Culture and Reason

Ukrainian man pesters wife for sex
while she is vacuuming,
she strangles him with cord.

A judge has just ruled that the policy of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is unconstitutional and “defies logic.” In her 64 page ruling she apparently just about destroys any arguments to the contrary. She is also going to issue an order forbidding the military from employing DADT. I don’t know if her decision will stand up to scrutiny or not, but there is every reason to suppose that it very likely will.

This follows a similar ruling not long ago by another judge that virtually destroyed any rationale against Gay marriage. This ruling was also said to be do definitive it is doubtful that it will even be appealed or challenged. It is clear that both of these rulings are pretty definitive and indicate that there is no basis in either reason or logic for a ban on Gay marriage or the policy of DODT.

What I find most interesting about this is that neither reason nor logic has changed in the past few years. So the question arises, if neither reason nor logic has changed, why were these rules against Gay marriage or Gays in the military established in the first place? They must have been just as unreasonable and illogical then as they are now.

These cases illustrate a basic truth about culture, cultural practices are not established on the basis of reason or logic, cultural prescriptions and proscription just are. If you ask people in the New Guinea Highlands, for example, why they do certain things (that seemingly make no sense at all) they predictably reply, “em fasin b’long tumbuna” (that’s what our ancestors did). More often than not they do not have any explanation for what they do, and what they do often defies logic. For example, they will not eat chickens, because they say chickens eat feces, but if you point out to them that pigs also eat feces, and they eagerly eat pigs, the just shrug. This does not mean they are just a bunch of simple “savages” who don’t really understand what they are doing. All cultures operate in much the same way. There are seldom any logical reasons why members of any given culture do the things they do, and often it is impossible to ascertain any reasons, either explicit or implicit why they do them. Thus we find sacred cattle in India, a taboo on pork in the Middle East, a failure to eat dog or horse meat in the United States, and so on and so forth. We also find extremely painful initiation rites, the excision of teeth, subincision, circumcision, cliterodectomy, and similar rites that make no sense whatsoever other than being perhaps religious in nature.

What this means is that human beings live lives of unreason and illogic, even though we are supposedly uniquely endowed with the ability to reason and apply logic to our lives. Surely it defies all reason and logic for the inhabitants of Easter Island to have cut down all the trees that once grew there, and for parts of Italy to have done the same thing. It is not logical or reasonable that we here in the United States have destroyed some of our salmon runs, the Passenger Pigeons, and almost the buffalo. You might say it also violates reason and logic to continue deep-water offshore drilling or building more nuclear energy plants. And it certainly defies reason and logic to ignore the dangerous threat of global warming.

So why do we do such stupid things? In many cases it is fairly obvious, greed, short-term profits come readily to mind. In other cases it has to do with completely irrational religious or other beliefs. Beliefs that completely defy logic or reason are the backbone of religions. They must be taken on faith alone. And most of them are completely bizarre, even far-fetched, but still believed. Even though humans are presumably endowed with reason they more often than not do not follow the dictates of reason. Currently, for example, it is absurd to be upset because Muslims want to build a community center near ground zero, just as it is absurd to believe that Muslims in general are our enemies. It is equally absurd to believe that Obama was born in Kenya or is a Muslim or a socialist. But large numbers of U.S. citizens seem to believe this nonsense.

Sometimes it is possible to understand irrational beliefs if you understand the underlying premises (which themselves don’t have to make much sense). For example, one day my interpreter in New Guinea announced that white women don’t menstruate. I said, of course, why do you think that? He replied, “No man would sleep with a menstruating woman, white men sleep with their wives, they must no menstruate.” Now that is a perfectly logical explanation, if you accept the premise. But where did that premise come from? Who knows, somewhere lost in antiquity. Such is life among human beings, we live lives of unreason while at the same time deluding ourselves that we know what we are doing. When I was younger and studying anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, and such, I believed that it might be possible to understand human behavior. Now I know better. We will no doubt continue struggling on for a time, but as our behavior seems to be increasingly divorced from reality as well as unreasonable and illogical, the future of our species seems doubtful.

LKBIQ:
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery

TILT:
The feral horse of Australia is called a brumby.