Introduction
To restate somewhat differently what was said in our entry on Innovation, Cultural Convergence happens when different people from the same culture perceive the same problem and arrive at the same solution independently of each other.
The Industrial Revolution was a time of seemingly endless innovation, and many of those innovations were commercially valuable. This explains the patent laws, which recognized two kinds of innovation and the problem of cultural convergence.
Novel innovation = the first of its kind.
Original innovation = independently arrived at after the first.*
*Meaning, after the first was registered but before it became public knowledge.
The rest of this entry will provide examples and commentary. The examples are from science, art, philosophy, and psychology.
Part I
One of the most famous examples of cultural convergence was The Darwin-Wallace Affair. Wallace’s theory was so like Darwin’s that some of the phrases were identical. This has led to the shameful accusation that Darwin “stole” Wallace’s theory.
Though certainly shameful, the accusation is an excellent, though depressing, example of what PRC International refers to in our Critical Thinking seminars as intert information.
In any event, it’s instructive of the nature of cultural convergence that some of Darwin’s friends warned him that this would happen. So, the first thing Darwin did was establish his priority at the next meeting of the Linnaean Society. Wallace deferred gracefully and accepted without hesitation the grounds of priority, the legal grounds established by the patent laws.
The Darwin-Wallace Affair is perfect for helping us better understand our next example which comes from the world of art.
Specifically, the great breakthrough of Western art into the Modern style. Before turning to that, as we said in Innovation, Culture is patterns of behavior, and the Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution is, in essence, itself a pattern of verbal behavior.
The theory of evolution was innovated exactly because both men saw the same problem, the gap between current theories of creation and the relevant data, living and fossilized.
And both men arrived at almost identical results because both could innovate only with the patterns of verbal behavior already available, Malthusian population theory and Lyellian geology.
Cultural convergence happened in this case because both men could call upon only common cultural patterns, because, on this subject, at that time, that’s all there was. This explains the almost immediate acceptance of the theory among the informed.
In spite of highly publicized resistance (coming, not surprisingly, from those armed only with value statements) few theories have made their way so quickly among the competent.
Yet, one wonders why more biologists, with the same tradition and the same knowledge, had not come to the same conclusion.
The answer obviously is genius, which is a combination of high learning ability and of high orientative flexibility. Once again we see why the attributes of wisdom are so valued at PRC. Not simply because genius and wisdom are often so synonymous, and certainly not because we think we or our partners are geniuses filled with wisdom we’re ready to share with others. Not at all.
In fact, on the contrary. For us, wisdom and genius are matters of aspiration. We aspire to them with the hope that such aspiration will help us solve our problems and improve the quality of our lives, both personal and professional. That’s all.
Part II
The conditions surrounding The Darwin-Wallace Affair help us understand the breakthrough of Western art into the Modern style because, just as the Darwin-Wallace theory was a pattern of behavior, and just as their writings were the artifactual deposits of the behavior of both men, so too was the stylistic novelty of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Frank Lloyd Wright and Schonberg. Each of these artists perceived a problem within the same cultural tradition and each proceeded to the same solution.
The solutions were identical in that each involved a thorough break in the continuity of their respective artistic styles, and in a way such as European culture, or any culture, had never seen.
It was an extraordinary instance of cultural convergence.
Of course, what stands out about their work was its revolutionary character, its extreme conspicuousness and its
still, to some at least, controversial features. All previous European art, by contrast, appears to be a continuum. In other words, the extent of their stylistic revolution was unique.
It’s exactly because of its conspicuousness that, from the point of view of cultural history, one of the great advantages of Modern art is that it can be used to form a paradigm that helps us identify other examples of cultural convergence. And that brings us to our next two examples, philosophy and psychology.
Part III
The two examples we’ll look at briefly not only converged with themselves, but with each other as well. The point we’d like to make here is how a knowledge of the phenomenon of cultural convergence can be extremely helpful in allowing us to understand the problem-solving process in our lives, both personal and professional, and in our social institutions as well.
Briefly, our first example is from philosophy, when the German philosophers Husserl and Heidegger, and later Jean Paul Satre, arrived at conclusions that were strikingly similar to each other.
The beating heart of this particular convergence was that Husserl and Heidegger called into question the traditional sharp distinction between subject and object.
Arriving at our last example we come to the great American Transactionalists who were all also part of American Pragmatism (culminating, though not completing, in the work of Morse Peckham, particularly his luminous Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior - as close as any book can get to being the zenith of human thought. It still has no equal).
Though, interestingly, the Transactionalists all started out as Hegelians, the path of their convergence was not philosophy but scientific psychology. They helped direct our attention to the fact that words like subject and object, for example, were hypostatizations. Another way of putting it would be to say that such words are not entities, but simply categorical terms.*
*This is an irrefutable fact that the practitioners of everything from Marxism to Critical Race Theory stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. This explains why their thinking is literaly pre-modern and why all of their categories are invalid. It also explains why their theories aren't theories at all, but simply modes of indoctrination that violate the minds of those subjected to them. No wonder people are fighting back. Who wouldn't object to being infected with what is essentially a verbal cancer being shoved down their throats by people whose hearts and minds have been poisoned by a variety of untreated emotional disorders whose root cause is found in the very belief-system they all live by?
This turned out to be the meeting place between phenomenalism and transactionalism. In other words, this is where and when not only both Philosophy and Psychology converged, but Perception Theory, Learning Theory and Behavioral Theory as well. All three, together with Systems Theory, should be used to replace Critical Theory and its mini-me, Critical Race Theory, now!
Why?
Because, from the point of view of problem-solving all four are simply superior in every way, from problem-identification to the proposal of a solution. And also because all four expose all of Critical Theory, which includes its mini-mi Critical Race Theory,
for what they are: examples of intellectual fraudulence and educational malpractice. But to persuade and convince the public of this notion, CRT should not be abolished, it should be debated. Why? Because debate is a theoretical enterprise. That's why!
Part IV
In the previous section I said that cultural convergence could help us better understand the problem-solving process. But I didn’t say much about how or why this is true, if in fact it is. So, it would only be appropriate to close with a few words on that.
One way to help us understand this would be through PRC's proposition that All behavior is continuous and hierarchical.
An American Indian rowing in his canoe two hundred years ago and an atomic physicist working in his laboratory today are engaged in the same kind of behavior - the manipulation of their immediate environment to their benefit. The difference is that the atomic physicist’s actions are an immense elaboration of verbal behavior, or, explanation. And, as we said in our first entry, explanation is everywhere. So, the more we understand how it works, the better off we’ll be. This is true now more than ever.
And now we’re back to our proposition that all behavior is continuous and hierarchical. To use another example, soon after they're born and more and more in their most formative years, all children exhibit behavioral examples of experiment (science), creativity (art), thought (philosophy), and behavior (psychology).
As that behavior continues, we move up the ladder of learning, hopefully arriving at a point where we can become who we are because we know who we are. Since all children deserve this opportunity, shame on all parents, educators and leaders who not only don't provide it for them, but actively work to prohibit it!
But a life in Hell for those who do this and then scapegoat a family member or some politically outcast demographic, or both.
A culture that does not permit learning, change, and growth, does not have long to live. Especially if that culture is a part of a civilization more complex and unpredictable than ever before in human history. In other words, like the one we’re living in now.
Conclusion
Our world truly is more complex and unpredictable than ever before. And certainly one human response to complexity of any kind is the impulse toward simplification. This is both understandable and, to a certain extent, necessary, given the human brain's primary attribute of randomness of response.
But the key words are to a certain extent. Because if simplification is permitted to become oversimplification then those who welcome such a response turn another conditional necessity conformity into something not only unconditional, but mandatory, overconformity. It’s exactly the surrender to something so tempting that creates societies that are both dysfunctional and maladaptive. Such societies cannot survive.
Since this has happened before, we might be able to begin working our way out of this dilemma by calling Cultural History to our aid and look at the problem from that perspective. So, to the subject of Cultural History we shall turn. But, before we do, and because our three-part entry on Cultural History is the first part of our WTF? series, let's begin with an Introduction.
Until then!
Note: Our use of the term Cultural Convergence derives from the work of Morse Peckham and is not to be confused in any way with that of Convergence Culture associated with Henry Jenkins.
The justification for our use of the term is found in the very reason why much of the material used by PRC International is either inspired by, based on, or derived from, Peckham’s work. Because Peckham’s work places The Drive Toward Reality above The Drive Toward Belief. In other words, the focus is on analytical statements, not value statements. This is essential for problem-solving.
Peckham didn’t conceal value statements under some Have A Nice Day analytical mask as does Jenkins. To be blunt, Morse Peckham was a virtuoso of explanation dedicated to high-level problem-solving and significant innovation. He was not a messenger boy for bankster globalism, like Jenkins.
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