Redefining Bridges and Borders

Abstract

Imagine, if you will, that in your own country, from the time of the first people, today, and far into the future, everyone that was ever born or will be born was born with two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a pair of sunglasses. The color of the lenses in the sunglasses is yellow. No one has ever thought it strange that the sunglasses are there, because they have always been there and they are a part of the human body. Everyone has them. What makes them yellow are the values, attitudes, ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that all people in your country have in common. Everything that they have seen, learned, or experienced (past, present, and future) has entered into the brain through the yellow lenses. Everything has been filtered and interpreted through all these values and ideas that have made the lenses yellow. The yellow lenses thus represent your attitudes, beliefs, values, and cultural background. Thousands of miles away in another country, from the time of the first people, today, and far into the future, everyone that was ever born or will be born was born with two legs, two arms, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a pair of sunglasses. The color of the lenses is blue. No one has ever thought it strange that the sunglasses are there, because they have always been there and they are part of the human body. Everyone has them. Everything that the people see, learn, and experience is filtered through the blue lenses. A traveler from the yellow sunglasses country who wanted to go to that faraway land had enough sense to realize that, to learn about the country and the people more thoroughly, he would have to acquire some blue sunglasses so that he could see. When the traveler arrived, he wore the blue sunglasses, stayed for two months, and felt that he really was learning about the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the people. He actually saw wearing their sunglasses. He came home to his own country and declared that he was now an expert on that country and that their culture was green! This fable is useful to our understanding of the internal cultural baggage that we carry with us whenever we cross, physically or figuratively, bridges and borders. How are we to understand the implications of open borders on culture? As an integrated system of learned behavior patterns characteristic of members of any given society or human group, culture is central to human existence. (1) However, we know that humans experience it pluralistically: as cultures, of myriad divergent patterns and complexities. We also know that we are entering a new realm of intercultural awareness, where human relationships are increasingly dependent on intercultural skills. (2) The development of intercultural competence is part of an unfolding spiral of evolution, an evolutionary process rather than a random pendulum swinging back and forth from one extreme of perception of the other to its opposite. To borrow an approach put forth by Teilhard de Chardin, the intermingling of cultures is part of the evolution of consciousness. (3) Yet, as implacable and wise as evolution seems, our collective amazement and euphoria alternate with free-floating terror. People feel more and more schizophrenic, disconnected from a world that has become less ordered and localized. This feeling of brokenness stems from an evolutionary pull that we do not really understand. When we translate this feeling of unease into discourse, we often attribute the disruption of social cohesion to outsiders and further conclude that open borders are a threat to cultural survival. The answer to this schizophrenic syndrome is what might be called polyphrenic ability. Each of us has many cultures or worlds contained within ourselves that are expressed through everyday life. Are we the same beings when we are acting as parents as when we go to visit our own parents and become children again? Are we the same beings when we are drivers as when we are spouses or when we are surfing the cybernetic net? …