I want to explore what we value as a culture.
Culture is a very sensitive thing, and it is hard to say these hard things. The Bible does not say, 'have this kind of culture' and so if I say that we are not 'doing culture' the right way, I am not being inflexibly dogmatic. There is no way that the Bible could dictate every aspect of culture, though some things are laid down clearly. We have to explore culture by evaluation of our experiences, and ask if we are fullfilling the commands to love our neighbors as ourselves, to abstain from sexual immorality, to obtain a wife in a way that is holy and honorable, and to not cause others to sin. The question of culture is subtle and interwoven with many aspects, but let us not dodge the duty to evaluate our cultural habits of thought. They may not be so Christian and loving as we suppose. We may be practicing subtle forms of oppression and dishonesty that are really quite heinious.
We have our values and institutions. We have capitalism, and the free market ideal. Usually if you say anything bad about capitalism, people think you are esposing communism or socialism. But capitalism as I am talking about it is a cultural habit of mind, not a goverment system. The communist party bosses in Red China are competent capitalists, by the way, though they are not 'free market-ists'. You have to be high in the party to have access to the opportunities. By the same token, the first great capitalists were kings, who advanced trade to build up their power.
We value friendship and equality between the sexes, freedom of opportunity for young people to find someone and meet them and decide freely about whether they could commit themselves to marrying them. These things are not neccessarily to be destroyed by valuing some other things in balance, like the father's protection and authority over her daughter, the capacity of the older generation to see ahead what would be best. We also could value more the idea that the father gives the bride, notwithstanding that she should be persuaded by her suitor. We also could value marriage at a younger age than is now average for young women, not withstanding that their autonomy is less developed and that therefore the father giving her with his wife's counsel has more weight in such a descision than does the maiden's. These values may be in tension, but surely something can be worked out.
The value we place on friendship between the sexes must be balanced against other factors. If friendship means free love, that's out biblically. It is called 'fornication'. If valuing friendship means coeducation away from parental influence, then what about the families of the two? Whose paying for this schooling, by the way? O, you say it is the government or a 'student loan'. I wont go those two places right now, except to say that we are an overly bueractratized and debt driven culture. Perhaps we could balance this value of friendship with the value of the economic preparedness of the man and the dowery investment in the marriage of the virgin's parents. Virginity, if it is to be valued, must withstand the pressure of the inordinate desire placed on friendship by young persons. The young person is is easily seduced by their value of friendship to engage in premarital sex and to place inordinate value on similarity of age, because friendships are formed around coeducational institutions which place young people of the same age together to form a "youth culture". But a true culture is an intergenerational planning of young persons with their parents. Our planning and investing tend to be planned around big structure, that is, the capitalist and lending at interest type, rather than small structure- the dowery, lending at no interest by parents and relatives payable back by a cultural system of honor, with investment and repayment in small local commercial and familial structures. An American married a Philipine girl and was appalled to find that she was regularly sending money he gave her for her own spending home to her parents and relatives in the Phillipines. In her cultural context, it was her duty to look after her family. Perhaps she was relocalizing the money that would have come from them but had been transfered by war and world trade, which hurt and opressed her culture, and drove him out of his to seek a wife elsewhere.
The value we place on free economic competition is good, because, free markets can do some impressive things. But cultures, teams, or groups of people do impressive things, and how do they do them? By cooperating, by being a culture. Every cooperating group is a culture, including the corporations and the hangers on who invest in them. We survive by teaming up, but it is still a risky thing. Some people lose their jobs or their promised benefits when the investors who now own the company decide to change things. Some investors get burned when the company decieves them about the profits and then suddenly declares bankrupcy. Some people in our teams are shifty, and the whole structure, while incredibly wealth building, is risky. Surely we ought to reserve some of our investing for smaller structures closer to home, and not suppose that all monetary shrewdness must exempt brotherly and neighborly love. I find it odd that you have to go out of your way to buy locally grown food from your neighbor farmer. I find it odd that we invest in the far away rich and already established, but not in our neighbor's smaller enterprise very easily, whose success could more directly enhance our own power and reputation locally and provide us with more meaningful satisfaction, but the system has preempted the possibility in most cases. I find it odd that we pay for our daughter's education so that she can be away from her children when she marries, and so that she is not dependent on a man, by working as a pretty secretary or receptionist to adorn some large structure of investment, but we will not invest in a young man's efforts to get himself together to marry through a dowery for our daughter. Marriage is a small business, but our investments and values are too much with the bigger structures. And so the wife complains that her husband is away too much selling, trucking, etc. as the larger companies seek markets further out from their home. They both work during her children's tender years while they pay for some illegal imigrant to take care of thier children, and they pay for their home on a morgage that costs so much because so much business is already there with the jobs that we provided with our investment in the stock market or by simply putting our money in the bank. And they worry about the value of their home going down as the blacks move in because they are not commited to the community, they are commited to their careers and to being ready to sell their house, because their lives are dictated by the company that may move them away, which may even provoke them to move them away from each other.
We place value on friendship-romantic marriages, but we find that this makes natural attractions between unequal ages embarrasing. In smaller structures of culture, the man whose work necessitated a delayed marriage might be honored for his work finally. He might have the pleasure of watching a girl promised to him become a young woman while he prepares himself to marry her by working. This would enhance his work ethic. This observing would take place in the home of the parents, where he was an honored guest, not a dangerous pedofile alienated from society and impoverished by the lesser job opportunities and investments given to single men.
We place value on chivalry, the idea that the man is to obtain honor from women by demonstrating his protectiveness of women and weaker members of society. But where do you find men obtaining honor from men, that is, their daughter to marry? Without that, the cultural system is too matriarchal, and tends more greatly toward "friendship fornication".
We place value on individualism, where the individual is praised for realizing personal ambition through hard work and smarts. But if this value is not balanced with community culturalism, many individuals are disempowered and ineffective, and no amount of exhortation to them as individuals can cure the pain that unbalanced competitive individualism linked with corporate culturalism has put upon them. What is culturalism? It is the value placed on the effectiveness of mutually beneficial work. It nurtures and sustains the individual's personal ambition by linking it to a supportive social group. It takes place in corporations today as corrporate culturalism, but little in local communities as it did long ago. There is not the full orbed community culturalism that we once had. Our money lending at interest and our giving gifts to the rich (stock market) has dried it up over the centuries by increasing the size of the structures of investment inordinately beyond that of the local community.
Parental Influence and Sponsorship
