Oh No! Not More Hippy Shit!
Nope! No hippy shit here. Just a word or two on Cultural Transcendence.
First, Cultural Transcendence is a term coined by the cultural historian and behavioralist Morse Peckham to describe a process one undergoes when attempting to move beyond the necessary limits of their culture.
Second, the effort to achieve Cultural Transcendence is a consequence of a Culture Crisis.
We are living in a culturally critical period today. Any help we can get in understanding how to deal with it is bound to be of some value.
Third, Cultural Transcendence is Self-Transcendence.
Another way of looking at this would be to say that Personality is to the Individual what Culture is to Society.
For the individual to move beyond personality and the culture that shaped it requires a change of behavior. Or, a change of behavior in the individual moves them beyond both personality and culture. One obvious and important example would be a culture’s ideas about, and attitudes and behaviors toward addiction in general, and the addict in particular.
If we’re products of our culture and we see a need to move beyond it, for whatever reason, then obviously cultural transcendence is self-transcendence, since we are transcending that culture in ourselves.
But why would be want to do this? What is it that gets us started on the path of cultural transcendence? An explanation is possible. To keep it simple I’ll just state conclusions. More details can be found here and here.
Cultural Transcendence
The conflicts between any individual and the culture they live in are irresolvable. No attempt in history to resolve that conflict one way or the other has been successful. As Peckham once said, this unsatisfactory condition yields on the part of a few individuals the behavioral phenomenon known as cultural transcendence.
Cultural Transcendence begins with an individual’s perception of, and response to, Explanatory Collapse, or the failure of ideologies (or any explanation of the world).
That judgment of Explanatory Collapse is itself the result of Trauma.
Trauma followed by Explanatory Collapse leads the individual to a position of Alienation from the culture and its social institutions - all of them.
It’s important at this point to make a distinction between the pseudo-alientation that really got going in the 1960’s and has continued among some to this day, and the genuine alienation of cultural transcendece. The pseudo-alienation of the political Left is really just Polarization. In this case, though the polarized individual has grasped their culture as incoherent, their response is not at all self-ironic. Hence, the irony-free, imperceptive, and often amusing judgments such people often make. The result is that their attempt to become coherent, or to innovate an alternative, is to simply, and simple-mindedly, glom on to a set of values that are already in the culture.
Such people remind one of two year olds who want to move away from their parents to walk on their own, but keep turning around to make sure their parents are looking. For the individual who recognizes this polarization as a huge part of the problem they are attempting to respond to cultural transcendence is the only solution.
That is why Alientation is followed by Cultural Rejection and Social Withdrawal.
Both amount to reducing one’s social interaction to the bare minimum.
The value of this is that Alienation, Cultural Rejection, and Social Withdrawal together permit Behavioral Randomization which makes possible an Emergent Innovation.
After that, Small Group Behavior follows.
Meaning, the individual collects or becomes a part of a small group of supporters, and begins sharing their particular cultural emergent, or innovation, or creativity. An obvious and ready example of Small Group Behavior is the kind found here on Substack, and not just Substack. It's not that small group behavior has never existed. On the contrary, it's the norm.
The difference with small group behavior in relation to Cultural Transcendence is that it is extracted from the context of human behavior and used to maintain healthy and productive behavior that is discontinuous from the unhealthy and unproductive behavior of the culture at large.
A final and important point before answering the question What is Cultural Transcendence? The pattern observable in Cultural Transcendence is exactly the pattern observable in the early Christians. The difference is in both the nature of Explanatory Collapse, which for the early Christians was only partial, and in the nature of Emergent Innovation.
For the early Christians it was not a full scale emergent, as with Cultural Transcendence. Christianity was not and is not a full scale emergent innovation exactly because, as was understanable at that stage of cultural development, it was aimed at establishing a stable and redemptive ideology (or theology, same thing) to which absolute commitment was required.
Though Christianity did offer a new pattern of conversion, or redemption, it differed little in its structure from the Explanation that preceded it. Cultural Transcendence is also a de-conversion. The difference is, one; that the culturally transcending individual recognizes and accepts the inherent instability of all explanations of the world, a world, that includes us, and two; because of this instability the character of any explanation is antiredemptive, that is, necessarily imperfect and never final or absolute.
To put it somewhat paradoxically, Cultural Transcendence is a conversion to a permanent de-conversion. For this reason it is the most fully human emergent innovation in human culture since the Paleolithic Age. The number of individuals who are fully converted to it is still very small, but their influence others has the potential to become, in time - immense.
What is Cultural Transcendence?
Cultural Transcendence is
Trauma
Explanatory Collapse
Alientation
Cultural Rejection
Social Withdrawal
Behavioral Randomization
Emergent Innovation
Small Group Behavior
Concluding Remarks
How does an individual achieve a cultural transcendence?
One answer is, by creating a new role. And by role, as in social role, is simply meant an established and recognized pattern of behavior, or behavioral pattern, as in the role of a teacher, or consultant, or executive, or manager, or housewife, or husband, etc.
One simply takes a traditional role and violates the expectation that they play it in a certain way, as I did with the role of an ESL teacher, and later as a consultant (more on that in another entry, or again, check out my website).
That this can be done, and that the results are deeply rewarding, I can attest from personal experience. But there is no question that, though the attempt can lead to something interesting and innovative, it can also end in something silly, trivial, and dumb. This happens when the person does not understand the traditions and history of the culture they are attacking (though they pose as experts). In other words, this happens when the person chooses polarization over transcendence.
The reason for this self-deception is a complete lack of self-awareness. That’s why, for all one’s initial sympathies for such unfortunates stuck in polarization, they’re ultimately so repellent and obnoxious.
To engage in a genuine cultural transcendence you have to have your wits about you and you’ve got to have a clue. You can’t just wing it, dude, and let happen, man. Put bluntly, no hippy shit here!
Cultural Transcendence is for adults; mature, self-respecting, self-ironic, and, above all, self-aware adults, who value tradition while recognizing its necessary limits, and their own, and the need to move beyond both.
Until then, All the best from Patagonia, Argentina!
Paul
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