practical inquiry regarding meaning » value » culture / valued by us / our 'is'
The goal here is to hitch a ride on a life-trajectory that's larger than one's own (as an individual). We do this by practicing cultural customs—not mindlessly, of course. If we don't take ownership of our practices but simply perform them, we haven't hitched a ride; we're lagging behind, merely following the procession that could move on without us at any moment. The key is to find a transpersonal identity in the heritage we choose to appropriate and repeat in our own way.
The task here is not to promote tribalism. The task here is not to identify with one group so strongly that it cuts off our access to the common humanity shared by all groups, all cultures. Rather, the task is to add one's color to the mosaic tapestry of humanity and ideally see how one's own color plays a part in the overall mosaic. It's in this way that we'll learn to appreciate those of other cultures.
We may then together begin to ask the question of a planetary culture. This would not be a monoculture, where cultural differences are subsumed and effectively annulled under a dominant set of customs. This can no more occur than the climate or geology of the earth can become uniform. Yet all those vastly different weather patterns and geological formations occupy a single planet. The unity is relational. The unity subsists in the dynamic relations between different relata.
