Karma, Chameleon

SILVIA: What, angry, Sir Thurio?  Do you change color?
VALENTINE: Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of chameleon.
THURIO: That hath more mind to feed on your blood than live in your air.

--William Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona

In exploring ethical behavior, the next pattern of conflict is the Chameleon.  Specifically, what I call the Chameleon is that behavior that occurs when one is upholding the ethical standards of a surrounding, foreign environment while going against one's own upbringing.  Like the Conformist and the Rebel, the Chameleon is a complicated condition with no easy answers.

A Chameleon can be something as innocent as trying to fit in, or it can be as sinister as using a difference of culture to exploit it.  The Bhopal disaster, for instance, was a direct result of corporate negligence--the company Union Carbide operating in India to exploit cheap labor and substandard safety conditions.

Not all fitting in is bad, as discussed more thoroughly in the posts on the Conformist.  But there is a subtle distinction between operating within one's own background and outside of it.  In the latter, there is an acknowledged, separate community of ethical standards.  You can think of the two ethical systems in terms of a Venn diagram.  In the area of intersection, the Conformist and the Chameleon are one and the same.  Where they diverge is slightly more complex.  The Chameleon is the specific case where one operates outside of one's own background ethics but still within the ethics of a surrounding (but foreign) community.  A good example may be smoking pot in Amsterdam, or Tobias Schneebaum's anthropophage experiences in Keep the River on Your Right.

Like it or not, we carry our cultural ethical upbringing with us.  It is a bias that is difficult to shed.  When we step out of our ethical comfort zones, we do so at a risk.  Sometimes we discover that our own cultural assumptions and biases are incorrect, and that there are other ways of thinking about things that feel "superior."  In other cases, we feel as if there are "backwards" or difficult to understand behaviors, which make us feel that our own culture is "superior."

Though we may want human rights to be universal, there are significant cultural hurdles.  The so-called "prime directive" in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is a futuristic version of Westphalian sovereignty--that which establishes the boundaries of nation states and allows non-interference in other cultures.  And yet, the world of today is linked at the speed of the Internet and globalization.

If we ignore our own cultural values, we can find ourselves in uncomfortable or dangerous situations.  If we project them, we can find ourselves at risk of insulting the culture we are in.  It is a very fine line, based on the value of mutual respect.