More surfing, less suffering
The moral panic of 'cultural appropriation' and our incessant drive to make each other miserable.
Among the sports that have been recently added to Olympic competition is surfing, and it didn’t take long for this to become a source of controversy, at least in the minds of people who choose suffering as a way of life.
A couple of weeks ago, the Associated Press reported that “the Tokyo Summer Games serve as a proxy for that unresolved tension and resentment, according to the ethnic Hawaiians who lament that surfing and their identity have been culturally appropriated by white outsiders who now stand to benefit the most from the $10 billion industry”. Never mind that Hawaii remains the uncontested mecca of this discipline, meaning that no respectable practitioner would get very far in their career without competing here. Never mind that the reigning world champion and, now, first-ever Olympic gold medallist, is a Brazilian of humble origins, meaning that the professionalization of surfing (like many other sports) has opened doors for promising yet anonymous individuals in distant corners of the planet to quickly rise onto the world stage. And never mind that the intended core message of this year’s Games is “Unity in Diversity”, meaning that the event has sought to invite people from all cultures and different walks of life to come together in celebration of our common humanity.
The AP went even further by saying, “Imagine if the Hollywood version of yoga became an Olympic sport, and by default overshadowed its roots in India, whitewashing the original cultural flavor into a white Californian trope.” At this point in the article one had to do some extreme mental contortions to understand what on earth these journalists were talking about.
Oxford Dictionaries added the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ to its official lexicon in 2017, defining it as “the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society”. In plain English, it is when someone adopts something from a culture that is not his or her own, and misrepresents or disrespects that culture in some way.
By this set of standards, pretty much any human behavior is susceptible to deep scrutiny and recrimination, especially at a time when there is an insatiable appetite for policing so-called “harmful speech” and “micro-aggressions”, as well as arbitrarily categorizing every member of society as either victim or perpetrator. And since we are dealing with the realm of infinite interpretations, the range of offenses may include virtually anything, from hairstyle to clothing, and from a manner of speaking to a type of exercise (such as yoga or surfing).
Consider my case, for instance. I am mostly of European descent but lived most of my life in Latin America, before immigrating to the U.S.. In the context of the post-modernist Oppression Olympics, I must have infringed every imaginable rule in the book. And I guess the same is true for any Westerner today who practices Buddhism, smokes cannabis, or drives a Jeep Cherokee.
All of the above would be easy to dismiss as absolute rubbish if it weren’t for the fact that it’s only one of many tools and mechanisms being administered for the sake of erecting psychological and ideological barriers between groups of people. Ironically, though not difficult to explain, this approach is enforced in large part by those who predicate diversity as the gold standard of progress. In fact, they insist on diversity but show a disdain for unity, resorting to finger-pointing whenever someone is suspected to be out of line (according to them). Needless to say, the most likely outcome of enacting such primal us-versus-them instincts at scale is a dramatic increase in anguish, mistrust, loneliness and lack of understanding.
The success of our collective human experience depends upon our ability to seek out, borrow, trade, and learn from each other’s ideas. Sharing and exchanging stories, art forms, rituals, symbols, customs and techniques, as well as building and improving upon them, is inherent to our process of civilizational advancement. For the most part, though, it is simply a conduit for living a creative and worthwhile existence, in harmony with others.
The moralistic compulsion to find every possible obstacle to healthy relationships and spontaneous interactions across various population cohorts strikes me as profoundly antithetical to human flourishing, not to mention unnatural. It’s as if a very vocal and influential sector of society were determined to make everyone else fearful, upset and depressed. Moreover, it saddens me to see this become a zero-sum competition, where no one even seems to agree on the basic rules of engagement anymore, while self-proclaimed puritans take it upon themselves to play referee. It is the worst sort of game to play, destined to end very badly.
So I propose the best way forward is to employ all of our willpower and wisdom in avoiding the trap of this voracious outrage machine, and strive for openness, connection and the free exchange of experiences. We should all teach one another a little more surfing, and less suffering.
This 2016 ad campaign for Momondo brought to the forefront the simple yet beautiful notion that “an open world begins with an open mind”. It is a great reminder that, no matter our differences, we have a lot more in common than we realize at first glance.