Page 36 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURE OF THE MIND

can be described in context as ‘timely’, ‘too early’, or ‘too late’. The time
factor in each current of activity also correlates with each dominant motive
in the stream of activities: interpersonal culture is present-oriented for the
belonging; economic-technical culture is future-oriented for the motive
of achievement; and political-social culture is past-oriented for the motive of
power (Triad II).
Third, the union between the individual and the cultural community is
formed on the emotional charge of what has been called primordial sentiments
toward language, territory (region), traditions (customs), religion, ethnicity, and
race. The six primordial sentiments refer to emotions in interpersonal life that
help create the social organization of culture. The social side of a primordial
sentiment points to the functions of sentiments in society. Principles and issues
integrated in the primordial sentiments invigorate emotions of belonging, of
ethics, and of loyalty surrounding the communal group. Emotions associated
with primordial sentiments thus provide the vital affective bonds for the social
organization of culture (Triad III).
The trilogy’s three dimensions offer a broad and strong de finition of culture
in which the content of civilization, the ideals and values of humanism, and the
norms of human nature are theorized to derive from culture, not the reverse,
and not in any other causal configuration. A paradigm of culture must include
parameters that account for the psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and
history of human beings. The trilogy constitutes just such a foundation. It is
designed to replace folk ideas about human nature in order to establish a base
for constraints on culture as meaning. The cultural trilogy is founded on a
neurophysiological template of the brain. 3

The importance of basic emotions

Beginning with the discussion of the emergence of modern man in the open-
ing paragraphs of this chapter, I have been concerned to express the import-
ance of emotion in human nature and culture. Development of the modern
view of emotions can be said to begin with the publication of Charles
Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872/1998). Dar-
win described how fundamental emotions find expression in the overt
behavior of human and lower animals in simple forms such as fear and anger.
But Darwin’s materialistic ideas were too controversial for psychologists and
philosophers intent on describing human nature as rational, constructive,
benevolent, even sublime. William James turned conventional wisdom upside
down in 1884, however, when he published the celebrated paper, ‘What is an
emotion?’. James’s answer to the question insisted that facial expressions and
visceral reactions, previously thought to be the result of an emotional experi-
ence, were instead the emotion itself in the form of perceptual responses to
changes in the physical body. The physiological nature of emotion was argued
to include processes such as faster heartbeat and breathing, and excitement

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