Page 28 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

walls were usually armed and in pursuit of animals, fighting one another, or
dancing.
The images’ vivid quality reveals the sacred nature and magical power of the
great predators. Emotion and danger permeate the symbolic atmosphere repre-
sented in the caves. The images seem to portray the animals from the inside –
displaying their primal power – rather than from the outside, as the predator or
prey would appear in real life. In contrast to the vivid and realistic depiction of
animals, human forms often take a simpler form. They appear as stick figures
such as hunters, warriors, and shamans.
The universal rites of blood letting and the killing of animals as sacrifices
were part of the rituals of magic that were invented to gain power over animals.
Complex religious beliefs aimed at pain, fear, anger, and the need for power
clearly underlie the content and distribution of cave art.
Cave art offers evidence of warfare in the Paleolithic period too. From a
cave in Spain, for example, archers fight archers with each one depicted as a
kinetic stick figure. The stick limbs of all archers are lengthened, because in the
act of running they feel long. The stylization works; the figures are dynamic.
From the right side, three archers on the run close in on a single archer who is
dashing towards them from the left side. A second archer runs behind from the
left to support the forward archer threatened by encirclement. At a greater
distance, three other supporting archers run toward the central fracas from the
left side.

The politics of cultural relativism
Edward O. Wilson attributes the low explanatory power of the social sciences
to the fact that social scientists spurn the idea of the hierarchical ordering
of knowledge that unites and drives the natural sciences. He insists that a sci-
ence can be valid only with ‘consilience’, the interlocking of causal explan-
ations across disciplines. Physiological psychology founded on biology, for
example, has taken huge strides in its knowledge base primarily because it has
begun to interlock causal explanations at the molecular, cellular, and organic
levels of the organism. The natural sciences have constructed a network of
causal explanation that begins with quantum physics and extends to the
brain sciences. They have also examined deep origins which, in the case
of physiological psychology, are isolated in evolutionary biology (Wilson
1998: 125).
The explanatory network now reaches the edge of culture, where it enters
and engenders a state of confusion. The anthropologist Franz Boas, aided by his
famous students Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, led a crusade against the
threat of eugenics and racism many people believe to be implicit in Social
Darwinism. ‘With caution swept aside by moral zeal’, they created the new
ideology of cultural relativism, believing that all cultures are equal but in
different ways. This position supports the politics of multiculturalism in the

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