A method of fishing: Cast net fishing, Caribbean 

                                                               (credit: Wikipedia)

                                         Another method of fishing: stilts fishing, Sri Lanka
                                                     (credit: Bernard Gagnon, Wikimedia) 

6. The Human Way: Cultural Programming

Note again that a cultural code is a basic operating system for the members of a given tribe, and it is programmed into the brains of tribe members by nurture. Humans don’t get much cultural programming from their genes. We’re made human by our upbringings, i.e. our lives before we’re six. If we are to persuade a majority of humans to update their way of life to fit our new circumstances, we’ll have to update how we raise our kids. But yes, humans are programmable.

We get our ideas about food, smiles, beauty, knowledge, history, and especially right and wrong from programming put into our brains by our upbringings. In our world, for the last ten thousand years or so, cultures have been tested more and more often by changes coming via famines, epidemics, or wars with rival tribes. Only tribes that updated their cultures to adjust to challenges survived.

I stress again that cultures vary considerably from tribe to tribe. They are hard – but not impossible – to rewrite, update, amend, or translate into each other. More on this issue later.

For now, we can say that we learn most of our tribe’s version of normal by six years old, and these various versions of normal are noticeably different from tribe to tribe, though they also have a few important areas of overlap.

All the parts of the code that an individual has had programmed into his brain by his parents, teachers, etc. so that he can get along and work in his tribe are also not identical from individual to individual across that whole tribe. Families and teachers differ even within one town so what they teach to the young differs at least a bit from child to child.

But a tribe’s members don’t have to think and act exactly alike in order to live and work together. They just need to have enough ideas in common to enable them to get things done – things best done by a team, like hunting and gathering food; or for agricultural tribes, growing and harvesting food; or gathering ingredients used in medicines; coping with famines or epidemics; making tools; nurturing the young; and fighting off invaders. All these complex group acts are done more effectively when humans work as a team, a tribe, a nation. Thus, nearly all humans have some sort of code of behavior in their heads: namely, their nation’s culture.

And I repeat: in all societies, culture is programmable. We’re not stuck. 

                                 

                                          Another method of fishing: flyfishing, USA 

                                                                  (credit: Wikimedia) 

                                               Another method: ice fishing,  Canada

                                                               (credit: Wikimedia)