Chapter 2: Cultures and Rationalities
Instinct and Culture
- Human beings are not heavily dependent on instinct - an innate typically fixed patterns of
behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.
Culture – is the system of system of symbols that allows people to give meaning to experience.
- It bears all the accumulated knowledge of people coded into symbols that will help
them interpret what is happening to or around them and how they can give an
appropriate response to the experience.
- It provides people with systems of shortcuts for meaningful interpretations and
responses.
- It is handed down through generations, everyone knows that:
Doctors cure you when you are sick
Profit is always good
Women raise children
Men should set time aside to drink with their friends
- this is what culture does; it takes the place of instinct to give people a quick
representation and response based on collective experience to the things that
confront us.
Culture can Change
- culture is superior to instinct because it is malleable or adaptable.
- It is both learned and inherited and readily determines how one understands and acts
- It changes when its framing of reality is no longer useful.
- It is the main difference between culture and instinct.
- The systems that shapes human behavior is malleable (capable of being easily changed or
influenced).
Ex. Self-promotion and publicizing the self, such as in social media website has
become acceptable behavior.
- Culture is the versatile system of meaning-giving.
- The problem in this setup is that when cultural systems orient people to act in a certain what
that is harmful, individuals tend to act destructively toward others without conscious
decision.
- If a community devalues women people programmed by their cultural system to act this
way.
- Thus, treating women badly and women being receptive to this bad treatment are due to a
cultural system.
-this thought is worrisome because it means that the unjust things we do are
not the fruit of our free will.
-it is hopeful because it means we act the way we do due to systems that can be
changed.
- culture can be transformed without waiting for genetic mutation to take effect.
- culture can change when its system of meaning no longer serves human flourishing
- We must understand how culture can be changed so that world becomes more just to women.
- To illustrate this point, examine micro-aggression as a form of violence.
Micro-aggression refers to hostile derogatory or negative racial slights and insults that can cause
potentially harmful or unpleasant psychological impacts on the target person or group..
Instinct and Culture
- Human beings are not heavily dependent on instinct - an innate typically fixed patterns of
behavior in animals in response to certain stimuli.
Culture – is the system of system of symbols that allows people to give meaning to experience.
- It bears all the accumulated knowledge of people coded into symbols that will help
them interpret what is happening to or around them and how they can give an
appropriate response to the experience.
- It provides people with systems of shortcuts for meaningful interpretations and
responses.
- It is handed down through generations, everyone knows that:
Doctors cure you when you are sick
Profit is always good
Women raise children
Men should set time aside to drink with their friends
- this is what culture does; it takes the place of instinct to give people a quick
representation and response based on collective experience to the things that
confront us.
Culture can Change
- culture is superior to instinct because it is malleable or adaptable.
- It is both learned and inherited and readily determines how one understands and acts
- It changes when its framing of reality is no longer useful.
- It is the main difference between culture and instinct.
- The systems that shapes human behavior is malleable (capable of being easily changed or
influenced).
Ex. Self-promotion and publicizing the self, such as in social media website has
become acceptable behavior.
- Culture is the versatile system of meaning-giving.
- The problem in this setup is that when cultural systems orient people to act in a certain what
that is harmful, individuals tend to act destructively toward others without conscious
decision.
- If a community devalues women people programmed by their cultural system to act this
way.
- Thus, treating women badly and women being receptive to this bad treatment are due to a
cultural system.
-this thought is worrisome because it means that the unjust things we do are
not the fruit of our free will.
-it is hopeful because it means we act the way we do due to systems that can be
changed.
- culture can be transformed without waiting for genetic mutation to take effect.
- culture can change when its system of meaning no longer serves human flourishing
- We must understand how culture can be changed so that world becomes more just to women.
- To illustrate this point, examine micro-aggression as a form of violence.
Micro-aggression refers to hostile derogatory or negative racial slights and insults that can cause
potentially harmful or unpleasant psychological impacts on the target person or group..
