Culture vs Nature
Culture is a manmade recreation of nature, the imaginative reenactment of the systems and the mysteries of nature and the body. The model is Mother Nature. The model for ‘romantic love’ is the mother’s natural selfless love; a love so primordial that it feels as strong as species’ need for survival. The rites of mating intimacy that we enact and that culminate in marriage are modeled on that love but enacted in culture (law).
We ‘feel’ the difference. ‘Feel’ is nature. ‘Know’ is culture. What we don’t quite know except in generalities, metaphors, estimates, and abstract calculations is nature.
Culture claims to be objective because Nature is subjective. Nature will always slightly disprove science’s airtight theories because science draws generalized conclusions based on nature, just as I am doing here, and nature is not airtight. Nature is process. If nature’s raison d’être is random optimal perpetuation, then the patriarchal culture’s has been domination of that process; and the newborn baby is its Holy Grail.
Love time isn’t ticking and quantifiable. Eros time can’t be measured and compared. Sex, lust, desire, family bond is nature.
Language, including love language, is culture. Romance is culture. Humans have lost awareness of what our natural marriage and natural family bonds are after five to six thousand years of living in a patriarchal society. Mating language is instinct-driven. But by this stage in our cultural evolution, our behavioral, verbal, and cognizant models have wiped out the mating rituals inherent in us.
Culture favors control of instincts and especially of our sexual instincts. We learn how to mate by watching models, by generational coding, by practicing, responding, reacting, repeating cultural codes. Culture favors addiction because it’s predictable. Addiction likes drama, since drama is life without the dull parts. The dull parts are the resetting periods, like sleep and rest.
Giving birth reenacts dying. It feels like we are dying. Birth is the fear of death. The first fear/death is the fear/death of losing the mother. The first love is the love of and for the mother. The unnatural separation from mother (kidnapping and abduction having been the most common socialization indoctrination method) is the first experience of our culture’s power to legislate our death; its control over our eventual death.
The knowledge that we are mortal, which we say makes us distinctly human, is the consciousness of giving birth. When the female gives birth, she lives on the cusp between life and death. That is where our knowledge of death comes from, where the odds of life and death are even and also worth the risk.
All other risk is culture (i.e., speculation).
Sex, love, and intimacy can’t be monetized. That’s the shortcut to distinguish between true love and all other love. True love is mother’s love. Mother’s love is unconditional in a unique way: the mother values the child more than herself; it is a choice she makes during birth and, once made, a choice she makes many times over. All other love is conditional love. Love contains envy and desire all in one. Fear and love are one instinct.
Culture can’t be freed of nature. Every human life happens in the push & pull between nature and culture. When the balance between culture and nature is off, when humans lean too much in the direction of culture or nature, humanity is imbalanced. This presents as a mass social left/right brain imbalance, a feminine/masculine imbalance, economic accounting imbalance, and so on. In the 21st century, humanity has to regain its social balance in order to survive.
“Fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move upon the earth,” said Genesis.
“Nature has made all things specifically for the sake of man,” said Aristotle.
The patriarchy is the Genesis of human exceptionalism. Its domination mandate infuses our habits and our norms, our rhetoric and our regimes. We treat nature not as who we are, but as who we must control and then use. For the past five millennia we have embraced that ancient hubris.
We say pork and beef rather than pigs and cow, timber rather than tree, plant instead of flora, beast instead of fauna. In this way we devalue who we are. We devalue our natural instincts and abilities and overvalue our culture-making abilities. In order to actually do this, we are taught at the earliest possible age; at the onset of our socialization with our initiation into our community and communication to split ourselves into body and mind — a separation that’s not real but that we feel as real since it’s a prerequisite for our learning how to think and act and relate and assume identity.
The patriarchy cannot function without this split. The patriarchy in this way replicates (copies and studies) the original splitting between woman and womb.
The original sin is this original split. It is universal in human culture, though not in human nature. It is not acquired through the experience of birth but of identity. It is the symbolic act of baptism, of society giving a new human their social identity, that marks their human experience of self as split and therefore as ‘sinful’ since one side of the split fights against the other, back and forth, for the rest of this new person’s life. The original split is symbolically inherited from Adam’s splitting from Eve in the Fall from Eden.
The Garden (Eden) was when humanity was ‘pure’ and what I call the patriarchy is when humanity is ‘corrupted by ego’.
The Fall is caused not by their or her eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or by Pandora’s opening the forbidden box. The Birth as a Fall into Consciousness is caused by the cultural emergence of a God, a patriarch father figure, who gets to make the rules for them, the rules that they must obey; and his inherent right for making the rules is that he made them, and therefore they belong to him. God made them like mothers (aided briefly by fathers) make babies, but God’s making of them was said to predate nature and therefore trump the rights of nature to claim to make the natural rules of who we are as we are born wholesome. The only way to understand this in terms of nature and culture is that God (as we know God) exists only when we have enough culture and maybe language to describe God.
Archaeologists tell us that the earliest gods were anthropomorphized forces and functions of nature — forces to which we gave names in order to begin to define and thereby mentally confine their forces. It took us millions of years to begin to deify Nature and millions more to anthropomorphize Nature — to recast our cultural ideas/constructs of Nature in our image. By the time we could enforce our definitions of what gods were and how they functioned and had come up with names for them, we had already broken up our consciousness into body and mind, or nature and culture, with the purpose of using mind and culture to colonize and organize and ultimately better control Nature.
From then on, we have lived in various degrees of self-contention and with the direct effect of anxiety or insecurity, a natural split or gap or fall or lack or loss we instinctively recognize. We try to fill that split or gap or fall or lack or loss from nature with cultural content and value. Those of us who don’t experience childbirth experience it more dramatically. So, they tend to focus on culture, on creating further content to fill up or mend or numb or blanket the split.
