An Autodidact's Bible, #12
Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 2c
This is the twelfth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.
Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11
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Last time we left off with the startling claim that the theory of evolution is an algorithm that tells a story that uncannily mirrors The Hero’s Journey. We now continue with an exploration of that classic story form, and its relationship to the structure of the universe:
Working Within a Tradition
So what is The Hero’s Journey?
It is a story template based on an analogy between the life cycle of a man1 and the movement of the sun through the zodiac over the course of the year.
It begins with the hero’s normal life being disrupted by a call to adventure (a treasure to find, a princess to rescue, a city to save, etc.).
He ignores the call, but then is forced to go on the adventure anyway.
Along the way, he receives help from mentors and gods...
Faces gatekeepers whom he must defeat, acquires friends and compatriots, then...
Dies and is forced into the underworld from which he must win free.
The process of returning from the underworld transforms him, bringing him the power and wisdom to complete his quest, conquer his enemies, and make amends for his previous frailties (and often those of his people).
When he has won his prize, he returns home with it, changing forever his own starting point with the knowledge, treasure, and wisdom he has won—but he is so changed by his experience that he cannot return to being who he was.
He must find a new role in his homeland, or strike out on a new quest to find another.
It is an evolutionary quest, iterative by design but perhaps not by intent. It mirrors the maturation life cycle of a young man who must prove himself in order to be considered valuable enough to win a place in society which harnesses men with careers and spouses as early as possible, so that their boundless energy will enrich, rather than destroy, the society in which they find themselves. Once a young man strikes out on his own, he can never again be a child in his parents’ house. Everything he knew about life up until that point is dead. He must forge a new identity.
This, by the way, is where we get the phrase: “You can’t go home again.”
The end of a man’s primordial quest is parenting—not simply siring—the next generation. The hero of one journey is a mentor of the next, just as Bilbo was the hero of The Hobbit and then one of Frodo’s mentors in The Lord of the Rings.
Iteration. But not iteration in a vacuum.
Iteration within a tradition.
Remember your glass box? The glass box doesn’t just constrain your worldview, it defines the constraints that outline your entire existence. You will never manage to break completely free from it. By the time you have mastered your milk language, you have acquired your first culture, and that culture exists within a wider tradition.
Given that this book is written in English for an English-speaking audience, I’m going to wager that yours is the Western tradition, which descends from Sumer and Egypt through Greece, Rome, and the Levant, where it splits again. The south fork reaches into Arabia and meets up with more ancient, (Persian and other pre-Greco-Roman) versions of the Western tradition creating the Islamic tradition. The north fork meets up with primordial European tribal traditions before diverging sharply (after the Enlightenment) into the Continental and English traditions.
By the way, if you’re not a Westerner-by-culture, welcome! Your tradition likely descends from Sumer and the Indus Valley and spreads throughout East Asia and Indonesia through the philosophical schools of China and the folk religions of hundreds of people-groups to eventually create several dozen very potent regional and national traditions, all of which share a basic model of the universe.2
Much as many of us would like to believe, despite all our glorious individuality and the power of action that gives us, we are not autonomous beings. We are social creatures. For our first nine months, we’re carried inside another human being. For five or six years after that, we’re utterly dependent upon other human beings for everything—your parents didn’t just give you the genes and the incubation space, they (or their surrogates) were your food, shelter, protection from predators of many sorts (however imperfect that protection might have been), the source of your language, the foundation of your neurological development. And during that whole period, they (and you) were nested inside a culture, itself nested in an historic context conditioned by geography and economics and warfare.
“Culture” is an interesting word, especially in this context. Sounds a bit like “cult,” doesn’t it? And “cultivate,” too. That’s not a coincidence. Culture, cult, and cultivate all share the same root word, and have a number of cross-connotations. They come from the Latin cultŭs, an extraordinarily rich word—it means “home,” “care,” “cultivation,” “civilization,” “refinement,” “elegance,” “worship,” “education,” “splendor,” and “grooming style” (among others). Your culture is your creche, the thing which has cultivated your consciousness and your categories of thought, that has educated you, that contains the symbols and templates (like The Hero’s Journey) you use to understand the world—it is both the vehicle for all the values and ideas you hold sacred, and the stuff of sacredness itself. People will (and have) died to defend their culture. They’ve built nations to guarantee their culture’s survival. And people can (and have, and will) kill for it as well.
Your culture is the garden in which you grow. You are a cultivar and (in at least some small sense) a cultivator of your culture, and you will never escape it—even if you move across the world, change your name and your language, dress like the natives of your new country, transfer your citizenship, and assimilate completely, you will still carry your culture inside you.
Your entire range of potential action is defined by this nested series of constraints in which you operate—and from which you cannot escape. Moving the walls of your glass box is not a matter of escape, but of transcendence. This is not pseudo-spiritual mumbo-jumbo or hair-splitting. To transcend something you must pass beyond its limits, in the same way a tree, in sprouting, passes beyond the limits of the acorn.
That soil you’re growing in, though, contains nutrients. From the sacred to the profane, the trivial to the profound, the bubble-gum pop to the great works of art, your culture is an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human, to be masculine or feminine, how to be gay or straight or somewhere in the middle, how to use your silverware and how to drive, how to think, how to argue, how to fight and when, and how to be a deviant in any of these matters and more—if it exists, your culture has a way in which it is done. Yes, in addition to being constraints, those norms can be constraining. Unpleasantly so.
But they also represent the tip of a deep iceberg stretching back thousands of years—a tradition of wisdom passed down from people who learned things the hard way, iterated every generation. This is your free inheritance to get you your start in the world.
You ignore it at your peril. Not only will you be throwing out a dragon’s-horde of wealth, and not only will you condemn yourself to re-learn lessons that previous generations paid with in blood, you will cripple your ability to find anything of substance elsewhere. A person who is not versed in their culture’s own tradition has little hope of understanding or benefiting from the traditions of other cultures.
Don’t believe me? Look around. Ever wonder why there was no great artistic movement in the millennial generation, and (at the time of this writing) nothing much is shaping up for Gen Z (their successors)? You should—it’s a unique event in post-industrial civilization. The first time a generation (let alone two) hasn’t produced its own distinct aesthetic, found its own voice, added a discernible new flavor to the cultural stew. So, what happened?
For the first time in modern history—and perhaps the first time in human history—two generations have grown up without a culture to embrace, react against, iterate, enjoy, or dialog with. The early twenty-first century is a time of great economic, technological, and geopolitical disruption, but no aesthetic disruption—not even within marginalized, disrupted, and disaffected communities (where such artistic movements ordinarily start).
Over-determined: Adjective. Describes an event which follows a number of different precipitating events that are all apparently causal. Over-determined events do not have a single sufficient cause and a number of contributing factors—they have multiple sufficient causes. Historical examples include: World War 1, the British loss of the Americas, the genocide of the American Indians, the fall of Rome, the unwinding of the post-Cold War world order, etc.
There are a lot of potential reasons3—major historical anomalies are frequently over-determined—but one is the shallowing of the cultural soil in recent decades. We already discussed some of the reasons this has happened in the early parts of this book, now let’s look at a particular consequence:
Very few people can now identify the origin of common idioms, or have a sense of history before World War 2 (if that), or know Shelly and Keats and Sophocles and Isaiah and Homer.
The humanities—art, philosophy, language, history, law, political science, religion, music, theater (and its descendants), and literature—emerge from and feed back into a tradition rooted in the home soil of culture. Like plants, cultures cross-pollinate and mutate and adapt and change and bend and sway, but they remain essentially themselves eon after eon.
They do, that is, unless they die, which they will do if their products are sampled merely on the surface, or if their children’s roots are shallow.
As with biology, in our cultures we bear the stamps of our lowly origins—traces of the sins and barbarisms of the past, as well as its triumphs and discoveries. And, as with a garden, culture may need the occasional bit of weeding to promote the good plants and reduce the noxious ones. But a person without deep culture differs as much from a person with deep culture as does a fence post from a two-hundred foot sequoia.