Exiting a major international airport in India is a sudden, multi-sensory body shock like no other I have ever experienced. Not only are you probably jet lagged ( if you came from Europe or the Americas), but you now have taxi drivers, porters, hotel scouts, and food vendors calling out at you from a dozen directions. Am I really this important? No, pale-skinned person, but your naive money is VIP! Hot, humid air hits your lungs as soon as a mash-up of smells that public health standards would make impossible in Europe and much of the U.S. (but not Hell’s Kitchen). Whoa! Your brain is about to explode with sensory overwhelm. If Flamin’ Hot Cheetos were a place, it would be Mumbai International Airport arrivals - just beyond the doors.
India’s religious diversity also strikes the keen observer who spends longer wandering independently (highly NOT recommended) or with local contacts (highly recommended). “The land of 33 million gods” may be a colonial British putdown of Indian polytheism that refuses to die,1 but figuratively, it conveys the impressive diversity of divine forms that Indians embrace in their lives. There are so many different sites of routine worship (from trees with paint and ribbons to hand-carved stone statues of lineage deities to thousand-year-old Brahmin temples financially overseen by state governments), names for the same root divinity, lineage deities galore, etc.
I spent three years as a researcher in the country. During this time, I found the diversity of religious infrastructure impressive. Still, the average level of individual religiosity is not much more than you’ll find among evangelical Christian Americans (but more than post-grad educated punks like me).
Other sources of modern social diversity (not marrying, women marrying in their 30s, not having kids at all as a choice, living together before marriage, etc.) are limited to tiny social worlds in elite cities and non-existent in most of the country.2
The Land of 33 Million Lifestyles
America offers a very different kind of social diversity as its modern anchor - one born of greater socio-economic autonomy afforded its residents, especially American women. Although we do have a large diversity of ethnic origins, I can attest, as a market researcher, that ethnic identity alone explains very little about everyday behavior for most American adults (two exceptions would be African Americans in the South and undocumented immigrants).3 Our urban consumer scapes generally foment rapid assimilation into a world of 33 million lifestyles for all but the most communally offset groups (e.g., the Amish).
Here, I use “lifestyle” as a broad concept marking the social outlook and values shared by those who make identical choices across multiple-choice variables:
household composition
women employed outside the home or not
acceptance of divorce as an option
loyalty to patriarchal gender roles, proportion of diet that is natural/organic, marriage timing, transportation expenses (including the kind of car), hours spent on leisure
tightness of extended family ties (cousins, nephews, aunts, uncles)
whether or not to have children
pre-marital cohabitation
and on and on.4
Each lifestyle is a bewildering combination of decisions across dozens and dozens of variables, many of which were not variable at all in the early 20th century. We live in such perpetual rapture before the idol of ‘the near future’ that we have forgotten how recent all this social autonomy is in America (and major cities worldwide). The “lifestyle” is a fragile outcome of all these interconnected choices, and needless to say, it quickly fragments and eviscerates strict ethnic norms and traditions like muriatic acid attacking an algae bloom in a swimming pool. The more divided we are, the more a capitalistic marketing ecosystem can anchor us in an ever-unfolding future of shallow trends.
In my new book, I use a thought experiment in Chapter One to make this lifestyle concept very concrete. It relies on combinatorial math (yes, this is a thing) to make the point that lifestyle diversity for adults grew exponentially in the first two-thirds of the 20th century and continues to grow as more and more variations in life choice appear (e.g., polyamory, ‘swinging,’ open transgenderism, IVF-based pregnancy avoidance, voluntary homesteading, religious fundamentalism, etc.). As variations appear, unique combinations of lifestyle choices proliferate quickly. The variations emerging today seem more nano (e.g., polyamory) than macro (e.g., marriage is optional).
The consequence is that we occupy smaller and smaller tribes where we can see most or all of our lifestyle choices are aligned enough to have easy, breezy small talk and chit chat, to make friends easily, not freak out the relatives, etc.
And, it is easier than ever to find ourselves in a social situation where we are talking to someone whose macro choices differ wildly from our own, how to navigate a world where you can not make any assumptions at all without getting in conversational trouble.
I’m a proponent of moderate social autonomy. Still, I am apprehensive that one growing reaction to all this lifestyle diversity is that Americans will retreat socially more and more into tiny little myopic, intolerant lifestyle tribes.
This may have already happened.
The Lifestyle Superiority Complex Is Our Achilles Heel
Why do extreme lifestyle tribalism and social retreat from the commons bother me?
Social retreat keeps local communities from strengthening and prevents neighbors from getting to know each other well. That’s one thing. However, the more significant issue relates to an older ideological tradition in America that is still with us: our evangelical approach to our lifestyles. Isn’t my lifestyle so fabulous? Look at me!
There is a long tradition in Christian America of seeing lifestyle choice as a moral battle. Our near-total destruction of native peoples resulted from this insane belief in lifestyle hierarchy. Indian boarding schools were violent lifestyle training programs, not just sites of racial conflict. Americans today still like to compare and contrast various lifestyle decisions in a sort of moral contest. Even something as simple as deciding NOT to have children (pretty common these days) is a lightning rod topic you don’t want to bring up at an office party. Even statistically invisible practices like polyamory or transgender surgery cause so much moral panic because it causes millions to wonder where they fit in a moral hierarchy of lifestyle choices. Once a formerly locked choice variable gets unlocked by anyone, there is a nervous reaction in America.
Americans are notorious for trying to persuade others of the superiority of this or that lifestyle choice. God, it’s so annoying. Americans love to show off big-ticket purchases like homes and home renovations as if every choice was righteously thoughtful. Even in jest, we do this. Did you see my $500 Vitamix blender for my morning smoothies? Isn’t this soooooooo admirable….so virtuous a choice?
I crudely peg the historical origin of this annoying attitude to an ironic source: evangelical Christianity and the global missionary activity that it spawned in the 19th century. This large swath of the 19th-century population made the ‘lifestyle superiority complex’ a very modern social phenomenon. In the conservative Christian view, lifestyle change should only occur because we’re purging some unChristian behaviors we’ve put up with for too long. Evangelical Christians, for example, have had to move beyond the raging husband patriarch who gets his way and is excused for his sporadic violence. One wonders why it took so long for this nonviolent behavior standard to influence men in the Church. The Jesus of the synoptic gospels, at least, only commits one act of physical violence during his entire ministry - against a table (most famous punk move ever). Selective reading, I fear.
Before the 21st century, this kind of lifestyle chest-beating was not normative in advanced civilizations. Let me share a story from my time in Tamil Nadu in the late 1990s to make my point.
When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, I was in a Tamil language training program in Madurai, led by two PhD-wielding Tamil women, one of whom was very conservative (but also very nice). We read passages from a Tamil newspaper each day to work on our reading fluency.
Our very, very sexually naive, though married, Tamil teacher stumbled right into the page one article on Bill Clinton’s sexual affair in the White House (and his lying about it). She thought we would appreciate a piece on America!
Whoops!
Tamil media is heavily censored to a G-rating standard. You can not print phrases like “blow job” or even “oral sex,” or at least not back then in vernacular papers. Things got awkward when she read out loud an unbelievably convoluted Tamil euphemism for oral sex…and stared at us with a confused look on her face. She had no idea what it was, I fear.
Oh shit, I thought. Bill! Look what you’ve done to stress us out in this class, five thousand miles away!
My classmate and I skipped the oral sex thing and clarified in English that this was a sex scandal.
“Oh,” she replied in Tamil, “why is this news?”
This led to a much more interesting conversation than why Monica, the intern, was giving blow jobs to our President.
Our very conservative teacher (so conservative she did not even know the Tamil euphemism for a blow job) proceeded to explain to us some basic tenets of the Indian social order, of which I already had caught whispers. India has incredible lifestyle diversity in terms of caste and family traditions and rituals - all weighted heavily toward a traditional structuring of the labor economy in localized regions. The Indian solution to all this social diversity is extreme tolerance. Tolerance is very different from moral approval. India is a perfect laboratory to see this distinction at work.
Brahmins do not run around recruiting more to the fold, for example. That’s not a thing in any traditional jati. The country is the opposite of evangelical. Your group does its thing. Mine does ours. Let it be. I may look down on you, but I won’t say anything. India mastered the concept of a socially diverse (i.e., caste-diverse) urban civilization where you do not mess with other groups’ customs. You may judge them harshly in private, but you do not interfere…at all. It is none of your business if the middling castes enjoy prostitution services or bigamy. You do not try to outlaw prostitution or bigamy.
There’s plenty of group conflict in India, but it is not over which one has the superior way of life. That kind of debate is very American. And tragic.
My limited research suggests the British misreading originates from a bad translation of a Sanskrit word that means ‘form’ but also is used in modern Marathi to mean ‘10,000,000.’ Great explanation here from an educated devotee - https://hinduism1.quora.com/Why-are-there-33-million-gods-in-Hindu-religion?top_ans=15985184
In 2017, the average age of first marriage for Indian women was 23, a number America has not seen since 1980. Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/from-21-to-33-years-how-average-marriage-age-varies-across-countries/photostory/61559402.cms?picid=61559465
Ethnicity correlates a lot to one’s favorite food categories, and this is why smart grocery chains spend a lot of time adjusting their mix to the local ethnic make-up of each store’s shopper base. It’s about ensuring good traffic into the store. Ethnicity does correlate loosely to a rough caste system of occupation, where the defining characteristic is the steering of African Americans, undocumented immigrants, and Native Americans into specific, low-wage, and often physically degrading occupations to this day. See Isabel Wilkerson’s important book on the global phenomenon of degraded occupational groupings often aligned to specific kinship identities (caste, ethnicity, etc.)
One of the details not featured in my book’s thought experiment is the fragmentation of social networks due to professional occupations. This is largely a problem among the educated elite, which is why I kept it out of my book. The problem is less about social connectedness than it is about the social myopia of so many professional elite tribes. Professions tend to over-define one’s social networks if you have one. It is like an elitist caste hierarchy superimposed on a mash-up of generic lifestyle variations made possible by an individualistic society that promotes freedom of life choice.
Transgender surgery (or at least all the steps leading up to it) is not statistically invisible in my particular bubble/demographic: mid/high socioeconomic parents of teens and college students). I know offhand 6 families struggling with this, and sadly they are not outliers.
Otherwise this article was interesting, in espousing a lack of shame in a multicultural society. I know we both read Rob Henderson, and I think he has made a very good case/successfully threaded the needle in saying that people should share the social norms and judgements that lead to successfully raising children.