Culture
Syrians value strong family ties. Unlike young Americans, young Syrians find leaving their family unnecessary to set up their independence; the reason being, is that Syrian society just like Southwest Asia, North Africa and the wider Eastern world, places great emphasis on the group rather than the individual. In the West the individual is key and the group is secondary. Respect and social status are important in Syrian societies. Men are respected for their financial success or their honesty and sincerity. Syrians are characterized by their magnanimity and graciousness, ethics which are integral to Syrian life." However, much of the Syrian traditions have diminished with time, mainly due to the fast pace of life in America which encourages individual independence.
Read more about this topic: Syrian American
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the best use to put a fine person to is to drown him to save his board.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)