In our discussions, we will refer to culture in its most basic (culture as such) and most developed (high culture) aspect. In regular discourse, ‘culture’ often refers to this second aspect, denoting the most exalted expressions of art, literature, and fine cuisine. Though our usage will certainly include this sense, it is rather something more fundamental: culture is a way of being human.
“Man is a political animal (ζῷον πoλιτικόν).”1
Such is the famous axiom of the philosopher Aristotle. His axiom is important for us, as it not only aptly summarizes an anthropology to which we would subscribe; but, also reflects the ages we will explore, giving us crucial insights. Yet, we must note a certain gap between Aristotle and we moderns that muddles our understanding of his treatment of human nature. This dictum seems inappropriate or even disturbing in our democratic age. As if to be human is to be vulnerable, and alone amidst society's chaotic, noisy, brazen, and always merciless power struggles—to be at heart that most fearful Darwinian beast perennially engaged in social contest. Being referred to as a “political animal” would ring as derogatory, far from a description of the substance of being human. Curiously, Aristotle had none of these implications in mind when he formed his now axiomatic dictum. Aristotle’s political animal differs from our mishearing. His meaning is that man navigates his existence as a social being not standing naked before the yawning abyss of cruel nature. Indeed, his social reality to him is nature, the world of his experience.
Peter Berger, the sociologist who developed social constructivist theory, explains that if a human were completely alone, relying solely on instinct and physique, he would struggle in any environment.2 Unlike “the other higher mammals, he has no species-specific environment.”3 Yet he thrives everywhere. In Berger’s coinage, man should not be described as a generalist, but rather is characterized by a world-openness.[3] He thrives everywhere because he can adapt and shape his environment to suit him and craft a life-way in the world to fit and master his environment.
Also, unlike other animals, humans are born unprepared, incomplete, vulnerable, particularly ill-equipped, and utterly dependent in comparison. Yet it is precisely here, in this incomplete equipage in the face of the challenges of our environments, that we find one of the most determinative and decisive aspects of human nature. We are born of our mother half-made, but we continue necessarily to develop long after, formed not just in the womb of our mothers, but in the matrix of our cultures.
Man is not realized via nature (physiological endowment) alone, we require a special human and humanized contribution to human being. The environment we encounter is both a natural and human one. Thus, the “developing human being not only interrelates with a particular natural environment but with a specific cultural and social order, which is mediated to him by the significant others who have charge of him.”4 Social formation provides most of what we need to thrive. The human environment we encounter instills and completes what is lacking in bare nature and realizes the potentia of our humanity.
The human animal has a second nature, that of culture which is wholly natural to him and as such just as central to navigating the world as are limbs, sense organs, and a digestive system—he has a dual inheritance of both nature and culture: genes, and memes. As the biologist Mark Pagel, himself drawing on the thought of Richard Dawkins, explains; “Like our physical bodies, this cultural body wraps us in a protective layer, not of muscles and skin but of knowledge and technologies…it gives us our language, cooperation, and a shared identity.”5 Alone, humans are weak against the environment, but together we conquer it.6 “Homo sapiens” as Burger concludes, “is always, and in the same measure, homo socius.”7 Man confronts nature and the necessities of life as a social animal.
Culture as the Socially Constructed World
Man is inherently social, and our culture is as real as the natural world. This human world can be said to be the primary reality of our experience. But it is a manmade one—hence the formulation: the social construction of reality—the totality of which we have formed and by which we are informed, we call culture. Cultures embody universal characteristics. Indeed, cultural anthropology is predicated on these universal similarities across times and places, varying within a range of possible life-ways all different stratagems arriving at certain universal ends. We shall refrain here from enumerating those ends and hierarchically ranking them. For the time being, we will explore the proximate ends serving our immediate needs for survival.
Energy Costs & Necessities
Without food, shelter, and community, we perish. Such imperatives quickly consume our physical and mental energies, especially when lacking stability. “Neurons are living cells with metabolism” as the psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist Daniel Levitin explains, and “they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue.”8 Yet, “our brains are configured to make a certain number of decisions per day,” once those energy resources have been exhausted, “we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are.”9 In Levitin’s words, our brains do not prioritize.10
Responding to this anxiety, Berger describes a kind of ‘habituation process’ wherein these imperative activities are standardized across a given human sociality so that they no longer consume so much neurophysiological energy. We require such energy for focused attention. Thus, what is required to reduce this cognitive load consumed on basic necessities is a limiting of possibilities—we do not eat anything, but this and that and get it in this way, we do not wear anything, but this and in this way, we do not live anywhere, but in structures like this made in this way. New affordances arise from reduced possibilities. For, this solidification, is an “externalization” process wherein “people no longer need to mentally retain large quantities of information themselves;”11 thus, liberating cognitive energy as biological imperatives become habitual and concretized ways of life.12 And here, in this process of progressive habituation, we see culture as an abstract social problem-solving capacity moving into its actualized particularity as life-ways become distinct and its habits solidify into a normative and recognizable socio-cultural form.13 There is a profound link between concretization, the emergence of distinct and definitive cultural forms, and lowering energy expenditure.
This constraint or closing possibilities is likewise an affordance. Man no longer faces an endless abyss of problems with limitless solutions. But as a recipient of specific problem-solutions—which must be relevant and effective—the “thought-work” is externalized in the praxis or the object itself. That is to say, the cognitive energy that would have been expended by arriving at a practical or objective (i.e. tool based) solution is now “stored” in that habituated solution. This “background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation.”14 For Berger’s nomenclature, such a typified habit is called an ‘institution.’15 Somewhat counterintuitively therefore, and wonderfully chafing to modern ears, traditions, and institutions make any life beyond mere subsistence, possible. The more concretized a culture is in its life-ways, the more it can move its cultural energies away from mere biological imperative. This basic substrate of culture affords higher culture.
Man navigates nature as a social being—as homo socius—his social reality is his nature, as he is heir to both a genetic and a memetic inheritance. Culture is our second nature and is just as essential as our physical attributes. Indeed, it fulfills the imperatives of our biology by a habituation process thus reducing their neurophysiological strain. We need energy for focus, and we need to focus to retrieve energy. Culture in a sense cancels out one side of this equation. To reduce the cognitive load on basic necessities, we limit possibilities. But this itself affords the redirection of cognitive energy liberated in externalized cultural praxis. This process of habituation forms cultural norms and recognizable social patterns. A universal human capacity toward culture (Berger’s world-openness) is met by a culture (a solidified world).
Politics I, 2, 1253a2.
Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 51.
Peter Berger, ibid.
Ibid., 48.
Mark Pagel. Wired For Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. (New York: W.W. & Norton & Company, 2012), 12-13.
Willian von Hippel makes the same point in The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy (New York: Harper Collins, 2018), 106.
Berger, 51; derived from Arnold Gehlen’s concept of Triebüberschuss and Entlastung, cf. note 18, 197.
Daniel J. Levitin. The Organized Mind (New York: Penguin, 2017), 6-7.
The Organized Mind, 6.
Cf. Ibid.
Ibid., 14.
Cf. Berger, 53.
Cf. Ibid., 54.
Ibid., 53.
Cf. Ibid., 54.