Genetics of Culture

The genetics of culture is in the stories we tell.

The stories are the genes of culture.

As we tell the stories we are guaranteeing the replication of the culture.

How they are woven into the society is the DNA.

The stories are woven into the fabric of the society and they reappear sometimes very visible and sometimes hidden but very apparent.

As the stories appear and reappear they carry out their goal of replicating the culture represented.

The most important stories are the ones we tell little children.

When they talk about myth it is like taking the genes of society and analyzing them with a butcher knife.

This is because it is exactly at the boundary between the unquestionable real and the borderline myth in a story that we find the power of stories to replicate the culture.

The necessity for the mythical portion is that our minds live in dualism; whether the physical universe is dualistic or not.

Then to call them just stories or to call them mere myth misunderstands the whole process of culture.

Stories are not transferable between cultures because the myth is typed (e. g. King Arther, Daniel Boon, Sun Yat-sen, Gandhi).

Understanding culture, requires that we recognize the meaning of those stories as they are woven into the fabric of the society.

But to understand, we cannot question or alter the meanings that these stories provide to that fabric, even though the stories from another culture may never fit into our own culture.

To understand the culture we must understand the myth.

The story becomes more important as it comes closer to the physical center of the group.

The story becomes more important as it comes closer to the mythical center of the group.

To exactly the extent that we do not understand the way the stories are woven into the texture, we do not understand the culture.

Where is the edge of language?

Language has an extremely strong effect on our lives. We define ourselves through language, we relate to others through language, and we relate to reality through language. Language effects all of our lives quite completely, but there are weaknesses in any and all languages. The greatest weakness of language is that we think of language as being more complete and accurate than it is, particularly as we are using it. When Wittgenstein said "The meaning of a word is in its use," he was expressing the limits of language. The problem is that we depend on language too much if the language has such weaknesses; and we are not realistically able to give up this dependence.

Since all of our intellectual processes are done in language it is hard to critique language. Language does not reveal its own weaknesses but hides them. We find the weakness by developing one blind alley of logic after another and then doing a review of the process, which is how Wittgenstein developed his famous statement. Kant did a similar thing in Critique of Pure Reason.

We need to understand the limits of language in order to critique language. That is what I mean by the edge of language. Where do we go in order to look at language differently?

Where is the edge of language?