In suffering, creator and creation are one.
For today's entry, just a word or two on Cultural Transcendence.
First, 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. Second, Cultural Transcendence is a term coined by the cultural historian and behavioralist Morse Peckham (1914-1993) to describe a process one undergoes when attempting to move beyond the necessary limits of their culture. 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, a change of behavior is required. 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.
In fact, given the human brain’s primary attribute - randomness of response - since there is no necessary link between culture and behavior the citizen is an addict. The explanation for this is that, since the need for social stability is itself a response to the brain’s randomness, conformity to society’s norms requires reinforcement, and reinforcement leads to pattern repetition, and pattern repetition over time leads to addiction.
The human paradox: what keeps us going can leave us stuck in the mud.
The more stable the culture, and the more well-adjusted the citizen, the truer this is. The citizen becomes attached, as it were, or addicted, to a particular way of life, that is, to a point of view and corresponding pattern of behavior (although even these two are never perfectly aligned or can be), thereby making any change - when change is necessary - difficult, even perilous, and not in a few cases, impossible. Unable to change, the "well-adjusted" are unable to adapt, so their behavior, perforce, becomes maladaptive.
From this perspective, a committed ideologue of the Right or Left is not a human being, but a social role, a fixed pattern of human behavior that actually prohibits them from ever developing full humanity. This would explain why their Polarization has reduced rationnal dialogue and respectful debate to senseless, immature, and unproductive mudslinging, leaving public discourse laying dead in the gutter - where it doesn't belong. We need social roles, we just don't need to be stuck in them. Polarization is a dead end.
That’s why any adaptation is and must be over time a maladaptation. It’s why the well-adjusted citizen, or, put bluntly, the conformist, is a perfect model for understanding addiction, as in, the addiction to social stability.
This is not to say that an addiction to innovation isn't possible, because it is.
In that case, no greater need for balance could be found than in the human need to create a balance between stability and innovation. Whether or not human beings are capable of creating a society that can in fact achieve that balance is arguably one of the most important questions in the world today.
But the proposition to be rescued from these considerations is not so much that the individual can be addicted to social stability, but that the addict is the perfect model for society. More than any other personality type, the addict is society. After all, the link between addictive behavior and societal norms is - reinforcement. This is why recovering addicts and family scapegoats - and the two often go together - are arguably the ones with the most to contribute to the conversation about Cultural Transcendence since, whether they can articulate it or not, they have direct experience with what such transcendence involves. But, even in those cases, that what this involves will, sooner or later, need to be articulated is unquestionable.
In any event, 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 human 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, theologies, 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, amusing, and even downright silly 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. How progressive. More like, how reactionary.
This mob of unironic, totally clueless, and obnoxiously self-important cornball hipsters, 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. The only difference, of course, is that the two year olds at least have an excuse. Their behavior is age-appropriate and their parentns are looing. Not so in the case of the cornball hipsters.
Be that as it may, for the individual who recognizes this ideological polarization as a huge part of the problem they are attempting to respond to, cultural transcendence is the only adequate solution. That is why Alientation is followed by Cultural Rejection and Social Withdrawal. Both of which amount to reducing one’s social interaction to the bare minimum. The value of this is that Alienation and Cultural Rejection, together with Social Withdrawal, 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 often found on Substack, and not just Substack.
Now of course this is not to say that small group behavior has never existed before. On the contrary, it's the norm. The difference with small group behavior in relation to Cultural Transcendence is that such behavior is extracted from the context of human behavior and used to maintain healthier and more productive behavior that is entirely discontinuous from the unhealthy and unproductive behavior of the culture that one has left behind.
The unhealthy and counterproductive culture could be anything from a family, to a social institution, to a country, or an entire civilization.
The source of an unhealthy, destructive culture, is its belief that the explanatory system it lives by is perfect and final, and so gives the people of that culture the right to demand that everyone should place it above criticism, love it unconditionally, and blindly obey its authority, or else.
A final and important point before answering the question What is Cultural Transcendence? The pattern observable in Cultural Transcendence is exactly the pattern observable, for example, in the early Christians of Galilee.
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, which in the case of Cultural Transcendence culminated in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche - culminated, but not completed, since by its own principles of deconversion Cultural Transcendence can never be completed.
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 understandable 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 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 on 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, or parent, 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 (for more on that check out the rest of 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, but also dangerous. 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 and not only doesn't know it, but actually thinks they have done something innovative.
Hence their confusion, and even irritation, when this is pointed out to them. The reason for this self-deception is a complete lack of self-awareness. That’s why, for all one’s initial sympathies with them, 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. That's why cultural transcendence is self-transcendence, and self-transcendence is self-creation, and creation requires a creator, a creator whose creation is a response to suffering and an attempt to transcend that suffering through the joy of creation. That's why in suffering creator and creation are one.
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