5. The Necessity of Cultural Programming

Early on in this argument, we must also grasp that almost all members of all tribes already have a behavior code in their heads. If they didn’t, they couldn’t function daily in their communities. With no code at all, they’d be catatonic.

Thus, even though each tribe’s code differs substantially from those of the other tribes of the world, the vast majority in every tribe do have a code in place. People who live in a society but refuse to discuss their moral codes are nearly all either sociopaths who feign following their tribe’s code when it’s seems useful to them to do so or reactionaries who refuse to discuss the code by which they function. Sociopaths and reactionaries. All nations have at least some of both.

                              

                               Sociopath Charles Manson, 1968 (credit: Wikimedia)

On the other hand, the few who don’t have any cultural/moral programming in their heads are either catatonic or feral. A person who truly has no cultural code program in them either sits and stares (catatonic) or lives like an animal (feral).  

There are such creatures as feral humans, ones nurtured by animals; a few even run on all fours. They’re very rare, but they prove cultural programming is vital. They are the evidence which shows that, without any culture programmed into their heads, homo sapiens individuals are barely recognizable as human.   

The catatonic and the feral, in most tribes, deserve and get the sympathy of the rest of the tribe. Usually, they are cared for like the handicapped. (For the curious, check online for the story of Oksana Malaya. She is arguably the most stunning of the feral child cases ever. There are plenty of images, video clips, even interviews with her in them.)

Catatonics and feral people are both beyond our scope in this essay, but they do give us a chance to define the term “culture” simply and clearly. Culture is the sum of all the programming acquired by each human through the nurturing given to him by other humans; it is all the programming they would not have if they were raised by dogs or apes. To a high degree, then, each of us is his or her cultural programming. Mine runs me. It guides me as I decide second by second what matters and what I should do about it. Without my code, I wouldn’t be ‘human’.

                                              

                                                    Chinese fashions, traditional and modern

                                          (credit: Serene Wang, via Wikimedia Common) 

Note again here that a human’s cultural programming is difficult to amend or update once that human is past about six years old. Difficult. Not impossible.

On the other hand, we try to persuade the reactionaries who refuse to discuss their way of life: “Change is constant. Accept it. Can we at least talk about it?” And true sociopaths who simulate allegiance to their nation’s code so that they may cynically manipulate others, we do our best to apprehend and quarantine off from the rest of society. Put them in jail. But I repeat: my focus here will be on the socialized majority, not the incorrigible reactionaries, nor the sociopaths. I claim that this necessary software, the moral code in each of us, that we must have just to live in our communities – even though it varies profoundly from one society to the next – can change. In fact, given time, all cultures do change.