The Complexity Of Culture

Unless a society is truly unified on a philosophical level, which has rarely happened in the historical record and is highly unlikely in contemporary times, it is a cauldron of conflicting ideas and motivations.  There is no contradiction in saying that certain cultures are dominated by blatantly exclusive philosophies because there might be large but separate groups of people who vocally cling to one or the other.  In a sense, a society can be collectivist and individualistic, complementarian and egalitarian, or relativistic and objectivist.  This is not because these ideas can both simultaneously true, but because different aspects of a culture can represent distinct ideologies.

It is for this reason that so many dimensions of Western culture, to give an example of a particularly prominent society, remain inconsistent with each other despite contemporary social shifts.  Each pair of ideological opposites can be easily found in America and elsewhere in the Western world if one simply looks for them without having a mistaken understanding of what the ideas mean and do not mean.  On one level, this should hardly be surprising: people generally do not share the same worldviews beyond a handful of broad beliefs.  However, the true nuance of a culture's "worldview" seems to be largely ignored or unnoticed.

Every community that is not completely uniform in the worldviews of its members is a storm of competing ideas, only some of which are truly backed by reason to begin with.  It is thus misleading to ever describe a broad society like the West as distinctly disfavoring certain ideologies that may initially seem incompatible with its superficial norms.  A culture can be accurately described in many different ways even when those descriptions might seem to clash at first.  Indeed, even if those ideas do clash, inconsistency is common enough that it is frequently found in most communities!

Rationalistic sociology acknowledges the nuance of culture and the disparities between one deep part of the culture and another, between perceptions of culture and the culture itself, and between culturally popular ideas and truth.  Without rationalism, the full nature of societal complexities will elude the people impacted by the very nuances they remain ignorant of.  They will unknowingly keep themselves in a state of ideological vulnerability to what would otherwise be recognized as the fallacies and largely unspoken truths of the communities around them.  They will perhaps even contribute to the idiotic inconsistencies of their society thanks to inconsistencies of their own they have failed to identify.

Anyone who wants to affect a culture has a far better chance of succeeding merely by understanding the complexity of culture and the often contradictory beliefs and actions of various individuals that partake of their culture.  There is not always one specific set of consistent or true ideas that marks a given society, just as there is not always and is not often a set of consistent truths that individuals look to for something other than personal gain.  Since humans can be complex in ways that show their individual capacity for irrationality and societies provide more opportunities for open irrationality, it should not surprise a rational person to realize just how deeply the societies they live in can be diseased by stupidity.