Mar 30, 2011

New blog: Fox News In Context

Fox news is a mix of journalism and opinion that seems to be dictated by a script, from time to time, written by someone else (Rove?). As a consequence over time Fox news seems to have become the voice of the top echelons of the Republican party.

I have been watching Fox News, on and off, over the last few days and it is most definitely conservative in opinion, however that's good (free speech remember?).


I don't agree with all the views and yet a few do make some sense (Except for Glenn Beck as I will just explain). but most importantly I like the anchors and enjoy thier comments (not so much where Hannity is concerned but I support his right to express his views - Note that if you remove Beck from the line up then Hannity is aggressive but not scary. The scary part comes from believing Glenn Becks nonsense).

If you watch the journalism and then some of the random stuff that gets said I think it's obvious that in some cases the news and opinion show anchors are being told what to say. You also have to keep in mind that ideological terrorists such as Glenn Beck have not only an influence on the American public but also on Fox news anchors and journalists and - amazingly - you can see Glenn Beck's ideas spread through the entire American media/news network. That is why when I want to hear peaceful, balanced journalism I watch BBC World News.

Anyways, on to my new blog: Fox News In Context

Mar 29, 2011

Joseph Campbell puts culture and society in perspective

The following video is a narration by Joseph Campbell that appears at the beginning of "The Power Of Myth, Part 3". In this video clip Campbell provides some perspective about the world we live in from our origins as tribes of hunters and gatherers, through the beautiful prehistoric caves found in France, to the difference between modern life and prehistoric life.



The ancient cultures were very different from ours yet it is from our deep past that the structures of our psychology are supposed to derive. Also, Joseph Campbell mentions that the visions of the Shamans must be of the same structure as the dreams we experience in our sleep. Joseph Campbell is referring to the observation made by Jung that dreams often contain symbolism which transcends the social experiences of the person dreaming. In other words, people from one culture have had dreams in the symbolism of another culture without any prior familiarity with that culture.

More on Shamans and Shamanism: Shamans have probably been around for many millennia as Joseph Campbell as stated in his analysis of the symbol of the yogi on ancient seals found at Mohenjo-daro, "the yogi, as a higher transformation of the shamanistic techniques and experiences of ecstasis [ecstasy]"(Primitive Mythology page 437). In other words yoga has probably developed from the accumulated knowledge (including psychological descriptions such as 'spirits' - see archetypes - and techniques to help people that sounds allot like hypnosis) of generations of shamans that led to whatever form it had in the Indian subcontinent around 2000 BC (to which time the following image of a seal with a yogi on it is from).

The form of yoga practiced now derives from the format outlined in the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali dated to around 200-500 BC. The passed down, accumulated, knowledge of the tribes in the orient through their line of Shamans, settled in the basin and mountains of China from whom Qigong and the other arts such as acupressure must come from. In other words, every culture must have had their own Shamans or 'Myth Keepers'. Some more compassionate while others may have been more aggressive, each adapted to his/her own culture and time. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the Shaman must have been the world's first professional getting paid for services (such as healing or chasing away 'spirits') by gifts of meat, or fruits or whatever was of value in the culture the Shaman was from. Such payment is common in our time, in primitive cultures, as well and may have a long history, even the Indian culture has a whole tradition of ascetics living off of the villages nearby and spending their time doing yoga...could this be a remnant of an ancient culture with shamanistic roots? Anyways, getting back to Joseph Campbell, here is what he has written about one of the seals found in Mohenjodaro that must have been a remnant of the ancient Saraswati civilization. [Note: I say 'remnant' because of the evidence of ancient cities I outlined earlier]

The following extract is from Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell page 435

"The so-called Harappa stage of the great cities of Mohenjo-daro, Chanhu-daro, and Harappa (c. 2500-1200/1000 B.C), which bursts abruptly into view, without preparation, already fully formed and showing many completely obvious signs of inspiration from the earlier high centers of the West (i.e. fertile crescent), yet undeniable signs, also, of a native Indian tradition – this too already well developed. As professor W. Norman Brown has suggested, a native Indian center (i.e., a mythogenetic zone) somewhere either in the south or in the Ganges-Jumna area would seem to be indicated, where the characteristically Indian traits, unknown at this time farther west, must have come into form. For on two of the stamp-seals of the period we find figures seated on low thrones in the meditating yoga posture."


"One of these is flanked by two kneeling worshipers and rearing serpents, while the other, with two gazelles reposing beneath his seat, is surrounded by four wild beasts – a water buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant, and tiger. It is well known that precisely these compositions are associated in later Hindu and Buddhist art both with the god Shiva and with the Buddha. One can only suppose that the practice of yoga must have already been developed and associated with the concept of heightened state of consciousness, not only worthy of worship but also capable of quelling and fascinating the animal world – like the music of Orpheus in the later tradition of the Greeks."

An interesting fact is that this ancient seal, from a city that has been dead for around 3000 years, has some amazing similarities between later Hindu, Buddhist and Greek mythology.

"The seated yogi among the beasts wears on his head a curious headdress with a high crown and two immense horns, which, as Heinrich Zimmer has pointed out, resembles to a striking degree on of the so-called "Three Jewels" (symbolizing the Buddha, the doctrine, and the order of the Buddha’s followers), which in the form of a kind of trident. The Hindu god Shiva carries a trident also; and among the Greeks, as we know, this same sign was the attribute of Poseidon (Neptune), the god of the watery deep." Primitive Mythology page 436

Mar 25, 2011

History: The earliest evidence of ritual and myth part 1



Joseph Campbell writes in Primitive Mythology:

In Dreachenloch and Wildermannlisloch little walls of stone, up to 32 inches high, formed a kind of bin, within which a number of cave-bear skulls had been carefully arranged. Some of these skulls had little stones arranged around them; others were set on slabs; one, very carefully placed, had the long bones of a cave bear (no doubt its own) placed beneath its snout, another had the long bones pushed through the orbits of its eyes.

The cave in Germany, Petershohle, near Velden, which was explored by Konrad Hormann from 1916 to 1922, had closet like niches in the walls, which contained five cave-bear skulls – and once again the leg bones.

Now the cave bear, it must be told, for all its size, was not an extremely dangerous beast. In the first place, it was not carnivorous but herbivorous, and in the second place, like all bears it had to go to sleep in the winter. But during the ice age the winters were long. The bears would go into the caves to sleep and, while there, could be readily killed. In fact, a tribe of men living in the front part of a cave with a couple of sleeping bears in the rear would have had there a kind of living deep freeze. (Page 339)


The following article show us a little about the evidence we have of cave bears;



ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) — The cave bear started to become extinct in Europe 24,000 years ago, but until now the cause was unknown. An international team of scientists has analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences from 17 new fossil samples, and compared these with the modern brown bear. The results show that the decline of the cave bear started 50,000 years ago, and was caused more by human expansion than by climate change.

There is evidence that one species of bear has survived over another simply because they didn't live in caves as a normal part of their behavior pattern. Could this be because of the ancient cave bear cult that hunted this species of bear to extinction?

"The present day brown bear did not suffer the same fate and has survived until today for one simple reason -- brown bears did not depend so heavily on the cave habitat, which was becoming degraded, and this is why they did not follow the same pattern as the cave bears.

"Brown bears rely on less specific shelters for hibernation. In fact, their fossil remains are not very numerous in cave deposits," the Galician researcher says. The definitive extinction of the cave bear "broadly" coincides with the last cooling of the climate during the Pleistocene (between 25,000 and 18,000 years ago), which may have led to a reduction in shelter and the vegetation that the animals fed on.

The cave bear inhabited Europe during the Late Pleistocene and became definitively extinct around 24,000 years ago, although it held out for a few thousand years longer in some areas, such as the north west of the Iberian Peninsula, than in other places. This ursid was a large animal, weighing 500 kg on average, and was largely a herbivore. The bear hibernated in the depths of limestone caves, where the remains of individuals that died during hibernation slowly accumulated over time."
This suggests the possibility that if there was a ritual being played out in the ancient tribes of hunting the cave bear then there would be a large continuum of this culture with obvious signs of thier passing. And there is:

Vestiges of a circumpolar Paleolithic cult of the bear have been identified throughout the arctic, from Finland and Northern Russia, across Siberia and Alaska, to Labrador and Hudson Bay: among the Finns and Lapps, Ostyaks and Vogul, Orotchi of the Amur river region, Gilyaks, Goldi, and peoples of Kamchatka; the Nootka, Tlingit, Kwakiutl, and others of the Northwest American Coast; and the Algonquins of the Northeast. And so here is a northern circumpolar hunting continuum in counterpoise to tha broad equatorial planting belt which we traced from Sudan to the Amazon in Part Two. And just as there a certain depth of time was indicated, going back to perhaps c. 7500 B.C., the dawn of the proto-neolithic, so here too there is a depth in time – but how very much greater! For in the high Alps, in the neighborhood of St. Gallen, and again in Germany, some thirty miles northwest of Nurnberg, near Velden, a series of caves containing the ceremonial arranged skulls of a number of cave bears have been discovered, dating from the period (it is almost incredible!) of Neanderthal Man.(Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology page 339)

Here we come to the amazing possibility that neanderthals could be another species of human beings. Well, its kind of implied in the earliest signs of culture that there might be a continuous cultural continuum from ancient times to our own age but this is the first evidence we have of geniune culture and mythological thought. Before I begin my analysis of the evidence of deep thought in some human species, that may have been our evolutionary cousins, I would like to point out one simple fact; Whatever an artist's preconceptions of the neanderthal lifestyle and intelligence may be it is likely that this perspective gets reflected into their illustrations of neanderthals. Consider the following portrayals of ancient Neanderthal Man.







Politics: An introduction to my new blog

What if one day you had a dream, sorta like this...



Could opinion shows backed by various sources have hijacked the image of innocent journalists?



It's possible. I was watching Fox News last night and Glenn Beck came on and was very entertaining. However, he touched upon many areas of information that can be confusing so I thought I would start a blog to help people put the words of Glenn Beck into perspective and not apply them to the rest of the Fox News broadcast.

Check out this interview that helps put Glenn Beck in context of a Fox News broadcast cycle


Now check out my first post, on my new blog..."An Analysis of Glenn Beck's Theories" (Rated R). Enjoy!

Mar 22, 2011

Music: Our oldest flutes and a little about banjo music

I have mentioned in the previous post how fashioning materials out of wood must have come before stone and provided some examples. The same could be true for bone. In fact, our oldest archeological finds include a 40,000 year old flute!

A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes back humanity's musical roots
If flutes were being made out of bone 40,000 years ago then certainly the wooden flutes must have arrived on the music scene sooner. After all, wooden flutes have been in continuous use throughout recorded history in several cultures and societies. Consider the common reeds that grow in many riverbeds. They can easily be fashioned into a flute and could not possibly last in our archeological record except by some lucky chance.


Water Reed Native American Flute


I also mentioned in my last post how it could be possible for a person to make a guitar like object with easily perishable items like a wooden box and animal hair. Take the example of a banjo, as Steve Martin explains:




Although any guitar or banjo like object of the deep past would have varied in form and uses from region to region and culture and culture (if indeed any such instrument existed at all) the music itself would vary in style and sound. However, it is possible to imagine that maybe in the deep past little banjo and/or flute groups could have existed. Anyways, the following example is of a group using a string based musical instrument:



What if this hypothetical musical group of the past had singers for ritualistic or just plain social reasons?

Mar 18, 2011

History: The earliest evidence of culture

When Archeologists do their digs looking for artifacts or fossils, they can only find what is made of stone or is preserved somehow as a fossil or frozen in ice. Accordingly we now have the most extensive collection of stone tools and weapons going back far into antiquity. This has led some to believe that stone was the only material all human races have ever used or maybe just the first material that we mastered which has led to the term ‘stone age’. Joseph Campbell mentions that wood is probably the oldest material humans have ever used as it’s easily available and is still used almost exclusively by hunter-gatherer groups that have survived to our age. It is also the easiest to re-use in another construction or for burning (firewood) and it is easily lost from our historical (archeological) record through decay.[note: can’t find the exact quote but have some more recent authoritive evidence] Could our earliest houses, weapons and even jewelry have been made of wood? After all, we don’t need stone to make an arrow or a spear.

Our recent archeological discoveries are simply mind-blowing and though there is currently no evidence of wooden jewelry or wooden musical instruments (how difficult would it be to make a wooden lute/guitar with a box and some appropriately prepared animal hair?) from our deep deep past, we may yet find some as the following presentation of evidence and examples will show.

Wood does decay but it also gets preserved by accident. First take a look at this 10,000 year old wooden spear-like object found in some melting ice:




Next consider the wooden spears found even longer ago (400,000 years!)

Gamble cites wooden spears found preserved in a bog at Schöningen, Germany, and are associated with horse bones. Dated to 400,000 years ago, the spears provide the first hard evidence of human hunting and are weighted at the ends to be thrown like a javelin.

"I just wonder whether the Schöningen spears were ever used. Yes, there are horses at the site, but are the tips of the spears damaged? You'd think spears like that would break after they'd been jammed in a few horses," muses Gamble. For heidelbergensis, tools and hunting weapons may have played an important role in social display, one that we don't yet fully understand and may even border on ritual.

"They may have been more interested in making things as a demonstration of who they were and what was important to them. Killing horses was probably something they did once a week," Gamble remarks.

"It is very hard to get colleagues to accept evidence of ritual for early humans," says Bermúdez de Castro.   BBC

To say there are signs of ritual or culture is one thing but to actually begin to describe how they must have performed a possible ritual is a little absurd. To compare with modern tribes in some way to draw some logical conclusions about possible meanings of the rituals or possible lifestyles of ancient humans is more appropriate.

No matter what we now know that ancient man did use wood in hunting and probably in other spheres of life. Since wood is easiest to form or build with it is possible that every stone advance came after a development that was earlier and based in wood.

For example, check out this hunter-gatherer group, their 'huts' are made solely of wood and leaves;


They are not living in caves, (though I’m sure if they were facing horrible weather they would lose their housing and end up in any caves available to them) and their little thatched houses would rot away with time so that people living 10,000 years from now would find no evidence of them, plus if there is any change in environmental or geographical conditions they would provide great firewood. With the rise and fall of the ice ages (and local catastrophes that must have been associated with large changes in weather throughout history) such evidence of human culture would be completely wiped out.
Because humans lived as hunter-gatherers for 95 percent of their species' history, current foraging societies provide the best window for viewing human social evolution, according to the authors. Given that, the researchers focused on co-residence patterns among more than 5,000 individuals from 32 present-day foraging societies around the globe, including the Gunwinggu, Labrador Inuit, Mbuti, Apache, Aka, Ache, Agta and Vedda.

A major point in the study is that foraging bands contain several individuals completely unconnected by kinship or marriage ties, yet include males with a vested interest in the offspring of daughters, sisters and wives.

"The increase in human network size over other primates may explain why humans evolved an emphasis on social learning that results in cultural transmission," said Hill. "Likewise, the unique composition of human ancestral groups promotes cooperation among large groups of non-kin, something extremely rare in nature."

The group's findings appear in the paper "Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure." It is the first published analyses of adult co-residence patterns in hunter-gatherer societies based on census data rather than post-marital residence typologies, Hill noted.

Notice how flexible these groups of human are. They aren’t bound to a small tribe for life but rather a system of tribes that together form a large social system. Here we find a modern counterpart to what an ancient culture of small hunter-gatherer groups could look like.

In fact, even in the large cultural groupings of the North American Apaches or Sioux or Cherokee we can see possible echoes of an ancient system of cultural organization that maximized the resources of the land and the practice of the hunt by forming small groups that could live together without adversely affecting their food supply. They use stone but notice how much of their technology revolves around wood. At the same time these North American hunter-gatherers would have large social meetings where two or more small tribes celebrate some event. Could this be a practice that is natural to any human culture going back through the millennia?

What about the hunt? To hunt you need to track animal footprints, understand its habits, prepare a trap or have some skill in killing it effectively and have the ability to communicate this body of knowledge to youngsters, i.e. language. The Apache teach the whole role a youngster is expected to play using stories which we call their 'religion' or mythology. Every primitive tribe has such stories that explain and train the young ones. Why not ancient humans?

The theme of language and the hints of the existence of a human culture and society can be been clearly in the development of the hand ax, as Campbell explains;

Indeed, some excavations (for example, those of L. S. B. Leakey at Olduvai Gorge in the north of Tanganyika) have revealed in perfect sequence every stage of the evolution of the hand ax from the pebble tools of man’s first beginnings to the finely finished, really elegant axes of the period of the Neanderthal. And if the view into the depth of the well of time that we obtained in the South of France was great, this of Olduvai is simply beyond speech. But what is even more amazing than the profundity of the prehistoric past here illustrated is the broad diffusion over the face of the earth of exactly the same ax forms as those of Paleolithic East Africa. As Dr. Carleton S. Coon has remarked: “During the quarter of a million years when man made these tools, the styles changed very little, but what changes were made are to be seen everywhere… This means that human beings who lived half a million years ago were able to teach their young skills that they had learned from their fathers in most minute detail, as living Australians and Bushmen do. Such teaching requires both speech and a firm discipline, and the uniformity of hand-ax styles over wide areas means that members of neighboring groups must have met together at stated intervals to perform together acts that require the use of these objects. In short, human society was already a reality when the hand-ax choppers of the world had begun to turn out a uniform product.

All of which speaks volumes for the force and reach of diffusion in the primitive world.

Moreover, what is perhaps more remarkable still is that some of the most beautiful of the symmetrically chipped hand axes of this period are as much as two feet long, a size too cumbersome for practical use; the only possible conclusion being that they must have served some ceremonial function . Professor Coon has suggested that such axes were not practical tools but sacred objects, comparable to the ceremonial tools and weapons of later days, “used only seasonally, when wild food was abundant enough to support hundreds of persons at one place and one time. Then the old men,” he supposes, “would cut the meat for the assembled multitude with some of these heavy and magnificent tools,” after which, like the magically powerful tjurungas of the Australians, the sacred implements would be stored in some holy place. Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell, Page 364

In Campbell’s time the debate of when the human species first appeared on our planet was considered to be about a half a million years ago.
The African finds that have most recently stirred the halls of science are roughly (very roughly) dated at the commencement of the Pleistocene or Ice Age, circa 600,000 B.C.; and at the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956, Dr. Raymond Dart of Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa, showed a convincing series of slides in which the implements of this pre-lithic (pre-Stone Age) culture were illustrated. These included the lower jaw bones of large antelopes, which had been cut in half to be used as saws and knives; gazelle horns with part of the skull attached, which showed distinct signs of wear and tear use, possibly as digging tool; and a great number of ape-man palates with the teeth worn down – human palates being used to this day as scrapers by some of the natives of the area. Primitive Mythology by Joseph Campbell, Page 359
In our time evidence of the use of jaw bones of animals to cut and eat meat (indicating the hunt was developed) goes back even further. The following extracts bring Joseph Campbell’s archeological survey up to date. The last article I’m presenting in full as I think that it represents the border of our current archeological acceptance of the existence of a species that has the distinct behavior patterns that can be called human. Hunting (involving tool making such as wooden spears, the need for speech for communication of the techniques of the hunt and passing on of the art of the hunt – i.e. how to make the spears/arrows(?) or just a way to trap an animal and drop rocks on it or push it over a cliff), walking upright and taking care of the members of the tribe. Lucy, whose people are at the forefront of archeological theory as the possible first humans, was found in the geological layer indicating an age of about 3 million years. 
From About.com
The Stone Age (known to scholars as the Paleolithic era) in human prehistory is the name given to the period between about 2.5 million and 20,000 years ago. It begins with the earliest human-like behaviors of crude stone tool manufacture, and ends with fully modern human hunting and gathering societies. The Paleolithic is the earliest archaeology; anything older is paleontology. Today scholars divide the Paleolithic into three categories, more or less as follows. 
Lower Paleolithic (sometimes called the Early Stone Age) 
The Lower Paleolithic lasted between 2.5 million-200,000 years ago (or at least according to one permutation), and it was when the Hominin ancestors of human beings, including Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, roamed most of the earth and began making the first stone tools.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) — A fossilized foot bone recovered from Hadar, Ethiopia, shows that by 3.2 million years ago human ancestors walked bipedally with a modern human-like foot, a report that appears Feb. 11 in the journal Science, concludes. The fossil, a fourth metatarsal, or midfoot bone, indicates that a permanently arched foot was present in the species Australopithecus afarensis, according to the report authors, Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, together with William Kimbel and Donald Johanson, of Arizona State University'sInstitute of Human Origins. 
The research helps resolve a long-standing debate between paleoanthropologists who think A. afarensis walked essentially as modern humans do and those who think this species practiced a form of locomotion intermediate between the quadrupedal tree-climbing of chimpanzees and human terrestrial bipedalism.



Researchers working in Ethiopia's remote Afar region have recovered evidence that humans began using stone tools and eating meat far earlier than previously thought. The finds—cut-marked animal bones dating to nearly 3.4 million years ago—push the origin of butchery back a stunning 800,000 years. Furthermore, these ancient butchers were not members of our own genus, Homo, but the more primitive Australopithecus, specifically A. afarensis, the species to which the celebrated Lucy fossil belongs.

Scientists have typically viewed tool use as the purview of Homo. Indeed, in 1964 Kenyan paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues named the earliest Homo species, H. habilis ("handy man"), for its association with stone tools. Subsequent finds have since extended the evidence of stone tool use back to between 2.5 million and 2.6 million years ago. But exactly which member of the human family made and wielded these older tools was unclear, both because no human remains turned up in direct association with the tools and animal bones, and more than one human species lived in the area at this time. The earliest example of a clear association between humans and tools dated to 2.3 million years ago, and the human remains belonged to an early Homo species.

Still, archaeologists suspected that earlier stone tools remained to be discovered, because these examples seemed too advanced to represent humanity's first foray into tool manufacture. "Nearly everyone that works with the earliest stone tool industries at between 2.3 [million] and 2.5 million years has commented on the surprisingly high level of skill and understanding that we see in these early knappers. Most have predicted that something older will be found," says archaeologist Shannon P. McPherron of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

That hunch helped motivate McPherron and his colleagues, who have been working at a site in the Afar region called Dikika—just a few kilometers from the Lucy site—to look in older geologic deposits in the area for earlier evidence of stone tool use or manufacture. They were rewarded with bones from two animals—one cow-size and another goat-size—that display cutmarks and percussion marks indicative of flesh removal and marrow extraction with stone tools. McPherron, along with Dikika Research Project leader Zeresenay Alemseged of the California Academy of Sciences and their collaborators, describe their discovery in an August 12 paper in Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

Because the earliest Homo remains date to just 2.3 million years ago, scientists can be certain that an australopithecine made the cut marks on the 3.4-million-year-old Dikika bones. And because the only human species that is known to have lived in the Dikika area during this time period is A. afarensis, it seems reasonably certain that this species in particular butchered the bones. (The A. afarensis remains found at Dikika include a spectacularly well-preserved skeleton of a youngster, popularly dubbed "Lucy's baby.")

Australopithecines had teeth and jaws that were in many ways adapted for eating fruit, seeds and other plant foods. "[The discovery] shows that meat was added to the diet earlier than we had thought," McPherron observes, although he notes that it is difficult to say what portion of the diet was meat. "We could now be looking at an extended period of time when hominins were including meat in their diet and experimenting with the use of stone tools."

Although the Dikika finds prove that A. afarensis was using tools, whether they were fashioning implements from stone or just picking up sharp-edged rocks from the landscape and using those to carve up the carcasses remains unknown, because no stone tools have turned up at the site. Future discoveries may resolve this question. They may also reveal the extent to which Lucy and her kin relied on stone gadgetry, setting the stage for developments that would profoundly impact the course of human evolution.


"This discovery dramatically shifts the known time frame of a game-changing behavior for our ancestors,"Alemseged remarked in a prepared statement. "Tool use fundamentally altered the way our early ancestors interacted with nature, allowing them to eat new types of food and exploit new territories. It also led to tool-making—a critical step in our evolutionary path that eventually enabled such advanced technologies as airplanes, MRI machines and iPhones."

Mar 17, 2011

Psychology: An introduction to the use of psychology in understanding culture and society

Since Joseph Campbell wrote and published his masterwork The Masks of God psychology has advanced quite a bit. Some of the phrasing of his statements will seem old and in some cases even acceptable scientific terminology has changed. So I have to do a little updating to some of his work from Primitive Mythology.

I thought I would open with one of my favorite psychological aspects of us which is how our curiosity and ability to play with material forms or ideas has probably led to all our psychological, technological and cultural achievements. [Note: All extracts below are in italics and are from Joseph Campbell’s Primitive Mythology]
                                      
Every study undertaken by Man was the genuine outcome of curiosity, a kind of game. All the data of natural science, which are responsible for Man’s domination of the world, originated in activities that were indulged in exclusively for the sake of amusement. When Benjamin Franklin drew sparks from the tail of his kite he was thinking as little of the lightning conductor as Hertz, when he investigated electrical waves, was thinking of radio transmission. Anyone who has experienced in his own person how easily the inquisitiveness of a child at play can grow into the life work of a naturalist will never doubt the fundamental similarity of games and study.

Konrad Lorenz, Primitive Mythology Page 40

I began this study out of curiosity and it has continued to fascinate me, and with all the amazing historical articles I’m working on, I hope you will enjoy reading my research as much as I enjoy putting it together.

One of the biggest debates in our time is the one of ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ which has echoes of a debate which has been going on for a while;

Jung’s idea of the “archetypes” is one of the leading theories, today, in the field of our subject. It is a development of the earlier theory of Adolf Bastian (1826-1905), who recognized, in the course of his extensive travels, the uniformity of what he termed the “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanke) of mankind. Remarking also, however, that in the various provinces of human culture these ideas are differently articulated and elaborated, he coined the term “ethnic ideas” (Volkergedanke) for the actual, local manifestations of the universal forms. Nowhere, he noted, are the “elementary ideas” to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned “ethnic ideas” through which they are substantialized; (page 32)

To the explorer of that time elementary ideas were of the type as the language similarities of Latin and Greek or similarity in the attributes of their gods.

Two possibilities of emphasis are implicit in this observation of Bastian. The first we may term the psychological and the second the ethnological; and these can be taken to represent, broadly, the two contrasting points of view from which scientists, scholars, and philosophers have approached our subject.(page 32)

In other words, there are two aspects in analyzing culture, the psychological aspect which we as a species have in common (which I will be explaining more of later) and the ‘ethnological’ or social ideas and training that we are raised with and with which we function in society as Campbell explains:

“First,” wrote Bastian, “the idea as such must be studied … and as second factor, the influence of climatic-geological conditions.” Only after that, as a third factor, according to his view, could the influence upon one another of the various ethnic traditions throughout the course of history be profitably surveyed. Bastian, that is to say, stressed the psychological, spontaneous aspect of culture as primary; and this approach has been the usual one of biologists, medical men, and psychologists to the present day. Briefly stated, it assumes that there is in the structure and functioning of the psyche a certain degree of spontaneity and consequent uniformity throughout the history and domain of the human species.

But on the other hand, if climate, geography, and massive social forces are to be regarded as of more moment in the shaping of the ideas, ideals, fantasies, and emotions by which men live than the innate structures and capacities of the psyche, then a diametrically contrary philosophical position must be assumed. Psychology in this case becomes a function of ethnology; or, to quote one representative authority, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, in his work on The Andaman Islanders:
A society depends for its existence on the presence in the minds of its members of a certain system of sentiments by which the conduct of the individual is regulated in conformity with the needs of society. Every feature of the social system itself and every even or object that in any way affects the well-being or the cohesion of the society becomes an object of this system of sentiments. In human society the sentiments in question are not innate but are developed in the individual by the action of the society upon him. The ceremonial customs of a society are a means by which the sentiments in question are given collective expression on appropriate occasions. The ceremonial (i.e. collective) expression of any sentiment serves both to maintain it at the requisite degree of intensity in the mind of the individual and to transmit it from one generation to another. Without such expression the sentiments involved could not exist.
It will be readily seen that in such a view the ceremonials and mythologies of the differing societies are in no sense manifestations of psychologically grounded “elementary ideas,” common to the human race, but of interests locally conditioned; and the fundamental contrast of the two approaches is surely clear.

Mar 16, 2011

Why I think the Japanese are going to come back stronger than before

Japan has just gone through one of the worst disasters in modern history. The earthquake was so big that it increased the rate of our planets spin and the tsunami that followed was watched all over the world Live as it swept away cars and buildings. On top of all of that we are watching again Live, a nuclear factory go through turmoil (fortunately, as of this posting, the safety devices are working enough for the safety of the population) and the earthquakes continue rattling the population.

The Japanese are used to earthquakes but so many one after another has to be unnerving especially with all the destruction around them. As Japan's Prime Minister stated, "This is the worst crises since World War Two".

I'm sure I'm not the only one amazed by the Japanese stableness (or 'stoic' posture as one BBC commentator put it) in dealing with this disaster. They have been calm, orderly and dealing with each situation as it comes. This is what happened after WW2. The Japanese got themselves together and rose above the disaster to become one of the largest economic powers in under fifty years which is amazing just in and of itself.

Joseph Campbell has this to say about the Japanese people:

Japan, like England, is an island world wherein a self-understood rapport exists by nature, from top to bottom of the social order; so that whereas on the mainland clashes of race, cultures, and mutually inconsiderate classes represent practically the norm of the social history, in Japan, even in day of the most brutal disorder, the empire functioned, in the main, as an organic unit. And with such effect that today, as nowhere else in the world, one has the sense there of a permeation of the social body by a spirit essentially heroic and aristocratic, endowed with the quality of honor, which has penetrated downward from the top, while, in counter-play, the sense of wonder and delight in the numinous just mentioned [i.e. of the world around you], which is generally lost in the sophistications of a developed civilization, remains significant in the structure of life, supported from beneath by the sensibilities of the folk, yet pervading the culture spectrum to the top.


Oriental Mythylogy by Joseph Campbell page 461 - words inside the brackets [ ] are mine


The attitude described can be seen on the news. We all know a disaster of this magnitude is not something that can be handled easily by just any culture and the Japanese calmness - through continuing 6.0 aftershocks and dozens of minor quakes - is a testimony to their spirit. And a confirmation of what Joseph Campbell  writes above.

Mar 15, 2011

Introduction to Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell's master work The Masks of God, particularly his first volume Primitive Mythology, provides some of theories and evidential touchstones for my study into history. However, his focus was on mythology while mine is on culture and society. The following is video 1 of a 6 part series of Joseph Campbell being interviewed by Bill Moyers which is called The Power Of Myth.




Mar 9, 2011

Daniel Quinn’s theories on culture and civilization part 4



[DQ= Daniel Quinn]

"We see it as catching up with our population while its really people catching up to extra food supply."

Here DQ is talking about how, as a culture, some people see our production of food as a means to feed our growing global population. What he does here is an inversion, saying that it's not the food production that is catching up to population but the population itself is increasing to catch up to our growing food supply. As he states;

"Totalitarian agriculture has been a disaster, mainly because it has fueled this tremendous population growth of ours - Mathis said we are always catching up with our growing population where as in fact our growing population is always growing up with our food population."

What he has noticed is called 'a correlation' in the field of statistics. For example; if you find that highly stressed out people are more likely to get colds you have just observed a correlation. To say that the stress itself caused the cold (rather than bacteria) is a statement of cause and effect NOT a correlation. Correlations are useful to get an idea of different variables that move together and provide a better understanding of the forces at work on a particular subject of study but they do not prove anything about cause and effect. DQ observes a correlation and then stretches it to a belief of cause and effect without any backing evidence (to my knowledge - I have found videos of over 2 hours of DQ talking, when I have the patience to listen to him I may go through those videos to discover if he provides any evidence... in the books of his I've read I haven't found any).

"We have a food race going on" says DQ, which he compares to the cold war, i.e. making better weapons between enemies made it an arms race so extending that analogy the only way to end the arms race was to do it like gorbechov which was to say 'we quit', thus no one to race with.

It baffles me that this guy gets away with the things he says. Anyways, lets do what he says...lets stop food production to fit the amount of population we want and let the excess die off. I'm sure this theory can't cause psychological imbalances in the already imbalanced.

"We have a 'win' on the side of food production then we have a 'win' on the side of population... thats why we are annually adding 7 million people to our population... and people have this terrible delusion that we are growing more food to feed the starving, the starving do not get fed, the starving population is a growing just like the other parts of the population are growing its a delusion, we are growing more food to grow more people."

What DQ is talking about here is a problem of economics that is better suited under the title "income inequality". People with more money can buy more food, nations with more money can buy more food. Some people take care of their populations to some extant, some don't (for whatever reasons). The choices are made by society and the distribution of economic wealth (and the power associated with it). This has nothing to do with the food supply.

The belief that increasing our food supply (which began with agriculture) also increases our population is to an extant accurate [refer to posts on Guns, Germs and Steel, Part 1 and Part 2]. Tribal people could not store as much food as an agricultural population and in most cases didn't have the types of grains that could be stored for long periods of time. Being constantly on the move to look for food doesn't help a population establish itself or grow. If we have more food we can have a larger population.

Agricultural communities (such as third world countries) tend to have very high birth rates which, historically, is normal as having a large family is helpful in the labor intensive life of farming. However, it is also a historical fact that as the economic wealth of a country increases and it moves from a mostly agrarian economy to an urban one, the birth rates drop. In the urban lifestyle, where children are meant to go to school - not to work - it makes no economic sense to have a large family (generally speaking, individuals may have different preferences but the community as a whole will cut down on kids if they have to support them).

With the increase in economic wealth in a country and the movement of jobs towards the services industries, many people have opted to have smaller families. This way they can enjoy greater economic prosperity (assuming there are child labor laws in place that are enforced or such laws have been around long enough for them to become a part of societal belief).

The following links and extracts are meant to show economic trends which disprove DQ's theories on food and population.

1. In industrialized countries there is a movement from large families to small ones:

Global population ageing is a by-product of the demographic transition in which both mortality and fertility decline from higher to lower levels. Currently, the total fertility rate is below the replacement level in practically all industrialized countries. In the less developed regions, the fertility decline started later and has proceeded faster than in the more developed regions. Yet, in all regions people are increasingly likely to survive to older ages, and once there they are tending to live longer, as the gains in life expectancy are relatively higher at older ages.


2. The drop in birth rates in industrialized (economically wealthy) countries is so large that some economists are worried that the populations are going to start shrinking. [This is called replacement level fertility]

The overall fertility rate increased 2 percent between 2005 and 2006, nudging the average number of babies being born to each woman to 2.1, according to the latest federal statistics. That marks the first time since 1971 that the rate has reached a crucial benchmark of population growth: the ability of each generation to replace itself.

"It's been quite a long time since we've had a rate this high," said Stephanie J. Ventura of the National Center for Health Statistics. "It's a milestone."

While the rising fertility rate was unwelcome news to some environmentalists, the "replacement rate" is generally considered desirable by demographers and sociologists because it means a country is producing enough young people to replace and support aging workers without population growth being so high it taxes national resources