Chapter 4, Culture: philosophic perspectives I

Brameld, Theodore.  (2008).  The use of explosive ideas in education:  Culture, class, and evolution.  New York:  The New Press.

Metacultural assumptions of culture

“We call the assumptions or presuppositions of culture metacultural because they lie, strictly speaking, beyond or above or beneath an exclusively scientific description.  and since philosophy is itself sometimes defined as the critical study of assumptions, let us for present purposes call the philosophy of culture a metacultural discipline.”  (p. 45)

The reality of cultural order

“One of the most interesting contributions to the study of culture is Alfred L. Kroeber’s concept of the superorganic. . . . Culture, however, is a level above that of the merely organic.  It has emerged from the organic, to be sure, but, like other emergent levels of nature that have evolved from lower levels, culture has acquired its own distinctive features that are explicable in their own scientific terms.”  (p. 47)

Leslie White in The Science of Culture, explains that “culture causes culture, as it were.  Thus, the order of culture is subject to its own laws, just as the order of the biological level of nature is subject to its own laws. . . . These laws are located most centrally in the patterns [for instance, patterns of language, patterns of custom] of culture.”  (p. 47)

“The metacultural assumption implicit in this viewpoint of cultural order may be associated with a cluster of philosophic beliefs that we shall characterize as belonging to ontological realism. . . . Thus, culture too is an objective reality, just as are other levels of nature.”  (p. 47)

“Some ontological realists have been called historical materialists because they hold not only that culture has an objective reality which generates itself but that this occurs according to historical laws which are explicable in terms of the utilization of material energy in increasing complex ways.  That is, the spatiotemporal order of culture is to be viewed most fundamentally according to ways people channel the energies of nature in order to produce economic goods.”  (p. 48)

“A related but far from identical view of reality of culture . . . is called by philosophers objective idealism. . . . it is perhaps enough to recall that this theory of reality assumes that, although reality is governed by its own objective laws of stability and change, the ‘stuff’ of reality is not ‘material’ but rather ‘spiritual’ in character.”  (p. 48)

“Is it possible for one to hold a kind of superorganic view of culture and yet to be an idealist in one’s metacultural assumptions?  We think that it is.  One such proponent is the philosophically minded sociologist Pitirim Sorokin. . . . Sorokin tries to establish the basic laws of the history of culture which, despite their complexity, follow in a certain sequence, one upon the other, and are primarily characterized by the way human beings think and feel and then behave according to their thinking and feeling.  Culture has an objective reality, but this reality is spiritual in its innermost nature.”  (p. 49)

“The superorganic approach to cultural order is congenial to both the essentialist and perennialist orientations.”  (p. 51)

“Our chief conclusion is that . . . essentialism provides powerful theoretical support for the common view that education’s primary role is to induct each generation into the objective order of culture — an order that has already emerged in nature and is now waiting to be perceived and transmitted according to its own inherent laws.”  (p. 52)

“The operational approach to culture, on the other hand, has close affinity to the progressivist and reconstructionist views of education. . . . progressivists hold an operational theory of culture in the respect that they believe its members should learn how to interpret the meaning of various patterns of culture, not so much for the purpose of perpetuating them — although this role is also a necessary one — but, most importantly, for the purpose of modifying them through such operations.”  (p. 52)