Monday, September 12, 2011
Kansas football games are likely one of the largest displays of blue-clothed and blue-chested 20-somethings yelling about athletes and mythical animals and waving arms together en masse that you can find.
Every fall semester, for several non-consecutive weeks, masses of both the young and old gather together at an outdoor stadium (no matter the weather) in hopes of witnessing a victory. Relatively loud instrumental music fills the stadium.
Not only has our love of entertaining ourselves through venues like athletic competition and other cultural practices (parties, movies, dinners, etc.) wavered little, but we’ve also gone the extra mile to make sure we will be entertained regardless of the outcome. “Win or lose, we’ll still booze,” as the Joe College adage goes.
What does this say about our society? We aren’t the only culture in the world that will consistently blow money on such entertainment. A different kind of football (soccer to us) is the most popular sport in the world. Ask Europeans if they’ll still booze when they lose and I bet you’d get a similar answer to our own.
For thousands of years, cultures have taken the time to entertain themselves. A surplus of entertainment (and art as well) implies a surplus in wealth and population. If we had half the resources and half the people, our culture would look and operate a lot differently.
But I wonder just how much of an effort it would take for cultural norms like these to change. Clearly, over time and space, a universal need for comfort, fun and relaxation with like-minded people has translated into different ways of passing by the time. I’m not arguing for some sort of change, but it would be valuable to remember the roles we play in perpetuating these norms. We may believe that we are fiercely free-minded, independent individuals, but we are also the product of a culture’s ways and means without even thinking consciously about it.
Our generic standards of beauty are another example of this; think of how hard it is to project your own standards onto the societal norm. Though what was attractive 10 years ago isn’t necessarily the same as today, it’s still unremarkably similar.
Ultimately, the power to change these standards rests in the hands of changing attitudes and customs over a period of time. Realizing how we have a learned ignorance to other cultural practices and how translatable they are over cultural boundaries is invaluable, but yet doesn’t serve to change much of the norm in the short term.
The bottom line is that human nature is extremely consistent. I am by no means a behavioral scientist or anything of the sort, but it is clear in my eyes that what makes our current culture distinct from any other is not that we think and reason differently; it is how we employ that very thinking into our own lives that truly makes us original.
— Salsbury is a senior in English, History of Art, and Global & International Studies from Chapman. Follow him on Twitter @brettermichael
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