Anyone who experiments is a scientist, but the destiny of science is to experiment with human culture, for as yet no culture exists which has been properly designed, tested and evaluated, and so it’s no surprise that cultures continue to fail their people, or at least perform sub-optimally.
I am dreaming of the age of cultural science and cultural research and development. I am dreaming of the day when people stand up and say, “Okay, I can be honest. My culture, religion, political party, tradition–whatever, isn’t perfect. So, this year I’m going to try something different, and if the new culture does not satisfy all our reasonable expectations of a culture (i.e. is it sustainable environmentally and politically, and does it foster the highest possible mental and physical health?) I will try something else again, until I discover or formulate the best possible culture.”
While this envisions a responsible and necessary application of the scientific method, let’s be serious: no one has ever lived this way, and I doubt anyone can.
Besides, cultural scientists cannot be part of their own experiments and expect to be objective evaluators. We cannot extricate ourselves from one culture and enter or experiment with another as if we were uncontaminated subjects. Moreover, any persons attempting to adapt to a superior culture will experience difficulties, even if they desire to adapt to it. For while superior cultures can produce greater health and happiness, they can only do so by first destroying the spirit or personality created by the inferior culture, and such destruction can easily produce negative, subjective evaluations, withdrawal symptoms and decisions to abort.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, a less formal and usually less conscious approach to cultural experimentation is normal. Cultures are constantly evolving, however blindly, and people too, however little. Experimentation occurs wherever anyone tries to do something different. I am not excluding such apparently trivial experiments as a person’s first attempt to wear red instead of black. While such behavioral changes may be upsetting and even traumatic (don’t laugh), they remain very minor experiments. More serious experiments would include religious conversions and immigration.
The true and necessary scientific spirit is lacking wherever people do not consciously experiment with their cultural identity, and simply slide along the blind and bloody historical slope of cultural evolution. Too often people expect Heaven when they have only taken a baby step forwards, not even upwards, and often enough downwards.
Now the question arises: who on Earth has time enough to experiment with all the possible manifestations and permutations of human culture in order to discover the best possible version? A thousand life times might not be long enough. Fortunately humans can recognize patterns, which helps us eliminate entire ranges of cultural expression on the basis of a few examples. To illustrate: if a few capitalist cultures share the habit of creating economic injustice, we can assume that such injustice is a necessary expression of capitalist cultures, and then all possible expressions of capitalism can be eliminated.
The law of patterns also applies to individual parts of a culture. Thus, although some cultures are somewhat heterogeneous, they are generally homogeneous, and therefore if one part is corrupt all the parts will be corrupt. For example: modern cultures practice monoculture in the area agriculture, monogamy in the area of reproduction, monotheism in the area of morality, and in the area of education they are mono-pros and one-trick specialists. As we erase entire forests to plant soya, so we erase the fertile world of the child and hand it over to an education system that requires increasing specialization, until the students focuses entirely on one subject and becomes a specialist. Students will need the chemical fertilizers, I mean pharmaceuticals, as the soil becomes increasingly depleted of nutrients, and we call this their Attention Deficit Disorder.
The positive result of our specialization is that this mania has allowed experimental specialists seeking revolutionary developments to develop improved cultural expressions in their respective fields. And then, whenever one specialist succeeds in improving one aspect of culture, the rule of one-part-like-another can be used to extrapolate desirable principles from that part, and the principles can then be used to generate improvements to other parts of culture (I refer the reader to my Little Country Handbook). For example, if we discover a highly sustainable form of agriculture, its core principles should be applied to architecture/rural planning, education, aesthetics and social planning. This technique may sound strange, as one would think agriculture has nothing in common with other parts of culture, but as I’ve just shown, the opposite is true.
Now this monomaniacal culture is crumbling, and as our leaders speak of bricks and banks, I ask them, where are our cultural leaders?–our cultural scientists and engineers? Political and economic structures can repress experimentation, growth and evolution, but they inevitably end in disaster, as does any attempt to keep a child from growing up. The more I examine the historical evidence the more I see that all past and present cultures are non-sustainable evolutionary stages on the road to a sustainable culture. In fact, despite the overwhelming signs of sickness, I dare say sickness is good insofar as it heralds and demands the end of an evolutionary stage. Besides, pockets of progress exist, even progress beyond modernity, progress fueled by strong characters living apart from the masses, in private laboratories.
