Writing 20 Essay 2

Culture and individual identity Due Jan 31

Culture is a complex way that we construct community. It includes religion, art, ideology philosophy, our shared values and the rules that are imposed upon us. Sometimes, perhaps inevitably these shared values and expectations come into conflict with our individual identity, impulses, and choices. It is important for the conflict to exist because that’s the way cultural standards & norms change for the better.
In our reading we have tracked several points of conflict between group cultural norms and personal choices. They include gay marriage, arranged marriage, dating within your ethnicity, and women’s rights to self-determination. You may see some other areas of conflict as well. In these areas people do not have the full support of their culture and often experience internal discord. Andrew Sullivan, for example, in his essay “The Conservative case for Gay Marriage” described the deep psychic suffering of being permanently excluded from the family and he made a case that the culture would be more stable if it included gay people in the right to marry. But we know personally that the forces of culture have conditioned many people, perhaps most, to disagree.
Write an essay, four pages with at least four citations from our essays. Focus your essay on one area of conflict and describe for me the way we need to understand this conflict and how we can arrive perhaps at some harmonious agreement. What can we
do to sustain individual freedoms without damaging the cultural stability that we depend upon? Where do your sympathies lie? Should people sacrifice personal choices for the stability? Maybe people need to go slowly. Or maybe you think that, like Martin Luther King said, this “gradualism” is not tolerable and only means things will never change.
Use your observations of people who are in these situations and discuss the
cultural forces that are contending with and explain their most likely outcome.