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Family Feud · Letter to America

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: As clickbait goes, it was pretty impressive algorithmic fishing.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: My wife sent me an Instagram post about what gets lost in translation in intercultural relationships.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I wondered if there might be some embedded message, but she appeared to be genuinely curious to see what light this psychologist might shed on us.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: We read the post aloud and unpacked it as we went, more amused than studious.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: In short, the way your family communicates is often driven by its culture.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like many things we grow up with, from the way safety feels to the taste of tap water, these things feel normal and universal.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: That is, until we meet some really cute, very well-dressed person in an intro to advertising class and fall in love.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: We paused and discussed things that resonated and those that didn't land.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: The author wrote that in American culture, the self is an independent unit, and that in Arab cultures, the self is embedded within relationships.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Family isn't separate from the self.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: We nodded along, smiling and amused at the sense of being seen and heard by a stranger across continents and decades.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: But then I asked Mimi if she remembered how struck we had been when we met each other's families, the supposedly different cultures and even generations they came from, the way neither of our families could separate at a doorway, goodbyes lasting so long that they had to reset and repeat.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: A hug turning into hugs, and family hugs.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mimi's family was similarly deeply enmeshed and affectionate, waspy relatives on both sides, always in touch, always involved, always together.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: It got complicated, not because the observations were wrong, but because we sensed a critical difference in context, perhaps because of the age difference between us and the writer.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: The America we grew up in and the one she's describing today seem to have evolved in dramatically different directions in just a few decades.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: My grandparents in Minnesota and Mimes in Ohio and New Jersey were products of a very different time that shaped a very different American culture.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: We noted how much our waspy relatives from the Midwest sounded like the authors from the Middle East.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, we were suddenly struck by how culturally similar my Turkish grandmother, my mother-in-law, and strangely even my dad were to each other, and how amazingly my uncles from Turkey and Minneapolis got on with my father and brother-in-law in New York.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: We kept lazily referring to traits and relatives as waspi or Middle Eastern, and tried to understand how these seemingly different and often contradictory cultures could have so much in common.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why do white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, like so many of our relatives, seem to jibe so easily with our Mediterranean ones?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Until I sat down to work on this letter, I wasn't even considering that a recent day trip we made for my dad's birthday might hold the key to understanding.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: We went to Nicaea, a couple of hours from Istanbul, in modern-day Iznik, Turkey.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: We stood at the place where roughly 1700 years ago, bishops from across the Christian world gathered under Constantine and agreed on a shared statement of Christian belief.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Living in the Middle East, you routinely find yourself in the presence of history like this.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: The seven churches of Revelation, the traditional site of Mary's final home, Antioch, where the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: These are all places in modern Turkey.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: From our terrace in Bodrum we can see the walls of the Crusader castle built by the Knights of St.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: John, partly with stones from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassus.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: After the Ottomans took the castle in 1523, its chapel was converted into a mosque.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: The West has deep roots in the East.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Greek, Roman, British, and American civilizations reach back across oceans and seas to this same soil.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Across three Abrahamic traditions, the scriptural lineages overlap again and again.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: These traditions share an extraordinary amount of geography, ancestry, prophecy, and narrative.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yet even today, their differences remain consequential enough to shape identity, politics, and conflict thousands of years later.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Freud called this the narcissism of small differences, so much in common that the differences get exaggerated and emphasized to create division, like the differences between relatives that make Thanksgivings awkward, not like the differences between strangers from countries half a world apart.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: Sound familiar?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: On Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, billions of people read and reflect on scriptures filled with stories set in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, along the Jordan, in Egypt, and Babylon.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Some live across the street from each other on islands in the Nile or the Hudson.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: The cultural ties get tangled where the stories diverge and how they conclude.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: For example, Pugh's 2022 survey found that 47% of American Christians said they believed we were living in the end times.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: Among evangelical Protestants, it was 63%.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: Seen through an end times lens, events in the Middle East can take on an urgency beyond shared traditions and attachments to the same sacred lands.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Family ties fray when inheritance comes to the forefront.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: The U.S.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Secretary of Defense has tattoos of a Jerusalem cross and the words Deus vult, God wills it, a phrase historically associated with the Crusades.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, the U.S.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ambassador to Israel has explicitly invoked the book of Genesis when discussing Israel's biblical claim to the land.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly this same historical shared soil becomes a present-day battleground.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Context, as they say, is king.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: The psychologist's post makes an interesting observation about transcultural families.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: She talks about how Arab culture is high context, meaning tone, silence, gesture, and relational history carry meaning.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: American culture, by contrast, she says, is low context.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning is expected to be explicit and direct.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: As she says, when these two systems share a life, silence gets misread, indirectness gets experienced as dishonesty, and directness lands as aggression.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Neither is communicating poorly.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: They are communicating in entirely different frequencies.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: That would explain a lot.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is Handalin from Zekiriak, Zachariah's village, named for a local Muslim holy man named Zekiriya, the Turkish form of Zachariah, father of John the Baptist.