Ok, guys..here it is. These are some of the notes that I lectured on. This material may help you to
write your papers. These passages are gathered from various sources and I’ve put them together in
note form as general background material and not as reference material.
It has been said that in an insane world, a sane person would be viewed as abnormal.
What would be regarded as insane behavior in one person can be the norm for entire societies whose
members never question the beliefs they embrace and enact. The term consensus reality for
experience conditioned by beliefs uncritically shared by many people. For instance, the belief that
material possessions bring happiness is a dominant of cultural conditioning in the present global
consumer society. Those who embrace this belief participate in a consensus, not merely by endorsing
the truth of the belief, but also by enacting it.
Consensus reality is a behavioral control system that blinds its members to any evidence that might
cause them to question or alter their behavior. Consensus reality is a state of behavioral conformity
that controls the minds and hearts of those immersed in it. Its power is totalitarian, its influence
terrifically difficult to refute
individuals in the emergent global society, must break though the consensual spell and claim the
genuine reality of human potential. As long as societies run on blind consensus, we will find ourselves
living in cultures that reinforce their own prerogatives without regard for the sanity of their members.
The term acculturation is the process of conditioning by which we are recruited into the consensus
reality characteristic of the culture to which we belong
unless we see what acculturation is there is no way to correct it, let alone surpass it.
That we are shaped by the culture we create makes it difficult to see that our culture is what must be
transcended, which means that we rise above our notions and techniques of survival itself, if we are
to survive.
problem unique to humanity is to have produced a global society that works against the best interests
of our own species,
culture absorbs and transforms any content into its own formative structure. In short, it co-opts
everything to its own self-serving, preprogrammed ends: Culture is based on fear and loves its
own.
we are driven to some fairly beastly behaviors by enculturation, despite the fact that the process itself
is supposed to prevent this
beliefs held sacred in the mainstream religions can drive the believers to some fairly beastly
behaviors, or to be passively complicit in such behaviors, even though they genuinely believe that
their religion teaches them how to act in good and decent ways. The schizophrenic split thus incurred
enforces the fatal effect of acculturation (enculturation)
Enculturation
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Enculturation is the process whereby an established culture teaches an individual by repetition its
accepted norms and values, so that the individual can become an accepted member of the society
and find their suitable role. Most importantly, it establishes a context of boundaries and correctness
that dictates what is and is not permissible within that society's framework.
It is the process of learning that takes the person and teaches him or her the ways of life of their
people or country. It is a life-long process, affecting not only the child, but the adult too. Enculturation
is learned through communication in the form of speech, words, and gestures. The six things of
culture that are learned are: technological, economic, political, interactive, ideological and world view.
Conrad Phillip Kottak (in Window on Humanity ) writes:
Enculturation is the process where the culture that is currently established teaches an individual the
accepted norms and values of the culture or society in which the individual lives. The individual can
become an accepted member and fulfill the needed functions and roles of the group. Most importantly
the individual knows and establishes a context of boundaries and accepted behavior that dictates
what is acceptable and not acceptable within the framework of that society. It teaches the individual
their role within society as well as what is accepted behavior within that society and lifestyle"
Enculturation can be conscious or unconscious. There are three ways a person learns a culture.
Direct teaching of a culture is done, this is what happens when you don't pay attention, mostly by the
parents , when a person is told to do something because it is right and to not do something because it
is bad. For example, when children ask for something, they are constantly asked "What do you say?"
and the child is expected to remember to say "please." The second conscious way a person learns a
culture is to watch others around them and to emulate their behavior. An example would be using
different slang with different cliques in school. Enculturation also happens unconsciously, through
events and behaviors that prevail in their culture. All three kinds of culturation happen simultaneously
and all the time.
Enculturation helps mold a person into an acceptable member of society. Culture influences
everything that a person does, whether they are aware of it or not. Enculturation is a life-long process
that helps unify people. Even as a culture changes, core beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing
practices stay the same. How many times has a parent said "If all your friends jumped off a bridge,
would you?" when their child wanted to fit in with the crowd? Both are playing roles in the
enculturation. The child wants to be included in the subculture of their peers, and the parent wants to
instill individualism in the child, through direct teaching. Not only does one become encultured, but
also makes someone else encultured.
Enculturation is sometimes referred to as acculturation, a word which originally referred only to
exchanges of cultural features with foreign cultures.
Socialization in the study of animal and human behavior is the process by which human beings or
animals learn to adopt the behavior patterns of the community in which they live.
Education is a social science that encompasses teaching and learning specific knowledge, beliefs,
and skills. Modern education is a part of enculturation, but with methods and goals that attempt to be
more consciously chosen, objective and practical (as opposed to, say, transmission of non-rational
tradition), with ideas more likely to be shared by a majority. It may evince multi-cultural goals.
Enculturation
Sociologist Talcott Parsons spoke of the birth of new generations of children as a recurrent
barbarian invasion. One reason he said that was because human infants do not possess culture at
birth. They have no conception of the world, no language, nor a morality. It is in this sense that
Parsons uses the word "barbarian" in reference to infants. They are uncultured, unsocialized persons.
All an infant needs to live and cope within the cultural context awaiting him is acquired through the
process termed enculturation by the anthropologist and socialization by the sociologist. We may
define enculturation as the process by which individuals acquire the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and
values that enable them to become functioning members of their societies.
Awaiting the infant is a society possessing a culture, an ordered way of life. The child possesses
certain possibilities for processing information and developing desires making it possible for that
ordered way of life to influence him. These enduring competencies and standards of judgment, along
with attitudes and motives, form the personality. The personality, in turn, influences the culture.
Enculturation, says E. Adamson Hoebel, is "both a conscious and an unconscious conditioning
process whereby man, as child and adult, achieves competence in his culture, internalizes his culture
and becomes thoroughly enculturated." One internalizes the dreams and expectations, the rules and
requirements not just for the larger society seen as a whole, but also for every specific demand within
the whole. Society does whatever is necessary to aid any one of its members in learning proper and
appropriate behavior for any given social setting and in meeting the demands of any challenge.
Enculturation begins before birth and continues until death. Thus, one learns respect for the symbols
of the nation through reciting a pledge of allegiance and singing the national anthem in school. He
learns with whom he may be physically violent (a wrestling competitor) and with whom he cannot (the
little girl down the street). He becomes aware of his rights and obligations and privileges as well as
the rights of others.
Some saints and revolutionaries successfully internalize the norms of their society and then make
a novel system out of them. Sometimes totally new novel systems displace established ones. For
instance, Jesus Christ introduced a new life way and the new proceeded to supplant the old. The
American revolution, which it took place on a continent that Europeans were in the process of settling,
permitted a novel system to progress through time without undue hindrance from the Old World.
There is no question, however, in the minds of students of history or comparative sociology, in each
of these cases, the new was clearly an outgrowth of the old.
The result of the enculturative process is identity: the identity of the person within the group.
Society seeks to make each member a fully responsible individual within the whole. While the
enculturation process may at times alienate some persons, the intent of society is responsible
participation.
God was underscoring this when He presented the Hebrews with the Ten Commandments. He
said in effect, "Don't let the system of family, of the economy, of interpersonal relations, and of
religion be abused. Let each one work and do his part for the good of the group and each member of
the group. I will thus be honored." It is no wonder, therefore, that Jesus and Paul, living in New
Testament times, sought to uphold the ideal of one's responsibility within the corporate or group
setting. "Render to Caesar" and "obey the government, for God is the one who has put it there" are
very specific commands or instructions building upon previously-laid foundations.
The enculturation process has two major aspects: (1) the informal, which some call "child training"
and in some senses precedes and in other senses runs concurrently with (2) the formal, more
commonly termed "education." The former is most likely to be carried out within the context of the
family and among friends. The latter is carried out in institutions of learning, sacred or secular.
:
Our human spirits show themselves most dramatically in moments of freedom,
when we consciously resist enculturation and make free choices.
Even tho we have the everyday experience of exercising freedom,
we might still be conditioned by the dogma of determinism
to believe that no acts are really free.
Is human choice an illusion?
OUTLINE:
I. TRANSCENDING ENCULTURATION
II. CHOOSING FOR OURSELVES
III. CHALLENGING THE DOGMA OF DETERMINISM
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
Freedom: Transcending Enculturation
and Choosing for Ourselves
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Freedom is...a nothing rather than a something,
a possibility rather than an actuality.
It cannot be grasped by thought
only known through the exercise of freedom;
and perhaps even then it is only in those rare moments
of anxiety in the face of freedom that we perceive
something of the abyssal and primordial character of freedom.
[John Macquarrie Existentialism (Penguin, 1973) p. 139-140]
I. TRANSCENDING ENCULTURATION
Nothing is more characteristic of the human spirit than freedom.
We are persons of spirit to the degree that we shape our own lives.
As children, before our spirits had developed very far,
we had little capacity to resist enculturation and choose our destinies.
We were largely the products of our genes and our upbringing.
As we became teen-agers, we might have manifested spirit
as rebellion against authority—especially parental authority—
but we had not yet focused our freedom into constructive projects.
Behavioristic psychology denies the reality of human freedom:
It claims our sense of choosing is an illusion,
that our behavior is really caused by our genes and conditioning.
The social sciences offer models to explain human behavior.
And if all our behavior can be accounted for
within these deterministic models, we are not yet persons of spirit.
But as adults most of us can resist enculturation,
can rise above our social circumstances, at least to some degree.
If we were not free, we would all be mindless consumers,
hopelessly in debt because advertising would make us buy, buy, buy.
Most enculturation is extremely useful.
Years of socialization has enabled us to function as adults.
We have learned how to listen and speak, how to read and write,
how to relate with other people for our mutual benefit,
and how to function successfully within our
familial, social, economic, political, & technological systems.
But enculturation becomes an influence to be resisted
when it dictates the essential content of our lives.
As we become more free, we will certainly use what we have learned,
but we need not pursue the purposes and goals provided by culture.
On all sides we are surrounded by social pressures
trying to squeeze us into various conventional patterns of behavior.
But when we notice that others have resisted conformity,
we might decide to design our own lives around our own goals
rather than accepting society's ready-made roles.
The capacity to transcend enculturation develops gradually.
The better we understand the social processes that created us,
the greater our capacity to take responsibility for our own lives
—and become self-creating persons.
As we successfully resist conformity in small matters,
we exercise and develop the spiritual 'muscle'
that will empower us to break out of the expected patterns
in even more important and dramatic ways.
The freedom inherent in our human spirits
enables us to rise above the social circumstances
that would otherwise control us entirely—if subtly.
Instead of remaining normal, well-adjusted adults,
we learn to name the internalized influences
that would shape our lives if we did not exercise our freedom.
And as we come to understand what is expected,
we can choose which (if any) of these expectations to fulfill
and which to reject and replace with purposes we freely choose.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------II. CHOOSING FOR OURSELVES
We exercise freedom most powerfully in selecting our own life-goals.
While we were quiet, unwitting products of enculturation,
our lives were just the unfolding of the assumed cultural patterns,
the psychological outcomes of forces holding sway when we grew up.
But as our spirits develop more fully,
we can choose to pursue lives never before attempted.
This freedom to choose our life-purposes comes in every degree
—from the smallest deviation from expectation
to the ability to re-design ourselves completely.
Many 'spiritual institutions' are actually anti-spiritual
because they are primarily means of enculturation.
Many organized religions promote very narrow rules of behavior.
But if becoming persons of spirit means rising above enculturation
and choosing freely for ourselves, one step in becoming more free
might be disconnecting ourselves from narrow-minded religious groups.
In exercising our freedom, we might uproot ourselves
from the places where our spirits first began to grow.
How can we develop of our capacity to choose?
As children we were free only in the negative sense (freedom from)
—we could say "no" to whatever others told us to do.
But later we become free in the positive sense (freedom for).
After we discover within ourselves what Søren Kierkegaard calls
"the anxious possibility of being able" (not knowing what we can do),
we can arbitrarily exercise our freedom, choosing almost at random,
until we ultimately create a basic direction for our lives.
Of course, we can freely change this basic thrust at any time.
But if we consistently pursue purposes we have freely chosen,
we create ourselves around what becomes our 'project-of-being'.
We invent ourselves by making life-shaping decisions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------III. CHALLENGING THE DOGMA OF DETERMINISM
Everyone who believes in freedom must confront determinism
—the doctrine that all human behavior is determined (caused)
solely and entirely by hereditary and environmental factors.
We might undercut this dogma by challenging its philosophical basis.
The determinists hold that their belief has a scientific foundation.
Granted, much evidence has been collected supporting the belief
that people are the products of their genes and learning.
But has anyone collected evidence supporting our freedom of will?
All scientific disciplines must be able to specify
what new evidence would upset their hypotheses.
Beliefs that cannot be overturned by new evidence are dogmas.
So this is the challenge to all determinists:
Try to conceive of a method of research that could possibly conclude
that some people (at least occasionally) exercise personal freedom.
I have yet to meet a determinist who could even imagine an experiment
that might have as one of its possible outcomes the discovery
that some individuals make choices independent of their enculturation.
If an experiment can only support a theory (and never disprove it),
the experiment is pointless because we know the answer in advance.
This shows that determinists are dogmatists, not scientists.
If they acknowledge only evidence that confirms their dogma,
how can they claim that their belief is based on experience?
If a free act were to occur,
the determinists would not be able to recognize it
because they have decided in advance to interpret all human events
in ways that support the dogma of determinism.
If only one kind of evidence can be recognized, is that science?
Clearly most human beings are products of enculturation.
Determinists themselves might be good examples of how indoctrination works:
Thru a process called "education" human beings can be led
to embrace beliefs contrary to their immediate experience.
Usually they learn determinism from psychology courses in college.
Such indoctrination is so effective for some people
that it cuts them off from their experience of making choices
—acting in freedom—which they have been doing most of their lives.
Instead of trusting their own obvious, daily experience,
they trust the 'scientific authority' of the determinists.
Fortunately, this brand of psychology shows signs of giving way
to more humanistic approaches, which notice personal freedom.
We must agree that our acts are profoundly shaped by culture,
but this very recognition can become a tool to pry ourselves loose
from the life that would result if we never exercised our freedom.
As we develop in spirit, it becomes easier and easier
to transcend enculturation and to choose our own paths thru life.
Further Reading
James Park Becoming More Authentic:
The Positive Side of Existentialism
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you would like to explore the concept of freedom more fully,
See especially the first chapter of Becoming More Authentic :
"From Conformity to Autonomy" .
This chapter explains how we can freely set our own goals in life
and then proceed to fulfill those purposes in workable ways.
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------This cyber-sermon:
"WHAT IS SPIRITUALITY?
4. Freedom: Transcending Enculturation and Choosing for Ourselves"
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Spirituality for Humanists:
Six Capacities of Our Human Spirits
by James Park.
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