Please forgive me for trying to lighten this up a bit.
Usually, when people think of “culture”, they think of art, music, museums, etc. Of course, culture is really all around us. Culture is the set of values, items, ideas and mores that bind a society together.
The other day, I posted this picture on Facebook, and it started a lively discussion (and a few jokes, naturally):
Language is one of the items that holds society together. It is not just a shared idea or object, but language is the means by which those shared values, items, ideas and mores are transmitted.
Franz Boas, founder of American anthropology, like his German forerunners, maintained that the shared language of a community is the most essential carrier of their common culture. Boas was the first anthropologist who considered it unimaginable to study the culture of a foreign people without also becoming acquainted with their language. For Boas, the fact that the intellectual culture of a people was largely constructed, shared and maintained through the use of language, meant that understanding the language of a cultural group was the key to understanding its culture. …This is similar to the notion of Linguistic determinism, which states that the form of language determines individual thought. While Boas himself rejected a causal link between language and culture, some of his intellectual heirs entertained the idea that habitual patterns of speaking and thinking in a particular language may influence the culture of the linguistic group….
~ Wikipedia. Culture. “Society and culture”. retrieved on 21 February 2012
While debates can rage on as to the degree, it seems there is much evidence that speech affects thought and vice versa. That’s one reason that idioms vary so much from society to society.
There really should be no doubts that language helps hold people together. Why did God change the one language into several at the Tower of Babel?
7Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
8So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
~ Ge 11:7-8
They scattered due to the different languages. Instead of cleaving together, as they wished to do, God divided them by giving them different languages.
I grew up at the tail end of the Viet Nam era. I remember news stories about riots in some streets between war protestors and police. I grew up in Ohio, so I remember stories about Kent State. In spite of this, I don’t think the society of the United States has ever been more fractured.
Think about this for a bit. All we have ever had was a shared language and a shared set of values. In particular, values like freedom, equality, etc., were constantly in view. I’m not saying we always lived up to those values, but at least they were established values. If either language or cultural mores erode, then a society like ours is bound to fragment. Unfortunately, these are being challenged on all fronts, and a lot of it is done in seeking the holy grail of multicultural diversity.
There are other societies that have a shared religion or a common dictator to hold things together. The US was never that type of society. While it must be acknowledged that it was built upon a Judeo-Christian framework and that most people identified themselves as Christian, there has in general never been any real compulsion to be particularly religious or irreligious either one.
It’s quite simple, but there are those who will still stick their heads in the sand. There are descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob scattered around the world. They were slaves in Egypt, but God remembered Abraham and brought them out. He promised great blessings if they obeyed. However, they lost sight of those promises time after time after time. So, many of them went into captivity without their descendants ever returning. However, God kept His end of the bargain, and now, in the end of mankind’s time, the descendants of Abraham have been greatly blessed. However, these descendants have over time also disregarded God, even in the diminished knowledge they had of Him to begin with, and are beginning to pay the consequences.
One of the consequences is that foreigners would sap the strength of Abraham’s descendants and even control the economics of the nation.
43The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.
44He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.
~ Dt 28:43-44
The foreigner would be “very high” implies ruling over the native born.
Of course, the stupid thing to do would be to blame the foreigner, because what God is saying here is that it is the nation’s own fault. These are the curses God said would come upon Israel’s descendants because of disobedience. The curses get much worse than this, of course, and these are just the beginning of troubles.
I just recently saw that there is a new book out that sounds interesting called Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late by James Robison and Jay W Richards. I’m not sure what else they espouse, but one thing they firmly believe is that American can survive if a revival occurs. Certainly, if this nation as a whole turned to God and at least repented of the sins they understand, it would probably stem the decline of its power.
The history of the nation of Israel, and I mean the northern kingdom here, shows that perfect worship was not a requirement for God to give a brief respite from troubles. In fact, who can claim to have ever achieved perfect worship? I believe God prefers positive reinforcement rather than doling out punishments for the least of offenses as a general rule, but that should not be mistaken for being soft on sin. What I am getting at is that God will likely respond to the degree that people are willing to repent.
Repent they must! Otherwise, the end of the nation could be nearer than anyone speculates.
