The American Monks

I was having a discussion with Corrie about "American Culture", as we've done many times over the years. It has at times drifted towards the "does America even have a culture?" topic. Is a lack of culture really a defining characteristic?

Maybe when you're brought up in the middle of a culture--of a society, really--it's quite difficult to step outside of it and take a long, thoughtful gaze back at it.

Here, in America, people were directed and encouraged to focus on skin color, rather than class, to 1) drive the myth of upward mobility through acquisition of wealth; and 2) to keep the poor majority distracted from the gulf between the holders of capital and everyone else. Only in America were the Prussians, the Poles, the Magyar, and the Irish were the same. That assimilation erased the major cultural cues connected with fair-skinned Europeans and their descendants, while dark-skinned Africans and their descendants had their cultural cues forcibly erased. What's left is occasionally described as a lack of an original culture.

In a direct, Frans de Waal way, we obviously have a culture; by which I mean the set of social constructs by which we teach (directly and indirectly) the next generation of people about the world they inhabit exist in Americas as they do everywhere else. This discussion is more about the social cues that make up American-ism.

One way I think about these types of claims--the lack of original American culture--is by remembering some stereotypes the Europeans we met at a hostel in Budapest described as American. They were funny and rather accurate, for the ugly American tourist in Europe anyway, but they led to a small discussion about some of the ways we Americans appear to the outside world: proud, rebellious, falsely cheery, uppity, and a strange brew of humble arrogance.

The music, the braggadocio, the style, the entertainment, the world consuming consumerism...a penchant for leaving the nest as a young person and never returning (a rarity in a global perspective). These are things we take for granted in America.

Other things we take for granted are the archetypes that the social culture we have resemble almost any other culture in history. We have warriors, merchants, gladiatorial bloodsport (male emotional release), and even public-anointed royalty (celebrity).

We seem to lack a perceived aristocracy, due to our mythology of upward mobility (I'm not saying it's not ever possible, but...), which is strange, since the uproar over wealth disparity has finally come to the fore. We also lack an intellectual class. This culture actually disrespects the intellectual.

One class that we do have, in an American kind of way, is a monk class.

When I think of monks, I tend to drift between the Buddhist monks, living off of alms and wearing those cool looking orange and red robes; and the Friar Tuck type monk, brewing beer in the rafters of some Frisian monastery in Bruges.

American monks don't do it like that. Here our monks live a specific lifestyle. It's highlighted by a devotion of their time to their specific spiritual force.

Worship may not be the right word.

Can you imagine a group of Americans that have a quiet connection to a greater force that eventually envelops their life and becomes a lifestyle? Probably, but the main group I'm discussing are the surfers.

Surfers are the American monks, the monk class. They don't brew beer in the attic in between studying scripture, and they don't lead a life of example by not obtaining cash for a living.

American monks live a monastic lifestyle revolving around the ocean. The waves are their pages of study, their brew pots of discovery.

The surfer exists in a certain place in the American consciousness. I believe the inherent connection to nature around which their lives revolve is the reason for that complex position: part sneer, part jealously.

The ocean gives many cultures many different things of cultural relevancy, and this case is no different.