Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Alliance for Mystical Pragmatics

Harmonizing Evolutionary Convergence

Glossary Menus

cultural conditioning

When we are babies and infants, we humans are totally dependent on our parents for nourishment and nurturing, in a process that the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits called enculturation in Man and his Works: The Science of Cultural Anthropology in 1948.

This is distinct from acculturation, the title of a book he wrote ten years earlier, which the OED defines as ‘the adoption and assimilation of an alien culture’, from 1880, and Websters defined in 1928 as ‘the approximation of one human race or tribe to another in culture or arts by contact’.

Herskovits also made a clear distinction between enculturation and socialization. First, socialization is the process by which individuals are integrated into society, defined as an ‘organized aggregate of individuals who follow a given way of life’. In this respect, human societies have much in common with the way that other animals arrange themselves in social structures.

In contrast, enculturation is uniquely anthropological in that humans adapt to the cultures that they are born in through learned unconscious and conscious conditioning. Indeed, as John Bowlby says in his monumental trilogy Attachment and Loss, bonding with our mothers as infants, or another primary caregiver, is essential for the development of healthy human relationships later in life.

However, this process of mechanistic enculturation does not end with the close of infancy. It continues through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood until the death of the body, inhibiting, by its very nature, innovation and novelty.

Therein lies the central dilemma facing humanity today. The pace of some fourteen billion years of evolution is currently changing at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration. But because of our cultural conditioning, scientists tend to look at change mechanistically, not acknowledging the vital role that Life plays in creativity. It is thus only possible to answer the most critical unanswered questions in science when we are free of such restrictions on our learning.

Yes, there are many subcultures in the second tier of the spectrum of consciousness, but, in general, they are still constrained by the financial, religious, and scientific structures of the first tier. And from a social perspective, there are few who are yet willing to sacrifice everything, including relationships with family, friends, and other associates, in the pursuit of transcultural Wholeness.

The overall effect of enculturation is that it obscures our True Nature as humans, trapping us in what William Blake aptly called our ‘mind-forg’d manacles’. For, as he also wrote in Jerusalem, “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.”

Yet, it is our deluded reasoning, inherited through dozens of generations, that has led human society into the chaos it is in today. So, to bring universal order to the world, we need to create a system of thought that is free, as much as possible, of our cultural conditioning.

Vimala Thakar showed us the way forward from her conversations with J. Krishnamurti in her thirties, saying in 1961, when she was forty, “Everything that has been transmitted to our mind through centuries will have to be completely discarded. We will have to deal with it in a total way. I have dealt with it. It has dropped away. I have discarded it.”

Then in 1984, also much inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, Vimala wrote in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach, “In a time when the survival of the human race is in question, continuing with the status quo is to cooperate with insanity, to contribute to chaos.” As conservatism is extremely dangerous at these rapidly changing times, she therefore asks, “Do we have the vitality to go beyond narrow, one-sided views of human life and to open ourselves to totality, wholeness?” For, as she says, “The call of the hour is to move beyond the fragmentary, to awaken to total revolution.”

But because people tend to gather in ‘like-minded’ cliques or coteries, it is not enough for a few isolated individuals to break free of thousands of years of cultural conditioning. If such an apocalyptic awakening is to happen in the collective, it has to do so en masse, as many millions move from the second tier in the spectrum of consciousness into the third tier, free of attachment to money.

Etymology

The verb condition ‘to make conditions, stipulate’ is from 1495, from condicioun ‘particular mode of being of a person or thing’, before 1333, from Old French condicion ‘stipulation; state; behaviour; social status’, from Medieval Latin conditiōnem (nominative conditiō, condiciō) ‘agreement; stipulation; the external position, situation, rank, place, circumstances’, from Latin condicere ‘to speak with, talk together, make arrangement with, agree upon; fix, appoint, settle’, from com ‘together’, from PIE base *kom-, and dicere ‘to speak’, from PIE base *deik- ‘to show’.

The psychocultural, psychosocial meaning ‘to teach or accustom a person (or animal) to certain habits or responses’ is from 1909.

See also culture.

Common ancestor(s):