There is so much to think about in this one question.
I referenced Culture Health and Illness, by Cecil Helman, in my book How the Brain Thinks, when I talked briefly about context. Helman was a General Practitioner in London and Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University, Uxbridge, England and a Senior Lecturer in the Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health, University College London Medical School, where he taught courses on cross-cultural health-care.
In this book, Helman describes culture ‘as a set of guidelines (both explicit and implicit) that individuals inherit as members of a particular society, and that tell them how to view the world, how to experience it emotionally, and how to behave in it in relation to other people, to supernatural forces or gods, and to the natural environment. It also provides them with a way of transmitting these guidelines to the next generation – by the use of symbols, language, art and ritual’ and story. It gives the members of the group the skills to navigate the future.
Culture can be seen as ‘an inherited lens through which the individual perceives and understands the world that he inhabits and learns how to live within it.’
Cecil Helman
For some reason, maybe its the epidemic and the various responses to it, three articles, all from the New York Times, have made me think about this question recently, and all have shown the influence influence that culture has in our lives: from misinformation transmission, to narcissism and its role in this related epidemic, and that culture is much bigger than we are in the animal kingdom.
The first is an article by Max Fisher I came across in the NZ Herald reprinted from the New York Times titled: Belonging is stronger than facts: The age of misinformation. ‘We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. And those forces are only on the rise.
‘”Why are misperceptions about contentious issues in politics and science seemingly so persistent and difficult to correct?” Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist, posed in a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
‘Put more simply, people become more prone to misinformation when three things happen. First, and perhaps most important, is when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for what social scientists call ingrouping — a belief that their social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and that other groups can be blamed for their problems.
‘As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings who put truth-seeking above all else, we are social animals wired for survival. In times of perceived conflict or social change, we seek security in groups. And that makes us eager to consume information, true or not, that lets us see the world as a conflict putting our righteous ingroup against a nefarious outgroup.
‘This need can emerge especially out of a sense of social destabilization. As a result, misinformation is often prevalent among communities that feel destabilized by unwanted change or, in the case of some minorities, powerless in the face of dominant forces. Framing everything as a grand conflict against scheming enemies can feel enormously reassuring.
‘The second driver of the misinformation era is the emergence of high-profile political figures who encourage their followers to go ahead and indulge their desire for identity-affirming misinformation. After all, an atmosphere of all-out political conflict often benefits those leaders, at least in the short term, by rallying people behind them.
‘And then there is the third factor — a shift to social media, which is a powerful outlet for composers of disinformation, a pervasive vector for misinformation itself and a multiplier of the other risk factors.
‘”Media has changed, the environment has changed, and that has a potentially big impact on our natural behaviour,” said William Brady, a Yale University social psychologist.
‘”When you post things, you’re highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares,” Brady said. So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.
‘”Depending on the platform, especially, humans are very sensitive to social reward,” he said. Research demonstrates that people who get positive feedback for posting inflammatory or false statements become much likelier to do so again in the future. “You are affected by that.”‘
‘As people get more prone to misinformation, opportunists and charlatans are also getting better at exploiting this. That can mean tear-it-all-down populists who rise on promises to smash the establishment and control minorities. It can also mean government agencies or freelance hacker groups stirring up social divisions abroad for their benefit. But the roots of the crisis go deeper.
“The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.”‘ And then we type into echo chambers, pressing send on the way.
‘In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, “belonging is stronger than facts”.’
The second is Stephen Fry Would Like to Remind You That You Have No Free Will by David Marchese.
Stephen Fry admits that lately, ‘he has settled into the role of avuncular public intellectual.’ He goes on: ‘a friend of mine put me onto Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents.” I was intrigued with what Freud called the narcissism of small differences. How come when something aggressive occurs just outside your little moral, political and cultural bubble — a statement by someone you really dislike; it could be Eric Trump or some figure like that of no significance in the world — you find yourself trembling with fury at the person who is saying these things because they strike you as so dumb, so cruel, so deceptive, whatever it is? What we have to understand is that once we have our set of rules and outlooks, any suggestion that those may be wrong becomes a suggestion that I may be wrong. It’s an assault on my Self with a capital S. That’s partly what Freud meant by the narcissism of small differences: that arguments become deeply personal.
Indeed. In the online culture, narcissism is the gift that keeps on giving.
Culture is pervasive and blanketing, like an old cloak comfortable around our shoulders. But there is a hidden fire, ready to burst into an unimaginable conflagration at any perceived slight, particularly in this narcissistic age.
The third article I read was Meet the Other Social Influencers of the Animal Kingdom by Natalie Angier
There are ‘many surprising examples of animal culture that researchers have lately divulged, as a vivid summary makes clear in a recent issue of Science. Culture was once considered the patented property of human beings: We have the art, science, music and online shopping; animals have the instinct, imprinting and hard-wired responses. But that dismissive attitude toward nonhuman minds turns out to be more deeply misguided with every new finding of animal wit or whimsy: Culture, as many biologists now understand it, is much bigger than we are.
‘“If you define culture as a set of behaviors shared by a group and transmitted through the group by social learning, then you find that it’s widespread in the animal kingdom,” said Andrew Whiten, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, and the author of the Science review. “You see it from primates and cetaceans, to birds and fish, and now we even find it in insects.”
‘Culture “is another inheritance mechanism, like genes,” Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, who studies culture in whales, said. “It’s another way that information can flow through a population.” But culture has distinct advantages over DNA when it comes to the pace and direction of information trafficking. Whereas genetic information can only move vertically, from parent to offspring, cultural information can flow vertically and horizontally: old to young, young to old, peer to peer, no bloodlines required.
‘Genes lumber, but culture soars.
‘Some differences between animal tribes make sense only if viewed through a cultural lens. Liran Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and her colleagues have been following two neighboring groups of bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The home ranges of the chimpanzee-like apes overlap considerably, and the bonobo troops meet and mingle frequently, grooming one another, traveling and foraging together, and pausing often for mutual pelvic rubdowns.
‘But a there is a salient distinction between them. Once or twice a month, bonobos supplement their vegetarian diet with meat, and when these two troops turn carnivorous, they seek out different prey. One group goes after anomalures, which resemble flying squirrels, while the other hunts small antelopes called duikers. “No matter where they are, even when the group is together, they maintain the preference,” Dr. Samuni said. “If a hunt begins, it follows group lines: The duiker group chases duikers, the anomalure group pursues anomalures.” Dr. Samuni suggests that the prey specialization serves either to reduce competition between neighbors or solidify a sense of team identity. “We all like to feel we belong to a group, and that feeling has ancient origins,” she said.’
For me, living alone on the top of a cliff, I totally get it. We are social animals and the pain of isolation from humans is very real. But, there’s an abundance of local birdlife to converse with and I am slowly learning their languages and how to fit into their world.
