Cultural beings thrive or fail in the mesh. Cultural being is my current term for the cultural analog of the biological phenotype. As such it is the mental trajectory of a collection of coordinators (the cultural analog of the biological gene). That is most obviously true for expressive culture – stories, dance, charms, pictures, music, and so forth – but true as well for all manner of practical devices and practices.
And, yes, I know this is a bit dense with strange terms. They’re all defined on this page with discussion scattered, alas, throughout this blog and in working papers.
Moving on, we’ve got to make a distinction. For the moment we’ll call it a distinction between expressive culture and practical culture. Expressive culture–song, dance, art, stories, religion, etc.–lives in the reticulum. It speaks to our need for meaning and coherence in the world. Practical culture, on the other hand, supports the body in one way or another, providing nutrition and protection. The devices and practices of practical culture, however, must be consistent with the designs of expressive culture.
Not only that, but I posit a principle for consideration:
Expressive culture leads; the seeds of practical culture are always in expressive culture.But is that true? I don’t know.
It was suggested to me by the following passage from David G. Hays, The Evolution of Technology, Chapter 5, “Politics, Cognition, and Personality”:
In reading to prepare to write this book, I have learned that the wheel was used for ritual over many years before it was put to use in war and, still later, work. The motivation for improvement of astronomical instruments in the late Middle Ages was to obtain measurements accurate enough for _astrology_. Critics wrote that even if the dubious doctrines of astrology were valid, the measurements were not close enough for their predictions to be meaningful. So they set out to make their instruments better, and all kinds of instrumentation followed from this beginning. (That from White, MRTe*). Metals were used for ornaments very early – before any practical use?And now to find my examples where practical technologies and practices are preceded by their appearance expressive culture.
In its original manifestation the compass was a divination, or future-predicting, instrument made of lodestone, which is naturally magnetic." (George Basalla, p. 172; in BIBLNOTE*)I suspect that we could get many further examples, up into the growth curve from rank 2 to rank 3.
In fact, someone in the future may look back on psychoanalysis and remark that its origin was in parapsychology – dreams were interpreted first for divination, second for diagnosis of pathology.
Here is my first point: The driving force behind progress in social organization, government, technology, science, and art is the need to control anxiety, to satisfy the brain's striving for understanding.
To take a political example: In the origin of government, is the key problem why men choose to follow leaders, or how men succeed in making themselves into leaders? [Not a sexist formulation; just the way things happened.] For most of my life, I took for granted the first answer. Recently I recognized the second problem and adopted it. Ethnographies (culture reports) from hunting-and-gathering societies show absolute egalitarianism. But more: They show an absolute unwillingness to rise above one's fellows in any respect whatsoever.
Here and there we find a clue as to the kind of child-rearing practices (sometimes brutal) that produce such adults.
Since the earliest community leaders were war leaders, who gradually came to exercise some authority between wars, perhaps the answer to the key question is this: The first leaders draw their ability to accept the responsibility of leadership from success in war, from religious experience, and from innate genius or special accidents of handling in early childhood.
More later.
