The Culture Code (12 page)

I’ve always had a vision of myself as the way I looked the day I got married. I had porcelain skin and huge eyes and shimmering blond hair. People actually gasped when I walked down the aisle. I was the epitome of the young bride. I always thought I looked that way, even as the decades passed. A couple of years ago, my husband died. When I got home from the funeral, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw a gray lady dressed in black. I couldn’t figure out where the old woman in the mirror came from. I try to avoid looking in mirrors now.

—a sixty-three-year-old woman

I love being young. How can you not love it? You can do anything you want, your entire future is in front of you, guys look at you and like what they see. I plan to stay young for a very long time, and I’ll do whatever it takes to do it. I read some article that said that some day soon scientists will have a vaccine to stop aging. I’ll be the first person in line to get that shot.

—a twenty-year-old woman

In these stories and the hundreds of others like them, people spoke of youth as something tangible, something that could be kept or recaptured: “I have to have the look.” “It might be fake, but it makes me feel better.” “People still don’t call me ‘kid,’ but they will again some day.” “I’ll be the first person in line to get that shot.” They felt they could create the illusion of youth if they listened to youthful music, wore makeup and dyed their hair, or imagined themselves at a certain age rather than looking in the mirror. For Americans, youth isn’t a stage of life, but something you can hide behind, something you can wear instead of your actual age.

The American Culture Code for youth is
MASK
.

There is evidence of the youth-mask connection everywhere in our culture. Plastic surgery literally pulls our faces tight around our skulls, as though we were putting on rubber masks. Botox freezes our facial muscles into a masklike countenance. You can even buy “anti-aging masks” to remove wrinkles and beautify the skin. In fact, since our impression of physical youth is so often related to the face and head (the skin and the hair), one could say that any attempt to look younger is a version of wearing a mask.

Just as a costume mask creates an illusion, so does the mask of youth in our culture. As Barbara Walters homes in on her eightieth birthday, she maintains the appearance of someone decades younger. Is Joan Rivers seventy? Fifty? One hundred? It’s hard to tell through her mask. When we say that Paul Newman looks great at eighty, we’re really saying that he’s done an excellent job of masking his age. We don’t think he looks great because he looks eighty; we think he looks great because he looks considerably younger.

Many other cultures are not nearly as fascinated with youth as we are. Hindu Indians believe there are four distinct stages to one’s life. Youth is the first and least interesting, something to pass through quickly as you gain the tools necessary to live in the world. The next stage, maturity, is when you have children, make money, and achieve success. The third stage is detachment. Here you step back from the world and the “rat race,” choosing instead to read and explore philosophy. In the fourth stage, you become the equivalent of a hermit. One will often find elderly Indians roaming the streets covered in ashes, looking as if they’ve passed on to the afterlife already. In the Hindu Indian culture, a person graduates from one stage to the next, with death being the ultimate graduation. Hindu Indians don’t fear death, and the notion of fighting off aging is ludicrous to them.

The English find youth boring. Young people are inexperienced and prone to mistakes. The English regard young people as children who must be tolerated. Where Americans glorify the vitality and verve of youth, the English glorify the same qualities in their eccentrics. A key tension in England is the one between detachment and eccentricity. While the culture practices detachment, it revels in the other side of the axis. How else to explain the knighting of a man who famously wore a duck suit to work (Sir Elton John), or of another who launched a new product line by shaving his beard and dressing in drag (Sir Richard Branson)?

DRAPING
US IN YOUTH

Marketers operate on Code when they present a product as something that can give consumers a “mask” of youthfulness. Just for Men positions its hair-coloring product as something that “targets” gray hair and masks it with tones approximating one’s natural hair color. The company’s on-Code ads show a man masking his gray in just five minutes and then enjoying a full, youthful life.

With men, hair is the key to youthful appearance. Sometimes this means removing the gray. At other times it means regrowing hair that was once lost. Though bald men from Yul Brynner to Michael Jordan have stood as sex symbols in this culture,
balding
men rarely share that spotlight. Rogaine has done an excellent job of on-Code marketing by selling its product as something that can mask male-pattern baldness by enabling you to grow new hair and therefore appear more youthful.

Hair is part of the mask of youth for women as well, of course, and Pantene markets its shampoo and hair products in an on-Code way. Pantene ads concentrate not on cleanliness, body, or luster, but instead on health—essentially telling consumers that Pantene products keep hair young. The ads speak about strengthening and feeding your hair, treating it like a young child that needs nurturance to grow. Recent ones even tap into the Code for health as movement by saying that Pantene products give hair “swing.” For a middle-aged woman seeking youthful hair, this is a powerful message.

Another effective way to market a youth “mask” is to sell a product as youthful even while your core market is something else. Mazda introduced the Miata as an entry-level sports car for young people. The company continues to position the car that way more than a decade later (its website includes a Miata video game), even though the largest group of owners is over fifty-five years old. Sticking to this strategy is very much on Code and has proven very successful for Mazda. The company appeals to its most active buyers by suggesting that the Miata offers the mask of youth.

The French mime Marcel Marceau does a very funny routine in which he pantomimes putting on a mask of a smiling face. A minute or so into the routine, he attempts to take off the mask and finds that it is stuck. As he struggles and writhes to free himself of the mask, the smile remains plastered to his face. At the end, he slumps, defeated, but his synthetic smile is still there. In many ways, our obsession with youth is like that mask. Artificial treatments such as plastic surgery, Botox, and hair replacement give us the luster of youth, but they come at a high price and are often accompanied by pain and discomfort. Peppy cars and youthful clothing are exciting and wonderful if we really connect with them, but can make us feel like frauds if we employ them only to create the illusion of youth. Understanding the Code allows us to step back to answer some important questions. Do I really want to go through life wearing a mask? What would happen if I took it off? Am I missing something by hanging on to youth rather than embracing and exploring maturity? Since America is a youth culture, the answers to these questions are predictable. The new glasses of the Code allow us to see a different reflection in the mirror, but only for a moment.

AFTER
200
MILLION
YEARS
, IT
KNOWS
A
THING
OR TWO

The Codes for health and youth are powerful examples of our reptilian brains at work. These Codes express themselves this way in our culture because we see them through the prism of our particular survival kits (we will address this further when we talk about biological schemes and cultural schemes in the next chapter). Given the need for our ancestors to build an entire country, we don’t think of health as merely freedom from disease but rather as the ability to accomplish things—to keep moving—and to continue to contribute late in our lives. Since our adolescent culture has no reverence for the elderly, we feel the need to mask our aging and create the illusion of being forever young.

Our cortexes might tell us that aging brings us wisdom. Our limbic systems might suggest that health is a matter of taking a positive outlook and feeling good.

When our reptilian brains speak, however, we have no choice but to listen.

The Codes for Home and Dinner

A
s mentioned earlier in this book, every species is distinguished by the structure of its
DNA
. I call this the biological scheme. In addition, every culture has a cultural scheme that is an extension of the biological scheme. The biological scheme identifies a need, and the cultural scheme interprets it within the parameters of a particular culture. “Isomorphism,” a term borrowed from biology, chemistry, and mathematics, is commonly applied to the continuum between the biological scheme and the cultural scheme.

For example, our human biological scheme dictates that our physical comfort peaks within a certain air temperature range. If the air is too hot, we become lethargic. If it is too cold, we run the risk of illness and, in the extreme, death. To address the heat issue, we developed air conditioning. Each culture, however, regards the use of air conditioning differently, depending on its cultural scheme. Americans consider air conditioning a necessity (virtually every car in America comes equipped with an air-conditioning system), while Europeans consider it a luxury (in the UK, air conditioning is not standard equipment even on a Rolls-Royce). I recall visiting a four-star hotel in Germany a few summers ago. My room was very hot; when I asked the concierge to address the problem, he told me that the hotel didn’t have air conditioning because the weather only got this hot one month a year. This might have been sensible from their perspective, but as an American, I found it uncomfortable. It had an unpleasant impact on my stay and I kept thinking that even a room in an inexpensive motel in the United States would have had a temperature more to my liking. The German hotel’s policy was appropriate for the human biological scheme, but not for my American cultural scheme.

On the other hand, I regularly hear Europeans complain that American stores are too cold in the summer. Again, the conflict lies in the cultural schemes. Americans like to be cool, even extremely cool. Research has shown that the coldest stores in America tend to be the most expensive. Since air conditioning is a necessity, we need
extreme
air conditioning to convey a sense of luxury.

Biological schemes are specific to each species, and are not negotiable. We breathe with our mouths, noses, and lungs rather than with gills. These biological schemes pre-organize the way a Culture Code is created and evolves. They establish the parameters within which a particular culture can survive. A culture that spends some of its time underwater can work. One that spends
all
of its time underwater cannot. As long as a culture acknowledges the limits of biology, however, it is free to roam within the parameters. We all need to eat, but the American culture created fast food while the French created slow food. Every species needs to reproduce itself, but some cultures employ polygamy (one man with several women) while others prefer polyandry (one woman with several men). These are cultural answers to the same biological scheme.

One biological scheme is the need for shelter to protect us from the elements. Our first home is the womb. After that, each culture takes over, adapting to its natural environment (igloos for Eskimos, tents for nomadic Arab tribes, and so on). Once this biological need is met, the cultural scheme may evolve within a particular culture. By looking at the American Culture Codes for home and dinner, we can see where our culture has taken this evolution—how
house
became
home.

NO
PLACE
LIKE
HOME

Americans address the biological scheme when they build their houses: roofs and insulated walls protect us from weather and extremes in temperature,
HVAC
systems keep us cool and warm, kitchens allow us to feed ourselves, and bathrooms provide a place to relieve ourselves. We go far beyond the biological scheme, however, when our houses become our homes.

Home is a tremendously powerful archetype in the American culture. One of our most sacred, most distinctively American rituals—Thanksgiving dinner—is all about coming home. The dinner most often takes place at the residence of the family matriarch; even if she has moved over the years, and even if you yourself never lived in that house, it represents home. When we gather for Thanksgiving dinner, we reconnect with our homes and affirm the importance that home has in our lives.

When our troops go off to war, we offer them support and encouragement, but from the very beginning of the engagement, our goal is to “bring our boys home.” Some of our most enduring and powerful images are of soldiers returning to our shores and into the arms of their loved ones. In fact (as has been reinforced by the recent war in Iraq), our sense is that, regardless of what is accomplished along the way, a war is not truly won until our soldiers come home.

This notion shows up even in our national pastime of baseball. It isn’t coincidental that this American sport includes three bases and a
home
plate. Home is a potent and pervasive image for us, and baseball illustrates that eloquently: the only way to score is to make it home.

The powerful icon of home is pervasive in American pop culture, from commercials for Folger’s coffee to Hallmark greeting cards to songs that promise our return to our lovers. Perhaps no piece of contemporary entertainment better captured the resonance of this icon, however, than the Ron Howard movie
Apollo 13
. If this was a movie about any other space mission (let alone a space mission that failed in all of its initial objectives), the moviegoing public would have shrugged. After all, we’d long since expressed our boredom with the space program and initiatives to return to the moon, live in orbit, or send shuttles to and from a space station.
Apollo 13
was a huge blockbuster, however, because it was about something else entirely, something much closer to our hearts: bringing people home.