By Geoffrey Botkin, posted on 1 December, 2010

As I write this, my son Isaac is entering Egyptian air space. With three adventurous friends, he is about to begin a unique mission: to find, and then articulate, the ideas responsible for the survival of Egypt, the oldest continuous culture in the world.

When the team touches down in Cairo, all four will be immediately confronted with a tangle of local and global issues: Turmoil and violence on urban streets. Tense international relations. Age-old poverty. Smog. Age-old bureaucracy. Noise. And the uniquely Egyptian culture of age-old tedium.

Is it possible to derive meaning from this cultural mess? Yes. And it is important to be able to do so. Not just in Egypt, but in every culture.^[1] Men have duties to build stable and civil societies.^[2]

But they cannot do this if they are swept along blindly by cultural influences they fail to notice or understand. Culture will sustain civilization or destroy it. Men must not fall victim to the lie “culture is neutral.”

This morning’s online paper in Cairo, reporting on election-day apathy, included an insightful comment from a European reader. “Egyptians,” he observes, “are in a coma.”

Stop for a moment and look at this offhand statement. The writer is predicting that Egypt will never learn from past mistakes and never change for the better because of nation-wide conditions of cultural blindness.

This interpretation is a rather accurate five-word summary of a four-thousand-year-old culture. It is astute because it addresses the mental alertness of the Egyptian people. The writer sees a monotonous unconsciousness in the mind of the Egyptian, which has become a lethal cultural attribute. Are today’s Egyptians comatose? Well, take a close cultural look and see what you see.

How to see culture

People who are mentally unconscious cannot perceive what’s happening in the world around them. This cultural blindness causes men to stumble into slavery, or perhaps to surrender their collective future. Blind people are easily taken advantage of, and blind nations can become slave cultures or, even worse, comatose cultures. There is never cultural neutrality, and never an inconsequential idea.

Before Christians can be cultural leaders, they must be astute interpreters of the ideas that drive every expression of a culture. Cultural leaders must then maintain the ability to constantly interpret the world around them. This is one reason the team is broadcasting their adventure here, and inviting your participation. You may be able to offer the team some insights as you notice cultural traits they do not see.

Identifying the heart of a culture

There is one, main operative question the team will be asking in order to find the cultural heart of Egypt. It’s a very critical question.

Two highly observant Frenchmen discovered the importance of this question in the 1830s. Like the team landing in Egypt, these two world travelers were also young, in their twenties, eager to explore. They set off on separate expeditions to interpret the culture of foreign nations. One journeyed east to Russia. The other sailed west, to the United States of America.^[3]

Their destinations could not have been more different. America was reveling in new-found, hard-fought liberty. Russia was being enculturated with the dark habits of despotism.^[4] But both travelers hit the ground with their eyes open and their minds on high alert. Their findings are considered two of the greatest works of cultural analysis ever written.^[5]

As Astolphe Custine crossed the border into Russia, he immediately saw cultural clues in the mentality of the Russian people. He first noticed^[6] a strict commonality of thought, being directed from a centralized source. Custine immediately noticed something disturbing about the border officials. "Each of them discharges his duty,” observed Custine, “with a pedantry, a rigour, an air of importance uniquely designed to give prominence to the most obscure employment. He does not permit himself to say so, but you can see him thinking approximately this: 'Make way for me, I am one of the members of the great machine of the State.'"

Custine discerned that these border officials had been deprived of all true discretion by the state, and were deeply fearful themselves of state power, which ruled everything. Custine described them with chilling accuracy, as "[robots] inconvenienced with a soul."

Within hours of exposure to the behavior of Russian officialdom, he began to see penetratingly into the tragedy of a developing slave-state culture. The state ruled everything because the minds of men were permitting it.^[7] Men were afraid of the machine of the bureaucracy. Men and women were willing to be deceived and even pretend to be deceived to please political masters. They were willing to deny the yearning of their souls for honesty and freedom, in order to be compliant and approved tools of a secure social order. They were willing to align their thoughts and beliefs with the requirements of an unseen sovereign, the Czar.^[8] They were willing to adopt a common faith that was blind to everything but the required rituals of Russia’s new fundamentalist secularism. It was this common faith that was shaping the culture of a new slave state, Russia.

Custine could see what this self-deception was doing, not only to the minds of the people, but to their souls. The need always to lie and always to avoid the truth stripped everyone of what Custine called "the two greatest gifts of God—the soul and the speech which communicates it." People became hypocritical, cunning, mistrustful, cynical, silent, cruel, and indifferent to the fate of others as a result of the destruction of their own souls.^[9]

Five thousand miles away in young America, 25-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville had observed a different cultural experiment that was influencing the souls of a nation. “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds,” he observed, “that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”

Many things amazed Tocqueville about the American mind, and what it was yielding. He was beholding fruits of liberty which philosophers had only imagined. Economic prosperity was explosive. Families were healthy and safe. Women were a happy and integral part of community life. Crime was minimal, and clear definitions of justice were held in unison, from village to village, state to state. There was a unity based on ethics, not the coerced, false egalitarianism of Russia.

This common faith and common ethical standard^[10] Tocqueville traced to the commands of a common Sovereign, the God of the Bible. “Liberty cannot be established without morality,” he wrote, “nor morality without faith.”

Dr. Anthony Daniels, a world traveler and student of both Tocqueville and Custine, summarizes Tocqueville’s economic analysis: “[American] men became honest when they had to deal with one another on the basis of legal equality, rather than sly, underhanded, and dissimulating, as [men are] under despotism. When a man's reputation depended more upon his activity than upon his position in a social hierarchy, conferred at birth, as in Russia, he was inclined to virtue without any obvious external compulsion. In addition, the comparative absence of governmental interference in his life rendered him energetic, enterprising, and thoughtful in pursuit of his own economic interests.”^[11]

The cultures of America and Russia were both built on theology and faith. Each culture willingly submitted itself to a sovereign deity as the force that shaped its culture. America’s God was the King of Kings, Jesus Christ. The head of Russia’s theocracy was the man-centered state, overseen by a King/Czar/Emperor who claimed sovereign authority to rule with absolute power. This Czar, Nicholas I, created and enforced his own arbitrary law, and also a false cultural reality at the expense of all truthful objectivity. To maintain the lie of his unreal system, he made war against the God of all truth.

In Egypt, a similar, tyrannical, bureaucratic slave-state was established circa 2200 BC, and perfected with such managerial sophistication that the Egyptian people submitted without question for millennia. Today certain details of Egypt’s autocratic order are different, but there were cultural patterns of faith, belief and thinking that became part of the Egyptian mind, which is the basis of the Egyptian culture. Egyptians are still confined to a cultural way of thinking that is comfortable with strong-state order, political correctness, and personal irresponsibility.

The heart of any culture can be discerned by asking the right analytical questions. The most critical is this: What sovereign authority shapes the minds that uphold the culture and express the culture? This will reveal the faith of the people and point to the god that stands at the heart of that culture’s religion. Every culture is inherently religious. All culture is nothing more, and nothing less, than “religion externalized.”^[12]