Restoring Our Understanding of Culture
On April 6 of 2023, I launched this Substack page. A former educator who was in the system both public and private schools, I used the protests by parents in 2021 to provide the solutions that will bring the responsibility to educate our young back home. In that post I wrote:
The awakening of parents about this most important humanizing and socializing tool, the education of our people can now be harnessed to replace how we learn by reawakening who we are in reality and replacing the fake learning that teaches what some imagine we are. biological anthropologists know and prehistoric societies have manifested successful adaptation, cooperation and development way before experiments with complex societies and advanced technologies. Our prehistoric ancestors accomplished things that we have forgotten and in terms of the current call for sustainability were knowledgeable enough not only to recognize the limits we have as humans, but our responsibilities to our living environments.
I have come to realize that humankind in the 21st century has lost entirely a consciousness of the role and function of culture. To become conscious, it will first require our ability to define it. More and more people are aware of there being a culture war, but without being able to return to its origins and purposes , as well as set the rules of engagement, it is a war we cannot win.
Culture is Unconscious By Design
Unlike anything the humans need to learn for survival, culture which is the unique way that our species has adapted must operate below consciousness at the level of the subconscious. So each specific local culture has specific beliefs and behaviors that respond automatically. We can, and I assert we must relearn what culture is on the general and scientific level, since its meaning has been wildly altered over centuries.
No doubt six centuries of Western expansion and colonialism which had no respect for local cultures , or even a basic understanding its central role in human adaptation, had weakened the premier innate tool of our species to address the environment a tool that sustained them and was their reason for being. Even during those Cold War years, the Soviet Union which was made up so many distinct and different cultures , each a response to very different ecologies, was forcing their young to speak Russian and be re-educated to be proper and contributing Soviet citizens.
This view by ruling elites and managers resulted in a delegating of insignificance to the surviving indigenous cultures. Over centuries the meaning of the term culture had come to be understood by its artifacts. Take the common and accepted definition today.
culture
noun
a : the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a
racial, religious, or social group
also : the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as
diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time
b: the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior
that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting
knowledge to succeeding generations
With this passing as the meaning of the term culture you end up with a planet full of people who view culture as something ordinary, relative, non-essential and most importantly customs and practices relegated to the past. In truth, culture is the complete opposite.
Culture Properly Defined
Before I illustrate how beliefs have a biological basis and play a critical role in human adaptation, pulling from today’s accepted meaning of culture, and knowing that humans are “programmed to learn”, I will focus on two commonly accepted aspects of culture. First all cultures are integrated systems of behavior. Because all species except for humans have DNA to program all behaviors, and humas have culture, how is it possible that culture is not biologically responsible for human behaviors? The more you look at human culture through the lense of biology, consider how quickly humans can change behaviors as compared with non-human species. That gives us by nature of being human a distinct advantage should our environment change quickly. But the Lord also taketh away. With no imprinting and a great amount of choice, the behaviors could be the wrong ones and like that, your out of business.
The second facet of culture in today’s accepted definition is “the characteristic features of everyday existence”. This is yet another important clue as to the biological basis for culture in that it is operating full time addressing species-specific needs. The culture as things view would emphasize the different clothing, architecture or, crafts. The human-specific need as the basis for these is the need to belong to the group and be identified with the group. Also the differences satisfy the individual’s need to achieve rank, status and, achievement. That being said a simple, truthful and scientific definition of a culture therefore is,
1. The means by which humans adapt to their environments
2. The learned behaviors and symbols that unconsciously allow
Humans to live within the natural order
Most commonly held views of culture today mention, the arts, history, museums as in cultural attractions. This has reinforced a romantic and superficial emphasis on cultural traits passed down and preserved, when in reality culture has been and will remain the only way, the means by which a particular people can adapt to their environment.
Civilization v Culture
In terms of the evolution of humankind the laboratory for R & D for 99% of our time here on Earth was in small mobile bands. In the late Archaic Period and characteristic of the Early Woodland Period, humans settled down. With the advent of agriculture adaptation and so cultures had to respond. This brings me to another term that’s definition has been totally corrupted “Civilization”.
Civilization properly defined and its in its etymology is people who live in cities.
Therefore from 3500 B.C. until the next revolution, the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century each culture had its place. The needs of a people living in the Artic regions responded quite differently than a people living in a South American rainforest. Regarding R & D and choice, my study of indigenous societies of the North West Coast of North America revealed that even in identical environments with exactly the same resources there was great variation in how each was organized.
Biological Anthropology Restores Reality
Western Civilization has since its origins been uncomfortable viewing humankind in any other context than post-Neolithic. So fixated on removing us from our ancestors in prehistory, they made Anthropology ( the study of man) into the comparative study of cultures ( all cultures being equal) and created Sociology ( man defined by living in complex societies) a the truly scientific branch of Social Studies. This all changed dramatically with the publising of The Imperial Animal, by Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger in 1975.
Researching and writing at the exact time the United Nations’s Economic and Social Council drafted their outline for a global governance to manage the environment, bio-anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox were the first social scientists to put such actions in their proper evolutionary perspective. To say both were skeptical would be an understatement. Playing with the history of Western Civilization in a chapter entitled The City of Man by first referencing the all- too-human behaviors behind the architects of the new order and, then listing the necessary behaviors that are our human birthrights ignored by the global human and environmental rights managers.
Though Tiger and Fox did not state, they would agree that if the following behaviors still exist, they must serve some critical function and, thus were selected. This is certainly true when referencing symbolic causes and social hierarchies. The others when looking at adaptation might save the day in a future that we can’t presently envision. Globalism, their newest expoitation conveted as a Utopian offering, threatens national interest besides surviving cultures, there is greater urgency for consciousness and awareness. To quote Fox:
By the same token, however, we cannot expect Utopias, It is as natural to man to create hierarchies, to attach himself to symbolic causes, to attempt to dominate and coerce others, to resort to violence either systematic or lunatic, to assert, to connive, to seduce, to exploit. The only possible Utopia, in our perspective, would lie in a return to a simple hunting existence, But that is impossible. We have crossed the divide in terms of population alone.
Humanism has been extolled as the only rational and reason-based system of beliefs and exported by the West along with the construct of equality and democracy, more fashionable ideals than species-specific responses to an environment. Per Tiger and Fox,
Utopian idealism can only help to make the misery more bearable by deluding us into thinking that we can, by simple acts of will and rational activity. Make either a different creature out of man, or wish away the tensions that emanate from his premature leap into civilization,
The continued failure to understand that culture is not only the chief mechanism for humans living in an environment but, the only one will drive humankind further away from tackling the real issues and threats. Likewise the continued failure to align the social context, so that it fits our evolved species and not the other way around, is the only thing to live for. As Tiger and Fox concluded:
Without this perspective we are tackling reality but only with our own cultural versions of reality – and often just our conceit about what reality should be in a position to assess what the problems really are, and to tackle them with a knowledge of how it came to be a problem in the first place…. They have to do with the constraints and distortions of behavior that we create, or, to be kind, that are created by the almost impossibly difficult context into which we are trying to fit our evolved human behavior.
Science and Religion Can Agree (eventually).
I disagree with Tiger and Fox when they conclude that if the universal megalopolis that we are building for ourselves can no longer find its unity as the City of God, then it must find it as the City of Man. They however then go about many scenarios that demonstrate an intimate, interconnected and, truly responsive society. But if these were possible and mainstreamed, our humanist-driven societies would have amply demonstrated that by now. But again, that is what the globalists pretend could be the case. As far as humankind and our survival go, The City of God is essential, the state will always be a necessary evil.
I have been following many researchers in cellular biology, chemistry and quantum physics. A day may come when Intelligent Design, proof of a Creator will be proven “scientifically”. I believe that the more I learn about culture, the more I realize the intelligence that brought it into being. As a natural, extremely complex, and integrated system that can respond to an environment quickly, culture along with the human brain will never conform to Dawin’s model of evolution. Someday, and very soon I pray, humankind will wake up and see the folly of humanism that held that it is society that made us. That each of us was born a tabula rassa (blank slate), and reject the unreasonable view that culture and religion flow downstream from politics and not visa versa.