What’s your culture?

The article “Culture is Ordinary” by Raymond Williams resonated with me, confused me, and made me think about a lot of things that I had not yet considered. I’ll start where he started – with the title and idea that “Culture is ordinary.” It is made up of the world around us, a part of our every day life. More than that, every one of us are a part of our culture.

I especially appreciated his insistence on the combination of culture as something that is both whole, as a society, and individual, taken in and experienced through each of our own life lenses. I think that often, when we think of something as being “cultural,” we think of it as being something widespread throughout a community. To an extent, this may be true, but it’s important to remember what personal experience brings to the situation. Especially in these days with globalization and such widespread access to information from all over the world, individual interpretations of culture could vary wildly within a given society. Thinking about it myself, I would be hard-pressed to describe ‘my culture’ in a way that would match perfectly with the description of others who grew up or currently live in the same society as I do. It is for this reason that I pose this question to the class: what do you consider to be your culture?

I know a sort of sub-culture of my culture in these days is what is know as “cancel culture,” and Williams’ article made me thick about this as well. I have various personal opinions about the idea that masses of people can ‘cancel’ somebody (especially ‘influencers’) simply for doing or saying the wrong thing, but I like the way that Williams puts it when he mentions the “cheapjack” who tries to influence the masses. He states that “we are not to be influenced by his argot, we can simply refuse to learn it.” To me, this goes along similar lines as the old cliché saying that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. If somebody makes a mistake, they don’t need to be attacked, berated, and ‘cancelled’. We (as the masses) could simply acknowledge that the mistake was a mistake and we aren’t in favour of it, and then move on.

Life, and culture, cannot be prescribed as Williams mentions later in his article. There is not one correct way of doing it, or any clear defined path. We should all just be trying to try our best, and appreciating the differences that arise within that. It’s human nature (which I suppose could be considered as human culture?).