{"id":11213,"date":"2013-03-13T13:50:23","date_gmt":"2013-03-13T13:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nonesoblind.org\/blog\/?p=11213"},"modified":"2014-10-02T20:28:15","modified_gmt":"2014-10-02T20:28:15","slug":"swinging-for-the-fences-transmission-of-culture-a-hen-is-an-eggs-way-of-making-another-egg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/swinging-for-the-fences-transmission-of-culture-a-hen-is-an-eggs-way-of-making-another-egg\/","title":{"rendered":"Swinging for the Fences: Transmission of Culture — A Hen is an Egg’s Way of Making Another Egg"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the four dynamics, or magnets, I cited in the first round was \u201cThe Transmission of Culture Through Time.\u201d This idea \u2013this phenomenon\u2014is quite central to the larger, deeper ideas toward which we\u2019re heading here with \u201cSwinging for the Fences.\u201d <\/p>\n

(Those two ideas, it should be recalled, are:<\/p>\n

1) In the human realm, there operate deep and forces that warrant being called \u201cspirits\u201d\u2014not visible to our usual eye, but powerful in their effects.<\/p>\n

2) An important part of the human drama can meaningfully and appropriately be described as \u201cthe battle between good and evil.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is essential because the idea of \u201cspirit\u201d will refer to forces or patterns that a) move through time, coursing along channels in the culture, and within the human beings who inhabit that culture, animating their actions and b) have persistent tendencies in terms of the nature of their impact on the world, almost \u201cas if\u201d there were something \u201cworking\u201d to make the world more that way. And it is essential because among the various and patterns that move that way, and that have such consistent impacts, there is a cluster of them for which \u201cthat way\u201d the spirit seems to be \u201cworking\u201d to make the world are life-enhancing, constructive, beneficial, while there is another cluster that works in the world \u201cas if\u201d the destruction of what\u2019s beneficial were its \u201cpurpose.\u201d Hence the battle between good and evil.<\/p>\n

For now, though, let\u2019s just attend to the phenomenon of this transmission of culture, the persistence of patterns, with important elements of continuity even as circumstances change in the world in which the patterns are operating.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a powerful quotation I recently ran across in a profound book titled The Germans, by the late Norbert Elias. In a discussion of German political culture in the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, Elias describes a recurrent pattern, and makes this important observation:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is always astonishing to see the persistence with which specific patterns of thinking, acting and feeling recur, with characteristic adaptations to new developments, in one and the same society over many generations. It is almost certain that the meaning of certain key-words and particularly the emotional undertones embedded in them, which are handed on from one generation to another unexamined and often unchanged, plays a part in the flexible continuity of what one otherwise conceptualizes as ‘national character.\u201d<\/p>\n

That pretty well sums up what came to me at a crucial moment back in 2004.<\/p>\n

I would say that the single key moment which sparked the insight that\u2019s inspired my work of the past eight-and-a-half years \u2013my writing and speaking and then running for Congress\u2014came when \u201cI saw something about the way that those ]dark] forces operate, about how patterns can lurk in the cultural interstices, awaiting the chance to impose themselves again.\u201d This was in the election season of 2004, when the Republican presidential campaign was using the \u201cdanger\u201d of gay rights to frighten those people susceptible to such a message, and get them to the polls.<\/p>\n

That quote is from my article \u201cThe Concept of Evil\u201d (published in 2005 in Common Dreams at ), a piece that I often say is the most important thing I\u2019ve written in at least the past decade. That passage continues to describe what it was that I saw in that revelatory moment:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I saw, for example, how that manipulative genius, Karl Rove, effected his seduction of many traditionalist Americans, I recognized an old pattern\u2014one used a century before to seduce poor whites in the Jim Crow South.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Jim Crow South, and now again in Karl Rove\u2019s America, the leaders inflame passions around peripheral issues to distract their supporters from what the leaders are really doing with their power. A century ago, the hot-button distraction was racial purity. Now, the leaders whip people up about issues of moral purity. In both cases, unjust leaders use deception to exacerbate divisions useful to magnifying their own power and wealth.
\nElias, in The Germans, noted how a particular political pattern that had been around during the authoritarian years of the Prussian Kaiser came back to attack the fledgling liberal democracy during the years of the Weimar Republic, whose collapse led to the rise of Hitler.<\/p>\n

“In America, a pattern that was used for deception and exploitation by exacerbating racial antagonisms came back in our times to achieve similar goals by exacerbating tensions around sexual orientation.”<\/p>\n

This pattern Rove took off the shelf of Southern cultural history is not the only place where we can see a deep connection between the darker elements of Southern political culture and the darkness that\u2019s now being expressed through today\u2019s Republican Party. Some of the other parallels are easily identified in concrete political reflexes, like a shocking return of the long-rejected, long dormant doctrine of Nullification and the shocking re-emergence of talk of secession. But beneath these particulars one can discern deeper connections that suggest that a spirit that was active in the South during some wrenching times in American history has re-emerged in our times. (More on this in the months to come.)<\/p>\n

Not just LIKE the spirit of old. But the same spirit finding an opportunity to escape from marginality and imprinting its pattern on the country once again. <\/p>\n

Dark patterns lurk in the system, like some dormant virus, ready to erupt when the culture\u2019s immune system weakens.<\/p>\n

When we talk about transmission of culture, we\u2019re talking about an interplay between the human beings in the system, and the system their embedded in. It is not just that the old pattern from Jim Crow days was in the culture, but the susceptibility to be conned and exploited by that pattern is created in each generation of people growing up.<\/p>\n

In the same part of that essay, I wrote:<\/p>\n

“Just as a hen has been described as an egg\u2019s way of creating another egg, so also can we human individuals\u201d be seen as our culture\u2019s way of perpetuating certain patterns. Through our socialization and our life-experiences generally our culture creates us \u2014for better and for worse\u2014 in its own image.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“Sure, people make choices. But the patterns at work in the culture in which we grow up will shape the choices we make.<\/p>\n

“History isn\u2019t made just by people; it\u2019s also made by forces.”<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the four dynamics, or magnets, I cited in the first round was \u201cThe Transmission of Culture Through Time.\u201d This idea \u2013this phenomenon\u2014is quite central to the larger, deeper ideas toward which we\u2019re heading here with \u201cSwinging for the Fences.\u201d (Those two ideas, it should be recalled, are: 1) In the human realm, there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11213"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14072,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11213\/revisions\/14072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}