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Why did reason arise in some cultures?

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Question: Where do cultural tendencies come from?

Context: I have been wondering lately about the factors that influence cultural development. Obviously, philosophy is paramount among them, but the dominant philosophy of a culture is not created _ex nihilo_. Why do some cultures develop a tendency to embrace rationality, while others become mired in superstition? Without, one hopes, appearing racist, it seems possible to say, for instance, that the ancient Greeks had more of a tendency toward reason than away from it, while other cultures of similar antiquity--China, India, Arabia--descended into morasses of collectivist irrationality from which they have yet to recover, millennia later. This phenomenon can be seen in the "Athens-Jerusalem" dichotomy that describes some of the contradictions of "Western civilization".

Possible Answers: One possible answer would be a "great man" theory, similar to that seen in some analyses of history, which gives sole credit to the most prominent philosophers of a culture for shaping it. This seems intuitively wrong: it fails to explain why, for instance, Aristotle rose to prominence in Greece and Confucius in China, rather than vice versa. Unfortunately, it also exhausts my list of interesting possibilities. All I have left is the typical factors that anthropologists cite as influences on culture: environmental issues like geography, climate, natural resources, etc; and these seem woefully inadequate.

Challenge: Does anyone have any ideas on the subject? Are there any writings on anthropology by Objectivists that I should be looking into?

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Question: Where do cultural tendencies come from?

Context: I have been wondering lately about the factors that influence cultural development. Obviously, philosophy is paramount among them, but the dominant philosophy of a culture is not created _ex nihilo_. Why do some cultures develop a tendency to embrace rationality, while others become mired in superstition? Without, one hopes, appearing racist, it seems possible to say, for instance, that the ancient Greeks had more of a tendency toward reason than away from it, while other cultures of similar antiquity--China, India, Arabia--descended into morasses of collectivist irrationality from which they have yet to recover, millennia later. This phenomenon can be seen in the "Athens-Jerusalem" dichotomy that describes some of the contradictions of "Western civilization".

Possible Answers: One possible answer would be a "great man" theory, similar to that seen in some analyses of history, which gives sole credit to the most prominent philosophers of a culture for shaping it. This seems intuitively wrong: it fails to explain why, for instance, Aristotle rose to prominence in Greece and Confucius in China, rather than vice versa. Unfortunately, it also exhausts my list of interesting possibilities. All I have left is the typical factors that anthropologists cite as influences on culture: environmental issues like geography, climate, natural resources, etc; and these seem woefully inadequate.

Challenge: Does anyone have any ideas on the subject? Are there any writings on anthropology by Objectivists that I should be looking into?

What I think is the more the ability in a nation, the less the chances of embracing an irrational philosophy. Those who don't have ability find it easier to evade reality than to face it. They adopt the easier and evil way out. For e.g., the ratio of ability to population in India is very low. In America it is much greater. India has a tendency to bend towards socialism. America is more towards capitalism.

Even in high school the trend is apparent. Those who fail to understand anything or most things have a tendency to adopt drugs, punk culture, rap, heavy metal, etc.

I think the "great man" argument is false. Ayn Rand was the greatest philospher who ever lived by all rational standards. 22 years after her death, America doesn't seem to be improving much. But of course, even if rational people exist, there has to be a great man/woman to lead them. And even rational people get ideas from some great man/woman. However a great man need not necessarily shape a culture because thinking is a choice.

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Possible Answers: One possible answer would be a "great man" theory, similar to that seen in some analyses of history, which gives sole credit to the most prominent philosophers of a culture for shaping it. This seems intuitively wrong: it fails to explain why, for instance, Aristotle rose to prominence in Greece and Confucius in China, rather than vice versa.

The explanation for why Aristotle rose to prominence in Greece, and why Confucius did likewise in China, and not vice versa, is that Aristotle was born and lived in Greece, not China, and vice versa. That much isn't too hard. Another fact is that Aristotle and Confucius both had teachers of a particular type, who could have significantly influenced them (even negatively). I am somewhat partial to the view that Indo-European belief systems sowed the seeds for e.g. Greek philosophy and Hinduism alike (for better or worse), especially regarding controlling the universe (not being controlled by the universe). A specific difference is that Chinese philosophy has a strong aspect of ancestor worship to it, lacking in the Greek tradition. At a certain point, in trying to trace back the history of ideas, you'll hit the no-documentation wall. At that point, you can ask "What was it about Chinese culture vs. Indo-European culture that made the one crucial difference", and I'd have to say "I don't know".

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What I think is the more the ability in a nation, the less the chances of embracing an irrational philosophy. Those who don't have ability find it easier to evade reality than to face it. They adopt the easier and evil way out. For e.g., the ratio of ability to population in India is very low. In America it is much greater. India has a tendency to bend towards socialism. America is more towards capitalism.

...

What do you mean by "ability" here?

What about its origin? Is it genetic? Is it determined by the climate? Is it randomly distributed in populations around the world, but happens to bunch in some places and not in others?

Or, if "ability" is a matter of being a product of volition, then the question is: Why are more individuals in some societies more in focus than in others?

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What do you mean by "ability" here?

What about its origin? Is it genetic? Is it determined by the climate? Is it randomly distributed in populations around the world, but happens to bunch in some places and not in others?

Or, if "ability" is a matter of being a product of volition, then the question is: Why are more individuals in some societies more in focus than in others?

By ability I mean intelligence and the capacity to do work.

I cannot understand that ability or intelligence can be a product of volition.

Otherwise why would people be stupid? That is why I think that intelligence of every person is determined by genes though it can be altered to some extent. Not everybody can be a genius.

But I am not very informed on the workings of the brain so I could be terribly wrong on this point.

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By ability I mean intelligence and the capacity to do work.

I cannot understand that ability or intelligence can be a product of volition.

Otherwise why would people be stupid? That is why I think that intelligence of every person is determined by genes though it can be altered to some extent. Not everybody can be a genius.

...

I too am exploring this subject. As usual, I have more questions than answers.

1. If ability is genetic, as you said, and if some countries have more individuals of high ability than other countries, then is the explanation of that supposed fact a racial explanation? Was Renaissance Italy more advanced because of better genes than in Medieval Italy? The genetic explanation is very doubtful. It doesn't explain fairly rapid changes in respect for reason in a given culture from one period to the next.

2. I would also like to challenge the idea that men of ability are more likely to have a philosophy of reason (implicit or explicit). In my experience, I see no correlation between the virtue of rationality and intelligence (an apparently innate capacity for forming abstractions). If anything, I sometimes wonder if it isn't the other way around. People of average intelligence, the ones who do most of the work of the world (not the innovative work, but the application work) tend to focus on what they can see and understand. Of course, they also accept a lot of terrible ideas from intellectuals, but in a division of labor society that is not a sign of lack of reason.

Mike the construction worker was just as rational as Howard Roark (which is one of the reasons they liked each other). However, Roark was a genius, and Mike was a man of average intelligence. Rational geniuses will be more successful in their reasoning than rational men of average intelligence, but they doesn't mean those geniuses are more rational.

P. S. -- You are right that not everyone can become a genius. But, on the other hand, it is also true that everyone can become a moron -- by abandoning volition, that is, the commitment to awareness. And without awareness how can any work get done?

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I cannot understand that ability or intelligence can be a product of volition.

Did you ever hear the old saying: "The harder I work the smarter I get?" Amongst people there are certainly structural differences in the brain, just as there are structural differences in physiology. But, for most all of us, by far the greatest factor affecting intelligence lies in the use or misuse of consciousness. All knowledge that you acquire is a consequence of volitional effort, and the broader the range of your integrated knowledge the more intelligent you become. That is what intelligence really means, i.e., dealing with broad-ranging abstractions.

Otherwise why would people be stupid?
Lack of volitional effort and thought?

That is why I think that intelligence of every person is determined by genes though it can be altered to some extent. Not everybody can be a genius.

Leaving out the extremes of idiot and genius, and assuming the normal range of brain structure and functioning, most everyone else's intelligence is almost wholly a function of their own mental effort. As a loose analogy, think of the brain as a field upon which you play: the field's are larger or smaller within some range, but how you play determines how much of each field you will cover.

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If you compare and contrast the civilized and the barbarian cultures (or a happily civilized Greeks and tyrannically civilized Chinese/Indians) and ask yourself the big "WHY", I think it's a mistake to look for an answer in some one difference at the dawn of each culture that, through time, produced such divergent results. As is obvious, there was no superior gene, no superior geography, no better environment, no difference in vitamins and access to sea, no *one* choice of the fathers in the first generation of a civilization's history, that created this difference.

Again this is only tentative, but I would suggest that instead of one massive difference at the birth of each culture, there is one small difference in every generation of each culture. So to understand why the Greeks prospered at 500BC, what enabled them to produce all the fruits of their civilization, I would answer that the answer lies not in some superior gene at the dawn of their race, but instead spread out over the centuries. So, if I were pressed to provide one distinguishing quality that they possessed over unhappy civilizations and over barbaric people, I would give 'honesty' as my answer (by that I don't mean honesty in a superficial sense, but in a metaphysical sense of dealing with reality). Remeber that Ayn Rand, when asked whether she was "extra smart", or otherwise asked to provide a cause for her intellectual and personal achievements, responided that she didn't think it had anything to do with her intelligence, but her honesty.

Thus, to explain Greek achievements, I submit we view the progress of their civilization over centuries, starting around 1000BC when their arts were crude and unrefined, and writing was as unknown as it was irrelevant. Then, as we watch them live out their lives over the centuries, we notice at the dawn of their Classical civilization that men, only a few at first, begin to approach their metaphysical views with honesty; as centuries roll by, the minority grows, ever so slightly; these few, due to an honest relationship with their world, choose to employ reason more and more in practicing their livelihood; centuries crawl by, and the minority slowly emerges as a majority. Each successive generation retains and improves the achievements of all previous ones because more and more men in this generation choose to be metaphysically honest, which in turn makes them favor reason more and more. Honesty and reason end up complementing each other, and as each new generation proves to be a match in these two virtues and worthy heirs to its fathers, that civilization grows, the products of the mind multiply, and success and happiness abound.

So then if someone asks, "But why did more and more men become honest with each successive generation? What necessitated this increase in honesty, what necessarily guaranteed that each new generation would be better?", the answer is, "There was no guarantee." There were plenty of civilizations in the world's history that showed explosive growth at first, and yet became stiffled and fizzle out. The Greek choice to be brutally honest with reality was not some derivative of other forces. Though a cultural choice, it was as irreducible as a choice of a single individual - it simply was a society of creatures that possess free will, each individual in which irreducibly (not metaphysically caused by antecedent events) increasingly chose to live in an honest, and therefore rational, manner. This choice of many thousands of men, over centuries, produced an envy of the world.

So, again tentatively, to answer why the Greeks prospered, while the loony Europeans didn't, the answer is that most Greek men chose to live their lives in an honest fashion, while most Europeans did not. And this was not some sudden choice, but a choice that each successive Greek and European generation made over centuries of living next to one another; each generation made the very same choice time and time again, creating growth and success in one culture, and stagnation and misery in the other. Greeks didn't always make that choice. Before 800BC they were as primitive as everyone else. After the Roman Empire fell in ~400AD, we don't hear much of Greek philosophers anymore, because they suffered the same curse that the Romans did - the advent of Christianity, and the institutionalized focus on metaphysical dishonesty.

Take a simple subject such as death. A true Christian today consoles himself that death is not the end, it's a beginning. Indeed this life is just training for the next one, and death is a joyous gateway from the world of Man to the world of God. Homer, in 800BC and at the very dawn of the Greek civilization, wrote down The Iliad, where men fight for earthly possessions and earthly glory. They seek no happiness after death, they seek to spend their earthly lives in the best way they can. What happens when they die? What awaits them at the Threshhold between life and death? Nothing. What sort of Heaven do they enter? Not a very good one, a hazy and meaningless existence in Hades, something they were very much uninterested in, and cared little for. What prompted a brave warrior of The Iliad to fight on the field of battle? Not martyrdom and success in the afterlife. What consoled him when realizing his chances of survival were slim? Nothing consoled him. There was no theurapeutic God to make him feel good in the Afterlife, no entrance into an effortless existence of Heaven. If struck, he knew that his life finished, and his consciousness would be obliterated in a few moments. A Homeric warrior knew that death was final; there were no 'extenuating circumstances', no merging with the Dao, no Hindu reincarnation, no Christian absolution, no 72 perpetual virgins; for him death meant that he as an entity would cease to exist, be irrevocably obliterated, annihilated... erased.

This sort of brutal honesty (inconceivable to a Christian), among other things, is what makes The Iliad such an important poem in history - it was written down not at the twilight, but at the very dawn of Greek civilization, and outlined every important principle that subsequent Greek men would adopt and were to live by.

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Question: Where do cultural tendencies come from?

I think you are on the right track with the answer of philosophy and the "great man" hypothesis. It is individuals that come up with new ideas and philosophies, but they do not do so in a vacuum. Ayn Rand noted that she could not have developed her philosophy of Objectivism without the Industrial Revolution.

It is a whole sequence of individuals (or many sequences concurrently) that combine to form a dominant philosophy. I think Peikoff does a good job of demonstrating this on a smaller scale in his Ominous Parallels.

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If you compare and contrast the civilized and the barbarian cultures (or a happily civilized Greeks and tyrannically civilized Chinese/Indians) and ask yourself the big "WHY", I think it's a mistake to look for an answer in some one difference at the dawn of each culture that, through time, produced such divergent results. As is obvious, there was no superior gene, no superior geography, no better environment, no difference in vitamins and access to sea, no *one* choice of the fathers in the first generation of a civilization's history, that created this difference.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply; what you've said makes a lot of sense to me. I suppose I was hoping for some single cause that could explain everything, but that doesn't really seem realistic.

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My point is that in the beginning of the 21st century, amidst a glorious and glittering civilization, in a tremendously spectacular movie such as "Ben Hur" that only America could make, the main characters still try to teach the audience that death is just another step, that the world is brighter on the Other Side, and that upon death we will find a loving and comforting God to shelter us and absolve us from all responsibilities and concerns. Compare this to the stark view expressed in the Iliad, about the inevitable finality of death, and the consequent extinguishing of consciousness that all must prepare for, and accept. If you compare only these two views alone, who is more advanced: the Christian screenwriter in our glittering 21st century, or the Greek poet who lived 2,800 years before?

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My point is that in the beginning of the 21st century, amidst a glorious and glittering civilization, in a tremendously spectacular movie such as "Ben Hur" that only America could make, the main characters still try to teach the audience that death is just another step, that the world is brighter on the Other Side, and that upon death we will find a loving and comforting God to shelter us and absolve us from all responsibilities and concerns. Compare this to the stark view expressed in the Iliad, about the inevitable finality of death, and the consequent extinguishing of consciousness that all must prepare for, and accept. If you compare only these two views alone, who is more advanced: the Christian screenwriter in our glittering 21st century, or the Greek poet who lived 2,800 years before?

OK, I can see that, but you're quoting the "classic" Ben Hur of 1959, aren't you? It's not exactly a 21st century movie. Today's films, by and large, err on the side of nihilistic subjectivism, not religious intrinsicism. Whether that's an improvement or not is debatable. :)

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Touche :)

If you compare only these two views alone, who is more advanced: the Christian screenwriter in the glittering 20st century, or the Greek poet who lived 2,800 years before?

--

Oh and believing in something, no matter how wrong, is always better than believing in nothing at all.

Oh, I'm not disagreeing with either point by any means. In fact, I've cited the second as one of my prime reasons for prefering conservatives to liberals, when forced to choose between the two. (I.e., every time I vote. :))

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  • 1 year later...
Amongst people there are certainly structural differences in the brain...

...by far the greatest factor affecting intelligence lies in the use or misuse of consciousness. All knowledge that you acquire is a consequence of volitional effort, and the broader the range of your integrated knowledge the more intelligent you become.

I agree. As for structural differences in the brain, such differences need not necessarily be heritable even though there is a genetic basis for them. Just because something has a genetic basis does not mean it is fully heritable. This is why you can get really smart kids being born from really stupid parents. And vice versa.

E.g. there's a genetic basis for the presence of muscle, and in a limited sense, muscle bulk is heritable. But I am sure I could become a bodybuilder IF I wanted to, regardless of my "genetics". But it all depends on whether I want to or not.

The capacity for reason is present, to some extent, in all individuals, unless they are missing a cerebrum.

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In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond proposes a few ideas for the West's general head start that are somewhat applicable here, the two notable ones being that most of the really valuable domesticable plants and animals originated in or near Europe, migrated easily into Europe, where food production/animal raising was sustainable, and Europe was always politically fragmented, as opposed to China, which was unified under one political system for a long time.

With the ability to support themselves in cities as well as the degree of freedom (and constant pressure) supplied by political fragmentation, it's no surprise that the West surged ahead, starting even in prehistoric times.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Two quotes come to mind:

"Mistake, error, is the discipline through which we advance." - William Channing

"There are men who never err, because they never propose anything rational." - Goethe

There is nothing wrong with making an error as long as you continuously check your premises and honestly identify your mistakes. However, being a nihilist who believes in nothing.... that is pretty much incurable.

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I think the ammount reason played in the culture's survival is directly related to how prevalent reason was in their culture. If a society had to develope conplex social structures and products for mere survival in the winter, there was more motivation for a society to center around reason.

If you raise a child in an environment with barely anything for his conscious to latch onto spare very simple surroundings, he wont rationally develope as much as a child raised around lots of appropriate books, legos, or even the possibility of physical activity in the form of sports and games. The motivation must present itself in order for a being to grow. Organisms dont evolve on a whim, they evolve because they must.

Edited by ColdWontRise
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