Integra
Member
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2016
- Messages
- 118
Since this is my first post, I want to just quickly say hello first. I'm very interested in the mind-body connection; more specifically, how the mind affects the body. By this I am not implying that the two are separate physically or functionally; I see the mind as of the body and that the two imply each other. If we think about health and disease as psychosomatic states on a spectrum, I'd like to understand how I can mindfully (as in, with the mind) support the recovery of physical health.
With that said, I hope that some of the things I write here will be useful to other members of the forum and maybe start new conversations. I am writing in part to try to understand things I am writing about and I would greatly appreciate new perspectives. Please feel free to challenge, expand, or tattoo on your forearm anything I write. Perhaps not the last one, 'cause the things we learn change. :) I tried my best to separate my own opinions from quotes or paraphrases and my interpretations of other people's ideas, but if I conflate some of those I'd be happy to clarify.
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On the limits of culture
Almost at the very beginning of the text, Ray Peat presents one definition that, for all its simplicity and apparent obviousness, made me reflect on and reconsider how I relate to the idea, functions, and limits of culture. In his article on academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals & science, Peat matter-of-factly defines culture as “the perceived limits of possibility.” Not only does it limit our possibilities, but he adds that culture may “make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.”
In an attempt to expand this discussion, I would like to add another definition of culture. The definition I will be focusing on is in line with the works of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, and Carl Rogers, people whose works I’ve been studying because I’m fascinated with alternative theories on the relationship between the mind and the body, or the relationship between our psychological and physiological functions. Influenced by the people I mentioned, my working definition of culture would be that it is a set of hierarchically organized values and accepted modes of behavior. These values and behaviors are transferred from one generation to another with the goal to regulate an individual’s fulfillment of biological and psychological needs and expenditure of energy so that both are in line with the established social order. On a biological level, this might translate to Peat’s idea that “Our brain grows into our culture, and the culture lives in our nervous system.”
This definition sounds a bit circular mostly because (under certain social and economic conditions) it can form a closed loop, and in fact I suspect many cultures self-reproduce in this way and remain fairly static over long periods of time. This changes once, I believe, contextual factors such as private property and the recognition of individualism emerge, developing a culture which consists of freely acting individuals that have a sense of personal agency or what some philosophers refer to as the free will to self-determine, and consequently make subsequent changes to that culture. But because the topic is the limits of culture, let us use an example that demonstrates a psychological mechanism that keeps a culture static and limiting to individual freedom.
As many of us unfortunately know, some people and maybe entire cultures practice physical punishment as an acceptable form of child-rearing practices. Even with the growing body of empirical evidence on the negative impact of traumatic early life experiences such as physical abuse on children’s psychological development, there are people who find this behavior acceptable, justified, and a good solution. I have recently had a conversation with a person who, upon reflecting on the idea of physical punishment of children, shrugged his shoulders and offered that it was good for social cohesion. I will withdraw my comments and simply tell what happened next.
At first, I allowed for the possibility that this was in part said to lighten up the atmosphere of an otherwise casual conversation, which in all fairness it was up to that point, but soon, the person continued with elaborate examples from another culture with the goal to point out how child beating is a culturally dependent practice and in turn, I believe, to imply that as such, we should leave it be—since interventionism would be patronizing towards the culture, as opposed to respectfully allowing that culture to self-regulate in its own ways. The rest of the conversation continued in a series of exchanges in which other people present maintained what I saw as a self-congratulatory tone for their open-mindedness and cultural sensitivity. Because it is only fair that I don’t remove myself from the story, I was, among other things, sitting there wondering whether the person who made this initial statement was ever beaten as a child.
If this person was in fact subject to physical punishment in childhood, our open-minded and culturally permissive fan of social cohesion would be a good example of how an individual is perpetuating the same cultural cycle (in this instance, that of violent behavior) because he or she is not willing to problematize aspects of one’s own or another culture or, more personally, aspects of one’s personal upbringing. To add to this level of difficulty, if physical punishment is the given culture’s answer to shaping a child’s behavior, an act of free will would require a dose of creativity for finding an alternative solution to the problem, and I doubt that people like the person I mentioned, who I consider to have been conditioned into an authoritarian culture and accepted its tenets as a given, would have enough energy, both metabolic and symbolic, to run against the currents of that same culture. These people’s energy is largely spent on submitting to principles that are not one’s own, performing various social roles as an energy-sapping substitute to being rooted in pleasure as an authentic self, instead investing efforts in advancing one’s image, endlessly repeating personally meaningless social rituals, etc.
This is a good place to consider the usefulness of social norms and external authority on the regulation of an individual’s behavior. I’ve never thought of laws as an effective preventive measure and I suspect that developing societal norms that, following our example, would be against hitting children simply because it’s not ‘proper’ would also have little effect. Perhaps my experience living in a society that in many ways rejects the individual as a social unit is hardly unique*, but if we add to that collection of factors a dysfunctional family, economic problems, and some rigid gender norms that dictate and regulate down to the most mundane aspects of an individual life from clothing, professional choices, family size, daily responsibilities, appropriate interests and even what food one is supposed to eat and when, I guess that my questions are:
The questions I ask above may seem rhetorical and to a certain degree they are suggestive, but I am truly looking for answer and different opinions on this topic. I know I’ve only touched the limits or negative sides of a culture, but it would be interesting to think a bit more about the (potential) benefits culture has as a source of potential for creativity, or an expansion of the self different cultures can offer.
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* The authoritarian society I grew up in did its best job to convince me man was inherently a selfish, evil animal, and that the society’s rules and norms are there to help us from self-destructing ourselves. In school, people from my background were taught a deterministic view of life (one of the biggest lessons in biology was limited cell division, the progressive entropy of all natural systems, the mechanistic view of the universe, and of course, Darwinism with a bit of a Nazi twist on it); in sociology, we regurgitated Thomas Hobbes’s bleak view of mankind, were taught that capitalism was evil and almost by definition exploitative, and so on…
With that said, I hope that some of the things I write here will be useful to other members of the forum and maybe start new conversations. I am writing in part to try to understand things I am writing about and I would greatly appreciate new perspectives. Please feel free to challenge, expand, or tattoo on your forearm anything I write. Perhaps not the last one, 'cause the things we learn change. :) I tried my best to separate my own opinions from quotes or paraphrases and my interpretations of other people's ideas, but if I conflate some of those I'd be happy to clarify.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On the limits of culture
Almost at the very beginning of the text, Ray Peat presents one definition that, for all its simplicity and apparent obviousness, made me reflect on and reconsider how I relate to the idea, functions, and limits of culture. In his article on academic authoritarians, language, metaphor, animals & science, Peat matter-of-factly defines culture as “the perceived limits of possibility.” Not only does it limit our possibilities, but he adds that culture may “make us stupid long before the metabolic problems appear.”
In an attempt to expand this discussion, I would like to add another definition of culture. The definition I will be focusing on is in line with the works of Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, and Carl Rogers, people whose works I’ve been studying because I’m fascinated with alternative theories on the relationship between the mind and the body, or the relationship between our psychological and physiological functions. Influenced by the people I mentioned, my working definition of culture would be that it is a set of hierarchically organized values and accepted modes of behavior. These values and behaviors are transferred from one generation to another with the goal to regulate an individual’s fulfillment of biological and psychological needs and expenditure of energy so that both are in line with the established social order. On a biological level, this might translate to Peat’s idea that “Our brain grows into our culture, and the culture lives in our nervous system.”
This definition sounds a bit circular mostly because (under certain social and economic conditions) it can form a closed loop, and in fact I suspect many cultures self-reproduce in this way and remain fairly static over long periods of time. This changes once, I believe, contextual factors such as private property and the recognition of individualism emerge, developing a culture which consists of freely acting individuals that have a sense of personal agency or what some philosophers refer to as the free will to self-determine, and consequently make subsequent changes to that culture. But because the topic is the limits of culture, let us use an example that demonstrates a psychological mechanism that keeps a culture static and limiting to individual freedom.
As many of us unfortunately know, some people and maybe entire cultures practice physical punishment as an acceptable form of child-rearing practices. Even with the growing body of empirical evidence on the negative impact of traumatic early life experiences such as physical abuse on children’s psychological development, there are people who find this behavior acceptable, justified, and a good solution. I have recently had a conversation with a person who, upon reflecting on the idea of physical punishment of children, shrugged his shoulders and offered that it was good for social cohesion. I will withdraw my comments and simply tell what happened next.
At first, I allowed for the possibility that this was in part said to lighten up the atmosphere of an otherwise casual conversation, which in all fairness it was up to that point, but soon, the person continued with elaborate examples from another culture with the goal to point out how child beating is a culturally dependent practice and in turn, I believe, to imply that as such, we should leave it be—since interventionism would be patronizing towards the culture, as opposed to respectfully allowing that culture to self-regulate in its own ways. The rest of the conversation continued in a series of exchanges in which other people present maintained what I saw as a self-congratulatory tone for their open-mindedness and cultural sensitivity. Because it is only fair that I don’t remove myself from the story, I was, among other things, sitting there wondering whether the person who made this initial statement was ever beaten as a child.
If this person was in fact subject to physical punishment in childhood, our open-minded and culturally permissive fan of social cohesion would be a good example of how an individual is perpetuating the same cultural cycle (in this instance, that of violent behavior) because he or she is not willing to problematize aspects of one’s own or another culture or, more personally, aspects of one’s personal upbringing. To add to this level of difficulty, if physical punishment is the given culture’s answer to shaping a child’s behavior, an act of free will would require a dose of creativity for finding an alternative solution to the problem, and I doubt that people like the person I mentioned, who I consider to have been conditioned into an authoritarian culture and accepted its tenets as a given, would have enough energy, both metabolic and symbolic, to run against the currents of that same culture. These people’s energy is largely spent on submitting to principles that are not one’s own, performing various social roles as an energy-sapping substitute to being rooted in pleasure as an authentic self, instead investing efforts in advancing one’s image, endlessly repeating personally meaningless social rituals, etc.
This is a good place to consider the usefulness of social norms and external authority on the regulation of an individual’s behavior. I’ve never thought of laws as an effective preventive measure and I suspect that developing societal norms that, following our example, would be against hitting children simply because it’s not ‘proper’ would also have little effect. Perhaps my experience living in a society that in many ways rejects the individual as a social unit is hardly unique*, but if we add to that collection of factors a dysfunctional family, economic problems, and some rigid gender norms that dictate and regulate down to the most mundane aspects of an individual life from clothing, professional choices, family size, daily responsibilities, appropriate interests and even what food one is supposed to eat and when, I guess that my questions are:
- Can a person be considered psychologically free if there is no constitution that says so and lives in a culture that systematically rejects that on many levels, some of which I previously described?
- If, as Ray Peat offers, individuality consists of the choices we make, how is one’s individuality created or shaped when the choices available are extremely limited by contextual (cultural) factors?
- Where does the sense of real individuality and personal agency come from if one has not experienced anything else but the restrictive rules and norms that most members of society have accepted as a given?
- Are individuality and free will valid concepts for people making choices when they are not the conscious owners of their thoughts, feelings, and actions?
The questions I ask above may seem rhetorical and to a certain degree they are suggestive, but I am truly looking for answer and different opinions on this topic. I know I’ve only touched the limits or negative sides of a culture, but it would be interesting to think a bit more about the (potential) benefits culture has as a source of potential for creativity, or an expansion of the self different cultures can offer.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* The authoritarian society I grew up in did its best job to convince me man was inherently a selfish, evil animal, and that the society’s rules and norms are there to help us from self-destructing ourselves. In school, people from my background were taught a deterministic view of life (one of the biggest lessons in biology was limited cell division, the progressive entropy of all natural systems, the mechanistic view of the universe, and of course, Darwinism with a bit of a Nazi twist on it); in sociology, we regurgitated Thomas Hobbes’s bleak view of mankind, were taught that capitalism was evil and almost by definition exploitative, and so on…
