Culture is a diminishment of human endowment

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In every language, there are popular sayings that express, in the one-liner format, some aspect of popular wisdom. If you eliminate the “wisecracks,” the humour and sarcasm, you might collect a handful of statements that appear to be saying something meaningful and profound.

We tend to dismiss them, as they are garbed in popular language and then seldom found in the discourse of scholars and other prominent personalities.

For instance, if a cab driver or your TV repairman tells you that “what you see is what you get,” what is he really saying and why is he saying it, in that precise formulation? Often, you might find that the statement seems to be disconnected from the circumstances or setting to which it is supposedly related. As if, some higher truth needed to be expressed, to explain the circumstances and justify the actions and attitudes. What is the statement saying? A quick analysis, for purposes of illustration, might yield the following:

1)Things are what they appear to be. You would be wasting your time going beyond appearances. No depth or hidden meanings are involved. No profound deductions could be drawn.

2)That what you expect determines your degree of satisfaction; that your perception determines the way you assess the situation.

In other words, this “what you see is what you get” seems to be a reformulation of “man is the measure of all things,” a 2500-year old statement, pronounced in ancient Greece, by some old Greek called Pythagoras. Why would your TV repairman, in Toronto or Philadelphia, be repeating the very same “mantra,” made popular by obscure scholars of centuries?

The answer might be that this statement (man is the measure of all things) is part of an understanding of reality and the real world; a number of ponderations bundled together, copied in consecrated wording and transmitted by the oral tradition. For this “man is the measure of all things” expresses the very same relativistic view of reality that we also find embedded in “what you see is what you get”.

In other words, it says that there is no Reality, other than what human kind determines and defines for itself. It is, in fact, an anti-intellectual statement. Its purpose is to expose the vanity of abstractionism. However, the statement does not only constitute a judgment on human endeavours to arrive at an understanding of the real world. It also implies a judgment of the World itself. It implies that the world is like a soup or a haze. In the soup you could single out the bits of carrot and say, “it is a carrot soup.” If you single out the peas you could feel justified in saying that “it is a pea soup.” The same for the paradigm of the haze: you only see shadows, all blended together. One says that that shadow is a man while another deems it to be a tree. It would be an error in judgment to deem such statements as expressions of defeatism, despair or fatalism. For they’re always expressed with a jocular sense of irony; in a dismissive manner, like saying, “who the Hell knows?!” or “what does it matter anyhow?!”

Furthermore, the posture is not a deadlock as it affords an exit. It implies that the only thing that truly matters is that you and I reach some consensus. For the “nature” of what we are dealing with will, eventually, be determined by our own combined will and actions. We do not require a divine Perspective to determine what we can do, how to do it and why to do it.

How, then, does one develop a sense of the “Real” world is really like? You might want to stop me, right there, and ask me to define my terms.

“What do you mean by ‘a sense of?’” and “why do you use the term ‘Real,’ since the whole point of this exercise was for you to tell me what the word might mean, at the end of the exercise?” Of course, such questions have been asked a million times before over several millennia. The ancient Greeks and their contemporary Indians were very good at this kind of debating. Theirs are evasive answers, all of which I find frustrating and greatly unsatisfactory. They go something like what follows:

1)There are no words to speak of the Real.

2)You could only know the Real by “transcending” your human nature.

3)You could only know the Real by Revelation or states of Grace. In other words, the Real reveals itself to you.

4)You could suspect the existence of a Real world by the long and disciplined practice of Doubt.

5)The scientific study of our own senses, mental and emotional functioning, reveals the fact that we “process” some external Reality. In other words, we could only know a “translation” of whatever is Out There that acts as a stimulus.

6)There is no Real world. There are no external stimuli. We are in the position of a playwright who directs, stages and acts, in our own plays. Our Reality is self-contained. We produce our own simulations.

7)Any “Sense of Reality” is, simply, Common Sense. All we know are psycho-motor and intellectual associations, which we call knowledge and science.

8)There would be no noticeable difference whether there is or there isn’t a Real world: our functioning would remain the same.

9)There is a Real world. However, since we are made of the same “stuff,” have been shaped by its laws; we cannot identify it as a separate entity. You could never see what you are immersed in. The fish is not aware of the water or the birds of the air.

10)Not only is the world “Real,” it is alive and animate. It contains both mind and matter. Our own minds are proof of the existence something other than Matter. Our minds are either duplicates or approximation of the Universal Mind. This is why our thoughts are reflections of the Reality of the world. Our thoughts are like “memories” of What Is. Because we are highly socialized, we only think social thoughts. We are cut off from the Ultimate Reality because we are wrapped around our selves. As such, we like to believe that our thoughts are our own creations.


The preceding, hopefully, serves to illustrate what is meant by “Real,” the Real World, Reality, the Absolute and “sense of Reality.” They also serve to illustrate the kind of thinking and type of debate that has been going on, perhaps, since time immemorial. For written history is but a small fraction of true History. Scholars can only work with written thoughts, a type of fossil record of the thinking life of humanity.

No-one, however, would get me to believe, that Caveman did not ponder the same questions in his own ways.

In retrospect, we could see that, basically, the debate, however varied, resumes itself to two positions:

1)Reality is reduced to what is within the fold of the social. There is no truth to be found outside culture. It is on such an assumption that the Roman emperor could proclaim his divinity and the Totalitarian State proclaims the primacy of the collective, the nation and the culture. The collective dictates the terms of what is real and what is not. Not so surprisingly, the majority of humanity, for most of historical time, has accepted this position. Its gods are always outside the confines of its Reality. They thunder and punish or cajole and reveal, they send their angels or Only Sons to Redeem this errant humanity; but, they always remain on the Outside. It is, then, a matter of placating and appeasing the gods. In fact, the very existence of a God or Gods demonstrates humanity’s bad conscience: it suspects the existence of a Real world but persists in existing in the Relative world of the Social. The only reality it has constructed for itself and over which it has a measure of control.

The prophets of the Absolute, when they are not beheaded, are taken with a grain of salt, in very small doses. Their message received as if a purgative of some bitter medicine, that one deems “good for the soul” while twisting and wriggling. This is why all religion and philosophy always involve atonement and austerities. The mystic of the Absolute finds it necessary to take to the hills, the desert or live a lonely life in the midst of millions. He considers Civilization the root of all evil; the true Fall; the source and cause of the great rift. To many thinkers, the irony of it all is that, in fact, that at its very peak, Civilization always seems to culminate in Animality. An example, often mentioned by the cynics, is the case of the great Newton ending his life as an idiot, unable to read his own writings or comprehend what used to be his thoughts. Holy books relish tales of Angels sent to Earth, to destroy the sinful cities of the world. The very same hysteria prevails in our times: global terrorism, Armageddon, killer meteors, unstoppable epidemics, the nuclear holocaust, the collapse of the world’s economies and the modern versions of the Anti-Christ, in the guise of foreign dictators. The fear that all of civilization could be snuffed out, in the blink of an eye.

Does this translate as some profound sense of guilt, have we displeased Daddy who art in Heaven?

Is it “the Revenge of the Real?” The conflict between the Real and the Unreal is one of the perennial themes of history, even though historians have always ignored it. They prefer to speak of empires collapsing “because of over-extension” or “excessive centralization,” rather than state the obvious: the said Empire had reached the maximum degree of unreality. Read, “I Claudius,” for purposes of illustrations. How else to explain the dissolution of the Soviet Union, with no world war or civil war?

Like someone said, in the best vernacular: “people have a built-in crap detector.” You can fool all of them most of the time, until this undetectable “point of saturation” is reached. If such a limit does exist, it is because we all have this elusive “sense of Reality.”

Assuming the existence of this crap detector/sense of reality, a number of questions remain that need to be investigated. For instance, we may ask: “is it innate or acquired?” Or “does it come in degrees or are we all endowed (or acquire) the same level or degree of understanding?”

The preliminary interrogations are rather easy to answer. Obviously, some of it must be innate, otherwise, no newborn would have ever survived. For as soon as the doctor slaps your bottom, you start breathing air and react offensively. Blind as you were, in those very first days, after birth, you instinctively suck your mother’s breast (or the nipple of a bottle). Soon, you will be doing the innumerable little actions and functions that keep a living organism alive. Some of these are not at all, “physical,” like associating sounds and colours or motions and silences – to things, people, foods or even times of day. On the other hand, you might not even know, yet, that fire burns or that you are supposed to sleep at night, even if you are not sleepy. There are millions of conventions that remain for you to learn. Obviously, this “sense of reality” must be a mixture of the innate and the acquired.

The best illustration is to be found in sexuality and the sexual acts. Take some male of the species, raised in the strictest of gender “apartheids” one could imagine. He has never seen a naked woman. He knows nothing of female anatomy or psychology. He was raised in a cultural setting of sexual taboos and mythological understanding of procreation. Yet, on his wedding night, he would still be able to perform the sexual act. Of course, he might never, in his lifetime, find out about flirting and foreplay or oral sex and manual stimulation. That aspect of the complexities of sexuality is a matter of learning; of collective experience; that is culture.

2)The second illustration regards thinking.
Even the most primitive human, still to be found on Earth, exhibits all the fineries and complexities of a sophisticated thinking mind. Even though he lives in a forest or the Kalahari Desert, he knows about “what if” and “therefore.” How does he know? Daily, he practices Cartesian Doubt and applies the rudiments of the scientific method. Otherwise, he would not survive! How does he know? Obviously, without schooling, he knows nothing of the Pythagorean Theorem and has no conception of geography. We know, however, that thousands are studying in our Universities at this very moment. I have known such people. People born in the African bush, in some village, where not even a water pump existed. People who grew on manioc, peanuts and monkey stew. Yet, the French and Belgians made them into research scientists, constitutional lawyers and theologians. Many became scholars and writers, in France, for instance.

Somehow, they were capable of passing from a stone age culture to Information Age in less than 20 years – what does this fact tell you? What does it mean?
Obviously, it means that the Innate is vastly more important than the acquired. If tomorrow morning, we were to wake up and find our IQs reduced to 70, we would be stumbling, like sleepwalkers, within our own cultures. We might not even know, anymore, how to use an ATM and we might be fearful of the elevator. On the other hand, the intelligent primitive, as soon as he hits our sidewalks, wants to find out about everything and loves it all. Until he finds out that he cannot have it all!

To our detriment, we fail to notice that, daily, millions of such “primitives” enter our cultures. They are our own progenies, born every minute. How do they adapt, century after century, at all these levels of culture – always with the same endowment? For the child born in 1025 A.D. was not different from the one born in 1999 A.D., in the very same spot – say, some small town in England. The one born in 1025 did not have to contend with the complexities of the present culture. Yet, the one born today, perhaps within the same genetic pool - perhaps even an exact duplicate of his distant ancestor – will take to the ways of the culture, almost instantly. It matters little that it takes 10, 15 or 20 years to inform him and train him, nowadays.

The fact remains that he will absorb the culture and go beyond it.

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Obviously, there must be, at work, a lot more than culture, training and problems of integration. There is a native ability, an endowment, far greater than any of the cultures that ever existed.

It is the culture, any culture, that cannot keep up with the human endowment.

Throughout what we know about history, we can see that culture subjugates the human element, forcing it into strange ways and, often, unnatural practices. Thus, as a brief glimpse and as an illustration, one could suspect that a Leonardo da Vinci was, really, a man built by Nature for some other century, at a level of cultural development far beyond the one in which he happened to be born.

Isn’t this the reason why we keep records on such figures? Isnt it why we can still draw lessons and inspiration from people who lived long before out times? Instinctively, we know that that they represent a promise.

The promise that Humanity deserves a lot more that what it has been getting.

Part 4 to come...