Brian McAndrews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wrote
and
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Replied
I appreciate the exchange below. It seems to me that the teaching of
culture is the inculcation of what we used to call morality. The unwritten
rules and laws of behaviour (mental and physical) that are communicated
more by practice than by curriculum. Since the rules were inculcated by
osmisis, so to speak, they served until experience either validated or
invalidated them.
The watershed occured in my opinion during the 60's when both the
authoritative and the authoritarian were rejected. The veracity of moral
laws was rejected unless they could be validated.
That was a reversal of traditional process when moral law was accepted
unless it could be invalidated.
With society's love affair with the TV, the proving ground has ben removed.
The resultant loss of social "self government" has created a vacume that is
being filled by the writing into statute law what more property belongs in
the realm of moral law, where the practice of it is modified to suit its
time and place.
Ed G
end
===============
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Blaming the victors [Winning without fighting -- culture's way]
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Brian McAndrews wrote:
>
> I believe this captures a great deal:
>
> >"It is not necessary to construct a theory of intentional cultural
> >control. In truth, the strength of the control process rests in its
> >apparent absence. The desired systemic result is achieved ordinarily by a
> >loose though effective institutional process. It utilizes the education of
> >journalists and other media professionals, built-in penalties and rewards
> >for doing what is expected, norms presented as objective rules, and the
> >occasional but telling direct intrusion from above. The main lever is the
> >internalization of values."
> >
> >[P.8, Herbert I. Schiller, CULTURE INC;
> >Oxford, 1989. ISBN 0-19-506783-5]
> >
>
> Brian McAndrews
I think you are right on target. That "apparent absence" is
the key, since no person can try to stop something they are not
even aware is going on.
As I have said before, Edward Hall deals with this
in _The Silent Language_:
"Compared with such notions as the unconscious or
repression... the idea of culture is a strange one even to the
informed citizen." (pp. 20-21)
"Culture hides much more than it reveals, and
strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively
from its own participants." (p. 30)
"[A]lmost everyone has difficulty believing that
behavior they have always associated with 'human nature'
is not human nature at all but learned behavior
of a particularly complex variety." (p. 44)
And here is the paradox which gets to the heart of the
problem:
"Since culture is learned, it also seems clear that one
should be able to teach it. Yet in the past there has
been singularly little success in this regard with the
important exception of language...." (pp. 37,38)
How can something be learned but not be able to be taught?
This is not the Platonic metaphysical puzzle it sounds
like, but rather the banality of the nursery, where
the infant's eagerness to please and need to be loved
meet up with the usually unwittingly manipulative
responses of its "elders". And we meet this same
unthematized communication of values in the classroom, the
locker room, the office, anywhere where persons hope to be
"accepted" (which does seem to be an almost universal
human need).
And, when this kind of "untaught learning" fails,
sometimes, just before the person who failed to learn
without being taught gets his or her punishment,
those who *have* successfully learned without being
taught will "let the cat out of the bag":
You mean we have to *tell* you to [whatever --
e.g., wear deodorant, get a haircut, tell your
mother you love her, buy your girlfriend a useless
hunk of De Beers profits you can't really afford,
stay late in the office even though you're
not accomplishing anything or take on
more work than you can handle without saying
anything about it, etc.]
And the best (or worst, depending on one's perspective)
part of it, is that in the normal case no overt
threat needs to be employed, so that there is no
appearance of manipulation. An example from Hall:
"Mother--how does a woman get a man to marry her?"
"Well, it's a little hard to describe, but when you get
bigger you'll find out. There's plenty of time for learning."
(p. 69)
Here the child has already learned a lot, e.g., that
satisfying one's needs for sexual gratification and
having a partner to accompany one through life are
to be satisfied through the child's culture's
social custom of *marriage*. Further, since the child sees how
children are powerless and adults get to do all sorts of
interesting things ("the obvious"), the child will
spontaneously strive to instantiate the social custom
(i.e., to "grow up"), without any direct threat of punishment
(failing to grow up is punishment enough!).
So the child [student, worker, etc.] becomes an
enthusiastic agent of implicitly assimilating his or her
culture through emulation (which is a form of learning without
overt teaching), and, as a character says in Alain Resnais'
film _Mon Oncle d'Amerique_, it is this *positive social
unconscious of permissions*, which is not the Freudian
unconscious of repression, which is a serious danger to
the world today -- manifesting itself, e.g., in the
almost universal spirit of *competition*, in which
everyone strives to win, and, thereby, the inevitable
winner is the furtherance of the values the competitive
activity embodies [e.g., the "invisible hand" of
global late-capitalism].
Hall again:
"We must never assume that we are fully
aware of what we communicate to someone else." (p. 29)
Just as the co-product of all work is the worker's
work environment, the co-product of every
normal social interaction is the reproduction of
the whole culture of which that interaction is
a representative. Thus, while the cliche of seeing
the universe in a grain of sand may be romantic,
the idea of reproducing a whole culture in each
little social gesture is quite true, and each
such social "molehill" is indeed a mountain
(or at least an iceberg)....
The surest way to win is if the "opponent"
isn't even aware there is anything to fight about.
+\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua NY 10514-3403 USA
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Ed Goertzen,
Oshawa
