Consumer/Producer

The individual uses, the collective creates
Production may continue to be instrumentally rational and analytic, but consumption is many-stranded and intuitive, and products are designed to encourage this: What happens when consumption overtakes production and becomes the dominant element in forming the human psyche? (p272)

Plough, Sword and Book
Ernest Gellner
U. of Chicago Press
1988

On the Division of Labor in Non-Humans

Something resembling cultural diversity may occur…The identical genetic equipment may allow some variation in conduct and organization of (say) a herd. (p273)

Very often, social change is simply far too rapid to be explicable by genetic change.

From society comes culture
Memes are in the culture, not the individual? –sure they are transmitted by the individual but the memepool is in the culture itself

Plough, Sword and Book
Ernest Gellner
U. of Chicago Press
1988

Meme-World

Most men see their environment not as nature but as other people. (p267)

Plough, Sword and Book
Ernest Gellner
U. of Chicago Press
1988

Truth, Belief and Society

Truth butters no parsnips and legitimates no social arrangements. There are at least 2 reasons for this. One is the failure of genuine knowledge to be subservient. The second is that publicly accessible truth fails to separate members of a community from non-members. (p272)

Plough, Sword and Book
Ernest Gellner
U. of Chicago Press
1988

What Culture Does

"We must needs live in and with the help of some culture (even a syncretic or sliding-scale one, i.e. one taken seriously to a varying extent, according to context). No social gathering, no meal, no establishment or perpetuation of a human relationship, is conceivable without some idiom to set the scene, limit expectations, and establish rights and duties” (p207)

Do we create our culture today with any more conscious effort than societies on the cusp of culture?

Ernest Gellner
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988

The Autority of Concept in the Age of Durkheim

"In the Age of Durkheim, man unselfconsciously imposes the authority of concepts on itself through ritual..."

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Abstractions will not inspire awe.
The ‘need’ for salvation implies that we have done something wrong.
All ‘sins’ are either genetically beneficial codifications, or actions that at one point in human history (proto-history) were permissible or usable.
They are part reaffirmation of what ‘works’ genetically, or they are guardian against natural tendencies which were once reinforced as permissible in an older society (or lack thereof).
In that the effects of natural selection have evidently worn-off, a more immediately communicable medium is necessary, thus ‘commandments’.
You don’t die if you disobey them, but you will live in hell forever: much more effective in a world of trans-genetic, free-thinking humans.

~Ernest Gellner
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988

The Dethronement of the Concept

 “Our convenience, or blind nature, are the only authorities which can validate our cognitive claims.” (p126)

“This theory reflects a culture which no longer accepts its own concepts as ordained from on high, but which chooses its own, and endows them with only a conditional authority. Neither ritual inclination nor Platonic meta-theory sanctifies concepts any longer…Concepts, like men, come to be valued for their efficiency rather than their honor.” (p126)

Ernest Gellner

Plough, Sword and Book

U. of Chicago Press

1988

Knowing Not

“Of the two great transitions in human history – the Neolithic and Industrial, they were unplanned and unconscious.” Those who sowed knew not what they would reap. (p20)

and states further:
“…it is unlikely that the great transformation [from agrarian society] could have been…anything other than both unconscious and individualistic. The transformation was too profound, and too contrary, and indeed offensive to the established patterns of thought and values, to be understood in advance.” By the time it came it was too late. (p170)


-Ernest Gellner
Plough, Sword and Book
U. of Chicago Press
1988