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Chapter Nine

Revised May 2008

From Whim to Culture

All human beings should try to learn before they die
what they are running from, and to –
and why.
James Thurber

We find ourselves adrift in a world that is mysterious, with many crucial things quite ineffable. What then shall we do? How will we begin to approach the many decisions we must make every day as we “spend” the moments of our days?

There are basically four ways to go about making our life decisions:

1. Follow our whims
2. Obey our culture, or another voice of authority
3. Use reason
4. Follow our intuition

There is value in each of these, and we will inevitably use all four in various combinations at various times in our lives.

Whim

Whim sometimes gets a bad name in serious circles, but there is much to be said for its value. It breaks us free from overly rigid rules and regulations, from the stultifying embrace of too many “shoulds” and “should nots” that can deaden our lives. Whim—our basic urges and desires—can give us a fresh glimpse of the direction our energy is flowing, can provide a motivating spark to move and to act. However, since one whim replaces another in rapid succession, trying to follow each would be totally impossible: not only would it be completely exhausting, but such a path would be crazy-making for the “whimee”—as well as everyone else around. There would be no direction or coherence to one’s life. And if everyone followed each new whim that arose, human culture and human civilization would be impossible.

Whim can also be understood much more seriously. In its grander form, it emerges as the “id” of Freud, those primal urges – mostly sexual – that drive us to our actions and activity (although sometimes sublimated—directed toward substitute objects, or repressed—disguised even to ourselves). But the idea of basic, primitive forces within us did not begin with Freud. Plato divided the human psyche into three levels, the first being that of desire (instinct and impulse). Schopenhauer defined this primal energy as the “Will,” by which he meant those blind, insatiable drives that arise out of living in a body. Nietzsche picked up this theme and spoke of the Dionysian energies that flow through us, of the instinctual energies which should be given a central place in our lives, rather than letting weaker spirits talk us out of them.

So in its more serious interpretations, whim has been seem as extremely important, and even as having the highest value in deciding how we should live. On the other hand, countless rules, laws, and moral teachings have been created and perpeutuated throughout history to reign in the dangers of whims and desires seen as running amok. Freud postulated that the superego arose precisely for this reason, and he came to believe that civilization arose primarily to curb the negative effects of an overly reckless expression of these primal energies. Kant argued that the most important value in life was to follow one’s duty, as opposed to being led astray by passing whims. It has even been argued that culture and religion both arose as an attempt to bring internal and external control to the destabilizing effects of whims running free.

Few have argued however, that we can let them exclusively guide our lives. (Nietzsche made a run at this, which will be discussed later.) But most who have considered the question have realized that our whims must be moderated and guided in some way. So let us make room for the fresh air of whim and whimsy in our lives, for the energy and vitality provided by our drives and urges and instincts, while acknowledging that these energies probably cannot, by themselves, be the main source of our life decisions. So let us turn our attention to the ways that have arisen in human history to guide, mold, restrain, and direct our whims.

Culture

In Freud’s view, cultures arose to prevent our whims from creating total chaos in human life, to restrain and guide our id energies so we could live together without constant conflict and strife. This is almost certainly part of the explanation for the emergence of human culture—though not necessarily the sole explanation. To look at it from a different angle, perhaps the primary function of culture is to provide ready-made answers to life’s questions, so that each new human being does not have to answer a limitless number of questions for themselves. This is perhaps what culture is – a set of answers about what is important, how to avoid problems, and the best way to live.

Having answers given by one’s culture as a starting point is essential, for if each individual had to answer all these questions for themselves each day, human life as we know it would be impossible – all of one’s time would be spent “reinventing the wheel” of culture, so to speak. We live our lives riding on the crest of the wave of our culture. Or to give a different twist to an old saying, we are able to reach so high because we stand on the shoulders of the accumulated wisdom that was gathered and stored in our cultural system by those who went before.

Thus every child who comes into life is immediately thrust into an answer system concerning:

Practical questions:

What is safe to eat?
What do I do when I feel sick?
How do I keep from getting hurt?
How do I protect myself from danger?
How do I make my life easier and more comfortable?

Questions about relationships:

How do I fulfill my sexual and emotional needs?
How do I show love and affection appropriately without causing problems?
How do I act toward parents, children, the opposite sex, community          members, strangers, enemies?

Questions about living in society:

What will get me in trouble with the authorities?
What is the behavior I can expect from others?
What rules can I insist that others follow?
What can I expect the government to do—and not do?
What can I expect, perhaps demand, from leaders?

Questions about values:

What values should I live by—and when: all the time, or does it vary with          circumstances?
What is honesty, integrity, courage, loyalty, etc.
Will I live by these values even if it requires a great sacrifice?
What is my obligation to those who are suffering?

And of central importance, questions about meaning:

Why am I here?
How should I spend my time?
Does life have a purpose?
What is a meaningful life?
What will bring me happiness?

Every child spends their formative years being enculturated into an answer system (sometimes a coherent system, sometimes a confusing and chaotic one), about what is real, what is true, what is right—leading to the formation of each child’s “worldview reality.” To get a sense of the necessity of this, just try to imagine what it would be like if each child had to start from scratch answering each of the above questions—with no guidance from anyone while growing up. 

Moving toward adulthood, each child begins to internalize these answers into a basic belief system on which he or she can rely—without having to think through each question every time it arises, without even having to become conscious that there is a question a lot of the time. (This is the internalized worldview described in Chapter Eight.)

The second function of culture is to provide an on-going interactive system to support and reinforce all those who share a common worldview. We mostly take for granted that the people around us share much of our worldview, and this is crucial for life. Just imagine what it would be like if the people you were living with held no common beliefs with regard to values, meanings, or the proper way to live and interact. (A lot of modern literature has to do with young people who feel they share so little with their families or communities that they simply do not belong.) So to repeat, each culture develops a set of answers to life’s questions, and then enculturates its young into this shared worldview, and provides an interactive system in which those answers are reinforced and supported.

Relying on these answer systems, most people through the ages—especially those who lived out their lives in the land in which they were born, and who had infrequent interaction with other cultures—did not spend much time struggling with the questions of life. Most of our ancestors simply lived out their lives within cultural systems that everybody around accepted as “right.” If a family or group was disrupted from their home ground, they carried their culture with them to the new place. Or if an individual or a small group migrated to a new land, they usually began to adopt the culture of their new home.

For most humans in most places throughout history, therefore, answer systems were given by the culture, and people simply “knew” what life was about, what was expected of them, and what they could expect from others.  There was a shared reference system, accepted by most everyone encountered each day, and for some, accepted by everyone encountered during a whole lifetime.  These answer systems could be referred to for guidance when life questions arose, and everyone around would usually reinforce the answers a person derived from them.

Of course, growing up in stable and established cultures did not keep a few individuals from wrestling with life’s questions, for humans have always differed from each other, and some individuals have always rebelled, questioned the “given” order. There have been a few mavericks and outsiders in every culture, no matter how stable. This is how cultures have changed through the centuries—these “outsiders” brought change and innovation. A few even gave rise to new cultural systems.

But for the most part, cultural rebels have had very difficult lives—they have often been ostracized, banished, ridiculed, and even killed. Because of this, as Dostoyevsky suggested in The Brothers Karamozov, most people don’t want that kind of freedom—they want to know what the rules and customs are, and they will try to fit into those rules. Recently, brain studies have confirmed Dostoyevsky’s insight: It has been discovered that the pain of not being included in the in-crowd is experienced in exactly the same areas of the brain as real physical pain.

Thus most humans have not been rebels, living out their lives in cultural systems that provided a stable set of answers for life’s practical, religious, and philosophical questions. These shared answers were used in communicating with others, and, crucially, in resolving conflicts—for resolving conflicts with others is especially difficult if the antagonists have no common values. Imagine how difficult it would be to communicate with those with whom you did not share any common views about what is right or wrong, the appropriate way to behave toward friends and neighbors, the rules and customs to be used in business dealings—and in romance.

So in our formative years, we each develop a set of answers to the important questions of life based on the raw material of the consensual reality in which we were raised. Most people then stay pretty close to the views they were given. “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  For those who do stray from their enculturated reality, they don’t do so in isolation—they find an organized group, or at least a group of friends, who help to define for them their new consensual reality, and who support them in the new belief system.

A World of Differences

When the first cultures were developing many thousands of years ago, they did so among small groups of people separated by vast expanses of the planet. Thus many different answer systems emerged in different locales. There were sometimes similar answers, and sometimes very different answers to the important questions of life. Different climates and different terrains led to different answers, and other differences arose that are not now clear in their origins.

Some of these answer systems worked better than others, some worked best in a particular locale, and each adapted and changed through the centuries, sometimes in significant ways. The cultures that worked reasonably well began to spread into ever-larger territories. Other times, calamities—famine, crop failures, etc.—caused migrations of some cultural groups to a new locale. Perhaps other dispersions arose simply from the wanderlust of our race—the urge for a new start, a better life, an adventure.

For all of these reasons, differing cultures began to bump into each other. When they did, they would sometimes fight, with the victorious culture eliminating or assimilating the vanquished. Fairly often, however, an uneasy line of demarcation would grow up between them. Over time, trade and exchange would develop between these adjoining cultures, perhaps interspersed with occasional hot conflict. Through this process, occurring over many centuries, individuals from each culture would gradually become aware of the significantly different answers the “other” was giving to life’s questions. Sometimes, this resulted in wonderful innovations, as creative individuals brought new ideas from “the other” into the life of their own community and culture.

However, these cultural collisions were all too often experienced as a great threat by those in each culture who had the responsibility to uphold the cultural norms. When an individual encounters a different set of values and meanings about life, it takes great maturity to be able to honor the beliefs of “the other” without undergoing a crises in one’s own belief system. Failing this maturity, the common reaction of most of us—rather than calling into question our own beliefs—is to conclude that “the other’ is wrong.

Further, without this defense against other belief systems, the less than fully mature individual—encountering a different answer system held strongly by “the other”—can easily find him or herself with an inner crises: How do I know that my consensual reality is “right”—compared to this new way of seeing the world? Such questioning can bring great turmoil concerning the most important questions of life: martial and sexual relations, how conflicts are to be settled, what happens when you die, what constitutes a meaningful life, definitions of property and ownership, who gets to make and enforce the laws, who owns the land, how to be in the right relationship to the Unseen, and on and on. Most of us want surety. We want to believe we have the right answers—and to constantly debate this within, to have to consider each and every decision, is untenable.

Then there is the threat to the social order if everyone is constantly calling into question the rules and values of the culture. To deal with these difficulties, it seems that every culture has a built-in mechanism to help its members believe that their consensual reality, their view of the world, is the right one. Almost every culture, in one way or another, instills from an early age the belief that its particular answers are “right.” Often, anyone from a different cultural system is characterized as “weird” or “strange.” For instance, almost every culture has a tendency to make fun of those who do things differently from its cultural norm. How many times have you heard someone make jokes about the habits and practices of “foreigners?” And these foreigners are as likely be those who moved in from a different part of the country as from overseas. Or in the modern world of intermingled cultural groups, they might simply be those who belong to a different ethnic or religious persuasion.

I have been to cold areas where people can’t imagine living where it is really hot (and make jokes about it), and hot areas where people can’t imagine living where it is cold (and make jokes about it). I have talked with people in cities who just can’t understand how anyone could live in the boredom of the country (where there is nothing to do), and I have met those in country settings who can’t image living in a crowded city (where it so hectic, or crime-ridden, or whatever—and make jokes about it). Very often these messages are conveyed as put-downs, as humor of some sort. Many, many times I have heard people make fun of what other people eat, or how they dress—without any awareness that some of the things their own culture eats or wears are equally weird to the “other.”

These are mostly harmless examples, but this tendency is so widespread in every culture of the world—down to the smallest sub-cultures within each region—that it must be a basic tendency in all of us. And because it is so widespread, there is probably a good psychological reason for the existence of this (mostly subconscious) mechanism. Very likely, it is an intuitively effective way for the individual to be protected from too much inner debate about the questions of life, and a way for each culture, and each sub-culture therein, to help its members feel more confident in their own set of answers. It allows people to encounter different ways of doing things without being thrown into confusion—it inoculates them against questioning their own ways every time they see someone doing things differently.

A completely mature and confident person might handle these encounters in a different way, but most people, by tendency and training—when confronted with a completely different set of answers to life’s questions—simply reject or condemn the beliefs of “the other,” and accept their own as right and true. And up to a point, this is probably a healthy tendency.

The Modern Dilemma

As discussed at length in Chapter Seven, there is an inseparable link between the enduring cultures of the world and belief in an Unseen Order, for each culture traces its beginnings to values and meanings given to founding figures by the Unseen. For most people, the right way to live is not just a matter of custom, but was proscribed by a Transcendent power—was Divinely Given. This adds extra fuel when cultures collide—for it seems to each side that “the other” is calling into question its whole religious tradition and belief system. Yet as populations have increased dramatically in the last few hundred years, more and more cultures are bumping into and overlapping with each other, with ever greater numbers of people finding themselves living in relationship to, or next door to, people with very different answer systems. This confrontation of cultures is the source of many of the problems arising in the world today, and one of the most profound issues of the modern age. Never in history has this problem been encountered on such a scale, for everywhere you look, more and more people are living their lives intermingled with people from very different answer systems.

Which leads us to the modern dilemma: How will we live in a world in which so many differing systems are interpenetrating and intermingling with each other? As was noted, cultures have a tendency to harden into the view that their particular answers are “right.” And the cultural teachings—to make them more powerful—are often presented by their proponents as based on God’s Will. Thus the idea that one should act in a particular way if one is to be a good member of one’s culture is expanded to a demand that each person must abide by these cultural rules if they are to be acceptable to God.

To say this as succinctly as possible, the modern dilemma arises from the increasing number of collisions between differing cultures, combined with the fact that the adherents of the vast majority of the world’s answer systems believe that their rules and customs came directly from God. And perhaps some did. It is impossible to know whether this is true or not—except by a personal act of faith. How exactly could you know this in any other way? To hold that none did so arise among the countless claims of Transcendent Origin for laws, rules, and customs throughout human history is a metaphysical belief, an act of faith with no rational basis. And for an individual or group to hold that their particular laws, rules, and customs came from God can only be an act of faith.

Yet in the modern world, rather than our act of faith being reinforced by everyone around, we live with constant challenges to whatever worldview we hold. When growing up, a modern child’s family and close social group might provide a partially coherent answer system, but swirling all around are many contradictory messages—close neighbors often fail to support the answers given, and even within many families, there is much disagreement about the “right” answers to the really important questions.  Many people in the modern world have a sister or an aunt or an uncle or a cousin who sees things in a very different way than their parents. Surprisingly often, even parents disagree. Fairly often, what is being taught by the caregivers does not even correspond to the example of their own actions. 

And as the child begins to step out from the family, going to school, making friends down the street, a mind-numbing array of different answer systems are encountered.  The child goes to the movies, or watches television, or logs onto the internet, and encounters another bewildering array of differing answers to all the important questions.  This modern world is truly mind-boggling, especially for the young, for in many places there are simply no agreed-upon answers to the significant questions.  At any moment, one can find a book, or a friend, or a talk-show host promulgating a view that directly contradicts what one read or heard a few minutes before.  This cacophony of conflicting ideas and views—with no commonly shared reference system to refer to for guidance—is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the modern era. Is it any wonder that anxiety, alienation, confusion, and despair are so prevalent in the modern world?

One response that emerges to the dilemma, especially in crowded cultures, is that larger cultures begin to break down into subgroups. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in April, 2008 of the United States:

It’s more accurate to say that the country has simply drifted apart into different subcultures. . . . Americans have a fuzzy sense of where the boundaries lie. But people in different niches have developed different unconscious maps of reality. They have developed different communal understandings of what constitutes a good leader, of what sort of world they live in. They have developed different communal definitions, which they can’t even articulate, of what they mean by liberty, security and virtue. Demographic groups have begun to function like tribes or cultures.

The mental maps people in different cultures form are infinitely complex and poorly understood even by those who hold them. People pick up millions of subtle signals from body language, word choice, facial expressions, policy positions and biographical details.

All this highlights the fact that there are two strong forces acting against each other in the modern world, pushing and pulling the modern citizen between them:

1) The natural tendency of people to form and live within coherent cultural systems.

It is crucial that a child grow up in, and that each of us be able to live in a culture that provides some “givens” for life’s questions. No one would have a human life as we know it without the formative role of a culture providing answers as a starting point for life. And there must be some agreed upon answers for a society to function. Just imagine trying to live in a community where there are absolutely no agreed upon values or beliefs about what is right or wrong, good and bad—or imagine living in a place where everyone is free to change at each moment how they will act toward others, based upon nothing but personal whim.

Versus,

2) Increasing numbers of people living in locales where conflicting cultural systems exist side-by-side, denying everyone in all systems a sense of broad support for what they believe.

The worldwide population explosion of the last 100 years, along with dramatic advances in transportation and communication, have brought more and more people into contact with answer systems that are quite different from their own—creating frequent collisions between competing values and beliefs. As this has happened, some have tended to cling ever more desperately to the old ways, others have attempted to form new subcultures, while increasing numbers in these intermixed, confused, and broken cultural systems have drifted away from accepting any answer system as true and right. For them, the old systems have taken on the feel of concepts that no longer apply—yet no shared reality has arisen to replace them.

Culture and the Unseen

What then do we do? If you don’t accept the underlying assumptions of an answer system by acceding to your enculturation or through an act of faith, nothing else will lead to it. Reason does not suffice, or all thinking people would have come to an agreement on one “reasonable” system a long time ago. Power does not suffice, for the greatest empires of history have been completely unable to force agreement, even with far fewer people than are alive today. Quite the contrary: in the face of the most ruthless and the most systematic empires humans could create, differing systems of belief have proliferated through the centuries, and continue to do so today.

The one answer that provides a glimmer of hope is that there are in fact a few First Principles, to use Aristotle’s language, transcendent to any one culture or tradition, that are common to all human beings. These principles transcend both whim and culture—are the ground out of which all cultural traditions spring. Many local differences were added by each culture, but a few things are common to all, and their source resides beyond culture itself.

Following the ideas of Aristotle, Cicero and other lawmakers of ancient Rome created a set of laws that applied to all people, no matter their race or religion, laying the foundation for western civilization for the last 2000 years. And underlying this system is the belief that there are a few principles that can be translated into laws that will resonate with every human being who is not brain-damaged or fundamentally flawed (as perhaps a psychopath is flawed).

In the interving 2000 years, rulers changed, ruling groups changed, religious power shifted, but the idea that there are a few common and shared principles inherent in being human remained, and to which something inside each of us will respond, created the basis for all Western cultures. So is there some underlying order, an underlying ground from which the core principles of all cultures arose, and to which we can still jointly refer for guidance as we meet each other across the cultural divides of today?  We will explore this question in Chapter, but first, let us examine one direction that the need for certainty in a confusing world can take: The Fundamentalist Turn.

Footnotes