What a Cup of Yogurt Can Teach Us About Religious Culture

Right-wing Christians are eager to make the same mistake that ended Islam's golden age

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

As a young mom without much money, I made everything from scratch — even yogurt. I did a lot of deep thinking while my hands stirred milk, kneaded bread or rolled out noodles.

You can easily turn milk into whatever you want if you expose it to a bit of culture. A dollop of plain yogurt will, under the right conditions, turn an entire gallon of milk into yogurt. But stir in a scoop of sour cream instead, and the whole gallon turns into sour cream. It’s surprising what a big change a little bit of culture can make, and how quickly it can happen.

I don’t know if everyone else already noticed the word “culture” works just as well for human societies as it does for dairy products. But it does, because the same process is at work: Exposure to a culture profoundly and permanently changes your nature, whether you’re a human being or a cup of milk.

Once you start this process, you can go on practically forever if you want. I used to save a bit of yogurt from each batch and use it to transform the next generation of milk into yogurt. It only took a little.

The right culture can save us, but the wrong culture can doom us

You’ve probably found a forgotten cup of milk left sitting out somewhere, especially if you have kids. The contents were disgusting, right?

The wrong culture — say, some bad microbe that happened to float through the air and land on the forgotten cup of milk — can turn the whole thing into a mess.

However, once or twice I found a sippy cup of milk that had turned into a creditable cup of yogurt all by itself, judging by appearance and smell. I never tasted those natural science experiments, but I’m sure something like this helped early humans discover fermentation.

If you know what you’re doing, you can add some culture to milk and turn it into something that will keep well for a while (yogurt, sour cream, kefir, quark, etc.) or even for years (hard cheeses).

Our ancestors didn’t understand the science behind it, but they did know there was a right way and a wrong way to preserve milk. And they learned that if they added the wrong element, things could go disastrously wrong.

It’s not just dairy

One bad element can ruin human cultures, too. Hitler is the obvious example. Because he came to power, some 75 million people died worldwide. We treat that like an accident of history, but not one of those deaths was inevitable. Many people at the time recognized the danger Hitler posed, but not enough people listened to their warnings. They were ignored or silenced.

The same harmful elements are at work now.

Human nature isn’t what you think it is

A lot of things that you probably think are just human nature are, in fact, only true of your particular culture. Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous explains how WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic — people think our values and culture are universal human values but are not.

I’d recommend any book written by Jared Diamond or Joseph Henrich. (Photo by Michelle Teheux)

The medieval Catholic Church and its rules shaped Western civilization in ways we don’t even recognize, and this is true even if you are not Catholic. If you’re an American or Western European, you have been cultured by Catholicism. What’s more, you’re passing this culture down to the next generation without even knowing it.

Here’s one example

You wouldn’t think some religious decrees against incest could change the world — virtually every known society has had incest taboos, after all — but the early church took this rather far. It handed down decrees that forbade marriage up to sixth cousins, tabooing marriage between those “who shared one or more of their 128 great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.” (P. 166, The WEIRDest People in the World.)

Changed marriage rules weakened kinship-based collectivist power structures that had been the norm. If your kin group has less power over you, you therefore have much greater individual choice. You will be more likely to move (because you may have to really look to find somebody you aren’t even distantly related to!) and you and those around you will begin creating all kinds of new associations to replace the kin-based ones you’d otherwise have depended on. Those new associations included guilds and universities. (Ibid, 191.)

Who would have guessed that stricter marriage rules could lead to the creation of universities? Or that they would shift us from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture?

Henrich shows us that cultures differ from each other in ways it’s hard to understand. We take it for granted that everyone thinks the way we do, which is why we can’t understand how people from other traditions could possibly argue about matters we think are obvious.

Should a young person choose their own marriage partner or should the family elders dictate an arrangement to benefit the entire extended family? Your answer will suggest whether you grew up in an individualistic or collectivist culture.

Westerners will think this is a no-brainer: Naturally, people should marry whatever person they believe they’ll be happiest with.

Non-Westerners may also think the answer is obvious: Your marriage will affect your entire extended family in profound ways, so anyone who runs off to marry someone unsuitable is doing real harm to the rest of the family. Now your siblings and dozens of distant cousins may be unable to make good marriages. How could you do such a thing to them?

We start learning before birth

A human infant’s cultural download begins in the womb. The fetus hears his or her mother’s language and can even taste the flavors of her diet. If a pregnant woman has a particularly spicy dinner before going into labor, you can sometimes detect the scent of her dinner in her amniotic fluid! Breastfed babies learn to like the spices of their culture’s diets by tasting them through the milk. They particularly seem to enjoy garlic-flavored breastmilk.

Most parents purposely teach their babies numbers, letters and colors. But they are learning far more than the things we are teaching them on purpose.

The Henrich book was a revelation to me. If we anthropomorphize milk, you can imagine milk exposed to the yogurt culture and milk exposed to the buttermilk culture having a heated disagreement about the nature of milk, each being absolutely convinced of their own version of reality. Neither would understand that had they been exposed to a different culture, their most deeply cherished beliefs would have been different — maybe even diametrically opposed.

The same people who are willing to die for certain ideas would probably be willing to die for the opposite idea had they been raised accordingly.

Kurt Vonnegut got it

Vonnegut was one of the few survivors of the Allies’ horrific and shameful 1945 firebombing of Dresden. He lived only because the Germans had captured him and other POWs and placed them in a cave used as a slaughterhouse. If you’re a Vonnegut fan, you know exactly which slaughterhouse he was in, too: Slaughterhouse-Five.

He fought, of course, on the American side. But he said he supposed that had he been born in Germany, he would have fought for the Germans and thought himself entirely in the right. We all like to think we would be an exception, but Vonnegut understood humans pretty well. (I’m a big fan, which is why my book, The Trailer Park Rules, has plenty of Vonnegut-related Easter eggs.)

A lot of Americans honestly think our culture is the standard

Other cultures and societies are mere curiosities to such people. They measure all accomplishments according to U.S. standards. The U.S., unsurprisingly, is best at meeting U.S. standards. What is wrong, some Americans wonder, with all the other countries that don’t even try to be more like Americans? Do they not realize the U.S. is the best in every possible way?

Try to tell such a person of the possible advantages of looking at the world in other ways and they scoff. It is crystal clear to them that their way is the only good way.

Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? examines several of them and shows that each excels at some things but not others. One society might do a stellar job of teaching children, dealing with troublemakers and settling disputes but a poor job of caring for their elderly, while a different society may have worked out ways to provide very compassionate care for their elders but not their children. No society is perfect.

Yet many Americans believe everybody in the world should immediately adopt American or at least Western values, because our ways are all superior, we think. The proof, we assume, is in our rich, industrialized, comfortable lifestyle. Can even one tribe in the Amazon rainforest boast as much technology and innovation as we have produced? No? Well, that settles it. Their way of life must be inferior to ours.

This sort of thinking bolsters racist beliefs. Why isn’t every country a miniature U.S.? Is it because other people are inherently less intelligent than a white American, or is it that their culture holds them back?

Neither of those assumptions is true

The real reason the U.S. and other rich countries are doing so well has little to do with our “superior” ideas or intelligence and much to do with things like what crops and animals were native to our ancestors’ lands. (Read Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs and Steel for an in-depth examination.)

Australia stayed in the stone age until Europeans came along not because of any inferiority of their intelligence or cultures, but because their continent didn’t contain any animals or grains that could be domesticated. Eventually, Europeans introduced sheep, cattle, wheat, etc.

If a curious alien had dropped 10,000 white European Christians with decent (for the time) agricultural knowledge into Australia in, say, 1600 without anything but the clothes on their backs, and then had checked up on them a year later, the alien would have found no trace of them. Neither their race, education, religion, skills nor culture would have kept them alive.

If, however, the Europeans had been able to bring with them herds of sheep, sacks of wheat and key tools, they’d have had a fighting chance. But only a chance.

History contains many examples of smart people with advanced information and plenty of tools failing to survive when stranded in an unfamiliar environment. But people whose culture developed in that environment have worked out what it takes to thrive there. (Henrich has a book that details this, too: The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.)

And if that same mischievous alien had dropped some Australian hunter-gatherers into an unsettled part of Europe at some point in the very distant past, they’d likely have developed agriculture, cities, writing and all the other things that we call civilization at about the same rate as the European barbarians did so. Whatever deep beliefs these people had about religion, marriage, art, social taboos and everything would have been passed down in some form.

It’s not inconceivable that this group might have become dominant over Western culture and even disdained our backwardness for one reason or another.

It blew my mind the first time I realized that the richest and most developed cultures on this planet are not on top because they are superior; they are on top for reasons that a scholar could trace back to their culture’s roots dating back to thousands of years ago.And of course, if my imaginary aliens had a penchant for intergalactic anthropology, they might question how successful a culture is if it can’t eradicate poverty or has high rates of suicide.

Still, we so believe in our superiority that we think we’re doing the rest of the world a favor by trying to force them to be more like us.

We do exactly the same thing on an individual level, frankly. We assume all wealthy people are intelligent and have earned their place at the top of the heap, even if they inherited or lucked into their situation.

Exploitation plays a role, too

Diamond’s book is called Guns, Germs and Steel, not Grains, Domesticated Animals and Religion for a reason. The societies that fell to the conquistadors were fairly advanced but their warriors were no match for well-armed men on horseback. The conquistadors were able to take everything from them and nearly wipe them out.

It’s impossible to imagine what the world would look like today if the Incans, Aztecs and Mayans had possessed superior weaponry and wiped out the invaders.

And what if the Arab world had continued to lead us in science? At one time, that looked likely. The Islamic world was full of scholars and knowledge until one sect decided that religion should trump science.

And now, more than a thousand years later, the Islamic world is still controlled by the anti-rationalists.

Isn’t it ironic that American right-wing Christians are today strangely eager to follow that tragic example? They are absolutely positive that their ultra-conservative white Christian culture is superior to any other. Should they manage to get their way, they could utterly destroy Western civilization.

If we could go back in time, could we convince the conquistadors not to destroy the New World cultures? Could we convince ancient Islamist leaders not to turn away from science? Could we convince 1930s Germans not to put Hitler in power? Can we convince Americans not to vote for Trump?

Perhaps some future culture — or the descendants of that curious alien — will update this piece in a thousand years.

About Michelle Teheux

I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here or on Medium. My new book is The Trailer Park Rules.

A version of this piece ran on Medium on July 10, 2024.