Culture – What Is It? What Purpose Does It Serve?
PART III: Establishing Authority
“Should one ask of the classical social theory: “What cures?” the answer will be frequently tantamount to the question: “Who cures?”
“Ultimately, it is the community that cures.”
The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Reiff
The first two concerns of Culture were discussed in previous posts. These concerns were societal survival and fear management.
The third concern of Culture is establishing authority.
Authority means more than deciding who is in charge of the military, courts, and police departments. These are the institutions of a culture. The people in institutions are given their power through the community. Individuals give up their own desire for revenge or their own personal judgement on the fairness of an issue to a third party for judgement. Without this submission to an outside authority there is no accountability and no way to settle disputes between individuals, groups or other institutions. In the past, acts of vengeance and feuds were the result of individuals and tribes unwilling to recognize the authority to a designated third party. Without this agreement between a community and its institutions of authority, the first two concerns of society (societal survival and fear management) are destabilized.
What and Who Cures?
Ultimate authority is where we look for answers to heal illness, war, mental well-being, etc. How a culture helps an individual restore his or her place in society after serious errors (or crimes) is another reason why culture is important. However, our world is divided as to what is the source of the cure.
When we speak of authority, we naturally divide the various attributes of authority into categories and hierarchies.
Ultimate Authority answers the question: What Cures?
People and institutions answer the question: Who cures?
Ultimate Authority
“Behind shaman and priest, philosopher and physician, stands the great community as the ultimate corrective of personal disorders. Culture is the system of significances attached to behavior by which a society explains itself to itself. A culture that is not thus self-explicative must be undergoing, in the measure of negative condition, a profound change.”
The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Reiff
The political right and the political left might agree that ultimate authority rests community under the well-known phrase: “the will of the people.” However, they disagree on two important and fundamental concepts.
1. Who are the “people”? Are they citizens only? Or do resident non-citizens get a say? Under the more universal understandings of “people”, the will of non-residents (other countries) might be considered valid in decision making.
2. From what (Ultimate Authority) do the people get the right to decide? The right might say “from God” and the left “from Science.” These are fundamentally different sources of authority, and therefore the conflict between the left and the right grows deeper.
So, while on the practical level it is true that the community cures through the “will of the people”, it is also true that it presumes that the community accepts the same ultimate authority or that if divided into more than one belief system, the fundamental beliefs of their cultures are not deep.
Hierarchies of Order
But where does this ultimate reality or authority come from? Something must guide human beings in the quest to understanding. What is the source of right judgement? How are ideals established?
Ideas are objects. Objects have meanings. We could not communicate ideas without establishing categories and hierarchies of meaning. Without categories and hierarchies, we cannot think about ideas. And so, we all have a concept of “ultimate authority” even if we disagree on what that authority is.
Because of human fallibility and the fear of making serious mistakes (or worse, commit crimes) in following the wrong authority, it is common today to hear some people say they reject all authority and hierarchies of order. They claim that they rely on their own judgement to decide what is right and wrong. But this is not what we observe in reality. Even the decision to reject authority, order, and boundaries requires establishing an authority to justify that decision.
Ironically, if an individual rejects all authority but his own, he is not able to provide any rationale as to why he has any authority to make any decisions. He lacks the power, as an individual, to enforce his authority. Other people may give him power and authority, as in authoritarian societies, but he will always be a tyrant. Even if he is good to his people (benevolent dictatorship), he lacks legitimacy.
This question of ultimate authority is not a new one. Diogenes of Sinope (4th century, B.C.) believed that human beings were being kept from their true potential by the chains of culture. He believed that true autonomy could only be achieved by freeing the human person from the corrupting influence of culture. We could say that he meant that humans needed to become “unbounded” from Culture.
Plato, who also lived at the same time as Diogenes, believed that true autonomy had to be balanced by obligations to others. We could say that he believed Humans were “bounded” by Culture.
Ideals must come from an ultimate authority. Whether we call it Truth or Reality, whether Divine or Natural, we put our trust in it as an ultimate authority.
Today, the “sides” in this debate tend to line up along the following lines:
The Failure to Communicate
I don't want knowledge
I want certaintySong: Law, Album: Earthling, David Bowie
How does the community have faith that they will get a fair and final settlement of their grievances from a third party? The community must have faith that the third party will uphold the ideals of the community. These ideals include the concepts of judgement, mercy, fairness, courage and wisdom.
But our modern dilemma is this: We don’t have faith in any ultimate authority outside ourselves. The full reason we don’t believe we trust any authority outside ourselves has to do with how we understand what “being” is. We believe our physical existence precedes our essence, and not the other way around as classical philosophy once taught. As a consequence, we believe we create our own essence. This is so great an error that it leads to absurd idea that “we create ourselves.” We will discuss why this is an error and how it developed later on, but for now we will focus on the consequences of this error. It leads to a split loyalty to our faith in God and/or Nature. We cannot accept either as a valid truth or reality or ultimate authority unless we experience the totality of it as an individual. We cannot trust another person’s experience of reality. And we cannot accept any interpretation of it by another person.
Why is this a problem? It is because our long, long written history tells us that one individual cannot know all things or experience all things. It is difficult enough for one individual to know all that is known by his own family, let alone the entire population of the world. Individuals must have some trust that the people who came before them have some wisdom that they do not possess.
The community cures because the community contains the deposit of knowledge and wisdom of the ages. The community that fails to pass on that inheritance is committing a terrible injustice to the next generation.
The Failure of Higher Education in the Modern Age
The Difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age.
Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman
In this age we are taught that all leaders of the past were error prone and morally bankrupt. And this judgment of the past is based on the fact that “God”, “Nature” or “Science” do not communicate as humans do to each other. And so, what truth an individual divines from observing or communing with these non-human authorities must be interpreted. And by the fact that humans are fallible, our spokesmen are fallible. They can and do make mistakes. We, who follow the spokesmen, will from time to time, perpetuate these mistakes.
So, we are taught that in order to make no mistakes, we should follow no one at all. We form networks, but shun our own communities. And that would seem to be a simple solution, but it does not reflect the reality of our situation.
It’s true that there are very serious consequences from following the wrong people and wrong ideas. There is no way to avoid making this mistake, except through tremendous luck. When we are young, we often believe we can avoid the errors of our elders. But life has a way of changing our minds about our ability to avoid difficult situations. Even if we do seem to come through unscathed, we at least come to recognize that we are capable of great harm and were fortunate to avoid doing so.
It is more likely, as one ages, that one will uncover great errors in one’s thinking and even greater flaws in one’s behavior. And that is why it is important not to confuse ultimate authority (What Cures) with individual human authority (Who Cures).
The Good Life
“The question of identity has changed from something you are born with to a task; you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What social networks can create is a substitute.”
Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman
The problem of our age is not that we don’t know who or what to believe in, it is that we are conditioned to not believe in anything at all - including any of the ideals that could help us live a good life. And we no longer trust the people - our family, our neighbors, our community - to provide these answers.
As a result, the concept of the “good life” is not possible because all ideals must have a source outside of ourselves. If, however, we are constrained from having faith in an ultimate authority, then neither can we believe in any ideals that would come from that authority.
Even if one believes that people are basically good, one can’t deny that people are also basically selfish. If you don’t think this is true, I suspect you have not spent enough time with two-year-olds. You can argue that they have not reached the age of reason (about age 7), so that doesn’t count. And my answer is that seven years is a long time, even for an old person like myself. There’s a lot of work that goes into getting that child ready to use his reason for good.
We might agree that selfishness is an evolutionary or biological necessity for young children in order to insure their survival. And, on a scientific level, this seems likely to be the main reason why selfishness is a dominant trait of humans. Infants must make their needs known without advanced communication skills. But, as their reason and their ability to communicate matures, their innate selfishness needs to attenuate in order to insure group survival. That requires adult help, children cannot do it on their own.
Can the Political Rift be Resolved?
“The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.” So wrote Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.
“Sixteen centuries later Thomas Aquinas echoed this observation. Paraphrasing it, he said in effect that little errors in the beginning lead to serious consequences in the end.”
Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Mortimer J. Adler
Both sides of our cultural divide suffer from an ambiguous understanding of authority and a confused concept of “truth.” At times, the conflict over God borders on the absurd – with both sides describing a cartoonish image of what “God” is. A discussion of the authority of science is often no better than the treatment of the concept of God. Science is often used as replacement for metaphysics and even within science’s true field of knowledge and inquiry, questions that cannot be answered by mathematical analysis are often dismissed as unimportant or non-existent. Until a more informed discussion of truth and reality emerges, we will most likely continue to argue absurdities and drift apart.
Whether there is a real effort made to reinvestigate the past so that the mistakes in our culture today can be corrected before a societal collapse is not something that can be predicted. No one knows the future. It is not that the knowledge and wisdom is unavailable to us today, it is that we are increasingly unable to find it buried among the volumes of written material. The dominant media culture believes that there is no wisdom in the past that could help us today. As long we continue down this path, we will not be able to find a way forward.
When ideologies and human behavior run counter to reality for too long, nature has a way of sorting out all excesses. Something terrible awaits a society whose people are no longer interested in where they came from, who they are, or where they are going.
The Teacher’s Job
In the year of Uzziah's death, the Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."
Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job — in fact, he had asked for it — but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."
Isaiah’s Job – Albert J. Nock
On the brighter side of history, the loss of a common culture is not a new phenomenon and humans have rebuilt their lives and culture under worse conditions than what we suffer now.
Still, one might ask, if there are no clear answers and the visible rewards from society are few, why study the past? What’s in it for me, as an individual?
Culture reveals to us our common humanity and nature. Understanding our human condition can bring its own kind of comfort. People have asked the same questions we have; they have tried to give us the best of their answers for us. We find in our common struggles, a recognition of what and who we are. We find we are not alone, but part of a continuous thread of humanity stretching out over the ages. We belong to a common humanity through time and place.
However, comfort is not the only thing to be gained by studying our past. Culture is not about resting on the past. A solid foundation in culture should lead to a desire to experience this life, our life to its fullest.
Déjà Vu - Does History Repeat Itself?
It is true that there are patterns of human nature that tend to repeat themselves. Perhaps the reason for the conflict between established culture and the individual’s desire to be free of all restraints is as simple as the reasons why a child rebels against his parents demands. He is becoming his own person and must test the boundaries that his parents have placed on him. It is a part of our nature, and we never seem to outgrow it.
Our common humanity helps us to recognize these patterns that we face now. They help lay the groundwork for own lives. But that does not mean that we need to repeat the same patterns exactly. Life is like music. We are given a certain number of notes due to our nature, but the unique compositions that can be created are endless. Human lives are complex and every era of history unique in its own way. History never repeats note for note. The keys to understanding the path we choose, our life in the present, is being lost to the idea that the people in the past, our ancestors, do not have something important to say to us.
How will we know which path we should take? Should we strive for collective civilization or individual freedom? Which is the better life and why is it the better life? Can we not have the best of both worlds?
As student or teacher, we will all find ourselves on one side of this debate or the other. To fully understand life, one must not only study it but live it. And depending on our education, age, and experience, we might even find ourselves changing sides more than once within our lifetimes.
“Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, "Tell me, where are you going?"
And this he told meSaid, "I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm
Gonna join in a rock 'n' roll band
Got to get back to the land
Set my soul free"We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion-year-old carbon
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”Song: Woodstock, Album: Déjà Vu, Artists: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
Further Reading
A Guide for the Perplexed – E.F. Schumacher
Ten Philosophical Mistakes: Basic Errors in Modern Thought – How They Came About, Their Consequences and How to Avoid Them, Mortimer J. Adler
A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, Thomas Sowell
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathon Haidt