Do you ever get the feeling that watching Republican culture is like watching children playing house? Children set the table with teacups and saucers, pretending to make and sip the tea with a rather stiff adherence to the superficial aspects of the process gleaned from adults, without realizing that adults having tea is explicitly about creating a suitable environment for meaningful communication. Imitating adults in play, of course, is one way in which children get bootstrapped into the process of creating routines of meaningful communication, essentially climbing on a scaffold of routines such as turn-taking, sharing, exchanging platitudes. The empty routines themselves build some competence and autonomy, but the real value comes in the revelations created by actual human interaction, the discovery of novel truths and a deeper underlying reality (at least to the children).
This exploration of human meaning through social learning and cultural transmission continues throughout development, but remains particularly potent at least through adolescence, as when Prospero’s Miranda meets the shipwrecked prince, proclaims the "brave new world," to which Prospero replies, "tis new to thee." Then, of course, Miranda realizes from some deep subliminal recess of hormonally-induced social recognition that her process of cultural discovery lies no longer with her father but with her peers who encourage her to get piercings, tattoos, and listen to punk-ass rock.
Poor Big Tent Democrat knows this all too well:
I went to the mall with my 13 year old daughter and her friend of the same age.
Well, it turns out that everybody I was with today thinks I am an idiot. But the 13 year olds made the more convincing case...[then later in comments]...It involves clothing and what is appropriate.
One of the main functions of social or cultural transmission is to create autonomous offspring. At some point true autonomy means handing over control to the offspring’s peers and self-judgement. Everyone passes the baton a little differently, but Glenn Greenwald has made some excellent observations about neoconservatives:
But the neoconservative attachment to and dependence upon their parents goes beyond mere exploitation of one's parents or other relatives for political career gain. So many leading neoconservatives end up following in their parents' footsteps – remaining attached to them and becoming carbon copies of them – to an extent that is quite unusual and clearly significant. To have the top level of an entire highly influential political movement be so dependent upon their parents for their careers and worldview seems, at the very least, to be worth some commentary.
Separation from one's parents is just a basic rite of passage of becoming an adult. In that regard, rebellion against one's parents is – to invoke an emerging cliché – a feature, not a bug, of adolescence. Repudiating control by one's parents and finding one's own way in life is a critical part of becoming a fully-formed adult, and so is an effort to have one's accomplishments exist independently of ones' mommy and daddy. Someone who decides to choose the exact same careers as their parents, fueled by their parents' friends and accomplishments, and who ends up reciting virtually the exact views of their parents, is someone who seems to be reliant on their parents in the extreme.
Rebellion for its own sake – against one's parents or anything else – is adolescent in nature and, if it doesn't balance out, is just as mindless as those who remain slavishly attached to their parents. And all of these dynamics exist as generalities with all sorts of exceptions. But in general, choosing to live in the shadows of one's parents – where everything copies their path and is shaped and molded by them – would seem to create very stunted and coddled personalities.
Many, perhaps most, of the leading neoconservatives don't seem to have arrived at their political worldview through much or any intellectual struggle or independence, nor do they seem to have had to make their own way in building their careers. Quite the opposite – they seem to have been bred into their lives, and they just marched, like good little boys, along with their parents' views and plans for them. And they not only willingly accepted, but seem to have eagerly sought, all sorts of help from their parents in building their careers, all in exchange for fully embracing their parents' views almost without deviation.
I can’t find Glenn’s original post, this link will have to do:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/...
The way conservatives talk about family values, freedom, human dignity, or mouth pieties is patently and bizarrely superficial viewed against the backdrop of their culture of authoritarianism and death.
It’s like when Chief Justice Roberts was sworn into the Supreme Court, the Roberts family looked like paper doll cut-outs from the 1950s, as if dressing the part from an uptight, bygone era would allow them evince the moral standards of that era, perhaps spreading that moral feeling to the whole country.
Is it possible to understand the culture wars by considering origins, mechanics, and functions of culture? I doubt it, but let's open a slightly novel avenue in this discussion.
First, let’s sketch a casual definition of culture as an arbitrary set of beliefs or attitudes, customs or practices, values or aesthetics, and perhaps even certain physical abilities (such as the ability to discriminate and produce the phonetic liquids "r" and "l" consequent to learning languages like Japanese) that are socially transmitted, i.e., acquired through social learning. In short, culture is just about everything you’re not born with, but rather acquire through some form of social exposure.
With respect to where culture originates, it did not arise de novo in humans. Numerous researchers have explored cultural transmission in the animal kingdom, demonstrating multiple examples that include filial and sexual imprinting, song learning in birds, alarm calls in monkeys, learning escape signals in fish and mollusks, tool-use (e.g., termite fishing and nut-cracking) and language acquisition in great apes, and so on.
One of the most famous examples is the phenomenon of imprinting. Konrad Lorenz showed that if he exposed hatchling geese to himself rather than their own mother soon after hatching, they would prefer to follow him thereafter, as goslings are apparently equipped with a learning mechanism that includes following behavior and remembering the first thing they saw and followed after hatching, which normally would help them to stay near their natural guardian. However, one can even substitute a shoe as a surrogate mother and get similar results, as imprinting can be a rather "blind" process of transmission, and hence arbitrary. I include it as social transmission insofar it normally is social and functions to promote social bonding. Similar arbitrary transmission of culture also occurs in humans, as in language learning. It just depends on what you are exposed to.
What is important is that there are many clear-cut bases for cultural transmission in the animal kingdom, and that contrary to popular belief, culture is not peculiar to humans, but rather has deep evolutionary roots, and adaptive value. Second, many of these basic forms of social transmission probably still occur in humans, some occurring even in utero, as evidenced by new-borns that already have acquired a preference for their mother’s voices during pregnancy. Finally, in animals one can often infer clear-cut adaptive advantages of many specific forms of cultural transmission, and similar adaptive advantages probably apply to humans as well, but let’s face it there is something about humans.
While culture is not unique to humans, human culture is indeed a wildly prodigious thing. To anyone’s knowledge, no other animal on earth generates or relishes culture like we do. Clothes, jewelry, cars, houses, dining experiences, music, arts and letters, religions, languages—the list goes on and on. We exalt and celebrate culture as the highest of human endeavors with Nobel prizes, book awards, great collections of art, fashion pageants and sporting events, and acknowledge the most technical and arcane movie industry processes at the Oscars. We even have the Darwin awards and the Kippies. Compared to our relatively unremarkable physical abilities, culture is the prize of humanity itself. But why do we, of all animals tend to overdo it so much?
While we can easily understand the adaptive value of, say learning to follow your mother, or learning about biologically significant events, such as who are your natural enemies, and where are the good foods or mating opportunities, the problem of determining the value of cultural transmission in humans is a much more daunting task due to our cultural vastness and diversity that pushes the envelope of extreme arbitrariness to the point of verging on fetishistic nonsense (e.g., translucent platform goldfish stilettos, stamp collecting, and hamster breeding enthusiasts). The adaptive value of many culturally transmitted passions is often not obvious. Furthermore, the cultural vanguard is typically not only immersed in its own form of "high culture," but is actively iconoclastic toward itself, constantly renewing and refreshing itself. Take Oscar Wilde, please:
"Nobody of any real culture, for instance, ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunset. Sunsets are quite old fashioned. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism of temperament. Upon the other hand they go on."
Thus, clinging to old cultural values in some sense indicates a lack of creativity, and culturo-genic behavior itself is a valued commodity. This is where I think Brian Eno’s Big Theory of Culture provides some valuable insight that ethologists, for example, may have underestimated:
http://edge.org/...
I want to find a way of talking about culture, so therefore if I talk about it, I have to be able to include everything from what's considered the most ephemeral, menial, and unimportant version of culture--haircuts, shoe designs--to what are considered the most hallowed and eternal examples of it. Now when I try to think about what it does for us, I try to think what happens to you in certain specific situations. For example, let's take this pair of designer sunglasses that happen to be on the table in front of me. They're very styled. They don't have to be like that. Glasses don't have to be funny, oval, weird-shaped looking glasses, space-age type glasses. As I put those glasses on, I'm not only keeping sun out of my eyes. I'm also engaging in some kind of game with myself and the rest of the world. What I'm doing is I'm entering into some kind of simulator. I'm saying, "what would it be like to be the kind of person that wears these kinds of glasses?" What I mean by that is, I'm not actually abandoning who I am and becoming somebody else; I'm for a while entering into a game where I suddenly become this person that's a different person from the person you've just been talking to.
Eno strikes two very resonant chords in that passage. First, he strikes the chord of arbitrariness: The glasses don’t have to be styled; they don’t have to be that way. Remember the horn rims of the 1950s? The tear-drop aviator style of the 1970s? The horizontally narrowed horn-rims still popular with hipsters? They didn’t have to be that way. Each was arbitrary, yet de rigeur in their time. More importantly, the second chord struck concerns the functional value of culture (in this case, fashion): It is a simulation of self, a game or an experiment that is distinct from an "truer" underlying self that must endure several more decades of fashionable trends. Like children playing house, it is indeed a world of pretend, but it is not pretend without value.
Eno continues:
This kind of playing with other worlds, this ability to move from the world in my head to the possible world in your head, and all the other millions of possible worlds that we can imagine, is something that humans do with such fluency, and such ease, that we don't notice ourselves doing it. We only notice how powerful that process is when we meet people who can't do it--severely autistic children, for instance, who are incapable of switching worlds--who in many senses can appear completely intelligent, but they are incapable of seeing that there is any world other than the one that they perceive at this moment. This makes them incapable of two very important things: they can't cooperate easily, because to cooperate you have to understand not only your world, but the world of the person with whom you're cooperating, because you're trying to make a new common world, so you have to see where the other two worlds are. And they can't deceive. Autistic children also are incapable of deception, because they could not understand how they could create a situation in which you could see a different world from the one that they believe exists.
Several notables in this passage. First, he mentions that part of "simulation" that culture allows implicitly involves what is known as a "theory of mind," the recognition that others have minds, beliefs, and intentions, perhaps different from one’s own, but that one can simulate, empathize with, and to some extent predict. It is also interesting that he mentions autism, because the so-called "mirror neuron system" is believed to be damaged in autism. These mirror neurons are a system of cortical sensorimotor neurons that fire when you watch someone else doing something, and fire as if you were acting it out yourself, except that you need not actually move as you "neuronally mirror" the actions of the other. Mirror neurons have been suggested to provide the basis for imitation, empathy, and deception. To date, this system has only been demonstrated in primates.
Human culture is much more than simply buying the next Lexus or another set of cool shades to play movie star, but is rather a profound essence of humanity and human achievement, an essence provided in addition all the classic ethological forms of social transmission that allows us to experiment with ourselves and the world, and to do so cooperatively. As Eno hypothesizes, this novel form of cultural exploration, discovery, and transmission gives rise to our highest abilites:
My argument is that what the constant engagement in culture does for us, is that it enables us to continually rehearse this ability we have--the use of this big part of our brain that is involved in postulating, imagining, exploring, extrapolating other worlds, either individually or cooperatively.
This is the point at which there is a deep connection between art and science: each is a highly organized form of pretending; of saying "let's see what would happen if the world was like this."
I really like the way he roots both art and science into a more general capacity for culture, a capacity likely rooted in specialized physical systems, that augment more basic forms of cultural transmission found in the animal kingdom. Human culture is much more than simply buying the next Lexus or another set of cool shades to play movie star, but is rather a profound essence of humanity and human achievement. Culture allows us to experiment with ourselves and the world, and it allows us to do so cooperatively. The ability to simulate novel possibilities may be the engine of human culture and evolution. Individual ability to generate cultural change desirable and lauded, and is frequently recognized as "cool."
I could go on to explore this hypothesis in relationship to neoconservative values, but this piece is already too long. Let me add one more thing then open the thread.
One might be tempted to say that the difference between progressives and conservatives is that conservatives are autistic, due to an apparent lack of empathy via mirror neuron malfunctions, though that is clearly not true, as evidenced by their ability to cooperate with coalitions for at least limited periods of time and clear-cut capacities for secrecy and deception. Autistics don’t recognize the need for deception. In addition, I have a strong feeling that they are literally playing with the Middle East, pretending what the world might look like "if." Clearly, some aspects of their "cultural experimentation" and "theory of mind" are working.
However, something is deeply wrong with conservative culture in their adherence to parental scripts handed down to them, their inability to see others’ points of view, their authoritarianism, and their hatred of the beatniks and dirty hippies who are the real cultural engines. Their extremely poor ability to simulate outcomes of critical importance results in their de rigeur fashion of catastrophic failure. When Marcel Duchamp created a new relationship between between the viewer and art by putting an arbitrary object on a pedestal, in his case, a toilet, no one died. Rather, the century benefited from a novel conception of the viewer’s interaction with art, which henceforth was no longer handed down to the viewer from the artist.
When you watch Commander Codpiece simulate a student, a National Guardsman, a baseball team owner, a Commander in Chief, when Dick Cheney plays as a can-do, tough-on-terror CEO and general invincible powermad freakshow, when Heckuva Job plays at a compassionate conservative doing emergency management, when Republican congressman pretend to govern, and when Condi Rice dresses up in a flight suit, aviator's cap, and big goofy goggles, you really have to wonder if, culturally, they have not gotten beyond children playing house. Here's our foreign policy expert hard at work, playing with "possible worlds:"
To which I will add cfk’s sig line:
"Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. They are unique manifestations of the human spirit." Wade Davis