There is a way to dream consciously so that the nightmares are diminished. The solution is to permit a political anarchy, based on traditional cultures, coordinated by a global "regulating" body, based on the United Nations. There are 500 million indigenous peoples in 15 thousand distinct groups, such as the Uighur in China or the Kuna in Panama; and, there are over 2 billion people in hidden nations within massive political structures, such as the Azerbaijanis in the Soviet Union or the Tibetans in China. Furthermore, there are regions in some countries, such as the Pacific Northwest in the United States or Wales in Britain, that may prefer independence to forced membership in a confederation. Any indigenous people with a traditional culture could become an independent nation without fear of conquest or compromise by existing political states. The benefits would outnumber those of a global monoculture and the negative aspects would be more manageable.
To provide for the needs of many and the extravagant luxuries of some, we have produced waste and pollution on a geological scale, from islands of garbage to acid rain. Manufacturing processes result in the production of new dangers, such as recombined genes, and new substances, which are not easily incorporated into natural cycles. The overuse of ecosystems results in deforestation, devegetation, and desertification, then in depletion of raw materials and depletion of agricultural land. Economic and political pressures, derived ultimately from population pressures, force farmers to intensify their efforts to increase crop production, instigating a dismal cycle of population expansion, environmental deterioration, and poverty.
To provide efficiently, we have increased the scale of our activities. But we have decreased the diversity of habitats by filling in wetlands, felling forests, plowing grasslands, and irrigating deserts. Agribusiness has caused widespread landlessness; people who try to grow their own food are forced onto marginal lands. Acquiring fossil fuels also creates landlessness; coal mining in the Black Mesa mountains of the United States, for instance, may force the resettlement of 20 thousand Hopi and Navajo people. Without land, and the economic independence it allows, cultures are more likely to disintegrate.
To achieve even greater efficiency, we have increased the speed of our activities, converting materials and cultures without consideration of the meaning of or need for efficiency. The speed of our economy is too great for many cultures to adjust to; and the thoughtless transformation of cultures may result in great mistakes. The speed of our conversion of wild habitats to domesticated lands is too great for many species to adapt to.
To increase trade and claim resources, states worked with business corporations to enclose entire areas and stabilize them with physical force. Now, every piece of land on earth is enclosed and claimed by major states. States have also incorporated traditional tribal territories into their artificial boundaries with little regard for representation. The Oromo in Ethiopia, for instance, comprise half the nation"s population, but do not have a voice in government or even title to their lands. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 450 million people speaking 1800 dialects have been compressed into 50 states.
To increase our economic wealth, we have created a "global marketplace" in a "global village." We have tied together people with millions of telephones, hundreds of millions of televisions and billions of radios. More and more people eat the same foods, wear the same style clothing, and read, watch, and listen to the same entertainment. People are pressured to give up their ethnic identity and kinship for the "global unity" of humanity. This global culture suffocates local cultures, and unique dialects and ways of life are diminished.
Population pressures, resource shortages, and manufacturing "side-effects" cause instability in many societies; militarism, intolerance, crimes, and health problems are symptoms of that instability. Confusion and misinformation contribute further to the destruction of cultures. The instability of cultures, as well as stress, insecurity, and insufficient diets, results in psychological problems for people. Individual powerlessness and disillusion provokes the further disintegration of cultures.
Secondary cultures analyze and deduce the operations of nature; rituals become more stylized. Cultural innovations permit larger human populations; ecological limits are raised by agriculture, although they are not eliminated. Moral consideration is reserved for human beings and sometimes other conscious beings.
Tertiary cultures (in fact, the real meaning of a third world: twice removed from nature), are based on mechanical images that objectify nature. Drastic changes in the production of goods forces other psychological and social changes; human relationships are based on economic allegiances instead of kinship and exist in societies instead of communities. Money becomes a symbolic representation for the value of labor and land, which are considered mere commodities. Social stratification and the specialization of labor become fundamental characteristics. Orders are rearranged during the process of urbanization. Moral order, for example, becomes subordinate to technical order.
This last transformation of culture is not the only one in existence, however. There are hundreds of others, although around 1900 there were over one thousand unique cultures and 3000 languages (roughly equivalent to the number of natural biogeographical provinces, subprovinces, and habitats on earth).
Cultures fail for many reasons. Early cultures had little understanding of their impact on ecosystems. Mesopotamians silted their water supplies and salted their soils; the Greeks overgrazed the Mediterranean hills. Other cultures were not able to adjust to a qualitative change in size. The Mayan culture probably became too large to grow and distribute food. The Marajo Island culture probably collapsed due to population pressure.
Some cultures, stagnant or senile like Rome, only avoided failure by expansion into new areas--for instance, the European expansion into Africa and America. Often the elements of a culture will simply be rearranged by a succeeding culture into a new pattern.
The images and diseases of secondary and tertiary cultures had immense repercussions on primary cultures. American cultures had no resistance to diseases bred in European cities. Many cultures could not compete with more aggressive groups. Many primary cultures have lost 60 to 99 percent of their populations. The Tasmanians, for instance, lost over 98 percent of their population; this much stress on a culture usually results in extinction, as happened to the Ona and Yahgan in Tierra del Fuego. About one third of the known groups in Brazil were gone by 1957.
Some cultures are simply wiped out. The Herero people in southwest Africa were exterminated as a culture by German forces. The Yanomami and others in Brazil are facing threats from prospectors and ranchers, now. Other cultures subside or intermarry out of existence. The Birale people in southwest Ethiopia have only 89 remaining members--and only 19 of them speak the tribal language, Ongota.
Industrial culture is wrongly considered to be the evolutionary successor to primary cultures and is displacing them rapidly. Scholars once plotted an evolutionary trend of cultural types, from primitive through historic, modernizing, and modern; they speculated that later developments were more adaptive than earlier ones and should replace them. It was assumed that the modern view culminated from earlier ages; thus, the "superior" modern cultures were justified in exploiting or removing "primitive" cultures.
There is no evolutionary trend of cultural types from the primitive to modern. Later developments have not proven to be more adaptive than earlier ones; nor do they necessarily replace them. Ethnic groups are not anachronistic stages that point to Switzerland or Japan; they are equally valid ways of living. Any culture is only one of many possibilities, one way of living in a unique place--there is no single correct way.
Industrial culture, depending on its expanding market system, is becoming unstable--worse, it is attempting to become a global system at the same time. We know that cultures can destroy their ecological basis, but we do not know how to extend the existence of stable cultures.
Culture is a codification of reality, a symbolic system that transforms physical reality into experienced reality, which can be preserved and transmitted through many generations by language. The uniqueness of the place of a culture is exhibited through language. The Inuit may have over 17 different words for snow, while the Taureg may have 11 words distinguishing the kinds of blown sand (and Americans recognize 94 shades of lipstick and 22 kinds of road surfaces). Language is not only a medium to express thought, it is a major element in the formation of thought. Different languages recognize events differently, therefore no culture can be considered apart from language or entirely apart from place.
The difference between cultures is not due to the number of phenomena taken into account; it is due to a difference in basic postulates of thought. Nor is the difference really a matter of truth or falsity. Truth and falsity are are less important than relevance. Primordial water is no less true than six-dimensional phase space or primordial ylem. Each group views and reconstructs the world through their experiences and values. Codifications are true to reality; they represent different facets, not exhaustive catalogues. The inconvenient truths of one culture, like the germ theory of sickness or the vengeance of Coyote, are usually disregarded when they conflict with the direct beliefs of another culture.
Although the capacity for culture is innate, culture itself is learned. Culture provides the framework and boundaries of reasoning as well as the basic ideas of discourse. Culture provides kinship rules, obligations, and entitlements, the values that determine behavior. It also defines the means of production, kinds of livelihood, and the ways of distribution. Culturally determined values and ideas are the basis of political behavior; these ideas determine the kind of institutions and their ability to change.
Culture is an active way of living for a group of people in a unique place, a set of behaviors that allow survival in one place. Culture is a dynamic whole. It is not simply a matter of territory or human ancestory or names; it is a living organ, like human skin, that allows the interpenetration between the human and the natural. Every culture has strengths and weaknesses, however, that may color and distort human perception, or limit and expand human adaptation to the environment.
Making a Common Image. People in a primary culture share a common image of their world--from the German word meaning "man-image." The image is a construct of human knowledge that reflects human awareness of a local environment. The image is constructed metaphorically, but treated "as if" it were true. A traditional way of living evolves with people"s experience and knowledge. The image guides their behavior.
If the images were incomplete or too arbitrary to fit environmental conditions, the culture failed; many cultures, simple or advanced, from the Cahokia to Chaco Canyon in the United States, failed to fit their environment and disappeared. The images were defective guides. The Aztecs, for example, believed that the sun needed human blood to survive and sacrificed great numbers of lives to ensure the sun"s life. Their political policy was based on raids for victims, and this policy contributed to their overthrow and decline with the arrival of the Spanish (whose gold acquisition policy was also defective and caused great destruction).
The central image of industrial culture has been the machine, which was a fruitful metaphor for explaining the operation of the planets as well as the living cell. This image is defective. The image of nature as a resource, for instance, has resulted in pollution, material shortages, and environmental degradation; a culture that degrades its habitat risks its own extinction. By ignoring the real cost of the capital, as well as the costs of natural services, such as nutrient recycling, soil building, and atmospheric renewal, these cultures create a temporary wealth while ruining the source of wealth, natural ecosystems. The image of the world as mechanical is not the only image: the world can be personal, as it is for the Navajo, or it can be a basic duality of humans and gods, as it is for the Dahomey, or it can be static and internal, as it is for the Yaruru. These other images may be more appropriate for fostering concern and responsibility.
Ordering Experience. A culture orders a whole cosmos (from the Greek word meaning "to set in order;" the word was applied to the human face as well as to all of nature, and what was beautiful was also morally admirable). A culture selects what is important from the undifferentiated phenomena of nature. What is important is often beautiful. Every culture strives for beauty that goes beyond utilitarian values; the most basic tools of the Inuits, for example, are enhanced by carving. Persons, objects, and events are appraised in terms of beauty, although the criteria may be particular and implicit to the culture (extinct cultures may be known only by artistic styles).
People structure their worlds with their own group at the center. This ethnocentrism is evident in small tribes as well as large empires, from the Campa to the Chinese. The center is often reflected in the mapping of territories. The Zuni, an agricultural group in the southwest United States, live in a highly structured world of zones. The universe is divided into zones for ritual purposes. These zones are oriented toward the center, the Zuni Pueblo. By contrast, the neighboring Navajo, who are sheepherders, live in scattered hogans, each of which is a center. The center is a dispersed cluster. The image of the center of the earth running through the place of a culture gives the culture moral or physical strength; in fact, the center may be necessary for a culture.
The central part of a people"s image of the world--a mountain, building, or grove, for instance--is usually sacred. Human groups have traditionally divided their world into two realms: the sacred and the profane. The lived place, the familiar, is sacred. Sacred space is where sacred experience occurs, that is, the manifestation of a wholly different order, more than human. The prevalence of sacred centers in villages, or sacred corners or sides, is almost universal. In Madagascar the northeast corner is most sacred and the north is for notable guests. In China, the northwest corner is most sacred, although the whole house is considered sacred. Ritual space distribution is found in Arab, Mongol, Lap, and Indian houses, as well.
Personalizing a Place. Cultures occupy a particular territory. This is especially true of the Campa, in a tropical forest in Peru, and the Ituri pygmy, in a tropical rainforest in Africa. The features of their cultures are unique to their place. They literally could not live with images of desert or ocean, like the Taureg of the Sahara or Samoans of the Pacific.
Regardless of the features of a place, myths are created to give it special significance; giving mythical significance to a place strengthens a people"s identification with it. People identify with their place and often equate their own characteristics with it; the Ituri consider themselves as bountiful as their forest, while the Mongols are as undeniable as the wind from their plateau.
Mythologies are attached to animals and personalized beings, such as mountains or trees. By explaining reality in this way, a culture binds the human and ultrahuman, and the past and the present, into a meaningful whole. A culture explains the human order in terms of physical, biological, and cosmic processes in one place.
Primary cultures think of nature as presence: things are personalized first, before being categorized. A noise in the woods at night is the voice of a living being or person. The natural world is seen as having human qualities. A core of anthropomorphism is necessary for understanding the ultrahuman. This core actually sponsors diversity in individuals and species. We understand other beings by expanding ourselves, not by shrinking them. This leads to relational knowledge. Symbolic associations and transformations are made between diverse entities. The social life of humans and other beings is not separate. Anthropomorphic thought increases the dimensions of the human intellect. By rejecting it, the experience of others is restricted and the scope of self-knowledge is reduced.
The Pygmies of the Ituri Forest of Zaire see themselves as a part of the forest, an abundant provider; they regard the forest as mother and father, conceive of themselves as children of the forest, and live in harmony with it. The Pueblo Indians consider the sun to be their father and earth to be their mother. Earth and sun create an endless series of cycles that govern life; people and animals and seasons are part of the cycle.
Knowing a Place. Knowledge allows survival in fragile habitats. The Kayapo in the Brazilian rainforest practice seed selection and crop rotation; they fertilize the soil with wastes. They gather 250 types of wild fruits, 650 medicinal plants, and 100s of tubers and leaves. The Karen of the Thailand practice shifting cultivation, which is only possible with low population density and sufficient land for a rotation of decades or generations. The !Kung San of the Kalahari desert exist in small communities that enable them to continue traditional hunting and gathering without depleting their resources; they hunt 80 types of animals. The Hanunoo of the Phillipines distinguish 1600 plant species (scientists only know of 1200 in the same area).
Industrial culture considers that primary cultures have a shortage of economically-relevant knowledge. But primary people know how to find or grow edible and medicinal plants; they know how to make appropriate houses and cooking utensils with a minimum of effort and materials. Traditional communities have a rich biological knowledge of animals and plants, as well as a rich mythical knowledge of animals and plants.
Adapting to Place. A primary culture is adaptive because it aids survival in the ultrahuman world. Its ways of living are sophisticated survival mechanisms. Each way of life is a set of adaptations to the limits of the environment. Primary thought patterns are highly disciplined intellectual structures that make the world coherent and meaningful.
Many rituals of the tropical American Indian tribes are concerned with ecological balance, though not necessarily self-consciously. Tribes have mythical or legal rules to reduce the negative effects on the natural areas that support them. The myths of the Tukano, for instance, do not describe their place in nature in terms of mastery of a subordinate environment. Instead, the Tukano learn that they are part of a larger system that transcends individuals. Survival and maintenance of the quality of life are possible only if all other lives are allowed to evolve according to their specific needs, which are described in myths and traditions.
Myth limits the impacts a people can have on the habitat. For example, the Tukano are taught that only a limited number of animals were created and that these were placed under the care of the spirits. Tukano fishing is limited because the fish own the riverbank, so humans have no rights over it. In fact, humans are held accountable by the shaman if the area is overfished. The punishment for taking too many is also told in myth--it is human extinction. The role of the shaman is not to seek more animals or exemption from overhunting, but to restrict human use. Myth presents rules for regulating the birth rate and for social behavior, as well as for the harvest rate.
Over many generations, people learn what kinds of food to eat and where and when to find it. Particularly in agricultural societies, cultures are gauged closely to seasons. They are also tuned to the limits of the local ecology. The pastoral economies of the Taureg of West Africa are as ecologically efficient as intensive ranches in industrial countries. The !Kung San of the northwest Kalahari are likewise efficient; individual adults need only devote 12-19 hours per week to support themselves.
Preserving Place. We know that cultures have been self sufficient for thousands of years. Although some of them fail, others last a long time. The Desana, for example, have existed in the Amazon for over 4,000 years by maintaining an equilibrium with the environment. Acoma town in the southwestern United States has been inhabitedfor almost 900 years.
Industrial culture offers great control over many aspects of the environment. One form of this control has been the setting aside of parks and wilderness areas for future generations; functioning ecosystems, such as wetlands, are being preserved, sometimes haphazardly, as the basis for human activities.
Ecosystems are local, not global. Although we regard communities as being tied together globally, each community is alone--that is the real meaning of local; being independent, striving for "survival" without regard for others. A restatement of Rene Dubos"s imperative to think globally and act locally would be to think locally and act locally, but be aware of the global implications, causes and effects, of any action.
Each culture has to be responsible for its own welfare. Preserving the local environment is one requirement.
Justifying Human Behavior. Another function of a culture is to justify human activities, in order to have those activities continue. Unless an activity satisfies a basic human need, it may not be repeated. The needs may be physical, psychological, or social, such as acquiring status.
In ancient China, people found justification of their world view in the matrix of nature. Perceived cruelty in nature justified real cruelty by human beings. The positions of women and men are justified also by culture. For the Isneg of the Phillipines, all religious matters are handled by women. Great Lakes Indians in the United States have male and female shamans without distinction. Other groups separate male and female roles completely.
Each culture develops rules for living together. A common culture provides an ideal framework for public and private decision making. The Sami in northern Scandinavia have institutionalized ways of avoiding conflict, for instance, by shaming those who would impose their will. The Fipa of Tanzania use cooperative exchange rather than competition to keep the peace. The Akawaio of Guyana believe that community disharmony upsets the spirit world, resulting in illness and misfortune.
Providing Identity. Culture provides an identity for its members. It tells them who they are, where they came from, and why they are special. Identity is basic to human existence. People are identified by their roles. A person is an incarnation of his and her group--even in industrial culture, one is identified as an astronomer or farmer.
Cultural values are continually tested against experience. Values arise from assessing the consequences of an action. Meaning arises when significant experience renews culture. The new experience is matched to the existing categories of a culture. When a culture can justify its behaviors, it can more easily defend and keep them in the face of external pressures. The Xavante of central Brazil have extraordinary pride in their culture and intend to preserve it, as they have done so far, despite the efforts of the Brazilian government.
Offering Security. With order and integration come stability and security, without which no one can survive. When human societies were small, the amount of control and security required was small. Although societies have grown, human security has not. Primordial security comes from a physical, knowledgable relationship with nature. The industrial sense of security has been centered in the state, and now in the corporation, in retirement, insurance, housing, recreation, even credit cards. Primary peoples were responsible for their own food clothing and housing. The economic well-being of modern industrial families depends on wages alone. People are dependent on the goodwill of capital corporations for personal security. We have substituted insulation and insurance for knowledge and experience. Narrowness of experience is one source of insecurity.
Although a culture can help people cope with fear, it cannot offer security against the biological fact of death. Michael W. Fox has pointed out that death awareness motivates much of human behavior. Many primary groups have worked acceptance of death into their myths. The Campa attitude toward death reflects acceptance: since the first Campas were made of earth, they return to earth after death; had they been made of stone, they would have been immortal. According to an Inuit myth, the first human beings lived on an island, Mitligjuaq, in the Hudson Strait; no one ever left and eventually there were so many people that the island began to sink under their weight. An old woman shouted: "Let it be so ordered that human beings can die, for there will no longer be room for us on earth." Her wish came true. Death was the solution to survival. Death is natural. But the human longing for immortality, from Neanderthals to postmoderns, is also natural.
No culture has developed a perfect balance of human and situational needs. Some do better than others. But all cultures change and age. As a culture ages, it may become abstract, indifferent, self-centered, and forgetful, suffering rigid rituals and cultural amnesia. Even a culture that fits its coherents and place changes and may become unfit even as the coherents and place also change. Cultures seem to have no limitations of size or kind, although declining mental health may be indicative of some limit exceeded in industrial culture; a culture can grow beyond ecological limits.
Holding Arbitrary Ideas. People sometimes construct their worlds from preconceived notions. Success in one area may become associated with a chance happening, an event that is repeated to continue the success. In this way a maladaptive image of nature can be built. The culture on Easter Island developed over 16 centuries, but extinguished itself before contact with Europeans. The people devoted enormous amounts of energy and materials to building heroic statues; other spectacular public works projects included a road network and agricultural terraces. Their culture allowed them to exceed the carrying capacity of the island. Even converting almost all land to human use was not enough, and the population dropped from about 12 thousand to 111. Some primary traditions may work against the conservation of a place; for instance, the Algonquian notion that game animals spontaneously regenerate after death means that there is no reason not to overhunt.
A powerful arbitrary idea, such as the Christian principle of plenitude, can influence many cultures over centuries. The principle states that an intelligent creator gave an earth of unlimited bounty to humanity for their use; this seemed to be confirmed in the Renaissance with the discovery of the richness of stars, microscopic life, and unexplored continents. Modern ideologies have even been shaped by the principle of endless wealth; the economist Adam Smith believed that the real price of anything was just the toil spent acquiring it. Many European cultures would have vanished if they had not been able to leave their exhausted fields for new lands.
Remaining Indifferent. Industrial cultures desacralize nature. Since the advent of the machine image, the concept of the sacred has been reversed. In the primary view, the familiar was sacred. When modern cultures made the familiar trivial, it became profane. The quality of sacredness was bestowed on the unknown, wilderness, or children. Modern cultures show reverence toward that which cannot be dominated. So, reverence for nature diminishes as control escalates.
In industrial culture, all aspects of life become interchangeable artificial units, including soil, water, and land. This view impoverishes humans by claiming all consciousness for humanity. It claims that nature offers no joy, love, peace, or certitude. Empasis on the emptiness of nature creates a gap between humans and their environment; there is no room for the intrinsic worth of nature. By granting human sovereignty over the entire earth, industrial culture justifies usurping the habitats of plants and animals for coffee plantations and recreational boating.
Many ecological problems are a consequence of populations in excess of those that can be sustainably supported. Many different peoples have deforested their lands and poisoned their waters, regardless of their religious ideals as Buddhists, Taoists, Moslems, or Christians. Industrial cultures are indifferent to the limits of a natural carrying capacity. Some cultures suffer from a collective amnesia regarding what life was like in earlier times; much of the richness of life is simply not known by later generations. The Ik, for instance, thought their dietary habits were fine, although less than two generations earlier, they ate a greater variety of foods that were more nutritious.
Overexploiting Nature. All peoples want some power over the natural order. Primary peoples rely on ritual acts instead of machinery. As technology supplies power to primary peoples, rituals decline. Power increases exploitation and interference. Exploitation can become pathological, when it interferes with the natural pocesses that maintain an ecosystem. The intrinsic worth of beings can become supplanted by monetary value. For example, some North American Indians were seduced into the fur trade by the lure of manufactured materials. The spread of power has two other effects. The natural order becomes simplified, the human world becomes increasingly complex--and both orders become unstable. Human society acts from ignorance of the bonds of living and nonliving beings.
Distinctions may not be made that could encourage survival in a long-term context. For example, modern cultures have not learned to distinguish between renewable and nonrenewable resources, or between the temporary and permanent carrying capacity of a habitat. Human carrying capacity is part of the natural system. Cultures may also be indifferent to long-term catastrophes, such as species extinctions, or to short-term hazards, such as volcanic eruptions or flooding; people always resettle floodplains and volcanic lowlands.
Being Incomplete. The very circumstance that makes each culture unique--being in a unique place--ensures that each culture is limited. All cultures produce destruction and waste, all of them produce at least some of the opposite of the good intended. A culture rarely meshes perfectly with the natural order or even its own social order.
That a culture includes so many patterns and dimensions makes its fitness less. To the degree that it is effective, any ideology can fit the order of nature. But the total mix of ideologies makes the overall fit very sloppy. As long as nature can be dominated, without catastrophe, the importance of the fit is not critical. But we do not know enough of nature to know when catastrophes occur, nor how to avoid them or minimize them. Nature is unpredictable.
Cultures rarely have long-range plans; they do not concern themselves with global problems. They rarely consider any cultures other than their immediate neighbors; they do not have policies to help them. They are rarely conscious of their activities. Many cultures have little interest in gaining new knowledge on how to exploit their areas more effectively and efficiently. Many cultures have no way to cope with their own expansion or contraction.
Staying Inflexible. It was thought that cultures could vary infinitely and change rapidly. This is an exaggeration. Change is not always easy or adaptive. The inertia of cultural practices makes change painful. People may become fixed in permanent roles and personalities. Even if cultural attitudes are appropriate, they can trap a people if there is no longer functional reasons for the practices. The Nembi of Papua New Guinea may be trapped in their system; making stone axes is difficult when thousands of steel ones are available.
Cultures can determine inappropriate attitudes towards nature. The Ik had a string of misfortunes after their hunting ground was turned into a national park. The difficulty of farming and adverse social conditions made their situation worse. The Ik acquired an attitude as victims, characterized by a cluster of new beliefs: nature as alien, unjust, violent, or vengeful; things being better in the past; humans being out of place.
By contrast, the English treated tropical lands as enemies to be defeated, then enslaved them in plantations. Their cultural attitude as conquerer of nature led them to treat biogeochemical cycles and soil requirements as temporary obstacles in a world where everything had its price. This is the prevailing mode in institutions dealing with land use today: nature is a beast to be tamed, controlled, and exploited. Despite proof of the importance of tropical forests and knowledge of their destruction, corporations still mine them for short-term profits.
Keeping Exclusive. When the largest social unit was the tribe or nation, it was possible for the local mythology to represent other people outside its bounds as inferior, and the local inflection of human mythology as the one true mythology. The young were trained to respond positively to tribal members, to love their home, and project hatred outward. But there is no longer an outward.
Primary peoples are usually physically isolated and have a low population density; that makes them politically weak in international competition. Primary cultures are vulnerable to the industrial culture because of their size and locality and because of the perception of the inevitability of global culture. The impetus for a single world order represents a misunderstanding of a workable order. No one ideology can contain the truth. Cultural knowledge over the entire earth is complementary. Each culture usually knows its place the best. The content of all cultures is the collective memory of humanity.
Where human understanding of ecosystems and human cultural systems is still undeveloped, we cannot afford to suppress the diversity of thought necessary to adapt to a diversity of wild and domestic environments or to eliminate ecological habitats or the societies adapted to them. Instead, we need to create a conceptual and political framework that protects local cultures, that is fit around them, not as a replacement, but as a means of coordination and preservation, not so much to save any one culture, but to ensure the process of adapting to a place. Cultural cooperation can only happen if the integrity of each culture is maintained, by stong myths, images, and rituals.
Our new mythology has grown to include the whole planet. A global mythology, however, cannot afford to teach singularity. It must teach a multiplicity of cultures. The centers of the world are everywhere, in every community, and not just Rome or Timbuktu or Beijing or Lisbon or New York. The human desire to refine the focus has neglected the frame of reference. We must adopt a frame that considers all cultures, short-term and long-term reforms, and local and planetary adjustments.
An adaptive holocultural framework can place human values within a global framework, attaining a balance of human and ultrahuman nature. A holocultural framework can preserve a diversity of cultures adapted to a diversity of environments.
Social boundaries may be better aligned to ecological realities; the boundaries of a watershed or ecotone would be more appropriate than geometric lines. A natural region supports a great deal of life without human intervention; it produces enough life to support a reasonable number of humans. We need to know natural associations and limitations because these determine the harmony of development.
By being a global framework, it can adjust international economics. Local communities are based on traditional cultures, which have long-term lasting power. Traditional cultures often have wealth-leveling properties, absolute property ceilings, fixed wants, and production coupled with need--all of which results in a stable economy. Efficiency and productivity are less important than use and appropriateness. The framework can promote limited and rational economic development and coordinate international economic exchanges, protecting those cultures that choose to remain outside networks. It can put restraints on the current international community, from large corporations to large federations.
The framework can provide a holistic education of all cultures, besides that of the local culture. It can archive knowledge of other cultures. The experiences of many lives are encoded in myths, along with natural phenomena, supernatural beliefs, moral values, and features of the culture. All interpretation and recounting of the past is mythmaking. Mythic symbols store information concisely, which makes it possible for a person to assimilate the collective experiences of a culture. That is why myths reflect the detail of a culture.
A framework can justify a wide diversity in nature and accommodation to natural laws. It can recognize the value of the total biosphere and respect all forms of life, past, present, and future. It can do so, because, unlike traditional or industrial cultures, it is conscious of itself and its purpose.
Being Conscious. Creating a holocultural image requires changing the gestalt of images of self, nature, and society. That effort is revitalization. Unlike classic cultural change, revitalization requires the explicit intent of the members of society; it depends on restructuring elements already in use (or known). Where the culture remains responsible for the performance of ritual or the preservation of doctrine, the images preserved. When the images are anticipatory, they lead to development and social change. Attractiveness reinforces the movement towards them. We are dependent now on our consciousness of the entire system of nature and humanity. Undertaking a conscious orderly change in our living habits, before it is forced on us by an unbalanced environment, gives us more options.
Recognizing Context. Cultures change as the result of human interactions in nature. Nature and cultures are in a constant state of flux; cultures have much in parallel with biological species. Our thoughts and ideas, tools and cultures, are as much a part of nature as other species or peat bogs. To preserve our cultures and natural environments, we must understand that they are examples of a dynamic order brought forth by the earth in its history. We are physically dependent on nature. We are psychologically dependent as well; without signals from nature, our minds become closed and dead. We also are physically and psychologically dependent on culture. Yet, the diversity of habitats and cultures, is allowed to erode.
A global framework for culture depends on important principles drawn from ecology. One role of ecology could be to urge the toleration of fluctuation, irregularity, uncertainty, and diversity. As adaptive systems, cultures change as ecosystems change. And sometimes ecosystem change is a result of cultural change. They are linked together.
If humans adapted more closely to the complexities of natural ecosystems, then human cultures would be more diverse and stable. If humans adapted to the complexities of natural ecosystems, then human societies would be more complex. The proper attitude of an ecological framework is care, a positive spontaneity, but also a "letting be," a reverence toward the wild alienness of nature, a willingness to comply with the limitations of natural systems, and a willingness to reduce the dominance of natural systems.
What this means practically is that the local environment would determine the extent of a culture. The frame would recommend wilderness areas sufficient for a culture, although the shape and expression of these areas would depend on the kind of culture. Eugene Odum has calculated that for the temperate southern United States it takes 2 acres of wilderness to support each human being.
Cultures can determine the minimum, or optimum, wilderness areas to support local ecosystems; for instance, very large areas are required in tropical ecosystems or deserts, relatively little ones in grasslands and temperate forests. They can determine the natural productivity and the percentage to be used by humans, as well as artificial productivity and costs. Cultures can key their population to natural productivity for long-term sustainable existence. And, they can multiply any increase by trade-offs, such as a reduced standard of living or exchange with another group.
The framework could recommend an optimum size for each human population. A nation must have a population large enough for economic advantages in food production, education, and entertainment, and for political tools. As Leopold Kohr has noted, the size of a culture is determined by the function it fulfills. The function of a state is to provide its members with protection and other advantages that they do not have as independents.
When a state becomes too large, it cannot offer protection--it cannot offer even clean air or water. The country of Andorra, with about 10 thousand people is stable, sovereign, and healthy; the Greek, Italian, and German city-states that furnished much of Western civilization often numbered less than 20 thousand individuals. As the size of a nation increases, the negative factors of civilization, such as overcrowding and breakdowns, increase. Technology has the capacity to allow some expansion, but not an infinite amount. A comprehensive population policy must be created for larger cultures, and it must fit into the context of wilderness and other cultures.
Being Comprehensive. A holocultural frame includes all human cultures without judgment. The framework provides a higher resolution image of the whole, since it incorporates all human cultures. It includes all its members, recognizing that each says something worthwhile. It is not details or knowledge of the operation that is critical, but an understanding of the wholeness of order.
The framework can interact with nature much like the mythic, but understand the rational and mechanical sides of thought. It would not be a conglomerate of sciences; it would not be limited by the facts of any science, even ecology. The insights of people of every culture must be considered. Each person tells of a way the world is; together, these ways make a holistic framework.
The framework includes ultrahuman cultures in its consideration. It can create wilderness zones that would have various limitations for conversion or use. It can reserve large areas of wilderness for ultrahuman beings and biogeochemical processes.
The framework can attempt to combine the best single elements of industrial culture with the superior components of primary cultures, in parallel with Gordon Taylor"s paraprimitive solution. High technology can offer immense benefits, with restraint and appropriate limits. Primary cultures can satisfy the human needs for belonging and status.
Making Authentic Images. The holocultural framework offers a holistic value of human worth, outside of any one local perspective. It promotes and protects universally accepted values: reciprocity--the repayment of obligations; territorial integrity for cultures; legitimacy--the value of children born in wedlock; and the working of opposites--life and death, sacred and profane. It can promote basic rights human rights: The right to land, food, shelter; to equal opportunity to develop, regardless of race or sex; to participate in global affairs as desired; and to live without excessive discrimination or conflict.
Protecting the Diversity of Cultures. Industrial culture condemns to backwardness any culture that is not part of its global electronic neural system. This definition of backwardness means only a lack of fast things or professional enslavement. Primary cultures do not lack art or play, or food, tradition, freedom, or happiness.
It might be good for cultures to be uncoupled economically; it might be a sound option for traditional societies unwilling to make the same mistakes as industrial ones. The frame would keep cultures separate and coordinate any exchanges between them. It would resolve disputes that arise from territorial expansion, the past movements of people and borders, or the unequal expansion of cultures in the same territory, such as the Sinhalese and Tamil in Sri Lanka.
Abstract. A holocultural framework is a general human construct, which may not be implemented. There is no working model of global unity. Our experience with international cooperation on an immense scale is minimal. Our ability to plan our cultures and foresee our impacts is minimal. Other abstract ideals, including democracy and communism, have been disappointing and severely modified in practice.
Kinship is more rigidly localized than other dimensions of culture, which can be more rapidly disseminated and assimilated. The transition from kinship to a simultaneous abstract global citizenship may slow. Kinship loyalty sometimes clashes with global perspectives. A framework trying to lessen the conflict and resolve contradictions may be faced with more conflict.
Uncritical. Such a framework, by definition, accepts any human culture, even bad ones. It cannot make judgments about use. In avoiding ethnocentrism, it must accept failure. It may not be able to deal fairly with cultures that are dying out, because they are unfit or because they are victims of a large coercive culture. Yet, it cannot artificially support bad images. It must preserve the process of making and sustaining a way of living, not every individual culture.
This framework does not reject or judge cultures, but incorporates all the practicality and paradox. It makes no distinctions between right and wrong or good and bad; these polarities are more like positive stimuli useful to development. Hence, there is no evil, as considered in many cultures, only suffering that results from lack of wisdom. Many customs, like sacred cows in India, at first glance, seem to be dysfunctional. But, even sacred cows provide dung for cooking fires.
Contradictory. It used to be, as Karl Marx said, that village life enslaved the human mind with traditional rules and subjugated it. No more--too much communication is a greater threat. Our excess communication tends to wear out our ability to feel empathy and react to suffering. Some cultures may overcommunicate and others may undercommunicate. Undercommunication may result in ignorance and suffering; overcommunication may result in passiveness and insignificance. The framework will have to abide the contradiction.
Weak. The framework may not have the power or authority to make agreeable boundaries. It may be unable to set aside large enough areas for natural processes. It may not be able to dictate population restrictions for some cultures without seeming to be genocidal or prejudiced. It may not be able to achieve an agreeable redistribution of some kinds of wealth. Any action may result in some dislocation and suffering. It may be impossible to limit the interdependence of nations.
The framework may not be able to deal with incompatible cultures or the divisive forces of large industrial cultures. Some cultures may refuse to participate. It may not be able to handle large differences or to limit the influence of powerful corporations, which have no local accountability. Some traditional cultures may have trouble incorporating new ideas, such as the equality of women.
Fallible. A holocultural frame may address global problems that may be insoluble within its range. Some of its actions may have negative consequences for some cultures. For instance, in mediating boundaries that have changed over centuries, it may be difficult to rectify imbalance, theft, or suppression. Cultures have dominated, displaced, merged, or destoyed other cultures for millenia. No one knows how far back to trace a wrong. The dividing line might always seem arbitrary. It may be appropriate to return lands to the Pawnee, but not to the people that the Pawnee displaced.
Industrial cultures have two great myths, progress and nationalism, originally successful, that are reducing our fitness to the environment. Progress has been described by Aldous Huxley as the theory that one can get something for nothing, that the gain in one field is not even paid for in another. Progress assumes that all consequences could be foreseen and that ideal ends justify any means. Primary groups, it was thought, only obstructed the march toward paradise and could be murdered or assimilated if necessary. Nationalism is the theory that one state is the only true god; all other states are considered false. Conflicts over prestige or power, as crusades for the true state, still lead to human and environmental destruction. The cure for progress lies in the responsibility of small nations for their own environments; the cure for nationalism is a holocultural framework of small nations.
Nations have embraced a dominant industrial culture for the benefits they perceive that it gives them. But this monoculture tends to displace local cultures, such that the local knowledge and traditions--the ways of living in unique places--are lost. Nations have tried to assimilate their indigenous cultures, but many of the cultures consider themselves to be independent. Indeed, there are over 100 separatist movements in half that many nations, from Lithuania to Slovenia, fighting for their independence, for the right to speak their own languages and teach their own traditions to their children.
The right to self-determination is listed in covenants of the United Nations, but the right has been limited to states and not primary nations. The UN, by promoting a holocultural framework, could produce a dialogue of cultures to avoid the crippling extremes of uniform homogeneity or tribal insularity. Corporations, nations, and trusts have legal rights, but cultures, and ecosystems, have been denied rights so far. The UN can rectify this oversight.
There are signs that some nations may be recognizing their indigenous populations. Peru recognizes two indigenous languages, Aymara and Quechua. Nicaragua has a regional autonomy plan for 100 thousand Miskitos, Rama, and Sumus. Some groups, like the Shuar of Ecuador, have formed legal federations to acquire title to their lands. Australian Aborigines are asserting their traditional culture and independence in the Outstation Movement, with 148 decentralized communities.
The framework for cultures should have few adverse effects on traditional cultures. Sometimes the widening of a culture results in a creative, explosive radiation, as when medieval Christian culture made contact with the ideas of Greece and Rome and with the achievements of China and India. Then people have more opportunities. The ideal images intensify human experience and widen its potential. We need to consciously direct our creative explosion without consuming the creativity of every other species.
A culture is a process of continuously self-creating, but the process now needs to be consciously guided to avoid disaster. Let us restore the political power of cultures, which are bounded by their nature and limited in their activities. These small cultures can practice restraint in terms of production and resource use. They are authentic and timed by natural rhythms.
Continued healthy cultural existence depends on the existence of good equilibrium between elements of change (youth) and elements of conservation (age). Rapid development may rupture tradition. Neither the young or old know how much traditional knowledge is necessary for healthy cultural life, so the future holds some experimentation no matter which direction we take.
Cultural traditions, however, describe what we may be and helps us become what we are. The world tends to become how we imagine it, as a spaceship or garden, as a global monolithic state or a loose confederation of cultures. So we must create the images carefully. Kenneth Boulding offered the perfect machine metaphor for the operation of the earth--as a spaceship. As a metaphor, the spaceship suggests the limits of the earth and the value of a limited life-support system; unfortunately, it implies that the earth is a human creation that can be controlled and fixed by a conscious captain and crew. The use of the word "ecology" by Ernst Haeckel implied that the natural world was a house, a place to live, rather than a machine. This image is more compatible with all cultures, from hunters to industrial corporations.
Equilibrium is needed between self-restraint and self-expression, between exponential growth and precipitous decline. The myths and metaphors of a culture are modes for conveying ecological wisdom; they are less concerned with bare survival than the survival value of a good fit to a place. Wisdom is the new kind of fitness; it is guidance by a knowledge of the whole interactive system, which if disturbed can change catastrophically.
Wisdom cannot be dependent on perfect knowledge; that does not exist. Humans must act "as if" they were wise, according to Hans Vaihinger, as if this earth were the ultimate reality and as if our human time were unlimited; we must act with caution and respect. Wisdom, as defined by Jonas Salk, is the art of disciplined use of the imagination in respect to alternatives, exercised at the right time and in the right measure. The time is now and the measure is primary cultures.