Page 48 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

RETHINKING THE FOUNDATIONS OF CULTURE

Rousseau’s political theory, therefore, upheld that society is a pact, a conven-
tion born from other conventions. Social life is built to deny nature, covering it
with a dense net of contractual knots. On the other hand, to define social life as
interconnected conventions also means to understand it as an exercise of free-
dom and will. This is another trait, separating nature from culture. Culture is
related to collective and general representations, product of a social will; it is,
therefore, the realm of freedom; while nature is repetitive, cyclical, the product
of an unchanging order, the eternal expression of the same.

Beyond Rousseau, with Darwin

Historically, Rousseau’s thought helped establish the current consensus that
freedom is the central mechanism of civil societies. But such commendable
achievement is based on a flawed assumption on Rousseau’s part. His claim that
nature is the domain of necessity is a mistake, unsupported by modern biology.
The natural world is not fixed nor permanent and it does not follow a prior
plan or a purpose set before the unfolding of natural events. Nature is under
relentless change and evolution.
After the avalanche of Darwinian arguments, it is impossible to accept that
nature is opposed to another realm of life, reserved and essential to human
beings. Darwin’s revolutionary understanding of biological processes leads to
the recognition that in life ‘all past and present organic beings constitute one
grand natural system, with group subordinate to group, and with extinct groups
falling in between recent groups’ (Darwin 1979: 450). Darwin’s understanding
of nature must be considered a radical departure from Rousseau’s apprehension
of natural life.
One of the reasons why the metaphysical postulate separating mind and
matter remains admissible for so many people is the massive presence in our
culture of an essentialist theoretical vocabulary that has been faithfully kept by
philosophy, theology, and physics.
Moreover, the illusions of the essentialist tradition seem to be constantly
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confirmed by how Indo-European languages structure phrases around a sub-
ject that functions like a substratum. The grammatical subjects are isolated and
separate unities, under which the predicates of the sentence are gathered. The
subjects suggest essences, while the predicates would be accidental attributes. 6
The subject apple is qualified by variable and non-essential attributes such as
green, sweet, round, etc. We talk like that all the time, and end up believing that
there is a variety of permanent essences or kinds in the natural world. There
should be as many essences as there are names functioning as subject of sen-
tences, and, because God created the things of this world granting them names,
each isolated name must indicate a separate set of beings, a species.
In 1831, when boarding the H.M.S. Beagle for a trip that would take him
during the next five years to South America, Darwin, like all British naturalists,
embraced the notion that species were created one by one, and that they were

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