High Culture? WTF? Part Eight

XL

To summarize what was said in Part Seven,

We can turn our social institutions into learning organizations by cultivating a radical sensitivity to problem-solving through an equally radical sensitivity to both the scientific method and the creative imagination. That is, to the Arts & Sciences. In other words, the values of High Culture and the attributes of wisdom.

This is another way of saying that educational reconstruction will require considerable disorder before it is accomplished.

But this is actually appropriate, since the problem-solving process itself is a situation filled with intellectual tension, psychological disorientation, and emotional disturbance. This, at bottom, is what is really meant by our motto Embrace the Fucked-upness.

In short, this means that the individuals in whom it is cultivated must experience a fairly lengthy process of Cultural Disorder.

Why?

Because of the human tendency to automatically associate order with value. As in Order = Value. And there’s good reason why human beings associate order with value. The central concern of human beings is and must be the stabilization of response.

That is, the stabilization of the conventions of appropriate performance, ie; what the culture considers to be appropriate.

This is why the primary interest of human beings is in limiting the range of behavior. Why? Because of the primary attribute of the human brain. And what is the primary attribute of the brain?

The primary attribute of the brain is Randomness of Response.

Before continuing, I can’t help but point out that if you search this online you won’t find an answer. Either the powers that be don’t want us to know about this, or they don’t know about it.

Either way, it is odd that there’s so little discussion, and then only here at PRC, about this all important and easily verifiable attribute of the vital human organ without which life for humans is impossible. You’d think they would know and would want us to know. But, apparently not. Again, don’t take my word for it, search online. You won’t find an answer. But you'll get one here.

In any event, proof that randomness is the primary attribute is found in the fact that every culture in the world must socialize their infants. That’s why parental neglect is so cruel, though, sadly, so common. And the fact that it’s so common helps explain societal collapse, since the family is the primary teaching-learning institution, making it arguably the most important social institution. If you want to destroy civilization, ignore or attack the family. Though, as we'll soon see, there's another social institution, sorely neglected, and when not neglected badly mispresented, that will prove valuable as a starting point for any educational reconstruction we might be able to achieve.

Given the fact of societal collapse, it seems crazy to suggest that people already suffering, or at the very least already confused and stressed out, should experience cultural disorder in our attempt to reconstruct our teaching-learning institutions. But the key word here is seems. And the reason cultural disorder is necessary is because the only way out is through. I’ll explain.

XLI

It’s very common for people to mutter cliches when under stress. Just go online and see for yourself. But, of course, muttering cliches and yelling, barking, and screeching idiotic platitidues has been going on for a long time, long before the Internet. In fact, it’s one of the features of the modern age. And what is the modern age? From one perspective the modern age started when

the people, the masses, stepped on to the stage of world history.*

* Make no mistake about it, just about all of us living today are products of The Population Explosion. What matters is how we respond to the cultural situation we're born into. Is the response that of Continuous Renewal or Automatic Conformity, Reflective Thought or Compulsive Action?

In other words: Do we accept or reject High Culture?

The most radical and explosive entrance was the French Revolution. But the steady and rapid rise of the masses was in the United States of America, a country that, through its accumulation of wealth and power and its effective use of propaganda, converted High Culture into Pop Culture, and Pop Culture into a Utopia of The Masses with its motto:

We’re All The Same! Turn Off Your Brain! which its new and extremely hostile elite proceeded to sell to the rest of the world.

Not satisfied, however, they then converted Pop Culture into Cancel Culture. How’s that been working out for them lately?

Well, we know the answer to that. Over time the masses, white, black, brown, gay, straight, Christian, Jew, Muslim, East, West, North, South, young and old, converged over time in the United States, in one way or another, by means fair or foul, and proceeded to destroy all of its major social institutions. And now we’re back to why the only way out is through. Because, though they destroyed the major social institutions, they didn’t destroy one, though not because they weren’t trying, but because this one has proven to be by far the most resiliant. The Individual.

Note: The fact that all of the above named groups and others not named want to blame virtually everything on straight white men also means that these groups want to be placed above criticism. And the fact that they want to be placed above criticism is proof that they don’t have the orientative drive under sufficient control, let alone the drive toward reality. Which is what they’re really at war with - Reality. And that in turn means that to the extent they control civilization they will destroy it. Since civilization is itself an adaptational mechanism, its destruction means the destruction of humanity.

The fact is, individuals want to know, especially the young, but happily, not just the young. We need a clue and don’t want to be in the dark about everything, as many are today thanks to the hostile elite and the social institutions that they have destroyed.

So when the social institutions occupied by individuals collapse the only way out is through the actions of those individuals, and the first action they must take is to crawl from the wreckage.

And the best way to do that is to have a clue. And the best way to have a clue is to know what you need to know and do in order to restore your sense of value. And now we’re back to what we have identified as the #1 problem in the world today - Learning.

I can’t think of anything that restores one’s sense of value, of well-being and one’s sense of identity better than Learning. And what we need to learn is exactly what is not being taught. The fact that it is not being taught, or discussed by those in power, is why no one should take the elite’s judgments of us seriously.

A Quick Q & A

Q: Alright. So what is it that you think we need to be taught?

A: Well, here’s where things get interesting.

Q: How so?

A: Well, because we need to be taught to know what we’re already doing so that we can do it better.

Q: I give up. Explain.

A: Sure. But I’ll give the answer first and then explain.

Q: Ok.

A: We need to reflect on what we’re doing automatically. To put it somewhat paradoxically, we need to teach ourselves again for the first time, something we’ve been doing since forever.

Q: Which is?

A: We need to relearn The Directions-Performance Complex.

Q: And what is the Directions-Performance Complex?

A: Let’s answer that in the next section.

XLII

First let’s consider what kind of statement the identification of value and order might be and second, it’s social source.

By “what kind of statement” we mean “What is its place in human behavior?” The most circumscribed area of behavior in which that place is to be found is in language. The problem of language is inseparable from the problem of meaning.

A behavioral definition of meaning is that the meaning of an utterance, any utterance, is the response to that utterance.

This points to the weakness of Identity Politics, and of course all Critical Theory, especially CRT. They hyposticize meaning, in the sense that language is identified and confused with the world, its referent, in the largest sense of reference. But serious intellectuals on the Left and Right are in no position to sneer, because they’re only one notch above them in this regard.

Meaning, serious intellectuals, Left and Right, though they don't hyposticize meaning, are still hyposticizing language. How so?

They hyposticize language by continuing to talk as if the meaning of an utterance is immanent in that utterance (just as they and almost everyone else believes that the response is in the stimulus, when obviously it’s in us and what we’re responding to is in fact not a single stimulus, but an entire stimulus field).

We can see evidence of this in such expressions as:

The statement refers to, or the referent of the statement is.

Now obviously language does not refer, humans do. Human beings refer, not language. Since language comes from human beings, it can't do anything without us. That's why before God is anything God is a word and words come from humans, not God.

From this perspective God is simply a word for what is best in us (or the worst), a word that is synonymous with the highest value.

Between any utterance and its referent is a human being who is responsible for deciding what that particular utterance shall in fact refer to, if anything. That is to say, a human being decides what the meaning of any utterance shall be. In short, the meaning of an utterance is the response to that utterance. This is where things get interesting, exciting and, for some, a little scary.

It also points to the value of reflective thought and the danger of compulsive action, at least from the point of view of adaptation.

Anyway, the question is not quite, as Humpty-Dumpty said, who is to be master, the word or the person: rather, the person can’t help but be master. But it’s something the person does everything to abdicate. How? By surrendering to convention.

XLIII

The reason for this attempt to avoid responsibility is very instructive and of the highest importance to this entry, especially as it relates to our formula: Situation - People - Problem - Tools, and as that forumula relates to the subject of this entry.

Why? Because if a person achieves mastery and contravenes or transcends convention - communication breaks down.

What we mean by this is that the person receiving the utterance either cannot respond at all or responds in a way inappropriate in the judgment of the originator of the utterance in question.

So, what makes communication breakdown possible? What makes the breakdown of communication possible is the fact that anything we say can be responded to in any number of ways.

A fact that anyone involved in a relationship can easily affirm.

This realization brings out into the open the fact that the only thing that keeps communication not merely from breaking down, but from dissolving into absolute chaos, is an incredibly complex web of convention. Education consists of instructing children in the conventions of response to an increasingly wide range and an increasingly complex quasi-system of utterance.

Meaning = learning conventionally appropriate responses.

But language is simply one of many sign systems that we use.

That’s why Linguistics is not just about language, but about the nonverbal aspects of language, such as, stress, pitch, volume, tempto, intonation, etc. And then there’s the other nonverbal signs like facial gestures, trunk gestures, extremity gestures, costume, motion, etc. This is why when it comes to response we cannot talk merely about a stimulus but must talk about a stimulus field.

The whole world consists of semiotic systems, each element of which, such as a tree or a cloud or a stone, is capable of eliciting a wide range of responses, all of which have to be learned, together with the conventions that govern their appropriateness.

In so far as a human being is capable of responding to anything it is because and only because that thing is a sign. The world means, the great poet Robert Browning once said, but it would be far more accurate to say that the world consists of signs linked to responses established and maintained by cultural convention.

XLIV

Still, the word convention, like so many words human beings use, has no phenomenal existence. In short, the word is a metaphor.

Conventions are pre-established responses learned from verbal directions - or from nonverbal directions, such as, for children and even on occasion for adults, manipulation by others.

Taking our metaphor from the stage we may call an action a Performance. And now we’re back to the problem of language and why it is inseparable from the problem of meaning, and of even greater importance, the relation of language and meaning to The Directions-Performance Complex that we need to learn about if we are to respond to our current culture crisis with, at the very least, a reasonable amount of competence and adequacy.

Because language does not tell us what the world is, nor does it refer. Language = Directions for Performance. But what is true of language is true of everything else, namely of nonverbal signs, both those created by us and those found in the real world.

The World = Directions for Performance.

Human Behavior may be reduced to two aspects, Directions and Performance. These two aspects may be unified by the term Communication. Therefore, human behavior is identifiable with communication. So? What does this mean? It means that we are not animals that use communication; insofar as we are human beings we are communication, and that is all we are. And with that we’re back to the notion of communication breakdown.

If communication can break down, then human behavior can disintegrate, that is, the conventionally established links between Directions and Performance, Culture and Society, can dissolve.

Because of the enormous complexity of those conventional links, because of the lack of natural or other limitations to respond to directions, and because of the inability of the human brain to learn any but very simple behavioral sequences with absolute exactness, Culture and Society, Directions and Performance, Communication, and therefore Human Behavior itself, are inherently unstable. We are always threatened with and constantly experience the inability to respond to directions.

And now we’re back to why the central concern of humanity is and must be the stabilization of response, that is, the stabilization of the conventions of appropriate performance.

A moment’s reflection on behavior from this point of view will bring to mind the constant and pervading demand for additional directions and the equally constant and pervading provision of them. It will, in short, bring us back to the subject of this entry,

High Culture, and why it is so essential for our survival.

Obviously, though we’ve said this before, this statement still requires further elaboration. That way we can make a solid connection between High Culture and the need to turn our social institutions into learning organizations by cultivating a radical sensitivity to problem-solving through the Arts & Sciences.

So that’s what we’ll do in Part Nine.

Until then!

Q: Hey! Wait! You didn't tell us what the Directions-Performance Complex is. You didn't answer your own question.

A: Aren't you the observant one.

Q: Well?

A: Actually, I did answer.

Q: Really? How? By not answering?

A: No. By implying an answer so that you could figure it out for yourself.

Q: Oh, so you're blaming your reader for not answering your own question?

A: That's the last time I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Q: Whatever. Quite stalling. Just tell us

A: That's a command. And I don't respond to commands.

Q: You do if they come from you know who.

A: Please. That is totally un.....related.

Q: Will you please tell us, oh wise one.

A: Now you're talking. Ok. The asnwer is, Us.

Q: What? Us what?

A: Us. We are The Directions-Performance Complex.

Q: Ok, I'm waiting.

A: Well, fortunately for you, since you're asking me you won't have to wait long. If you asked anyone else you'd be waiting forever.

Q:

A: Seriously. That's what was meant by We are Communication and that is all we are. And what is communication if not the Directions-Performance Complex?

We give ourselves directions to do things every day.

In every day matters small but important, like going to the store, paying bills, etc.

We give ourselves directions in how to respond regarding trivial matters like Pop Culture, ie; what movies to watch, what songs to download, etc. What social media to respond to or ignore.

And we give ourselves directions in matters of the greatest possible importance, as in High Culture, ie; whether to respond to it or not and if so, how. In fact, from this perspective the word consciousness amounts to the ability to give oneself directions.

In short, in matters daily, trivial, and important, we are constantly giving ourselves directions to perform an act of some kind. So, the more we know about the Directions-Performance Complex the better. Or no?

Q: Yes. Ok. That's better. At least for now. But, here's a question. How do we hold it together? Since, as you said in so many words, we need to stablize our responses, how do we stablize the Directions-Performance Complex?

A: That's a great question.

Q: I thought so.

A: And it deserves a good answer.

Q: Sure does.

A: So then, we will answer that in Part Nine.

Q: Sounds good.

A: Of course, I say we out of politeness.

Q: