Attachment in Culture, and a Path to a Better Future
Originally published on Medium on Jan 7, 2019.
A note — I was born in Russia and moved to Canada in 2005, and have many relatives in both places. When we moved, I remember it being a significant culture shock, and throughout the years I’ve been able to more accurately pinpoint exactly what the fundamental differences in culture are. The observations made here are from my own experience and conversations with people. Take everything I say with a grain of salt — some of these assertions might be a result of my personal biases. That being said, I hope that delving into this issue can be in some way insightful.
How do we talk to one another? How much do we help out others in our community? How do we structure our social institutions? The culture underlying our communities plays an important role in all of these questions — and cultures differ significantly from one another. I would like to discuss differences that arise between Eastern European and western culture — Russia and Canada particularly, since those two are the countries that I’ve had most exposure to. Particularly, one of the fundamental differences I’ve noticed is in interpersonal attachment — this is the focus of this piece, and it’s something that deeply affects most of our social interactions.
Here are some relative differences about the two cultures that I noticed throughout the years:
Generally stronger social bonds in RU than CA.
Less formality, fewer ‘contractual’ relationships in RU than CA.
Relative intolerance of other cultures and lifestyles in RU, compared to relative tolerance in CA.
Tendency towards blunt yet honest statements in RU, more ‘politeness’ for the sake of maintaining relations in CA.
RU prioritizes survival of the group — your family, friends, the larger community, the nation. Whereas in CA, the priority is placed on individual autonomy — with things like entrepreneurship, hard work for personal benefit, free speech, and challenging cultural norms held in high regard.
More physical contact in RU — handshakes, pats, hugs. Greater emphasis on personal space in CA.
In CA, there are attempts at sensitivity and openness to others, manifested through advancement of civil rights, various acceptance movements, political correctness, etc. I think there’s certainly a discussion to be had as to the effectiveness and motivation of these movements, but at least the sentiment is there. It is also interesting that derogatory insults aimed at race, sex and other parts of identity are heavily scrutinized whereas generic insults are seen as more culturally acceptable. RU has opposite sentiment — rights movements are seen as more annoying than helpful. Comparatively less compassion towards the individual. Interestingly, insults aimed at race, sex, etc are not seen as the ultimate harm one can do, and are treated more casually. On the other hand, generic insults carry a lot more weight and are generally perceived as more hostile.
The difference in culture can be put another way — Russia is more of a “mob family” mentality, where each member of the group holds a tight knit allegiance to everyone else, while Canada is a culture where people are motivated by their own well being primarily. Almost as if some section of culture in Canada values the law more as a source of morality than judging every situation accordingly and valuing relationships over rules. The other extreme of this isn’t preferable either however, as it leads to corruption and also comes with another price — you are expected to behave as other members of the ingroup. Any deviation from this behavior is met with coercion back to the ingroup and/or hostility. I’m talking about something as small as minor social cues and “etiquette”, to large scale life decisions like career choice, dating preference and an individual’s ethics/guiding philosophy. That being said, a healthy dose of increased intimacy in relationships might be beneficial.
Taking all of these differences into account, I wonder if it’s possible to take the best of both worlds and aim toward better social interactions that transcend both cultures. Can we take the deep interpersonal attachment of Russian culture and leave behind the xenophobia? Likewise, can we conserve the individual autonomy and freedom that is so prominent in Canada but leave out the shallowness? Is freedom and attachment necessarily correlated or are they two orthogonal issues? If they are orthogonal, then we should be striving to achieve both at the same time, as shown in the upper right quadrant of this graph:
I came across this concept of ‘Eros’ recently, and it seems to be the perfect description for these first-quadrant social interactions where both freedom and social bonds are positive. Eros is a kind of intense attraction, lust or worship. It is exemplified, for example, as pursuing the highest standard, creating more beauty in the world for beauty’s sake. Reaching your full potential.* You do this by letting attraction be your guide — by going towards what attracts you instead of away from what repels you. “Figure out what you want to do by cancelling out everything that you don’t want to do” is such bad advice in light of this notion. Daniel Schmachtenberger completes the idea with this quote (Future Thinkers podcast, episode 46):
“The Eros model of love, erotic love, doesn’t just mean sex. Sex is one place that it expresses itself, but it is a passionate desire energy. It’s an attraction, so we can think of things being attracted together, right? People being attracted together to procreate, to make new life is a special case example of people being attracted together to create anything, or anything being attracted together to create anything, right? Subatomic particles being attracted together to have this relationship that is atoms. And so, we can think of the evolutionary impulse as kind of an Eros energy…
…So when we think about participating the evolutionary impulse of the universe — consciously participating in it — then we think about supporting things coming together in right relationships that are synergistic, right? That’s what’s aiming at the, you know, there is no destination. It’s an eternal process of becoming and blossoming.”
I am only beginning to learn about this topic, but I feel like the Eros model is a promising lead toward a better culture — taking the benefits of both the Russian and Canadian approach and leaving behind the BS. We’re in an excellent position in time right now, where we can take the best aspects of different cultures and integrate them into our model of how to live. If we get this compassion and closeness thing right, and not at the expense of personal autonomy, we can pave the path to a world where self-actualization is made even easier, though deeper understanding of others.
Hope you are OK Sav....your blog was silent for a while