Political attitude as an influence on Human Evolution?

 I recently ran across a question in the Anthropology Network which asks how political perspective influences the role of culture in the evolution of H sapiens.The writer presented the question in terms of poll and asked readers to respond by selecting between 5 political attitudes ranging from the most conservative to the most radical. Specifically, between Reactionary and Radical.

At first I dismissed the question and the poll as "interesting" but irrelevant. How could my political outlook today have anything to do with the development of culture and human evolution? But as I thought about some more, I realized the question really attacks the question of how does cultural dynamics work and what impact has this had on the evolution of our species and its cultural diversity. A question that has been at the center of my own anthropological interests for more than four decades.  

The answer which I have found come from readings dating back to the 1960s and 1970s related to a seminar in community development which I took with Dr. Edward H. Spicer upon my return from the Peace Corps. The key book was Ward Goodenough's Cooperation In Change. Goodenough builds much of his theoretical argument based on the work of Anthony F. C. Wallace's Culture and Personality.

I realized that political attitude played out at the supraorganic or societal level certainly can influnce the cultural response of the group and thus indirectly the course of human evolution.

Anthony F. C. Wallace answered this question a long time ago and the Eastern religions even longer ago. It is the tension between "radical" and "reactionary" that produces the evolution in Human culture which in turn has promoted the biological evolution of the Homo sapiens species.

Wallace identifies two forces or principles at work in cultural development. The first, here the radical, is the principle of the ORGANIZATION OF DIVERSITY (OD). Human group activity which brings diverse elements in the environment(s) together to successfully solve a survival problem favor the survival of that group. The willingness to experiment and break with or question tradition is a radical position leading to innovation.

The second, here the reactionary, is the principle of REPLICATION OF UNIFORMITY (RU). Individual activity does not guarantee success and individual success does not guarantee group success. What is required to produce both innovation and evolution is the replication of successes across generations and the elimination of failed experiments. The resistance to change, orthodoxy, is critical to the replication of success.

Culture, based on these two principles, provides the tension which enables these principles to operate. Evolutionary success is the centrist or moderate product of these principles operating in a give environment. Change the environment and the system must recalibrate, i.e. the species must adapt and evolve..

So to answer the original question, I must ask another question: What is the environment for making a choice?

Kurt Lewin and the Eyes of the Beholder Part 2 - The Mode

About a month ago I posted a discussion topic on the NAPA (National Association for the Practice of Anthropology) forum on LinkedIn in which I asked,"If you are using simple descriptive statistics, which is your favorite?" The question formed the basis for the later post here in the Superorganic " Kurt Lewin and the Eyes of the Beholder"

I received comments from Vicki Ina F. Gloer which lead me to think about the issue further in light of my reflections on Lewin's field theory. Vicki remarked:

 I was reminded of Whorf's 1941 publication of "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (written in 1939) in which he detailed observations he made while working in fire insurance of people's perceptions of risk versus actual risk - explaining (of course!) how the words we use to think about risk tend to determine our perception of risk. Insurance underwriters use both simple and complex statistical formulations to assign relative weights and dollar amounts to risk.

I want to thank her for pointing out the connection. I find her comment so right on target. 

 

We are so accustomed to the use of the mean or average as the statistic used to compare things that we forget or ignore the other two measures of central tendency -- the median (the mid-point) and the mode (the most numerous) -- for measuring or describing a population. But as anthropologists we should know better. This is what Vicki was saying when she remembered the Whorf hypothesis. As observers, we may want to use the mean as the statistic to compare distribution within a population and/or a change in that population over time. But as participants, the mean is a useless statistic if we want to understand the sub-cultures and their impact on the status/role structure of an institution or society. 

 

Culture is defined by the process of storing and passing on experience, knowledge and beliefs from generation to generation. It is this generational linkage that distinguishes culture from a fad or fashion. To understand a culture or sub-culture statistically, we must look a population and identify these generational linkages -- that is the modes within the population.

 

When we discuss CULTURE we tend to think of it a singular phenomena, and on an Etic level I would agree. But in the real world in which we all live, "culture", is an Emic reality. Our "culture" is our universe composed of words and actions which have specific meanings and purpose and which we learn from our elders and our own experience and which we will pass on to the next generation.

Whorf and his teacher Sapir, pointed out that language is relative just as culture is relative. This, of course, was in response to the unilinear idea of linguistic evolution. Thus each language creates a conceptual universe for the speakers of that language. Where a specific language is the modal preferred means of communication, of a population or segment of a population it defines the or a cultural universe for the population. For example, the use of Latin in the Catholic Church at one time for example -- was the modal language of the priesthood and shaped the Roman Catholic church and its cultural version of Christianity despite the fact that the average member of the faith did not speak nor read Latin.

One of the theoretical threads of Culture and Personality, probably best expressed by Ruth Benedict, was the idea of a culture being defined in terms of a Modal Personality. Benedict and Mead expanded this concept during WWII and after with the development of the National Character approach.

The mode, that most forgotten and ignored statistic, is the important statistic for the anthropologist because it defines the cultural universe of a population of actors..