George Rebane
It is the unfortunate case that individuals can not only have their own opinions, but also their own facts that substantiate those opinions. – Rebane Doctrine
A person’s reality is a manifestation of his culture. More specifically, an individual’s ontology or worldview of reality is, at a minimum, strongly influenced or maximally determined by the culture in which he was raised or has since adopted, and now lives.
This thesis has been argued by philosophers, historians, and psychologists for the better part of the last 50 years, and today goes a long way to explain the behaviorally cohesive cultural cohorts worldwide. In America we have reverted into a strongly politicized polyglot of cultures (tribes?) whose diverse adherents no longer practice a common culture in the public square. Instead, we take great pride in demonstrating to one and all our particular complement of unique behaviors which declare our cultural bona fides and tribe memberships. And woe be it to anyone to dismiss, discredit, or discriminate against such behaviors as expressions of a sacrosanct culture whose dimensions include any combination of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, etc.
Everyone has unique rights when operating under the obvious mantle of their culture, since all cultures are held to be valuable and of equal worth. Actually, upon closer examination, some cultures have been and remain definitely worth more to humanity than others, especially if they derive from western or European cultures.
To illustrate the veracity of the above thesis, we can appeal to several examples that range from recorded history to current events from the present day. We start by recognizing that one reality of human consciousness itself rose from a cultural transformation that reaches back to about 1200 BC (or BCE, if you prefer). The late Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes gave a very convincing account of how consciousness, in the sense of the rise of the personal agency of I/me, arose in the middle east during the 400 years of the so-called Dorian Invasions (1200 – 800 BC).
In his The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1990) Jaynes describes how ‘pre-Dorian’ people, who then lived nomadically or in small towns and villages, actually saw and interacted with their gods. They recorded such occasions and incidents in their written records and graphic arts (e.g. murals and pottery). From early youth their cultures taught them to see and hear such gods, and behave as the gods’ agents, essentially expressing little or no of what we today call consciousness or ‘free will’ – in short, you did what the gods prescribed ‘in vivo’ or in your culture’s recorded scriptures/myths. Personal decision making and its attendant stress were minimized or even absent from such people’s lives. (more here)
In the pre-enlightenment age even the most advanced western nations/kingdoms had populations that overwhelmingly believed in and interacted with witches and other agents of evil. They actually ‘saw’ witches fly and cast hideous spells, and therefore felt quite justified in denouncing them for extreme punishments by the authorities. These beliefs were cemented early on by the religious teachings of their culture.
In more recent times we have teams of cultural anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) who have encountered and studied primitive tribes with cultures that embed drastically different realities in their members. An example of such a discovery occurred in the Papua-New Guinea highlands during the pre-war years. There a tribe was discovered whose members believed that the world ended in the middle of a river on whose bank was their village. They literally saw nothing of the other bank less than a hundred feet away. Anthropologists visibly encamped on the other side were received as aliens emerging from a fog in their inflated dinghy.
A similar culture-induced reality was enjoyed by tribes on a neighboring island during the Pacific campaign of WW2. The island had an airstrip for receiving cargo laden C-47 military transport aircraft. To the natives these giant aircraft were bringers of never-before-seen wondrous things to enrich and expand their lives. Not familiar with manufacturing processes, they believed “that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture had been created by spiritual means.” And no matter how many times it was explained and demonstrated to them, they never saw the airplanes as mechanical things operated by humans – to them they were simply alive as large flying creatures. When the war moved on and the airstrip was abandoned, the natives were bereft – the wondrous creatures stopped coming. Their response was simple, they formed what became known as a ‘Cargo Cult’ whose members continued to maintain the landing strip, and built decoys in the shape of airplanes to attract more of these giant flying critters full of presents. The clear and demonstrated reality of the foreigners did nothing to change their culture-rooted alternate reality. (more here)
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