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

Here I Sit

And here I sit holding the steering wheel
that long ago came off in my hands.

-Henry Mathews, The Journalist, 1994

Status Consumerism vs. Goods Consumerism

The link between material assets on the one hand, and status and power on the other, is not self-evident or given by the nature of things. The links are socially created and what we need to think out is what these links can become under the new dispensation. Material goods do still lead to power and status, but they are not the only path towards it. The allocation of position depends on the social system and not the economy.

Ernest Gellner on Self-Image
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

Case2

CASE2, RIP2011

"I'm not doing it just to say I'm doing it, and then exploit it. I do it to see where I'm at, based on my high-classificated way of thinking for the advancement of what art is like!"

History of American Graffiti
Roger Gastman & Caleb Heelon
Harper 2010