last discussion is probably the most extreme example of how God, or whatever invisible entity we imagine to be judging us, is constantly in the background, influencing our choices, and our evaluations of our choices. This is an American obsession.

In an earlier post I gave a brief summary of Chinese and American responses to this question:

If a person is rich, what should he/she do with his/her money?

How would you respond to this question? If yours is typical of any of the American responses, then:

1. You probably have some fairly clear ideas about how this rich person should use his or her money.
2. These ideas have something to do with the public good: donating to good causes, setting up foundations, investing in technologies to better the world.
3. Despite the clarity of your preferences, you feel uneasy stating them too strongly, for fear that, were you the rich person, you’re not sure you’d do what that real you is saying the hypothetical rich you should do. Nobody likes a hypocrite.

The following, rather long, excerpt contains a number of gems:

E-13 Okay, this is “should” and not “would,” so…I think the person should give a large chunk of his money to some kind of charity. Not just one charity, but different charities, ’cause I think there’s a lot of people who are living in poverty, not just in the U.S. There’s a lot of people in third-world countries who don’t get anything, you know.  And, I think, just out of philanthropy, you know?

E-14 Yeah.  I don’t necessarily agree with this, but a lot of rich people believe that once they’ve made their money it’s theirs and they have no obligation to give it to anybody.

E-13 But this is should…

E-14 Should.

E-13 Not would.

E-14 Yes.

E-13 If we were talking would, people would not do that.

E-14 But do you think that?  Do you think that if they’ve earned their money, they shouldn’t…

E-13 No no, I’m not saying they should give all their money away.  I think what you earn is, yeah, you earned it, right?  But then you should give back to the society.  And you should give to people who don’t have much because they’re not as fortunate as you.  They don’t have those capabilities.  They’re not in the same situation as you.  So I think people should give back to the society.

E-14 I agree.

E-13 Like do something, like make a foundation, or a charity.

E-14 Just put it where it’s needed.

E-13 Yeah.  A lot of people do say, yeah, I earned the money, so I should keep it, but really what are you gonna do with all that money?  You’re just gonna spend it on yourself. That’s so selfish.  But then again if I were in that position I don’t know what I’d do.

E-14 Yeah.

E-13 It’d be…it’s easy to say…

E-14 Yeah, see, everybody says, this person should give it to charity, they should donate it, but that’s not what people do.

I don’t know if I ever had an actual conversation with another American that went like this, but I’m certain I had internal dialogs that went like this. In fact, every time I’ve enjoyed some windfall, however small, part of me is tortured by the contrast between what I know I “should” do and what I actually end up doing. Even when I can coax some generosity out of myself, it’s often not really generosity, coming as it does from a sense of scarcity, when what I “should” have is gratitude for the great abundance in my life, for God’s grace in even allowing me to live, and on top of that have shelter, food, water, and clothes.

American’s often talk of “giving back to society.” In order to give back, I must have been given something. What have I been given, and by whom? The “what” includes the standard list of things Americans are “supposed” to feel grateful for having. In addition to the basic material comforts, we have freedom of many kinds (to choose our leaders, to pursue our passions, to choose our spouses and where we live) and opportunity (to advance socially and economically, to travel the world, and so on). And probably a lot of other things, depending on whom you ask. None of these are things any of us has earned. And yet we have them.

Which leads us to the “who” question: Who exactly gave us all these things for which we are grateful? We often point to the Founding Fathers, and to all those who have given of themselves to protect what the Founding Fathers founded, including and especially all the veterans of America’s wars. How many times have we heard, “If you love your freedom, thank a vet”?

The story doesn’t end there, though. Another entity is at play here. Who? God. Which brings us back to a place we visited briefly when discussing our imaginary friend Tom’s decision whether or not to join the rock band: civil religion. Who, after all, inspired the Founding Fathers, and so many soldiers? And while many cringed when George W. Bush said it in 2003, just as the war in Iraq was getting underway, it can’t be denied that a deeply American belief system is behind his statement that “Freedom is not America’s gift to the world. It’s God’s gift to humanity.”

God is everywhere in the American mindset, running the show throughout American society and in the thought patterns of America’s people — even, I suspect, atheists. When I say that, I need to point out that I am making a purely ethnographic statement, not a theological one: whether you believe in God or not, you’ve got an uphill battle to fight if you want to claim that something or someone like God isn’t imagined to be operating behind the scenes when we talk about rock-band Tom being “given” his talents, or when we state our upset at not “giving back to society” enough. The “God’s-eye view” dominates the American mindset.