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Culture and Personality in the Near Future?
- Mr. Vachaspati V.

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This is continuation of the series that is on ‘Culture and Civilization’. What might be predicted about the relationship between Culture and Personality in the Near Future? Two contemporary conditions may be expected to introduce new complexities into the problem of personality and culture. The first one is very rapid and uneven cultural change where a whole group of people undergoes a change together, voluntarily, the personalities of the individuals, after the change has occurred, show a systematic relationship to their old personalities. They may even speak a different language, engage in a new occupation in a new country and yet undergo relatively little personality change. This was true, for example, of colonies of Indian immigrants who settled in the United States, Canada and other parts of the world, in villages and in rural areas. However, where the continuity of the group and relationship between parents and children is broken, through industrialization or migration, an uneven or almost random quality is introduced into the way in which different personalities will respond to the change. It becomes less possible to predict the behavior of individuals from knowledge of the cultural regularities in their characters. More knowledge of each individual is required before plans can be made by, for example, educators, social workers, or employers. At present our adolescents are increasingly respond to the mass media rather than to behavior models provides by the adults in their own families and communities. Although this provides a very shallow set of models, it makes rapid change possible; but the ability to withstand hardship or endure protected trial and effort does not seem to develop as well under these conditions. This will result in friction in their personalities and that could result in violence in the society. Another factor is that of cultural complexity. The more complex a society is, in terms of class, caste, religion, occupation, etc. the more complicated are the relationships of each personality to the culture of the whole society. If the differences between subgroups are very clear and well known, marked by differences in clothing and manners, the relationships, are not as complicated as in a society like India. India, for example, children grew up as life members of their own caste, and religion, and learned about the behavior of other castes, which would never under any circumstances, be their own behavior. As different parts of the world become more to each other, people born in one part of the world may increasingly expect to live and work in another. New methods of rapidly learning those things about a culture that are normally learned in childhood are being developed. The individual who learns a new culture in adulthood has a different relationship to this learning than does the individual who lives in the same culture all his life or who moves with a group of relatives and neighbors to the city or to a new country. We may expect a new kind of cosmopolitan man to emerge, with new mechanisms for preserving a sense of identity and for integrating the different periods of life or the different segments of life that are spent in close contact with cultures other than his culture of origin.

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