Cultural Consistency

Changing Choices

Since I'm a cultural relativist, the point I wish to make is an easy one for me. It might be harder for those who feel there is something "right" or "hard" about the culture in which they participate. So, let me soften the blow by saying that my preference - the culture of liberalism - is just that, my preference. Historically, liberalism has come and gone several times. So, despite my deep-seated belief that liberalism and democracy is "better" than the alternatives, there is nothing that thrusts it on people as a preferred form.
 

If you can "see" that my culture is only one of many possible cultures, you may also "see" that your culture is only one of many possible choices; i.e., there are many cultures. Put another way, human culture is a choice, which also implies that culture is unstable because people change their minds now and then.
 

Confusing Words
 

Before proceeding, I want to dismiss or sidestep an argument about the words "civilization," "culture," "society," etc. I concede these terms are loosely used and ill defined. Sometimes they are taken to mean the same thing; others times different things. But for my purposes, here is - loosely - my way of looking upon those words, which I believe represent at least three different concepts; i.e., I don't think they are all the same thing.
 

I think "civilization" is the most general term of the three. In most of its uses, "civilization" seems a broad binder for large aggregations of people over time. Thus we have Ancient, Medieval and Modern civilization, Eastern, Western, Northern and Southern civilization, as well as the more specific Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, various Amercan Indian, and many other civilizations. As the term implies, civilization is about what happens to cities; i.e., it is de civitas, 'of the city,' aggregations of people. Civilization implies a governed organization of human activities, which may include many smaller societies, cultures, religions, etc. Many civilizations are believed to be homogenous; e.g., ancient Egypt and modern Japan. But that perceived homogenity is often the result of distance in time and space between the observed and observer. We really don't know much about the intimate details of ancient Egyptian life. Westerners are far removed from the daily goings-on in Japan, so we tend to see Japanese in an "averaged out" way. In compensation for the blurring of things seen at a distance, we invent a generalized story of daily life. In comparison, we encounter particular individuals in our own region, so we see them as individuals, not as groupies or stereotypes. "Civilization" is, thus, people and their activities generalized, a pattern in human activities we prefer to see when looking afar.

Civilization includes not only an organized way of life, but active regulation of the participants. The particulars of civilization may vary from place to place, and time to time. A civilization may include many languages, religions and patterns of thought, but it is united by a common perception of belonging to that group. Thus, the defeated Greeks, Gauls and Celts became part of Roman civilization because they acknowledged their Roman masters, behaved according to Roman law (adjusted for local conditions), and participated in the economy and other structures of Roman life. The Barbarians eventually became Romans by way of Conquest and the Army. This example shows that "civilization" is an amporphous term, including many features larger than "society" or "culture."
 

"Society" is sometimes confused with "civilization," as in "European society" and "European civilization." That is an error, because what is actually meant by such terms as "European civilization" is "Western civilization." The confusion arises in such cases because the place or time of a civilization is identified with a certain group of people, usually the original or ruling group within a civilization. But civilizations are often made of many societies which come to be organized under one roof, as one structure. The world's major civilizations were organized, spread or imposed by a core group, the original society. In the process of their establishment and enlargement, civilizations adjust to the societies and conditions they encounter, absorbing or eliminating components in order to stablizie the whole. Societies do the same thing, but on a smaller scale. Thus, we have European or American or Chinese society, which applies to people living in specific places who also share common goals and behavioral patterns. Those societies may be the core of a larger civilization, but that civilization is clearly different from its local origins. Much of the world has been "Americanized" since World War II, but that globalized civilization is often not recognized as "American" by Americans.
 

For starters, then, we can distinguish a "society" from "civilization" by its scale. Societies are of a smaller scale than civilizations, even if sometimes the borders are ragged and diffuse. "Society" is most often a term that refers to the homogenously patterned interactions of individuals. There is an assumed background - the physical environment - which supports the society, but usually that is not directly involved in "society." Someone might work in the coal mines, but the primary focus of "social" thinking is the miner's behavior with respect to other members of the society, not the.chemistry, physics or engineering of coal, or its economic uses. When coal is a social consideration, we consider it an artefact involved in social situations. Thus, coal might be a marker which sets apart the coal miner, or some people might worship coal, or other people might try to exclude it from their presence..What is of interest in society is the behavior evoked by objects, not the objects themselves.
 

Societies usually have formal rules and regulations, as well as definitions about who is a member. Thus, it is common to include the government and official institutions as features of a society. The French have their French government, French language, the Lycee, Versailles, Paris, fashion, French wine and French cooking. All these things are usually considered components of French society which, taken together with other things, are what makes people living in France uniquely French. French civilization has reached far beyond "la France" in varying degrees from time to time. When I was in High School, the French "owned" diplomacy, so would-be students of the internatonal world learned French. I learned it, but was never part of French society, even if in my small way I participated in French civilization (which I still admire).
 

Again, civilizations go beyond societies but both of them are rooted in "culture," which is another difficult word. "Culture," I think, is closely associated with the ecological circumstances of individuals. It is an ecological (hence, biological) term which covers the way in which a group of individuals is interconnected. Thus we have "bacterial culture," which means a bunch of bacteria clustered together in a given enviroment (e.g., a Petrie plate) and interacting in a way charactertistic of that environment and that assemblage of individuals. We expect that bacterial culture to behave the same whenever a similar assemblage of individuals is put together in a similar environment. The "culture" in that case is their group, or social, behavior, which primarilly includes what individuals do relative to their non-biological environment and other individuals. So, culture is "interactive."
 

Culture is often "Darwinian" as well, because it is closely attached to individuals (families) and groups (tribes). Culture evolves of its own, propelled by complex interactions among people and their environment. I suspect the ancient Jewish prohibition against pig's meat started when people got sick as a result of eating pigs or having them around. Pigs are still a problem, as they are an intermediary in the mutations of influenza. Because culture is so "close to the ground," we don't have total control of it, even if some elements are humanly decided. Religions, for example, usually have a mythological superstructure that is taught and enforced within a culture, but the root of that mythology is probably deeply seated fears, problems and questions. People are reassured by the stories that explain their condition, and allow them to cope with their emotions.
 

Culture may be controlled and transmitted by the genes, the environment, or by learning and choice. Its central feature is the distinct pattern of living activities which we recognize whenever the components are assembled.
 

Self-Reinforcing

Culture is hard to get rid of, short of genocide, just because it is "close to the ground." Successful cultures have lots of built-in feedback loops that inhibit change. Those inhibitions are usually somewhat flexible, so that eventually the culture adjusts to changes of circumstance. This fact is easily observed in plated bacterial cultures, which have to be submitted to extreme lethal, conditions to destroy them. It is also observable in higher beings, such as algae, fungi, plants and animals which have persisted for eons.
 

The inhibition of change is the opposite of Darwinian selection; i.e., it is the prevention of selection. Inhibition is not necessarily a bad thing, but it certainly prohibits "progress," whatever that is. Inhibition is a part of all living systems, because it is the feedback system that stabilizes. (Note: inhibition is not just negative feedback, but a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms that zero in on a stable state.) Fear of heights prevents a non-flying animal from jumping off cliffs. Inhibition cuts short lots of trials that would be fatal in Universes in which experiments are mostly fatal. Inhibition follws the basic, well known rule, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." In humans, social inhibition is the basic mechanism of conservatism (but not the reactionary impulse). Leaving things as they are is very often the safe and secure path of continuation. In contrast, changing things - whether in a reactionary or progressive direction - is always risky; because success is not guaranteed. Inhibition - fear of failure - is the motive that stops the oppressed from breaking their chains, even when they have nothing to lose

Fortunately, we need not take sides in this debate about evolutionary theory, although - disclosure - I am a supporter of Gould. It is enough for our present purposes that species evolve, one way or another, sometimes faster and sometimes slower. (For myself, I don't "see" the conflict between UH and PE, as I think both apply.) In between the appearance of species, there are variable periods of stasis when nothing much sems to happen. During those dull periods, whether watching the grass grow is interesting probably depends upon your scale of observation. For millions of years, the huge vegetarian dinosaurs waddled through the landscape, and were regularly stalked and eaten by the carnivores. A closer look would reveal that meat eaters gradually improved their methods, which may have been a reason the defenders got so big (the elephant defense writ larger). Inspection of details raises questions about dinosaur blood circulation, colors, mating systems and relationship to birds. So, in the fine, a lot was going on. In teaching a dinosaur primer, however, it's a lot easier to lump lots of details together and just say, "Well, they were like that!"

Well, human cultures are just like that, too! On the surface, there appears to be a lot of inhibition preventing change. People do the same things generation after generation. Until modern times (the half millenium), "older is better" was taken as an absolute measure of virtue. Even today, there are many adherents of religion who swear by their Bibles, Korans, Talmuds, etc. For them, whichever Holy Scripture is without blemish. Thus it was. Thus it is. Thus it will always be. For those who resist change (in whatever direction), there is always an argument why it cannot be done. Since most people are either too lazy, too tired or too worn out to do something different, it seems easier to leave well enough alone. These are powerful forces inhibiting change.

It's hard to get rid of a culture.
 

Lock and Key

Those desirous of change are volunteering to help Sysiphus push stones up the mountain, stones which almost always maliciously roll back down. Nontheless, some stones get struck and stay put (for better or worse). Within broad physical limits, the mountain changes its shape. There are two things worth noting in that sentence: 'physical limits' and 'change.' It is possible to change the mountain, which is why Sisyphus' assistants keep on trying.

The other phrase, 'physical limits,' is what I am more concerned with in this essay. That's because cultures have rules, whether implicit or explicit, acknowledged or not. Those rules determine how the culture operates. If the culture is a mountain, it will only sustain a certain number of rocks at the higher altitudes based on the laws of nature. This implies cultures can be adorned in certain ways, but not in others. The analogy suggests, if a culture is incapable of supporting a certain feature, then either one must accept the culture as it is, or overthrow it.
 

This section's title means to suggest that cultures work like enzymes, according to the Lock and Key Theory. I think that appropriate, since they are biological systems. Not everything fits with a culture; some things are a better fit, others things are a worse fit. The heuristic of Darwinian selection applies in "choosing" what components a culture will have. This is another way of saying that cultural change is either possible, or the culture has to be replaced (see previous paragraph).
 

I do not think it is hard to appreciate this point, but it is not widely accepted. In the following, I make a number of examples which suggest the desired hypothesis.
 

In ancient times, a Greek fellow named Hero living in Alexandra invented the steam turbine. The History Channel did a 1 hour special on him pointing out his many inventions, especially his use of mechanical gears and automated machines. That ancient one was an engineering genius who foreshadowed the modern invention of clocks, timing devices, computers, gears and much more. But his marvels all came to nothing: the ancients weren't interested. Modern technical civilization could have arisen 2 millenia ago, but it didn't, which seems astonishing to us moderns. No one has provided an exact ("cause and effect") explanation of that false start, and I doubt whether such an eplanation will ever be forthcoming. Hero's inventions didn't fit in ancient cultures, so they were treated as mere curiousities. For example, his invention of automatic door openers for temples would have been handy in shopping malls, but there were not any shopping malls. It would have taken a major change in the ancient economy to introduce the mall instead of the open market. The steam turbine and gears were two ideas the ancients did not grasp. Geared machines did not come into wide use for at least another 1000+ years, when Europeans used them in clocks. Practical use of gears required the development of refined, durable metals and extremely accurate metal working methods. The ancients didn't have those materials and skills; they used wood and clay. (Wood and clay ceramics are not good materials for the innards of a fine Swiss watch.)

Hero was a genius who, in another time, could have precipitated an industrial revolution. It didn't happen because many of the prerequisites of modern, industrial societies were absent. Moreover, it took many Leonardos, Bacons, Newtons, Leibniz' ... to invent the modern way of looking at things. As Nicholas Wade noted in the New York Times, there is a report in Science about the continuing growth of human brains. Maybe it took brain growth to produce a Leonardo and his successors, as well as ordinary people who can appreciate them.
 

Or, maybe it is just copy-cat monkeys on the keys. One of the marvellous abilities of primates, but especially of chimpanzees and humans, is to copy the behavior of their relatives. In other words, they learn. What's marvellous, since many species - even ants - are capable of learning, is the speed of learning as well as the teaching of new techniques to others. Tribes of chimpanzees have different tool sets and eating habits because they adapted to local conditions by inventing tools that improved their diet, and they teach the young to use those tools. School is a very ancient institution among primates. It doesn't take a special theory to account for the inventions that become part of the culture: trial and error produces results, even if it takes a long time. Added abilities, such as being able to "see" patterns and correlate events (forming "cause and effect" hypotheses), speed up that learning process exponentially. It also doesn't take a special theory to account for learning, as the basic form is learning-by-rote: copy-cat or 'do as I do.' (Maybe that is why 'do as I say' is so ineffective.)

I note that brain growth and copy-catting are relatively slow processes compared to the modern pace. They take from decades to millenia or more before their effects are apparent. This supports the notion that cultural change is usually a very slow affair. That makes the modern period, especially the last 200 years, a very unusual, perhaps unique, period in human history. (Is this an example of Punctuated Equilibria?)
 

Slavery hasn't disappeared, it was merely transferred to non-human servants. "High civilization" cannot function without a large volume of goods and services being supplied to its participants. Elevated people require water, food, clothing, housing, medical care and all the other artefacts of a luxurious life. Putting the matter passively, food must be grown. The ancient solution was the enslavement of people, animals and plants, which started with the domestication of plants and animals around 10 millenia ago. Slavery probably started shortly after the domestication of animals, as it is a small step from controlling an ox or pig to controlling some human creatuire who, obviously, is not "one of us." Tribalism dehumanhizes those not members, because it elevates only those related "by blood," thus removing some people to the world of animals. Once the practice of slavery was established, it was an easy solution to the production and maintenance problem. The modern world of democracy and equal rights is probably only possible because of the steam engine and its descendants. We simply cannot live without our slaves, human or mechanical.
 

Interactive Processes

We might assert the principle that technology changes perception. But it takes a changed perception to invent and use the technology. We can get out of this 'chicken and egg' problem by supposing that a few, like Hero or Einstein, have the ability and capacity to do new ways of thinking. That's a result of the Darwinian processes of evolution. The later adoption of technology happens by simple copy-catting, and the effects of monkeys of keys. I think it is a common experience that learning by watching others is easy. For example, most people can be trained to do most jobs in just a few hours. There are actually very few jobs that require more than a few days training.
 

Another common experience is "the improvement." Once a procedure is worked out, it is usually not long before somebody suggests a different way to do the same thing. Prior to the last few decades, it was considered offensive to suggest change, and people were often punished just for thinking change was possible or desirable. This resistance to change - inhibition - was widespread in so-called First World countries, and even more entrenched everywhere else. Only the approved (upper) classes were entitled to think of something new, and bring that about. Thus, we have the standard advice that the best way to implement change is to arrange for the Boss to "think" of it (the "top down" approach). During the last 40 years, we have had an Information Technology (IT) revolution which speeded up some processes of change considerably. At the root of this transformation is a number of strategies for recognizing and implementing suggestions for change. The famous General Electric (GE) Six Sigma strategy is based on the idea that the system should be open to improvements, regardless of their source (aka Taylorism), and that people should be rewarded for making improvements (aka Capitalism). Contrary to ancient fears, accepting and using ideas from the unapproved masses (ordinary people) has not overthrown the old order, but it has stepped up the rate of change and improved productivity (efficiency). Six Sigma and other competitive strategies co-opt the creative people by rewarding them and bringing them into the approved classes, thus preventing overthrow of the old order. This is an example of cultural adaptation overcoming inhibition.
 

Modern methods do not prevail in societies unprepared for them, as is the case in regions dominated by religious fundamentalism. The American South is sitll relatively backward compared to the urban North and West. Many countries dominated by Islam find it difficult to advance economically. India has been held back for eons by the resistance of male Hindi farmers to changing their cultural perceptions about the role of women and castes. It is in those areas of India most liberated from the old ways that great progress is being made. So, there are "break-through" cultural precepts, such as universal equality and human rights, which are precursors of modernity. Where those maxims do not take hold, inhibition prevails; i.e., the lack of change despite the presence of obvious, demonstrated benefits is a measure of inhibition. (Inhibition can overcome "monkey-see, monkey-do" as well as prevent innovation.)
 

I believe most philosophers and historians of science agree that modern physics begins with Copernicus, but it took the publication of Galileo's Two New Sciences to set the Copernicus' results in motion. During Galileo's life, the Italian City States dominated Europe. They set the standard in art, architecture, engineering, finance, government and much else for all of Europe. Christopher Columbus was a Genovese who had his own crazy and wrong version of Copernicus' ideas, which was the basis of his insistence on the westward route to India. Thus America, from which Italy did not benefit until the late 19^th century. Ignoring Christian Rome's persecution of Galileo, northern Europeans copy-catted Galileo and then Kepler. First the Dutch, then the Germans, French and British "got it," turning northern Europe into an industrial powerhouse despite bad weather and poor crops. Italy and Spain, precursors of modernity, were overtaken by the Inquisition and reduced to also-rans.
 

The impact of Copernicus is evident in our 21^st century world. He comes to us by way of the Netherlands, Germany and England. The Spanish ruled the Netherlands off and on, aided by the wealth of gold and silver imported from the New World. But, in the end, gold and silver were not enough, and the intermarried royalty of Europe meant nothing to the republicans who set up nation-states all over Europe. Monarchic autocracy gave way to constitutional government, which was the result of freethinking, Martin Luther, Cromwell, George Washington, Robespierre and Napoleon. Metternich's Congress of Vienna was unable to restore a Europe forever changed by reading and writing, movable type, and the Guttenberg press. Sir Francis Bacon challenged the old way of thinking, when he raged that the way to determine how many teeth are in a horses' mouth is to count them. That was the fundamental break leading to Sir Isaac Newton.
 

Until people were willing and able to think about things in new and different ways, change did not occur. Napoleon, for example, seems genuinely to have believed in the anti-authoritarian values of the French revolution. But, faced with the problem of governing an Enpire he created, he fell back on the old ways and tried to create a new dynasty. It suited his vanity and ambition to replace the Bourbons instead of instituting a stable, republican form of government. Of course, he might be excused because his problem was compounded by the enmity of England and the many crowned heads of Europe, which constantly embroiled France in European wars, and war always brings authoritarians to the fore. Foreign monarchs perceived the mere existence of Napolean as a threat, because in principle he represented the overthrow of the Ancien Regime, even if he wanted to be an extension of it. Once the French revolution happened, once the monarchs were ignobally guillotined, there was no way to hide or dispense with its legacy. Napoelan didn't understand that fact, which ultimately overthrew him, and neither did Metternich, as the Bourbons were once again overthrown. The day of Divine Right passed forever when Louis XVI lost his head, as we have all learned since then.
 

In the lock and key theory of enzymatic action, we always postulate mutually co-operative influences of the bonding electrons at the binding site. Thus, the approach of the enzyme's substrate induces changes in the conformation of the active site of catalysis. Similarly, the action of hormones on cellular membranes involves receptors "prepared" to accept the hormonal molecule. Antibodies, viruses and bacterial toxins all work the same way, as do the many transport mechanisms that move molecules through biological membranes. The biological lock is not exactly like the locks on our doors, preconfigured and static. Instead, it is rubbery and fluid; it has the ability to take the needed shape to fit an approaching key. The biological key is rubbery and fluid too, because it changes its shape as it approaches the lock. At a distance, neither the lock nor the key usually look like a match. It is only as they approach each other that they warp, twist and bend, compress and stretch to become a match. Even then, there is a finite probability the match will not be made. This sort of thing is exactly what happens in nanoscale molecular processes, in micro processes, and in the grander scale of happenings such as human mating.
 

In biochemistry, we describe the foregoing chemical reactions mathematically as "metastable" states. This may be thought of as a multi-dimensional landscape of hills and valleys. When a collection of reactants is located in a valley, it stays there. In order for a reaction to occur, the components have to be pushed up a nearby hill and then let go. In that model, a chemical reaction is movement from one valley to another valley until the movement stops. In biological reactions, the hills and valleys are not rigid surfaces, but are more like a trampoline. The particulars of the stuff located in a valley can alter the shape of the nearby hills, and also how flat or deep are the valleys.
 

"Inner Logic"
 

Cultures behave in similar ways. They resist change - inhibition is the common resting state. But they do change when they are "ripe" for it. It is not a straightforward matter to predict when a culture will run uphill and roll over to the next valley, or even one farther away, but it happens. The difficulty in making predictions or descriptions is the fluidity of their innards and their environment, the interactive nature of the process.

The other side of the description is that change does happen, often unpredictably. Once things are rolled far enough uphill, they start roilling downhill, just like Sisyphus' stone. In these interactive reactions, the weight of the uphill mass tends to distort and flatten the supporting hill. On the other hand, maybe the mass is like pancake batter or a chocolate ball, either firming up or melting with a little heat, so one never knows when or if the whole thing collapses. (This problem is similar to the description of earthquakes, plate tectonics and climate systems, which are formally set down as systems of partial differential equations known not to have exact solutions. In other words, what happens can only be modelled in experiments.)
 

Since cultures behave like other biological systems, the most reasonable prediction about their behavior is that they will continue as they are. It is also reasonable to predict that, once change starts, it will happen a certain way, if we know the "boundary conditions." Lacking knowledge of those constraints, the outcome is unpredicatable; we can only estimate probabilities. It is clear, however, that once change starts, it is very difficult to stop (because at that point, the ball is rolling downhill). All of this should be a warning to reformers and revolutionaries - the present writer included.
 

The "inner logic" of a culture is what we find expressed under duress. It is the shape it assumes when rolled up hill, pushed toward a different configuration. Is it rigid, fluid, sticky or amorphous? In the "business as usual" state, we never know.
 

Do or Don't
 

The foregoing considerations lead to this simple conclusion: cultures are of a piece. Cultural parts stick together because they are lock and key fits: they make each other what they are. This means it is not possible to pick and choose the good and the bad.
 

If you cannot live with a culture as it is, then you must change it altogether (or find another). You must not only roll the stone to the top of the mountain, but over to the next valley. In doing that, hope for the best, because you cannot predict the outcome.