Thursday, October 4, 2012

Human Culture – An outlook!


All the fauna only become distinct individuals through the process called learning. This could be said because if one animal learns something, the adaptation of perception will be unique and restricted to the individual, which means, the learning is not passed on to its fellow mates thereby completely annihilating the opportunity for a research and enhancement. There may be substantial physical or biological changes over time. But the flowering of a new phenomenon called “Culture” was not achievable in animals.

What about man? He is an animal too. The Sixth Sense is the Factor X, the magic ingredient of culture—the aspect that took humans out of the common run of animals and other highly social organisms.

Sixth sense gave learning; learning gave self-awareness and that awareness stood as the first step towards the blossoming of culture. But there never was a universal culture. It was diversified over the geographical expanse.
Cultural Evolution is the fruition of ideas, knowledge, morals, minds and technology within a society. All things grow with time and must be primarily understood by their record, their evolution.

As far as humans are concerned, we cannot deny the fact that Biological and Cultural processes have evolved together interdependently, which by now has been fused with human survival doubtful without such cultural products’ abet as clothing, cooked food and proper sheltering.

What after these three basic needs? There came the new term “Society”!
Society crafted laws and conventions to prevent us from following our natural inclination of self-preservation and survival of the fittest.  Inter human competition for the basic needs were diluted. This made human survival and progress possible in an effective conduct.
On learning, our grand fathers passed on their knowledge to their near and dear ones. Which evolved with days and now we have a more civilized way of living. As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”. By, doing things we learned repeatedly, we are now progressing towards excellence!

2 comments:

Ragavendran Ramalingam said...

A few questions:
1. By learning, did u mean reasoning as well? isnt self-awareness more dependant on reasoning to be specific? i felt the use of 'learning' too generic.
2. Dont animals communicate with each other?
3. To me biological process is respiration, digestion ...etc but am sure u dint mean that here...so wat did u?

am sorry abt the questions if they dont make sense, but i guess bcoz your write up is too good for me to comprehend. Difficult vocabulary frankly...may be would help if u add examples

Kumaran D said...

1) By learning, I meant it as the first and foremost step. But what you are saying is right; I could have added reasoning as well. The thing is, I felt learning more convincing to use here.
2) Animals do communicate, but the passage of knowledge with the generations is far too less compared to Humans. The basic reason being our capability to WRITE.
3) Biological in the sense of evolution. I meant Physical changes as a sub division of Biological changes.
My basic theme is Darwin’s theory. My point is, Darwin’s theory fails in case of Humans (sense 1) and does not fail (sense2) as well. I have tried to explain why, in this article.
Sense 1 – Survival of the fittest. A human does not fight with another Human for food because of the evolution of Society, basically Culture.
Sense 2 – Survival of the fittest. We have evolved from monkeys, if Science were to be correct.
The more the questions are asked, the more i understand my own work!