The eCrozier

I was born in Lancaster, Ohio in 1957. Lancaster is in the Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned most of my prejudices growing up in that region. I learned to look down on Kentuckians because they were obviously inferior to us sophisticates in the Buckeye State. “Kentucky jokes” were a staple of my schoolyard experience. Once, when I was in junior high school, I visited Columbus, Ohio with my father. While my father was in a meeting at the university, I hung out with some kids my age whose parents worked at the university. They made fun of my accent, saying I sounded like a hillbilly. Apparently even with the Ohio River dividing the two states, a kid from Appalachia sounded much the same regardless of which side of the river he lived. So much for my cultural superiority to those hillbillies from Kentucky! As Kris Kristofferson sings: “everybody’s gotta have somebody to look down on, who they can feel better than at any time they please.”

Twenty years ago, the term “cultural humility” was invented for professionals working in healthcare. This stance suggested an openness to people who were culturally different than the doctor or nurse treating them. Rather than taking an approach which assumed either the professional’s cultural superiority or the presumption that the doctor or nurse knew all they needed to know about the patient, it offered a more neutral and curious way to listen and learn about the patient’s life experience. We’d all benefit, not just healthcare professionals, from taking a regular prescribed dose of cultural humility.

Ten years before I was born, Forbes magazine proclaimed my birthplace to be what people thought of when they thought of an “All-American” town. At the time, the Anchor Hocking Glass Company was the largest maker of glass tableware in the world (my sister still has our family’s set) and it was the principle employer in Lancaster. At its height, it employed nearly 5000 people. Today, it employs less than 900. Since the 1980s, Anchor Hocking has been corporately raided numerous times by private equity firms. Author Brian Alexander, who also was born in Lancaster, describes in his book, Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town, the spiritual and communal devastation the recurring corporate raiding has caused.

We can dismiss Lancaster’s current fate as just the natural consequences of capitalism. But there was nothing “natural” about it. It was a “hit job” by those raiders who saw an opportunity to make money. And money is all they “make.” They don’t make beautiful glass tableware. I can’t know what those corporate raiders were thinking when they did what they did, so I don’t know whether they even gave a second thought to the human destruction they were causing. But knowing about the power of human prejudice from the ones I’ve carried myself, it seems likely they simply dismissed those dumb hillbillies who were having their community shattered. I’m not a social psychologist, but I believe humility, both culturally and personally, is a necessary precondition for any sense of shared morality. Humility creates the space for us to listen and learn from people we might classify as inferior or unworthy. It then offers us the possibility of placing ourselves in their shoes and thus follow the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12).

+Scott