Humans seek to transcend nature via culture

But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement.--Yates

“What will come of my whole life…Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”—Tolstoy

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker suggests that we all create an artificial world to avoid confronting the hopelessness of the human condition.

The basic premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.

Meaning is number ONE. What wo/man fears most is extinction, which includes insignificance.

Wo/man wants assurance that their life has somehow counted; if not for her or his self then at least within the overall scheme of things. If there is some kind of “judgment day” then I want to be in ‘that number’ that matter. While alive I want to know that “I am somebody”.

Religion is our primary means for responding to that basic need to be somebody. Otto Rand says that all religions spring up “not so much from…fear of natural death as of final destruction.”

“It is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some form or other, whether it appears as purely religious or not…culture itself is sacred, since it is the “religion” that assures in some way the perpetuation of its members.”

Our dichotomy of sacred and secular aspects of social life is an egregious error. There is no such thing as a distinction between sacred and secular in the symbolic affairs of sapiens. Sacred is that which transcends the natural world while secular is that which is of the natural world. In the world of symbolic affairs such distinctions do not hold.

“As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcendence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given meaning by the mind, a meaning that is not given by physical nature. Culture is in this sense “supernatural” and all systemizations of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above nature, to assure him that in some ways their lives count in the universe more than merely physical things count.”

Self-transcendence, i.e. transcending nature via culture, does not provide a simple means to deny the primacy of death; the terror of death still lurks beneath the veneer. We have shifted the fear of death onto a new level of anxiety; we must “now hold for dear life onto the self-transcending meanings of the society in which we live…a new kind of instability and anxiety are created.”

In our attempt to deny evil, i.e. death, we bring a new and grotesque form of evil. “It is man’s ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter fate.” Wo/man has, through ingenuity, heaped great evil on the world; far greater than could ever be created by our animal nature.

Quotes from Escape from Evil—Becker

This line reminds me of Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn.

Agriculture -- that is, its implications and presuppositions -- has become the dominant meta-culture. Apparent differences aside, we're all (say, 99%) living the shared culture born of the first farmers, in contrast with the culture that theirs eventually supplanted. (Was the story of Cain, the planter, killing his brother Abel, the herdsman, allegorical of this?)

With agriculture came the original surplus, with its dedicated managers who become the original ruling class -- a leisure class which could ponder non-critical but far-reaching questions of philosophy and science (there's no Aristotle without slaves; no leisure class without a toiling class to support it). But this intolerable arrangement, with its division of labor and comparatively swift technological advances, has pitted us in a race against nature (that is, against ourselves): can we advance fast enough to outpace the degradation to our species that comes with being removed from the natural pressures that all other species face? Should we? Is it worth the price of necessarily perpetuating inherently exploitative social structures? Will the exploited tolerate this long enough?

I don't see this paradigm continuing. Exploiters are short-sighted by nature. They're not looking ahead -- if they were, then we'd see capitalists arguing in favor of heavy regulation; they'd want to keep the toiling class at bay as long as possible with lavish returns of stolen profits, settling for just enough to keep advancing at a sufficient rate. But we see the exact opposite. At some point, the worm will turn, and the result will be a "regression" (i.e., a return to sanity), whereby we willingly submit ourselves once again to natural pressures in return for the revitalizing of our species.

We can't transcend nature forever.

Humans have the ability to create abstract concepts (ideas).

There are concrete concepts, i.e. those concepts created by our cognitive structures from physical experience and there are abstract concepts (ideas). Abstract ideas, such as freedom, justice, liberty, nation, religion, etc., are constructed from what are called conceptual metaphors.

Conceptual metaphor is the name given to the cognitive process of mapping the structures from concrete concepts into subjective, i.e. abstract concepts.

We humans live, die, and kill in the name of abstract ideas.

Abstract ideas are our means to go beyond nature and we will continue to do so until we destroy our civilization and perhaps all life on this planet.

Hello to all

Socially-learned cultural behavior thought to be unique to humans is also found among chimpanzees colonies, say scientists at the University of Liverpool.Historically, scientists believed that behavioral differences between colonies of chimpanzees were due to variations in genetics. A team at Liverpool, however, has now discovered that variations in behavior are down to chimpanzees migrating to other colonies, proving that they build their "cultures" in a similar way to humans.

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The definition of culture can also be zoological, as the transmission of knowledge not only between parents to breeding but also between non related individuals in the community.

So is given when a macaco in Japan began to wash the fruit in the river and all the group makes the same of even when a bird learns the songs of his or another species and repeat and modifies them.

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