It's a wonder...

"It all begins with the sea..."

WONDER’s a word that’s long carried with it strong implications of openness to joy. It’s a word that has been traced back to the origins of our English language. It isn’t a new emotion. And it’s typically our first response to the giddy depths of mystery.

Wonder has been credited with energising human curiosity, inspiring art and the origins of both religion and science. It penetrates deeply, extending the senses and animating the intellect.

Mystery energises us. Mystery gives us the appetite to strive to understand, first of all ourselves, and then in order to become what we should. Mystery makes it clear that we’re all humanity together, and that we inhabit a shared predicament. It’s one that makes us burn with awe and curiosity, so it’s good for us to talk with each other. But is also teaches us that cleverness is an illusion: it has too few dimensions to approach truth.

Mystery is neither good nor evil; it is enfolded into one human life no more or less than any other. Human lives can in turn only enfold themselves into the mystery, one at a time. The mystery is far more to be trusted than our deepest insight or anxiety. After all, as most other species seem to be aware, it’s where we are and how we all got to be here. So who are we to be picky?

The greatest gift mystery gives us is wonder… wonder’s essential to being human.

BUT, a little while ago, when I searched the word “mystery” in the “books” category at amazon.ca, the title that popped up at the top of the list was a work called: The Mystery Method: The Foolproof Way to Get Any Woman You Want Into Bed. So, expecting an tale of rejection and disappointment, I read the first “reader review”… but, no. It was glowing. And I soon had to look up “PUA” in Wikipedia. I discovered it means “pick up artist” and that there’s a “PUA” genre of “literature”.

Putting to one side the images this suggested of sullen, drooling men with low foreheads, their long, over-sized libidos slithering along behind them, I returned to amazon.ca where I discovered that, for $18.96, I could buy another favourably reviewed book called God is a Woman: Dating Disasters. Here, in a single non sequitur, was a title that simultaneously trivialised concepts of “god”, “woman”, “dating” and “disaster”. Breathing deeply, the moron images came right back.

It really gets wearisome, beating a path through the morass of mindlessness that the “rise of civilisation” has managed to generate.

We of the West claim to have spent thousands of years in the pursuit of knowledge, human dignity, truth and the “just” society… we have aimed for the stars, walked on the Moon and, inexplicably, wallow around in neurosis, vacuity, trashy dependencies, violence, despond, timidity and credulity, and the inane trivia that endlessly belches from the bowels of a global entertainment industry.

A human consciousness needs real food to flourish. It starves on trivialities and simulations. A healthy human consciousness sings with birds and breezes, weeps with a suffering friend, is grateful for goodness, needs and gives love, is distracted by beauty, seeks and values friendship, enjoys laughter, esteems intellect, is endlessly curious; it loves more readily than it hates, opposes injustice and is from time to time fired with inexplicable joy.  But it has to be fed. It can’t thrive in stasis or find peace in one place: it has to journey.

A starting point is immediately at hand: beauty.

Although “beauty”, too, is a word that’s been savagely trivialised, beauty itself is inviolate. Beauty is an experience of the BE-ing of goodness. It attracts. It inspires. And it redeems words like “mystery” and “wonder” because beauty lies at their core.

Beauty, it is commonly said, lies in the eye of the beholder. That isn’t true. Beauty is primal. But beauty undoubtedly exists, long before it is beheld.

Among the varieties of stone most favored by sculptors in marble for more than two and a half millennia — since the time of the Athenian cultural efflorescence — has been the luminously white marble of Naxos, a small island in the Cyclades in the Aegean Sea.

Marble quarry on the Aegean island
of Naxos.
(The black seams to the right are emery.)

Its fine grain and capacity to take a lustrous, polished finish made it a prized material for temples and statues of gods. Naxian marble has a capacity to glow as though it is on the point of being animated by an inner energy. Glistening in the brilliant Mediterranean sunshine of 2600 years ago, the freshly erected, 25-foot high statue in Naxian marble of Apollo in Delos must have been every bit as breath-taking as its creators intended.

It all begins with the sea: like time, its long, regular oceanic risings and valleyings, its sharper, breaking pitching and heaving, its rush to shores and hissing retreats, and beneath the sinewy flow of currents, a dark, seeming stillness. And beneath even that, there continue the achingly slow journeyings of the earth’s mantle itself… sliding and folding under to soften and grow molten or, prised upwards, rising and hardening so that the seas toss their wrack against new shores whilst patiently gnawing away at the old.

It all begins with the sea, like the surface-parting exhalations of whales that loom for air from their ringing depths, the majestic passage of sharks, the otherworldliness of depths where colour is washed away and countless creatures live lives that shake off everything we know from our circumscribed lives on earth to inhabit a three-dimensional freedom that surpasses even that of the globe-circling albatross; the heaving, changing otherness of it, the smell of it, the taste of it, the ever-presence of it, the plunge and crackle of surf, and the lurch of a surfboard catching the wave; the yawing roll of the deep ocean swell, lucent-black under a keel, and the trailing wake that slowly vanishes; oyster-clad rocks and spray-drenched mussel beds, tresses of kelp on the rocks, the thud and thrust of a filling sail and a ship’s churning wallow through the waves, that ship-smell of tar and cordage and iodine, the glowing trails of fish through phosphorescent subtropical seas at night while overhead the stars reflect on the open water where swells rise and fall as they did for millions of human lifetimes before the first human appeared, eons of motion, never the same, never different.

The loneliness of the sea’s constant, animated companionship, its power to console or destroy… this it where it all begins. Even the marble began here because, for at least 500 million years, small one-celled creatures called Foraminifera have teemed in the seas. We need microscopes to see them, but they take up calcium salts and carbon dioxide from the water and transform them into tiny shells for themselves. Their shapes are countless and striking in their life-formed beauty.

Over the millennia, these tiny creatures have lived and died, and their tiny shells rained slowly to the ocean floor to form deep beds of nearly pure sediment. The gathering weight compressed the small shells into limestone.

In some parts of the world, beds of limestone rock were lifted upwards by the planet’s slow re-adjustments. Water, slightly acidic from decaying plants and deepening soil, seeped into crevices and very gradually mined out dripping tunnels of underground watercourses and, as each small droplet of minerals-laden water evaporated, it left a trace of calcium carbonate behind. The residues turned underground caverns into pillared, chandeliered, glittering wonderlands that can be seen by human eyes only when people make their way into these unlikeliest of places — squeezing through tiny passages, scaling sheer, underground rock faces, swimming through dark pools and crawling through fine, clinging mud — then light lights and look about… and wonder. It is still possible to be the first person ever to stand in such a place and to reel with the revelation of it all.

In other parts of the world, the deep sheets of limestone were carried far into the Earth’s mantle: to depths where the core’s intense heat melts rock. Molten, the limestone was lifted again, and as it cooled, crystals formed. In a few places, where the limestone was sufficiently pure and the crystals that formed in the cooling were small, the rising layers contained lodes of fine-grained, white marble.

The neighbouring islands of Naxos and Paros rose from the sea endowed with such a stone. And, eventually, human beings stumbled upon this remarkable rock and, in their desire to honour the gods they’d moulded from the mystery, found a purpose for it that was appropriate to its worth. It is another wonder, an afterthought of nature, that placed beside the shimmering white marble are black seams of emery: the abrasive rock that is perfect substance with which to work the sculpted surface of marble to that heart-stopping polish.

My point in all of this is that beauty cannot be confined to this place or that. It permeates our world and is discernible everywhere and its discernment is a conscious act that ignites feelings of hope and “rightness”, meaning and gratitude: a “fit” with goodness.

There’s something elemental and universal in its character. The beauty of a musical note has been a part of the Earth’s acoustic capacity since the Earth was formed. The beauty we experience in various configurations of light, of sound, or form may be more of less apparent in different ways to each of us but it is there for us all. Nor does beauty ever seem to be a sufficient end in itself: it propels consciousness forward. It nags at its every beholder to take the next step, to continue the journey.

When and where did our sense of beauty get marginalised? Why? How did the idea of “beauty” get reduced to a broad-spectrum, unnecessary buzz-word? What makes us so often the arbiters and trivialisers of beauty rather than its discoverers and celebrators?

Real beauty is everywhere. Every insect I’ve ever seen, every creature I’ve seen, has been a masterpiece of dynamic design, a fusion of form and function that fascinates the mind as well as inspiring the spirit … an aesthetic marvel. Scientists estimate there are close to 10 million different species of insect. They pollinate our fruit trees and flowers, they give us silk, they give us honey, they are food for many people … and most are benign: unsung contributors to our wellbeing. And, moreover, creatures like this have been around for 400 million years, compared with our 750,000 or so.

We have a few blueberry bushes that produce delicious, health-promoting fruit. Blueberries are the sort of thing we tend to talk about “by the pound” — and there's nothing like commodification to rip the meaning from things.

But look at the complexity of one single blueberry: the seed-bearing pale flesh that tastes so different from the astringent skin. But two flavours complement each other beautifully and uniquely. And they’re not really very “blue” at all. Each berry is a gifted thing to pop into your mouth, but it’s also beautiful in its form.

So what gives us the capacity to be transported by beautiful flavours?

And sounds …

And colours …

And smells…

And textures …

And sensations …

And what does it mean? We seem to have evolved with a capacity to apprehend an infinite array of beauty, and to grow our wisdom in its “soil”.

And, primed with beauty, consciousness itself can hope to become beautiful.

Morality? ...ummm...

ONCE upon a time, the word “moral” simply meant acting in “customary” ways, as opposed to ways that were “just” (which meant ‘lawful”)… or “legal” (which meant “laid down”: compelled or prescribed by the ruler).

The terms drew contrasts between what everybody does, what’s okay to do and what the state insists that you to do. In terms a medieval peasant could understand, these contrasts told you how to keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble.

“Morality” particularly involved community consensus; in a community where there was no consensus, there could really be no “morality”: merely choices between conflict or mutual toleration. And, for centuries, tolerance was not an option… and we still wage wars for want of it.

Historically, consensus has usually been enforced by the ruthless and the powerful. They were the architects and enforcers of moral codes: codes that justified heresy trials, the “divine right” of kings and privileges of class, military conscription, gibbets, firing squads, dungeons, exiles and appropriations, harassments and marginalisation. Husbands owned their wives… it was in keeping with the moral order. Masters could flog their slaves… it was in keeping with the moral order.

In our own culture, in the shamefully recent past, moral codes based on “consensus” have favoured slavery and abusive labour practices, racism, sexism, homophobia, militarism, imperialism, witch burnings and the persecution, even genocide and the murder, of various “undesirables” …in Canada and other former colonial regions, for example, it drove energetic programmes of ethnocide against native peoples. We look back and are appalled, but are tempted to complacency about our “new, improved”, more “liberal” moral principals despite the presence of more injustice-inflicted misery in the world that we dare to imagine. Consensus doesn’t guarantee great ways to live. Morals can suck.

There are biologists who locate the origins of altruistic behaviour and, by implication, the antecedents of morality, in the evolutionary narrative by demonstrating that other species are not slaves to immediate, apparent self-interest.

There’s something a bit anthropomorphic in this view, especially when it’s taken out of the context of the wide ranging interdependencies that characterise all forms of life — a truth that’s often under-recognised. It’s at least “species-ist”: the idea that somehow we humans have, by virtue of our genes, regularised monkey survival tactics into the higher accomplishment of formalised ethical systems. In purely behavioural terms there are fascinating and informative similarities, but the contexts are too different for direct parallels to hold. Social behaviour among members of various species is not uncommon and, in each, it has its own parameters.

As Karl von Frisch showed us, honeybees communicate symbolically, co-operate compulsively and even act self-sacrificially. If we cast what we know of them in human terms, they look the very models of consensus morality and altruism. But there is no evidence that their communications are debates about the ethics of their situation. As a more loosely socialised species with divergent and sometimes contradictory needs for different co-operative strategies, we should not be amazed that the forms of co-operation we practise are more varied and, from the perspective of a bee, would look shamefully haphazard… more like monkeys, responding to “unfairness” with sulks or aggression. In fact, of course, we all do our own thing, and “altruism” is not necessarily indicative of nobility of spirit. It is as much an indication of our readiness to add value to a collective survival strategy by talking it up… medals to soldiers comes to mind. It helps us to prime others to act in similar ways on our behalf.

If, as some say, morality’s source is necessarily religious, one might expect the American Christian right to be calling for the forgiveness of terrorists, clamouring to restrain us from judging others, and urging greater outpourings of largesse as international aid. It would disdain war and militarism. Rather, I suspect the strength of movements like these derives from unsophisticated desires to draw clearer boundaries between “right” and “wrong”, “us” and “them”, “good” and “evil”… a cry for consensus with all of its simplicities… hunger for set of values that are perceived to be empowering.

The idea that anyone is privy to a universal or superior, god-gifted morality is naïve: it really shouldn’t takes the Ten Commandments to persuade us that there’s no good to be had from go around killing people, stealing from them, slandering them, seducing their partners and coveting their asses, slaves, oxen and houses. That was divine advice to a rough bunch of brutalised, wandering troublemakers who seem to have been remarkably reticent when it came to bonhomie. And, sure, some of that advice works for us because we’re people too, and not always that bright either.

Waving these insights about as having special significance on the grounds that god said so, masks some very selective thinking about god’s instructions as they’re spelled out on nearby pages of the Old Testament. It’s bad, god said, to vex strangers or curse deaf people, and you mustn’t gossip. A lot of those who say they take god’s word at face value seem to have got slack with the burnt offerings, “marring the corners” of men’ beards, having the local priest check out skin blemishes and running sores, or leaving a part of the harvest lying about for the poor to glean. God “said” you’re not supposed to wear wool and linen together, and you’re supposed to put fringes on your clothes. Then there are matters like having insubordinate sons stoned to death. Nowadays, the best we seem able to do in the West is try to get the car keys off them. There’s morality on the skids for you.

At some level, asserting the universality of even the best-intended moral principle is, by virtue of that claim, an expression of intolerance that’s bound to lead to conflict in a pluralistic community that has no consensus. And pluralism pretty much characterises modern societies… pluralism, and its lack of consensus. So, for peaceability’s sake, tolerance tends to be preached even where it’s not necessarily practised but that, undoubtedly, is better than a forced consensus.

I’ve often heard professions of attachment to the “Golden Rule” — treat others as you’d want them to treat you — as a foundation for possible consensus. It’s rather speciously claimed that the “Golden Rule” synchronises, harmonises and summarises the ethical teachings of all the great religions. But, as well as failing to understand what religions are about, this little rule of thumb assumes that everyone wants to be treated similarly… and that’s simply not the case, nor is it the case that many proselytisers of the “Golden Rule” spend vast amounts of their time in detailed studies of human social, cultural and political diversity to find out how others would like to be treated; cross-culturally it has been found that even evaluations of “fairness” vary.

The communications revolution (particularly if we date it from the launching of the printing press) has been responsible for a still-limited and widely resisted but naggingly persistent and growing awareness of global diversity. For many, this carries with it with a fear of moral dissolution. What it has in fact done is that it’s stretched illusions of intimacy beyond the reasonable boundaries of consensus, leaving us with much stronger perceptions of morality as a personal responsibility.

Instead of proclaiming consensus, we’re inclined to declare an attitude of broad relativism — “everyone has a right to his or her own opinion” (which we then studiously try to ignore) — whilst reserving for ourselves a place of personally satisfying of moral superiority. Without consensus to affirm us, we’re inclined to draw affirmation from the apparent chaos around us. And that too easily becomes the smugness of the “moral high ground”, every bit as dangerous in its own way as the clamour for consensus.

The hope, as I see it, lies in a fostering the emergence of a kind of social, philosophical and moral environmentalism that accepts the rootedness of humanity in biology but its beauty and worth in expressions of diversity and creativity: it is “human” to seek and establish harmonies because harmonies are sustaining; it is human to develop cultures that feed hearts, minds and spirits as well as bellies; it is human to express insights, excitements, dismays and anxieties in language and in art; it is human to wonder, to laugh and to weep. It is human to produce an array of knowledge systems. It is not necessary to uphold any one way, any one particular path of awareness, as the only possible way. In fact, it is almost certainly impossible to sustain one single way of being human. Humanity is far greater than any one person’s or culture’s repertoire of thoughts, meanings, intentions or actions.

Exploring an ethos centred on harmonies could certainly take us into new dimensions of sustainability, beyond naked competition or coerced centralisation. We’d need to find and practice a morality that recognises preconceptions as misconceptions, and is expressed in efforts to contain enmities and conflicts in ways that cushion and check their capacities to inflect fear, devastation and violence on bystanders.

Somehow, we need to find security and peace of mind in knowing that there is enough to go around if we set our hearts on it; if we’re willing to curb waste, find ceilings to greed and surrender to compassion, we could do it. There’s room on the planet for us all to discover who we are and find ways of becoming fully ourselves. There is enough love in the world for everyone to be cherished. Humanity is enormously varied, brimming with far greater treasuries of insight and expression than any of us can hope to glimpse, even in the most experiences-rich lifetime. That we do not devote ourselves to appreciating so much as a glimmer of this wealth is our own failing. That we too readily allow it to be suppressed, broken or obliterated is far worse than failure: in its vandalising of human hope it’s on a par with handing over an insubordinate son for stoning.

All of this is, of course, expecting a lot. But there are signs that it’s already on the way. There are places of growing dialog. There are movements, minority movements to be sure, to protect minority cultures, languages and livelihoods; to press for peace; to relieve poverty; to stop torture and capital punishment; to control disease; to feed and clothe the destitute; to provide clean water where water is absent or contaminated; to protect the environment; to live more simply; to prevent extinctions; to free and intervene on behalf of political prisoners; to combat racism, homophobia, sexism and ageism; to promote freedoms and discourage unfettered consumption; to widen the distribution of life-saving vaccines. There are dialogues between East and West, between the great faiths, between science and art and religion. More and more, academic work has become interdisciplinary; experiences of diversity are, for many, closer to hand. There are thousands upon thousands of small group initiatives and, together, they are heading towards a sort of consensus that could usher in a morality worthy of humanity, one capable of supporting humanity’s survival. It could happen… it really could.

I believe it will.

The way we are...

IT was a peculiar feeling. Once I learned that a nod means “no”, and a shake of the head means “yes”, trying to carry on a conversation in Bulgaria — even with English speakers — became a bad attack of mental stumbling.

To run into reversed understandings of gestures I’d grown up with made me feel far more awkward than my confusions with the Cyrillic script on signposts or my efforts to intelligibly pronounce the few words I’d tried to learn.

 Someone would comment on, say, the splendid weather. I’d clench my neck muscles to suppress any reaction until I’d thought the gesture thing through. By the time I had a warm, agreement-emphasising shake of the head ready to go, it would be too late. I found it difficult to pair a happy face with a shaking of my head, or a “no way” face with a vigorous nod. I must have looked as socially engaged as a traumatised turtle.Things like this are difficult for us.


So the eye contact we unthinkingly make as a show of recognition and interest in our Anglo-European way is offensive to some people, not least to those of most native North American and Pacific cultures. Such things are difficult to remember on the spot and in the flow of conversation, but they can turn the words we utter upside down in the hearing of the other person.

We’re each born into a culture, even more decisively than into a family. For better or for worse, whatever we have by way of a “family” is also embedded into the culture… even the notion of “family” is defined by the culture.

Culture began for us as we learned to speak our “native language” and began to respond to circumstances around us. Culture was the ghostly, ever-present interface between our startled newborn souls and all of the uncertainties that stretched beyond us. As our patterns-seeking infant minds found order in the regularities, imagery, consequences, emotions, harmonies and disharmonies around us, our culture took root. It swaddled us into the highly nuanced order that was being asserted by all those who inhabited our interactions, and each of us became one of them.

Our values, absorbed in infancy, steer us and provide filters through which we interpret our ongoing experience. We fall back on them out of habit and when we’re confused, usually unconsciously. To speak a language is to express culture, to know what and how to eat and how to deal with our bodily functions are expressions of culture; to interact with another human being or to claim privacy, these are expressions of culture. Our culture is the social air we breathe. Without it, we’d be alone, we’d know nothing, and we’d have nothing to say.

Culture animates and sustains us; it invigorates and informs our experience of life and sets our trajectory into the future with a precision few other influences achieve. It is necessary to us.

Culture is our social universe. It primes us to accept sets of  “certainties”, “truths” and basic premises. If our “hard drive” is physiology, culture is the “operating system and software”. Experience is the “data”. And, by the time we start thinking about tinkering with the software, it has already shaped us: the way we think, the things we tend to think about and the way we see and understand ourselves.

Anthropology — the academic study of cultures — began as a search for universals of human social behaviour. Pervaded by evolutionary thinking, it looked towards a fallacious hierarchical model that, had it been proven, would have vindicated the “rise” of (our) rational “civilisation”. It was a very polite, scholarly form of white supremacism.

It proved to be one of the unluckier disciplines and, of course, anthropology was itself the creation of culturally-formed curiosity. But something anthropologists did find was a thrilling variety of ways to approach and understand the complexities of human existence and survival. At that point, anthropology seemed to lose confidence, faced as it was with the impossibility of collapsing the wisdom of entire cultures into succinct functionalist summaries and nitpicking theoretical critiques for academic journals. All cultures are too complicated, internally co-ordinated, responsive and ductile for that.

It isn’t simple. Within a culture, there are roles and subcultures that produce displays of diversity, conflict and conformity… but even the conflict is recognised and addressed in terms the culture has established. To get what this really means, we can only reflect on cultures in which, for example, it has never seemed necessary to measure time so much as seasons, count above three or four, own land, create “money” or have a public transit system. Or we might try to understand highly complex and nuanced cultures in which people routinely consult long-dead ancestors, take dreams seriously or start explaining their extensive and effective pharmacopoeia in terms of plant songs.

It goes without saying that our first impulse will be to rate other cultures unfavourably in comparisons with our own: we all like to use our own toothbrushes. We assume our lives are enviable to those who aren’t part of them, and that what pleases us should please everyone. We consider ourselves rational, reasonable, objective, successful, clever, effective and moral… in a word, “right”. But these are all culturally established values, defined and given their worth by the culture that gave us the stuff of our consciousness.

It’s only when we start drawing up a hard-headed list of the shortcomings we see in our “civilisation” that we start seeing that other cultures might have some helpful insights to offer us, should we take the time and trouble to pay attention.

“True” cultures sustain a social order and sensations of meaning and significance — and we still have access to these — but what we know as Westernisation is something different. A fluid conflation of individualism, materialism, technocracy, capitalism, opportunism, pragmatism and militarism, it has some crucial moral, aesthetic, emotional and philosophical blindspots. Its ethos is to attempt whatever society will let it get away with (which is at once liberating and predatory), and turn to advantage anything that’s not screwed down. It is not a culture so much as an engine of cultural destabilisation and change. It’s what Margaret Thatcher meant when she declared “there’s no such thing as society.”

“Progress” — and what has been called “postmodernism” — has, for example, seen Westernised “celebrity” supplant cultural “heroism” as a desideratum, and Westernised “image” supplant cultural “content”… and so on. “Opinion” replaces “conclusion”, “technique” replaces “method”, “popularity” replaces “virtue”, “entertainment” replaces “art”, “success” replaces “respect”; “information” replaces “wisdom”… the fast, the dirtily direct, the easy, the immediate — feeling good rather that doing good — moves very much to the fore. A generation or two ago in the West, all of this was scarcely foreseeable and, in many ways, “culture” is finding itself stretched to screaming point as dynamic Westernisation tries to tow “society” along… like a speedboat burying its stern as it high-throttles to haul a barge. Between the two, there may be plenty of options but the choices are not easily made.

So it does seem to hold some lessons for us, this business of cultural critique. But it’s difficult to see one’s own culture with a whole lot of clarity. How does a goldfish see its bowl? What does it know of things beyond? That is where we are: bumping at our bowl, like goldfish, not to break the glass and plunge into some different cultural universe but to give clearer definition to our own.

We need to reach the horizon and look beyond. It may be disorienting at first but it is fundamentally liberating to encounter in other cultures new, clearer insights into the world that’s closest to us.

The horizon’s a tricky place to be. To look beyond it, we need a different set of eyes: eyes more forgiving, almost forgetful. We need to remember that early reactions are bound to be misleading. All cultures have a “dark” side and a benign side. Stressed, they generally show the snarl of their dark side; unstressed and feeling successful, goodness is more likely to shine forth.

Migration is such a feature of modern life that it’s not overly hard to start meeting people who are from, and familiar with, other cultures. In North America there are ethnic festivals, pow-wows and other gatherings that can orient strangers to an unfamiliar culture. In Europe, whole cultures lie cheek to jowl with each other. We can learn from indigenous cultures and new immigrants… and there are language classes and books that can help a stranger prepare for a visit. And purposeful travel is the best option.

Developing a particular interest that’s relevant to a culture, a genuine curiosity, is bound to open all sorts of doors. Learning a little of the language, seeking to understand its religion, its art, its history and philosophy, tasting the food, hearing the music, observing the etiquette, respecting the protocols, discovering its deeper values and, most of all, entering into a genuine interest in the adventure of it all, can be a liberating, friends-making and thoroughly enlarging experience.

Learning to understand another culture is an exercise in uncritical watching and sympathetic seeing. The first things we notice are the details of often-superficial difference. Foods often seem odd but it’s rare for any culture to make a staple of meals that are not nourishing, enjoyable and healthy. Food, and ideas about food, can be one of the great rewards of travel.

So, too, can the arts. Music that strikes us at first as strange or unintelligible, listened to patiently and with an open mind will suddenly fall into coherence and excite us.

But it’s only as the details and first impressions start connecting that we start to sense what it is all about. There are ways in which a culture can be counted on to make sense of life and generate genuine satisfactions for its members. And these can stir us to insights into our own values and encourage us to live more freely, more satisfyingly, more fully.

It is to our hazard that “culture” so little preoccupies us… and that is where our danger lies. Few societies have been totally overwhelmed by conquering enemies: invasions, occupations and even attempted genocides have tended, rather, to provoke resistance and subsequent cultural revival. Rather, most of history’s fallen nations and empires, died first at the centre and collapsed around it. They outgrew, over-stretched or outran the sustaining capacities of their culture.

There is nothing but gain to be had from discovering some other culture and charting it for ourselves — doing so helps to clear our eyes and see more clearly the values and culture we live by; it enhances our ability to understand who we are; it gives us a more secure place from which to chart our own narratives and culture and take our places in them…

And we need to talk about our values: they lie at the heart of whatever it is that we will become. They are the denoninators of our humanity. We need to make them clear to ourselves, and stand them in the sunlight to flourish.

Without some sort of clarity, our purposes will be vague, our intentions fickle, and we are likely to see their being colonised by interests that will try very hard to turn them to their own ends.

The risk is not that we’re likely to be forced to serve the designs of others; it’s that we may too easily be persuaded to.