Chapter 3 introduction

By the end of the twentieth century we will be heading towards a flood of integrated cosmopolitan cultures and truly realizing the dream of being a fully conscious citizen of the world, which is a very important and striking feature of the human condition .For the first time, the 50,000-year history lay before us, showing every life process that human beings have experienced: the primitive hunters and fishermen who drank blood; Residents; farmers far away from urban civilization, whose life is still almost the same as a thousand years ago; and those nations who have abandoned their simple and vigorous culture and replaced it with a simple, rough, and undeveloped new culture; Relying on any external intervention, it flies across the civilization gap of thousands of years and enters the modern society in an instant.While the natives of New Guinea still can't count, when they call a pile of potatoes "many," American aerospace engineering employees at Cape Kennedy are counting down the seconds as the Apollo voyage around the moon changes course.In Japan, there are some craftsmen who specialize in making pottery for special ceremonies. Today, their 13th generation descendants still believe in the taboo that their ancestors are not allowed to touch the pottery wheel and change the shape of the pottery.In some backward areas, older women find some herbs and murmur words to relieve the fear of teenage girls who are pregnant for the first time; but in other parts of the world, people are sorting out the various varieties of human reproduction in modern laboratories. stages to find the best method of contraception for different stages.While savages in groups of 20 leaped into enemy positions to capture captives from opposing tribes that had held a feud for 500 years to sacrifice to their gods, international conferences were seriously analyzing the enormous destructive power of nuclear weapons.The 50,000-year civilization history of human beings comes one after another in an instant, so that we can have a panoramic view in an instant.

This is a situation unprecedented in human history, and indeed, by its very nature, it will never be repeated in the future.This is because the entire earth has been controlled by us. Today, there are no ethnic groups unknown to us in any corner of the world. With the development and utilization of the earth, the natural mysteries are clearly revealed to the world. Future exploration will Happened in the vast universe.We can communicate extensively with various peoples from all over the world, and understand them with our existing concepts.And other nations can also share the culture transmitted by science in the world, and thus communicate with us in language.The early anthropologists often lived alone among the primitive tribes, conducting detailed investigations on those wonderful kinship relationships, but in the eyes of primitive people, these scholars were the most stupid people.Today, we can achieve mutual understanding through free conversation; we share the same blue sky, under the protection of the sky, airplanes can fly us over any mountains, and primitive residents in remote areas can also understand through radio or tape recorders Almost the entire complex world.Most of those backward primitive tribes don't know that human civilization once created a splendid ancient culture.They know nothing about the 3,000-year-old Chinese civilization, the great civilizations of the Middle East, or the Greek and Roman traditions that are the foundations of modern science.But, after all, they live in the same world as us, and the long journey from their past to our present has been greatly shortened, and their thirst for all new technologies and new types of organizations has become a communication between civilization and backwardness common ground.

While the above-mentioned events were happening one by one, there were many other events in this world one after another. The old colonial empires fell apart, and new nation-states were born one after another with the efforts of a few college graduates, gathered under new politics. The rising people need this kind of nation-state.The oppressed who dared to be angry but dare not speak out have awakened from every corner of the world and began to fight for more power and freedom for themselves.Children in grade 4 learned to sit in and protest, while university students demanded the freedom to choose their professors.The relationship between the strong and the weak, the possessor and the possessed, the old and the young, the intellectual and the ignorant has all changed dramatically.The old blind belief that the learned have more power than the uneducated has been shattered.

No matter how great a change has taken place, if this change has not been accompanied by the creation of a universal culture, I do not believe that we can easily understand all foreign and original cultures. all the contributions of human civilization. In 1967, I returned to the village of Tambunam, which was located on the banks of the Sepik River in New Guinea after an absence of 29 years.Civilization affects the village in various ways.Although the church had been allowed to enter the village to provide school education for the children, religious ceremonies were still banned; although the war had stopped and the chiefs had moved to other places, the aborigines still liked to build what they thought was beautiful. houses, produce si (valley) rice, and still fish the old way.Although little has changed, progress has been made. In the 1930s, when people entered the villages in New Guinea, the first thing the aborigines asked for was medicine. They asked for healing with festering wounds, and some people came to exchange goods-exchanging security razor blades, fishhooks, salt, Axes and cloth.At that time, they believed that the Europeans brought many daily necessities from the outside world, and if he could stay in the village, the residents there would continue to benefit.But, in 1967, the first question visitors heard was:

"Do you have a tape recorder?" "Ah, take it, what are you going to do?" "We hear the songs of other peoples on the radio, and we want others to hear our songs." What a huge change.Through radio broadcasting world culture and a democratic view of the unique value of each small cultural ministry, the villagers of Tabunan heard the music of New Guinea and heard the current government broadcast its policies, thereby enabling them to feel fully equal Shinsegae Broadcasting, which is actively participating.The situation is not limited to this.Take my colleague Rhoda Metlaux, who started recording the music of Aboriginal peoples, made them adept listeners and recorders, and learned how to recognize distracting noises like dogs barking and babies crying—once upon a time Without the tape recorder, they never noticed these sounds, and they certainly didn't notice how harsh the noise of the village was and how it affected their musical performances.But now, when they heard the jumbled, noise-filled recordings, they quickly realized it.Now, in order to obtain the best recording effect, they have begun to consider the wind direction during recording, and have also learned to adjust the sound of the instrument according to the timbre of different singers.This awareness resulting from the diffusion of new ideas and technologies is the first step in people's ability to participate in the social sciences.Not only can they share our existing world, but they must also be able to contribute to it in new ways.

Will we face a new situation, will the whole world happen at the same time?Today, we can go and visit a Shriner hospital with burnt children.We see hospitals with beautiful environments and highly trained and dedicated medical staff who often spend thousands of hours caring for a child with severe burns.They carefully transplanted his skin, modified his face, and tried their best to restore this brave and optimistic child to his original appearance.Recreating skin, installing prosthetics... This kind of dedicated effort to save lives and heal the wounded undoubtedly brings great hope to the future of the unfortunate.However, in the same hospital, we saw that the situation of another child was not optimistic. Facing the future, he faced the future with innocence and stubbornness, and with his desire for life, but made the other optimistic little patient Rehabilitation was obtained under the same conditions.However, please don't forget that those doctors who spend money and time to create miracles of rejuvenation are often people who have never contradicted the current military policy.Under the guidance of this policy, a large number of innocent people join the battlefield every day.Each year, far more children are burned by Molotov cocktails than saved by Schriner Hospital.When we realize this, whose heart will not tremble? "Did human beings fall into the abyss because of this, and it is difficult to extricate themselves?" Everyone is forced to ask themselves.The reason why we fall into the abyss is definitely not because of our innate instinct, and it is definitely not because of our natural desire to invade and plunder others as long as we are strong-or use the same reason to comfort ourselves when we are weak.We have fallen into the abyss due to the series of inventions called "civilization", and today's so-called "civilization" is fully supported by science and technology and population explosion, which makes human beings have to follow, even knowing It must also follow the preordained path of destruction that all early civilizations have traveled.However, what is destroyed at this time is not just civilization, but the entire history of the earth, or even the sun.

If I am convinced of the above arguments, then the more human beings are capable of creating, enriching, and transmitting complex cultures, the more indubitably they will be mired in cultural mires.While human culture embodies countless great achievements, it ultimately leads to destruction and terror.Ah, maybe I shouldn't be rambling.Although Cassandra is good at foretelling good and bad, her predictions have never been believed by wise seers.Yeah, who would go to the trouble of warning the world that the end is coming?Unless someone declares that the choice of the future has been decided, human beings must either guard against doomsday or choose the afterlife.The more people believe in the end of the world, the harder they will try to find a better world.The assumption that human beings will move to live on other planets after the destruction of the Earth may be just a fantasy.And the statement that God is tired of human beings, and that those who believe in him will go to heaven and those who don't believe in him will fall into eternal hell in the face of the huge catastrophe he is about to bring to us is even more absurd and deceitful. talk of the world.

However, as long as the real cause of the great catastrophe is not known, the legend about God sending water and fire to plunder the world, but saving some people to rebuild the future world will never die out.It was out of this legend that grew the belief that if you put your faith in God, you can get out of trouble.It is this belief that gives people hope in life, and they fight bravely and optimistically in the face of an unpredictable world.They firmly believe that, as God's chosen people, they will be able to live with God and obtain eternal life.Because of this, people have been rebuilding their homes on the slopes of the volcano again and again.In Kansas, the residents of a town that has never been hit by a strong wind still believe that their luck is better than others, so they will never be harmed by the wind.In some communities in the United States, scientists have participated in local residents' protests against dangerous military installations near their cities, but please be aware that if their protests are successful, these missile bases will be built elsewhere near the city of residence.Leo Szilard was a physicist who had lost faith in humanity for being such a brilliant member of it.He proposed that, based on the positive self-protection among American cities, a "hostage system" could be established between those cities that were easily selected for nuclear destruction, so as to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war.

These biased views of human destiny, sometimes condemned and sometimes embraced, neither secular nor religious, fit within the only world-wide mode of interaction we have today.The idea of ​​asylum for space immigrants cannot be realized, and the statement that God will destroy most of mankind and save a small part of it is purely fictional, and blind optimism will not bring realistic satisfaction either.Prognosticators can't point us to viable alternatives, although doomsdayists are still twitching their tongues.They not only show us that man has sunk into a gigantic man-made or divine-made quagmire, from which no one can escape, but also make us listen to them describe day and night why the quagmire of human destiny is a pitiless and closed trap .To these prophets, human beings, with their present upbringing, upbringing and environment, cannot comprehend them.Because of this, some people have fun: some people renounce the world and set themselves on fire;Perhaps too few people care about the future of humanity to actually save ourselves.Unless one day more people are awakened, human beings are doomed to end.So I live in this world, not as a contemporary Cassandra, but as a survivor of the perils of World War II.Under the weight of that seemingly inevitable war; we were able to gather all the resources to resist that disaster as a single person, and today I believe that each of us is eager to use the knowledge that humans have to avoid it. A cataclysm of great undetermined magnitude, although our knowledge is still very poor.The catastrophe at that time was so great that we all expected that science and human culture would be destroyed, and the whole western world would be swallowed up by the evil culture of fascism.Because this culture not only utilizes science and technology, but also makes science itself contrary to the development of free humanity.We once expected that after that disaster there would be a century-long "dark age". horrible.Perhaps it is precisely because we know so little that we can face this prospect squarely.On the contrary, few people at that time could have imagined that all human life, or even all life, would disappear from this earth.We often see in theological legends and scientific fantasies that everything in the world is destroyed, and only human beings have gained vitality.This is a kind of foolish optimism, just like I once compared myself to a truck. When I was being driven by someone and suddenly faced with a devastating disaster, as a truck, my first thought was that the driver's children would soon become Orphans, I murmured, "I'll watch over their lives."

While this optimism brings us hope, it also brings us great danger.If manifested in just one child who embodies our growing concern for the individual, this optimism might be able to brighten the world.But expressed in members of entire societies who are always rebuilding their homes in active craters, this optimism can lead to worldwide catastrophe.What we are looking for is to strike a balance between the optimism of the individual and the obstinate blindness of the crowd.One of the ways to achieve this balance may be to discover those who have a certain superhuman gift for optimism in their own individual and group history.Then, we give them the tools to observe and predict, and let them relocate for new cities instead of looking at the familiar slopes of active volcanoes.And that's exactly what I was hoping for.

In my opinion, the only reason why we can stand on the steps of the alternate evolution of human history and gain insight into all the great civilizations of the past is because we know so little about the past.This is a huge historical void: the tall walls are long in ruins, and we know nothing of the lives of the people who lived there; we cannot rediscover the long-lost songs sung to babies; The poverty and the lives of the oppressed that have never been mentioned are even more unrecorded... and it is precisely because of this that human imagination can describe the illusion and despair that history once had.However, history is like science. Grand plans without details can fundamentally shake people's faith and trust.Just like Darwin's theory of evolution just put forward, without rigorous proof, it can only arouse the anger of those who believe in God and confirm the social theory of "the strong prey on the weak" of those who do not believe in God. The exploration of seabed organisms has found that many brightly colored organisms in tropical oceans live in special niches, while those without special differentiation can change habitats at will.Every detailed examination like this of the mechanisms of living things eats away at our initial oversensitive reactions to the idea of ​​the survival of the fittest.For example, after we have scientifically studied lemmings (an animal that lives in the Arctic. Translator's Note) and rabbits, we can understand that the death instinct of these animals is just a reaction made by the enzyme system in their bodies to the amount of food. natural reaction. Every view of the world can lead us astray when it takes the form of crude and exaggerated theories.For example, we used to regard human society as a replica of the natural phenomenon of the weak and the strong, we regarded human beings as machines that people can manipulate at will, and we even regarded human beings as things that can be copied quickly and in large numbers just like machines .However, today, with the further improvement of the theory, the use of new tools and better observation and analysis methods have changed those rough and blind views in the past, and eliminated the despair caused by oversensitivity to new and complicated things. Appropriate human behavior will no longer be judged on the basis of a factor, or arbitrary interpretations of factors, that what is lost will be balanced by gains that at the same time necessarily mean the loss of some aspect of the system as a whole.This kind of arbitrary interpretation can be seen everywhere: for example, if you pay the price of land depletion and river pollution, the grain will be harvested; and in terms of socio-economics, the economic development of one country will inevitably mean the economic loss of other countries.Instead of the model of a single isolated organism or cell, we can use a model of biology, specifically an ecological model—a model based on a complex system of many organisms living together in a single environment.In this model, what is harvested by one part of the same system is also harvested by another part.Parasite and host are interdependent, and changes occur when the internal balance is disrupted and a new adaptation is necessary.We can use the anti-entropy state to replace the traditional calculation of gains and losses, and the concentration of information changes the trend of dispersion.A human being will follow the same path if he utilizes on the one hand and rejects previous scientific insights on the other.In other words, the more human beings understand the nature on which they live, the more likely they are to become slaves of nature. All these changes, from crude and natural pessimistic terms and concepts to those reforms, awakenings and rescues that still hold great promise, come from new and practical research.With the aid of the tools that mathematics, electricity, and technology in general make possible, one can more precisely probe into everything, into the properties of things that we have hitherto taken for granted or as belonging to a larger system with no intrinsic character of its own. scale and composition.Every scientific discovery of an entire feature of nature opens up new vistas of hope for humanity. Based on this belief, I will examine our current understanding of culture based on the paradigms of primitive societies.This paradigm has worked well historically, and it still works well today.But in the 25 years since World War II, the paradigm has not only grown in scope but has become increasingly indistinguishable in character.Today there is little resemblance between the concepts of culture derived from anthropologists' field investigations of primitive peoples and the concepts adopted by contemporary scientific thought in their writings.From the point of view that psychologists, sociologists, or historians want to understand, whether "culture" is identified as a "mediator variable" (by giving the same psychometric test to Puerto Ricans in San Juan and New York) easily cancel it), or regard "culture" as a kind of Pavlovian conditioning, can formulate primitive cultural paradigms as crude, fatalistic and reducing. Ten years ago, when I was writing The Continuity of Cultural Evolution, I tried to define the concept of cultural learning.I have carefully analyzed the various learning methods that exist side by side today. From here, I can trace back to the distant past, to the human being's ability to use language and writing to describe things across time and space, store information, and then use photography and recording equipment for Future analysis stores the situation before the original data. In this book, I will also use the same sources to analyze existing cultures of varying complexity that co-exist in the contemporary era.However, I will emphasize the basic difference between prehistoric culture, culture of the historic period, and contemporary culture after World War II, namely, the emphasis on cultural discontinuity. Aside from the shift in emphasis from stark continuities to stark discontinuities, this book discusses a little differently than The Continuity of Cultural Evolution.Here, I do not deal with the behavior patterns of early humans that are known by inference, but only discuss the behavior patterns of primitive peoples that survive in the contemporary era and allow us to actually observe and record them.Today, because of our lack of objective and true understanding of this, a lot of pessimistic and harmful thinking has been bred; and the inappropriate attempt to restore the behavior of our ancestors in the ancient prehistoric times has seriously hindered our understanding of what is outdated. successfully transformed contemporary culture.Taking our existing observations and our incomplete understanding of the behavior of birds, fish, and primates, applying the patterns derived from them to explain human behavior, especially the as yet poorly understood early humans Behavior, no doubt thoughtless and immature, yet people did it.The result is a theory of human aggression such as habit masters such as Lorenz and the dramatist Ardrey, which advocates that humans are inherently bestial, in contrast to Ashley According to Ashley Montague, human beings are inherently good.Rather than helping us understand human beings, these disparate viewpoints often confuse us.Therefore, I will only study the culture of the present, which is still alive, and my treatment of the culture of the past will always be speculative and without regularity.