My problem with culture

Warning: If you are one of those  people who is too sentimental about culture and heritage, I advice you don’t read further

Ok ,so we all take pride in our culture and heritage ,nothing wrong with that.Obviously what our ancestors did is something we do cherish and follow.Cultures evolve ,people change and so do traditions.

Let us look at how traditions and cultures are made: Whatever rituals we do for various reasons are passed on from generation to generation,slowly the reason is forgotten but the ritual continues and becomes part of our culture.

Many centuries later,people try to find the reasons behind those customs,research is done ,groups and cults are formed and many theories suggested.

Some people change with times,some try to stick to age-old customs and traditions .We may sometimes call them backwards or in some dialects conservatives.

I don’t have any problem with any of these, my problem begins when we sometimes try to find meaning in every tradition that we follow.We try to godify(if that’s a real word) our ancestors and believe that everything they did had some mystical reason

Take for example,Mayan calendar .It ends in 2012 and we decided to deduce that it marks the end of world. How can Mayans be wrong? Eh

What if they just ran out of space to make a calendar? What if they just lacked forward thinking similar to what happened during Y2k .

Y2k surfaced just because when computers were designed they did not have enough digits to store the full year .It stores 1934 as 34.Did that mean the designers implied that 2000 would be end of the world? NO. It just meant that they did not have forward thinking.

No I don’t mean to say that every thing our ancestors did was moronic ,what I am saying is that some of it could be or rather should be.

Surely our ancestors did have some morons within them , how else can you explain so many morons in the current world?

Surely those moronic ancestors did some stupid stuff that caught on and is now a part of our culture? We no longer understand the meaning behind that tradition so assume it to be mystical .Maybe there was no meaning

If you still don’t get me,get this.

We will be ancestors of our coming generations (assuming we don’t kill ourselves with the third world war),every popular thing we do can become tradition and part of culture ,even stupid things.

I shudder at the thought that someday researchers will research why we did “Planking” or “Owling”.

Maybe it will become a family tradition to Plank on every 1st december,maybe some cults might be formed who will believe that planking can give them superpowers. Who knows?

If you are wondering what planking is,

Planking (or the Lying Down Game) is an activity consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. Both hands must touch the sides of the body and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the Internet is an integral part of the game.Players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which to play. The term planking refers to mimicking a wooden plank. Rigidity of the body must be maintained to constitute good planking.

 

Now do you see? This could be considered mystical