On Cultural Security

What is it?

First and foremost, something most people take for granted.

It's a term I haven't considered before, because I've never heard it before. But it makes a lot of sense to me. On an individual and macro level, it's something I'm deeply concerned about.

On the macro level, I think about Cultural Security in the context of Neoliberalism and Multiculturalism. Gentrification is a huge threat to the security of a culture because it largely does away with cultural influences for something that is bare-bones functional and compatible. It's inoffensive, sure, and easy to export, easy to build and impressive when it's done right, but it's worrying in how it can remove cultural influences, design and presentation from local domains. It has the ability to silence culture, and in that sense it's equivalent to imperialism. I do like the birth and rise of "compatability culture", and it definitely makes trade and access to the world easier (at least for those it is designed for. It's functional in nature, but that doesn't inherently mean it is universally functional). But it's also worrying because it reflects the ideology of neoliberalism; that is, make your product and company the common denominator. Become powerful and sell your product by adapting it to different cultures, by offloading the values of your company and the culture it originated from so as to make it as inoffensive as possible. Strip your product down to the bare minimum and make it the baseline to dominate the market. Dwarf competition, sometimes literally, with the mom-and-pop shop or startup in the shadow of your towering corporate headquarters. Inoffensive, yet present, and everywhere.

I think modernism and modern architecture enables that, and it's why I'm sensitive to and distasteful of an excess of it. I'm going to expand on this more in an upcoming video essay on Mirror's Edge, the 2008 video game and accompanying comics whose elusive themes line up with concerns of cultural security due to gentrification.

All in all, I think we're overdue for an architectural revolution. Right now I'm fantasizing about a combination of Modernism and Art Nouveau (because Art Nouveau is really fucking cool, and because I'm learning more about architecture in a college class) but this new architectural style I'm thinking about is more about evolving Modernism past it's current neoliberal influences, going from essentially no decoration to decorative alterations rooted in cultural values and influences. You can fuck off with your grey carpet and pure white office desk, cubicles, walls, lights, all that. What values matter to your company, and what cultures espouse those values? Surround yourself with that. Be proud of it.

On the micro level, I think of cultural security in a very different way, more in relation to my own personal experiences as a TCK  (Third Culture Kid). Where on the macro level I'm more concerned about cultural security in terms of protecting cultures from erosion, on the micro level I'm more thinking about how you relate to your own culture and the level of "connectedness" you have to whatever culture you find yourself a part of. Personally, as someone who is sort of evenly split between different cultures and different levels (British, Swiss-French, French, European, American) none of which I was ever really fully immersed in during my upbringing, I find myself sensitive to cultural differences and overall rather culturally insecure (exacerbated when people don't see or understand by multi-cultural background). This manifests itself in the different dimensions; insecurity speaking and conversing in French (in a French speaking country I've lived in for 20 years) and fewer to no relationships with the people that live in my neighborhood, political insanity when trying to engage in American politics coming from European and Swiss politics, insecurity in how I dress myself and looking "out of place," fear of not understanding cultural references, particularly in British and American pop culture, difficulties interacting with and understanding family abroad (this one is especially tough as someone born "overseas"), etc... Even then I would say the area of the world that I live in is fairly neoliberal in nature and therefore things and trends are often common between my cultures, whether it's H&M deciding what's hot for the Fall or it's my Eurocentric food palette. But those insecurities do end up making a difference; overall less access to the host culture, less support from geographically distant family, extra cultural barriers to overcome, especially when transitioning.

But cultural insecurity is something that TCKs have to deal with on a personal level that others, who are immersed and comfortable within their own culture, don't. And it's a common denominator between a lot of TCKs that I talk to, this deep sense of cultural insecurity, and experiences with it that First or Second Culture Kids often don't have to deal with. Of course, the flipside is that we get to choose our own culture or create one for ourselves. But we live in a world where that isn't as well understood or supported, so the former is much more common than the latter, which can lead to life-long issues of identity and belongingness (I point to Nella Larsen's Quicksand, a novel published in 1928 that chronicles Larsen's own struggles as a TCK long before the term was developed in the 1960s as an example).

I haven't even touched on cultural appropriation and cultural warfare yet, even though it's all around us and often the basis of modern politics, especially in the context of the USA.

Nevertheless I strongly believe that everyone has a right to their own individual cultural security, and every culture has a right to self-determination. I guess it's part of my dream to see a world that is better at cultivating cultural security through diversity, democracy and through reining in dominant cultures that actively suppress others. I'll expand on this later on with my Nation of Nations project.

Is that too much to ask for?