Jed, I thought some of your recent post contained many astute observations. OTOH, you claim you "cannot transcend [your] own culture."
Personally, I would disagree with that assumption. I tend to suspect we all eventually transcend the boundaries of the culture we were born into, some more obnoxiously than others.
We may expand the boundaries of cultures, or change them. All cultures change all the time, even isolated primitive ones, and countries like Japan and the US where there is a great deal of travel and interaction culture changes very quickly. What we cannot do is transcend culture or choose our own cultures. To put it another way, we can only have one culture at a time. Japanese culture changed radically in 1945. Naturally some unreformed conservative people despised the changes and they stuck with the old traditions and customs. They tried to block or undo the legal reforms, such as giving women the right to vote and letting men under 30 marry without their parent's permission. The other people, who went along with the changes, cannot now go back or undo their mindset. They cannot choose to be pre-war Japanese, or Edo-period Japanese. Americans can never return to their country as it was before WWII, or before 9/11, for that matter.
A world-view not voluntary. It is not something we choose. No amount of exposure to Japanese culture can make an American into a Japanese person. (Not that any sane American would want to make that change!)
If you grow up trained every day to have a scientific perspective, and you parents drill into you that you must think for yourself, accept no one's word for anything, demand proof, and believe only experiments, you cannot put all that aside willfully. You simply cannot make yourself believe in miracles, or creationism or what-have-you. You cannot bring yourself to believe in logical fallacies such as Appeal to the Consequences of a Belief. It is like trying to believe that 2 + 2 = 8. And I suppose if you are a deeply religious fundamentalist no amount of experimental evidence or logical thinking will displace your belief in creationism.
- Jed
