The Bicultural Experience of Morality

Michael Byram, Durham and Sofia Universities, United Kingdom/Bulgaria

Introduction:

This is a work in progress and I am interested in readers’ responses: whether they think this is an important topic and whether they can add further examples/data.

People who encounter the culture of another social group – it may be a family, an occupation, a nation, an ethnic group, a religious group, an age or generational group, etc – may discover a new set of values and behaviours which they find to be in conflict with their own. Often the reaction is rejection and criticism.

People who ‘live in two cultures’, to use a commonplace designation, or identify with two similar but different groups – two nations, two ethnic groups for example – may experience the conflict of values in themselves. They may feel torn between two moralities.

Experiences Narrated:

Here are two examples of the experience as narrated by people who ‘live in two cultures’.

Kyoko Mori (1997) lived for the first twenty years of her life in Japan and for the next twenty years in the USA:

Japan has not been my home for a long time. Though I was born in Kobe, I have not lived there as an adult. I left at twenty to go to college in Illinois, knowing that I would never return. I now live in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I am an American citizen. My life can be divided right down the middle: the first twenty years in Japan, the last twenty years in the American Midwest. I’m not sure if I consider Green Bay to be my “home,” exactly. Having grown up in a big city, I am more comfortable in Chicago or Milwaukee. But even the small towns in the Midwest are more like my home than Japan, a country I know only from a child’s perspective. I don’t understand Japan the way I have come to understand the Midwest – a place I learned gradually as an adult so that I can’t remember when I didn’t know the things I know now and take for granted. I recall Japan with the bold colours and truncated shapes of a child’s perception. My memory seems vivid and yet unreliable. (p. 4)

She says she does not like going to Japan and there are reasons connected with the suicide of her mother and the upbringing she had with her father and stepmother. There are other reasons too, which are particularly relevant here. She describes sitting on a plane to Japan and the polite language constantly used in the announcements, a polite language which is ‘a steel net’:

In the crowded cabin, the polite apologies float towards us like a pleasant mist or gentle spring rain. But actually this politeness is a steel net hauling us into the country where nothing means what it says. Already, before the plane has left American airspace, I have landed in a Galaxy of the past, where I can never say what I feel or ask what I want to know. (p. 5)

She compares this phenomenon with driving:

Having a conversation in Japanese is like driving in the dark without a headlight: every moment, I am on the verge of hitting something and hurting myself or someone else, but I have no way of guessing where the dangers are. Listening to people speak to me in Japanese, over the phone or face to face, I try to figure out what they really mean. I know it’s different from what they say, but I have no idea what it is. (p. 7)

I am reminded of a conversation I once had with a Finnish woman who lived in England. She said she felt at home in England and was shocked when people asked her – noticing she had a non-native accent – ‘Do you like it here?’. It was like being asked ‘Do you like it in your home?’ In this respect she was similar to Kyoko Mori. On the other hand she too returned to the country where she lived until adulthood but had a different experience. She told me that during the flight from London to Helsinki she became Finnish again and then changed back on the return flight to England, and home. Unlike Mori, she implied that she had no problem in living again in Finland, different though it might be from England.

Mori describes how she copes:

In my frustration, I turn to the familiar: I begin to analyse the conversation by the Midwestern standard of politeness. Sometimes the comparison helps me because Midwesterners are almost as polite and indirect as Japanese people. Just like Japanese people, Midwesterners don’t like to say no. When they are asked to do something they don’t want to do, my Midwestern friends answer, “I’ll think about it,” or “I’ll try.” (p. 7)

I think Christina Bratt Paulston (1992) would agree about the indirectness experienced by Mori. She was born and brought up in Sweden and settled in later life in the USA. She analyses her experience and sees ‘identification’ as the most developed form of integration, a form she cannot accept:

Identification is becoming one with the people of the other culture (…). At these levels I don’t believe it is possible to be bicultural. When I took out US citizenship, I had to give up my Swedish citizenship; I could not have both. And so it is with conflicting cultural values; in the same way as one just can't believe in the overriding importance of consensus and conciliation of group interests at the same time as one believes in confrontation and the overriding rights of the individual in solving problems. (p. 100)

The challenge is to manage the conflicting values of ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’. She cannot hold contradictory values and has to choose. She accounts for this as a matter of socialisation:

Some aspects of culture are beyond modification. Many Americans comment on my frankness, but Swedes never do. Now I wouldn’t want to claim that Swedes lie less than Americans, but I do think there is more emphasis on the value of always telling the truth (or saying nothing) in the socialization process of Swedish children. I know some people dislike me for it, and still I don’t change because I simply cannot.

At other levels of integration however, she can adapt because the modifications are superficial:

But many aspects of culture are within the bounds of modification; one can learn to be half an hour late and not consider it moral slackness; one can learn to eat with one’s fingers and still feel like an adult. But such modifications mainly concern surface behavior, behavior one can switch back and forth. (p. 101)

What happens however if one is not allowed to choose between contradictory values at the deeper level?

Paulston again:

Sometimes it happens that the individual is not allowed to pick and choose between his two cultures but will have conflicting values imposed on him. The result is often some form of psychopathology. Seward (1958) 1 in her fascinating collection of case studies documents the stress of such individuals, like the Japanese Nisei boy torn between his desire to espouse modern egalitarian values and the imposition of his father’s strictly traditional Japanese values. His response to such conflict was mental breakdown, the inability (refusal?) to function with any cultural rules. (p. 102)

Approaches to Morality:

To understand – and perhaps help – such individuals, it is necessary to turn to analyses of morality. There are two broad approaches to morality and to understanding and making judgements about, other people’s moral values and decisions: relativism and universalism.

Relativism exists in a strong form:

• It is not possible for someone from group X to understand the morality of someone in group Y
• Language is one of the causes - translation from language X to language Y is impossible.
• Therefore, a person from group X does not have the right to comment on the values of group Y.

And in a weaker form:

• X person can understand a Y person - translation is possible.
• Y’s values and morality may appear questionable from X’s standpoint, BUT X can accept the validity of a Y person’s morality
• because X does not have the right to pass judgement on Y.
• Every social group and its members must be allowed to determine its own way of living.
• Universalism
• There are values and a morality which can and should be expected of everyone because everyone – whether an X or a Y – is a human being.
• both X and Y have the right to question what, seen in the light of universal values and morality, is unacceptable and wrong.

No doubts expressed here about understanding and translatability, or the right to pass judgement. There is much discussion of whether relativism is tenable or whether universalism is the best basis for judgment. Importantly, and less well known, there is an alternative to both in moral pluralism, which argues that

• all (groups of) people are essentially the same i.e. they are human beings
• they have common (universal) values as a consequence
• all (groups of) people face similar problems in their different ways of life and have to make choices according to the morality of their group (and that this can be observed empirically)
• although there are common values, different groups prioritise values differently and make different choices.

Therefore any evaluation of others’ values/morality has to take into account the local constraints and priorities. Whichever position taken – and I find a pluralist perspective appealing and persuasive – the philosophical writings do not consider if and how person X can adopt or be socialised into two moralities, and how they experience that position if faced by a moral dilemma. There is discussion in social-psychological literature of the experience of the individual who lives in one cultural group, and how they become, through their upbringing, a moral being sharing the morality – and usually conforming with it, but not always – of the group into which they are socialised.

The question I want to ask is: How do people experience morality when they ‘live in two cultures’ and are ‘bicultural’ and how can we theorise that experience?

The help I am looking for is (a) further (auto)biographical experiences and reflections and (b) comments on the theoretical approach one might take.

Contact: [email protected] [https://www.durham.ac.uk/staff/m-s-byram/]

References

Mori, K. (1997) Polite Lies. New York: Fawcett Books.

Paulston, C.B. (1992) Biculturalism: some reflections and speculations. Chap 5 of Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Bilingual Education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Seward, G. H. (1958). Clinical studies in culture conflict. New York: Ronald Press.

Michael (Mike) Byram is Professor Emeritus at Durham University (UK and Guest Research Professor at Sofia University (Bulgaria). He has worked on the education of linguistic minorities, intercultural foreign language teaching and doctoral education.