Page 39 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

EDWARD C. STEWART

Since then changes in human nature have formed through cultural evolution.
The mind emerges as an organ adapted to avoid threats and to exploit
opportunities our ancestors faced hunting and foraging in the hostile environ-
ment of the glacial period. The harsh circumstances of survival created in the
human’s perceptual systems the potential to perceive animals and people with
fear, and to defend the self and allies with an algorithm of aggression based on
anger and on predator–prey relationships. In responding to external events,
human perception developed a doubled-coded process of sensation and emo-
tion that forms in perception and cognition. All of this makes ‘reality’ an intui-
tive, implicit feeling beyond the reach of reason, a process that is coded in
language and the senses. In order to decode the complex processes of the mind,
it is necessary to map the structures and operations of culture. The Cultural
Trilogy presented here is one such approach to mapping nuclear culture as
innate human nature.

Appendix 1.1: The twelve parameters of the
Cultural Trilogy

Triad I: Individual analysis of behavior

1 Surface culture: Content is observable behavior (speech, facial expressions,
gestures, actions, etc.), artifacts (foods, dress, architecture, farmland, etc.);
psychology is external perception, contextualized in time, place, and
conditions of experience.
2 Deep culture: Content is cognition, emotions (thinking, values, systems of
knowledge); psychology is internal perception in the absolute and universal
time and space of the body.
3 Procedural culture: Content is performance and communication; agent
in interaction is in pursuit of goals in context (pattern of managing
self–others, decision-making, counseling, conflict resolution, modes of
production, etc.); psychology is synthesis of surface and deep culture.

Triad II: Time-factored activities in social environments

4 Interpersonal culture: Activities of interior life pursued with family and
others known face-to-face to satisfy physiological, security, and belonging
needs; time-factored in cyclic present.
5 Economic-technical culture: Activities of work life pursued with others as
experts to satisfy achievement need; time-factored in near future in linear
form of time.
6 Political-social culture: Activities of public life pursued to satisfy power
need; competition between civil and cultural time-factored identity formed
in time-factored episodic past.

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