• Cultural Narcissism, "the selfish culture"
  
• Culture-Civilisation

• Definition
• Thesis
• The Technical Trait
• Cooperation
• Allelopathy
• Civilising influence: Teleonomic Selection

• Stress and Cooperation
• Cooperation Dynamics
• Maximal-Stress-Cooperation
• Theatre of War
• Hooligans
• Local Rules plus Global Energy Flow
• Civilising influence: MSC-prevention

• Decorum
• Instinctive Architecture
• Decorum and Language
• Decorum and Gesture
• Genetics and Images The Invisible image
• 1. Formal Genetics: the Ikon
• 2. Molecular Genetics: History Painting
• 3. Genetic Algorithm: Artificial Art
• Decorum and Music
• Decorum and Political Thought
• - A Viability Theory
• Civilising influence: Unheroic decorum, the aesthetics of abstinence

• The "philosophical" message of Mathematics
• Population Mathematics
• Civilising influence: The return of the
• enslavement effect

• "Baldwin-Effect", aim reduction, shielding
• Dutch Painting
• Vienna school of Classical Music
• Philosophical Aesthetics
• Aesthetical Culture
• The Berlin Effect
• Fascism
• Civilising influence: "Alteration of aims",
• "exposure"

• "contrat naturel":"the altruistic culture"

Recipes are instantly recognizable cultural characteristics. Some recipes have a biological and genetic dimension. Thus the use of milk in nutrition is only possible where the members of a given cultural population are able to digest lactose, something that is not true for all peoples.

Cultural characteristics, not only recipes, can be expressed as rules. Those observers interested in algorithmic structures will prick up their ears at this. The cultural characteristic "the use of fire" can be described by the relevant instructions for use; the wearing of clothes by means of methods of production, mode of wear and fashion. The use of numbers can be described by mathematical injunctions.

Religions also belong to the characteristics which differ between cultures and can be represented by means of systems of rules of course, too. In the Balkans, Catholics, Greek-Orthodox and Muslims can be found in Northern Ireland Protestants and Catholics. Religions offer members of a culture more than just the ability to differ and remain separate. They enable people to believe in their own special position within the universe. In this way metaphysically based self-estimation arises. The people become convinced that they enjoy a special status in nature and have direct access to the Gods.

In many exotic cultures the demons, spirits and gods are approached by means of rituals involving trance, whereby drugs may be used to strengthen the effects. The headhunters of Luzon in the Philippines, after having suffered great loss, attack a member of another tribe, take his head and hurl it away in anger. They imagine themselves then to be at harmony with the gods.

The gods of advanced cultures are warrior gods. Their people have been chosen by them and the gods lead the armies of their chosen people to victory. It is not the soldiers and their generals who are victorious. It is the gods. In Homer's epics the gods join in the battle. The gods of the Assyrians and Babylonians were bloodthirsty warlords. Although for the Romans imperium meant command over the armies, the primary and real meaning was: charismatic power bestowed by the gods thus enabling the army to be led to victory.

Members of western culture long believed that the earth they inhabited had to be the centre of the universe. They believed this because they thought God would never allow it that they who had been created in his image would have to live on the edge of the universe. Copernicus set his contemporaries right. Anthropologists today talk of the Copernican humiliation. It was Sigmund Freud who introduced this term. In his writings "Die Zukunft einer Illusion" (1927) (The Future of an Illusion) and "Zur Gewinnung des Feuers" (1932) (The Discovery of Fire), he talks of narcissistic humiliations passed on to the individual by culture and nature. For example, according to Freud, in order to cling to his narcissitic condition th individual attempts to compensate for the humiliation experienced through nature's inexorability by means of a mythological culturisation of nature. He spoke of three narcissistic humiliations (Kr”nkungen), of which the first was the Copernican humiliation. When one applies Freud's term, as do the anthropologists, to the Copernican epoch, then it is the pain mean on realizing that one lives on a provincial planet, in an insignificant solar system, somewhere in a not particularly big galaxy in part of a galactic cluster which in its turn is only one of countless galactic clusters.

The Copernican humiliation is not the only one. More were to follow. Mankind was again to surrender the immediate certainty that it enjoyed an exhaulted position several times. Each time it was forced to redefine its own role within the development of nature. Ten or twelve humiliations have been listed up to now by anthropologists. After the Copernican came the Darwinian which was about the special status among living organisms. Darwin claimed that our origins go back to the evolution of the primates and that evolution is spurred on by mutation and selection.

Through the geological humiliation we learn that the earth is much older than the creation myths the religions claim and that its age surpasses our historical powers of imagination. Stephen Jay Gould talks of the experience of "Profound Time".

The Freudian humiliation, arising from psychoanalyses, brought about a new conception of the human soul.

Splitting the atom in physics was yet another humiliation and brought with it ghastly visions of the total destruction of mankind by means of a single weapon. Einstein's theoretically intended equation for matter and energy has become a component of material culture by means of the bomb. Einstein's restrained and general theories of relativity have been considered up to now exemplary in scientific theory. Their validity is not questioned by physicists. But even for the theory of relativity humiliation may be close at hand, as the experiments, supposedly proving the special theory of relativity, the measurements of the speed of light by Michelson and Morley in 1887, were not conducted correctly. Only three of the six stipulations were fulfilled. In the 1920's Miller, a former colleague of Michelson, cast doubt on the uniform dispersion of light in all directions. He fulfilled all six conditions in his own experiments (Collins and Pinch, 1993).

Quantum mechanics shifted reality away from our imaginative abilities as far as smallness in nature is concerned. This is also a humiliation. Time and space melt away to a certain extent. Astrophysics maintains that the universe is expanding. If we accept this supposition and then ask ourselves: where and in which direction is this expansion taking place, we must see with some disappointment that this question is then senseless.

Another humiliation goes back to ecology. This made producing peoples of the industrial age realize to their disappointment that the earth does not have unlimited resources at its disposal and unlimited space for waste products.

The humiliation of artificial intelligence gives rise to the suspicion that machines can think and once they have learnt to move freely over the surface of the planet can even have feelings.

An especially painful humiliation has its roots in genetics. This will cause great disappointment among people engaged in politics who are fighting for social justice. For them equality of all people is a philosophical conviction which has axiomatic significance in their political deeds. Geneticists contradict them, they claim that people are not equal due to their biological inheritance. Furthermore, members of religions who want to cling to a creation myth are expected to come to terms with the fact that by means of gene technology living organisms can be altered genetically.

There is another painful experience which one could call "philosophical genetics". In this case we are dealing with the emotional agitation aroused when we as rational, phenotypic individuals, which use symbols for their cognition, learn how genetic systems learn. Interdisciplinary research by information scientists and biologists has led to the development of a cognitory instrument that is called a "genetic algorithm" which functions as follows: Instead of a well thought out computer program, completely random, chains of binary numbers are produced. They are of the same length as a well-tested program which has been written to do a specifically defined task. This task could be, for example, sorting numbers. The random chains are then assigned the program's task of "sorting 16 numbers". The chains which come closest to carrying out the task, that is by sporadically distributed random successes, are singled out. This can be, for example, the most successful 10% of the entire number of chains. These chains are then allowed to reproduce, the unsuccessful ones must "die". Reproduction of the pseudograms selected is carried out sexually. In simple terms this means that the chains are not simply doubled but half one chain is combined with a half from another successful chain. As only 10 percent of the chains are allowed to reproduce, all successful chains are recombined ten times in order to attain the previous population density. Then they are confronted with the same task which the first generation was assigned: sorting 16 numbers. Afterwards the most successful 10 percent couple and reproduce as in the procedure already described. What is sensational in this procedure is that the pseudograms improve from generation to generation until they can finally take over the function of a first class written program.

In 1962 two information scientists showed an algorithm in a publication which they described as the best possible. It sorted 16 numbers in 65 steps.In 1965 another programmer published a sorting algorithm which managed it in 63 steps. In 1969 a program was developed which only required 62. Finally there was a program with only 60 steps (Knuth, 1973). The sorting program generated by a genetic algorithm required 65 steps for the work. That was all the same a good result (Levy, 1993).

While making note of this success we suddenly become aware of the fact that genetic self-organization can produce a system which is equal to one created by a rational individual. We are forced to realize also that the thinking, phenotypic individual, in this case the programmer, solves a problem by manipulating symbols. Symbols have extratemporal validity. Their significance applies only to a partial aspect of a natural object changing in the flow of time. But the significance, once it is there, is not subject to any temporal changes anymore. A Platonic reality of essences arises or in religious terms a doctrine of eternity appears. The genetic learning system on the other hand approaches its goal with the aid of death because the time steps, in which the genetically evolving system progresses, are the steps from one generation to the next.

The genetic learning system learns aided by death. The human individual, phenotypic, rational learning system learns with the help of symbols. Symbols abstract from temporal changes of the objects to which they relate. Mankind also depicts itself with the aid of symbols. It obtains in this way a picture of itself which is not subject to temporal change. The symbolic dream of eternity looks with melancholy at that which is ephemeral. Man fears death for the use of symbols enables foresight. Fear of death leads to attempts to conquer death through myths of eternity. Myths of eternity are systems of symbols which concern the whole universe. They are also the reason for metaphysical self-elevation and the belief in a special status within the universe, a characteristic prevalent in every culture and which leads to the conflicts of the humiliations.

All the same, do the humiliations bring humanistic progress for cultures? The metaphysically based self-elevation of members of a single culture makes aggressive action against other cultures possible. The chosen ones make crusades in the name of religions which consider themselves to be the only true one. Cultures, militarily superior, and which consider themselves superior in evey respect, colonize other cultures. All cultures exploit nature in an unscrupulous fashion. This applies to a certain state of consciousness which is now in our time being replaced slowly by a new consciousness.

Crusades, holy wars, nationalistic aggression, colonialism, destruction of the environment are cultural types of behaviour which are being rejected by rational, philosophical-ethical individuals today. At the same time, the rational individual is forced to admit that he cannot influence the collective agent which causes war and suppression with his ethically founded free arbitration. Cultural populations which wage wars seem to be macrostructures created by coupling which develops so-called "eigenbehaviour". Something like a cultural hypersubject seems to develop aggressive and extremely powerful dynamics. On the other hand there is the belief that through communicating of arguments individual rationality can influence the collective actions. We must ask ourselves whether this belief is not self-overestimation and thus part of the cultural self-elevation which by means of a hidden mechanism serves only to strengthen the aggressive power of the hypersubject "culture".

Philosophy is the mental discipline in which extratemporal symbols such as truth, good and beauty are offered as solutions to problems. These symbols are the products of individual rationality. However, philosophy never speaks of war. It does not speak of the aggressive, oppressing, colonizing outer limits of its own culture. For this reason one might think of using this silence regarding war as a new definition of philosophy. In that case philosophy would be a closely defined area of communication within bellicose cultures, whose system of symbols has been manipulated so as to render it impossible to relate to war. Furthermore, one could ask oneself whether it is conceivable that war and blindness to war within a bellicose system strengthen each other. And what is more, one could produce epidemiological maps of the European nations showing how strongly the various countries are influenced by autonomous philosophy and to what extent the nations have "distinguished themselves" in warfare, war crimes and ethnic murder.

In modern times the significance of the word culture as the screening-off from the temporal flow of reality by philosophy, culture refers to only a part of one's own culture whose most important trait is autonomy which is essentially influenced by philosophy, aesthetics and the human sciences. In this autonomous field a fanciful image of mankind, strongly influenced by the ethical ideals of philosophy and the aesthetic ideals of autonomous art, has been nurtured since the epoch of idealistic humanism at the end of the 18th Century. In addition, even in the last phases of various modern and postmodern new artistic directions, one is convinced that the artist is autonomous and through his creativity enjoys insight which does not need further justification and which is relevant to culture. This stance is also marked by metaphysical self-esteem and internal cultural self-elevation and with such traits a potential target for further humiliations for the West.

Let us put the following thesis forward: Culture is a living system. It is, so to say, an animal, a wild animal whose behaviour cannot be directly influenced by mankind. If it were conceivable that rational people could influence this wild animal beneficially, then this form of influence would correspond to the act of domestication. We would have to tame culture. But as we ourselves are to some degree this culture, we would have to tame ourselves. We would have to expect man to domesticate himself. To represent culture and thereby ourselves, with all our profound and beloved cultural heritage such as music, literature, philosophy, good, truth and beauty, as something that first has to be domesticated comes close to being a humiliation. Would this humiliation lead to any humanistic progress? Domestication was in the past an important step on the long road to hominisation. According to anthrophologists and prehistorians women in the Late Stone Age invented domestication. Women who had lost their children after birth found abandoned wolf cubs in the forest. They were touched by the helplessness and beauty of these baby animals. They were no different from the people of today. They are always delighted in seeing a puppy or a kitten. The women picked up the wolf cubs and stroked them. The wolves licked their hands. As the women had sufficient milk in the breasts after the birth of their own children which had died, they suckled the abandoned cubs in the impulse of extraspecific charity. And that is the way it must have been. The women had to suckle the wolf cubs themselves in order to raise them because the dog resulting from the domestication of the wolf was the first domestic animal. There were at the time no milk donors such as goats or cows. And there was no potter's wheel to make vessels to store liquids or drink from.

It must have been women with their especially physiological aptitude for childcare who invented domestication. They discovered by means of imprinting and breeding that they could transform the animals. They discovered that wolves, like all other canids, can be imprinted to a high degree. When a canine puppy during the critical time of imprinting - this also applies to today's wolves - comes upon a person it will follow him. That is what the starving wolf cubs of the Late Stone Age did when they were saved. They became as faithful as real dogs.

The second important aspect of domestication is breeding. It is with breeding that we find ourselves in the middle of the field of genetics. By means of the human selection effect, the genes of reproducing animals are recombined from generation to generation differently as would happen in nature. And so evolution starts going in a new direction. The animals which can live best side by side with man have the best chance to transfer their genes to the next generation.

The invention of domestication was more important for cultural evolution than the invention of the steam engine. The women of the Late Stone Age were the first engineers. It has been said that later the wolves in gratitude for this, man's act of extraspecific charity, sent the Capitoline she-wolf. She is supposed to have raised Romulus and Remus, who had been abandoned to starve in the wilderness, and thus contributed to a decisives phase of the cultural evolution, the founding of Rome, which was to become the cradle of civilization.

The process of hominisation only reached a certain stage genetically. After this, the evolutionary process of hominisation took place entirely culturally. The first important steps in hominisation were as follows: the hands were freed from being a means of locomotion. This was a genetic acquisition. This was followed by the cultural result of having the hands free: right-handedness and the use of implements. Then, enabled by some amount of genetically controlled restructuring of the larynx, came the doubly articulated system of language. To this can be added the use of fire, the sowing of seeds, harvesting and domestication. The last two could be called the "domestication of plants and animals". Both were influenced by the genetic systems of other living organisms. Their success was based on the receptiveness of genetic systems to exterior influences. That means the ability of all genetic systems to learn in the framework of domestication. The proceeding phases of hominisation were always progressive for the adaptive abilities of man. They facilitated survival and reproduction. They were responsible for man's expansion over the entire earth. This so efficient proliferation finally led to overpopulation and difficulties in the process of hominisation. While progress has led to relative stability in the northern hemisphere, the rate of reproduction in the southern hemisphere is greater than the resources available in the form of food and water. Populations arise living in a kind of no-man's land between animalism and hominism. In these areas hominisation is not guaranteed. Appeals to huminisation and humanistic solidarity of all people as to be seen in western culture obscure the issue in accordance with the familiar example of cultural self-overestimation. The philosophical belief in the values of humanity enables the problem of homanity to be simply overlooked. So overcoming the humanistic self-overestimation in our own culture would be a stipulation for recognizing the difficulties of hominisation in large parts of the world. And to overcome this would represent a forward step in the hominising process in our own culture. We are implying that hominisation in one's own culture requires techniques of taming and domesticating oneself. A technique of domestication means: the alteration of genetic systems. The ability to recognize the endangered hominity in the Third World will be coupled with a long overdue hominisation step in our own culture, and this step in hominisation would correspond to a form of self-domestication, which would mean influencing genetic systems.

These considerations, in which a further step of our own hominisation is linked with the ability to understand the problems of homanity elsewhere in the world, play the terms hominity and humanity off against each other in a certain way. Humanity is even put on the same level as the religious self-overestimation and self-elevation of the cultures. Without doubt the new definition of humanism of the 18th and 19th Centuries is based on a fanciful philosophical image of man in contrast to the sceptical humanism of the Italian Renaissance. It makes statements of metaphysical origin about a general human essence. As people, according to the philosophers, possess the essence of the genus man, they have a portion of generic human essence, just as the crusaders' enemies always had a portion of Christianity as there could only be one truth. All the enemies of the crusaders had been in reality Christians and only had to be liberated. With our conviction that the people of the Third World have their portion of humanistic values merely by their being human, we overlook that many of them, in the sense of hominity, are no longer human beings after having their cultures destroyed by the effects of colonization. Philosophical humanism prevents us from taking interest in the warfaring bellicose aspect of our own culture.

In the end culture is to be domesticated, and if domestication always involves influencing genetic systems, what has culture got to do with genetics?

There are three variants of genetic systems which generate and control culture. Culture is to a certain extent an object which is described by a three-dimensional genetic phase space.

The first type of culturally relevant genetics are the well-known genetics of DNA. We could name this "meat genetics". It is that which gives us inborn beauty or ugliness, inborn red hair or black wooly hair. Curlturally relevant traits affected by genetics are for example, a larynx capable of speech, a free right hand, aggressive behaviour, stress behaviour.

The second type of genetic systems which generate culture could be termed "formal genetic". One of the most important definitions of the biological phenomenon culture is: "Culture is the only area in which ontogenetically acquired traits can be passed on." While genetics proper deals with the passing on of phylogenetically acquired traits, ie. that which is learnt genetically, in culture it is the ontogenetically learnt traits that are inherited. Ontogenetic learning is the way of learning that we all know from school or university. When, for example, a female chimpanzee notices that potatoes rinsed in salt water are especially tasty then one is dealing with a case of individual learning. When she teaches her offspring the technique of washing potatoes in seawater then we have a cultural phenomenon. An individually and ontogenetically learnt trait then becomes cultural if it is passed on to the next generation. Inheritability is therefore the prerequisite for the cultural relevance of a trait. Thus culture finds itself in formal analogy to DNA-genetics. With this a consistent means of recognition results with which cultural evolution can be described. These are the very same types of iterative equations which are made use of in population genetics:

Whereby X represents the number of genetic or cultural traits present in a population.

The third type of genetic systems to be found in culture are artificial and thus already domesticated. There we are dealing with the genetic algorithm which, like a good domestic animal, has been solving problems of optimisation for some time. This genetic algorithm generates and perfects rules. The ability to describe culture means being able to describe cultural traits and cultural traits are systems of rules. The faculty to represent cultural systems of rules by means of genetic algorithms forms this third area of culture genetics. In the form of culture genetics, this area is a potential object for cultural domestication: Natural systems of rules appear in representational units of space by means of the algorithmic ability to be represented and become accessible manipulation.

The methodic aim of the following investigation is to represent culture entirely by recoursing to genetic powers of formation. The "last certainties" of philosophy and the humanities, for example the philosophical term "sense", will not be taken into account at all!

The humiliations, which were mentioned previously, are the painful confrontation between a Utopian self-overestimation nurtured by extratemporal use of symbols with the world of natural evolution and death. Where will the acceptance of all humiliations lead us? It will lead us to a complete turn around of the position of consciousness within culture. It will lead to a new variant of pain which the Utopian spirit in the face of the destructive forces of evolution will experience.

Mark A. Bedau of Reed College in Portland has applied the term "Functionalism", originating from the field of artificial intelligence, to the discussion on genetic algorithms and artificial life (1992). He is of the opinion that life depends much more on the form and the character of the typical processes through which it comes into being than on the material substrate such as carbon chemistry. The real characteristics of life are "information processing, "metabolism", "purposeful activity" on the individual level and "self-reproduction" as well as "adaptive evolution" on the level of successive generations. That is to say, when we describe culture using the metaphor "wild animal" and domestication we are also applying the functionalistic approach. We are describing culture as a living organism although we are not dealing with a biological organism based on carbon chains. We are treating the transference of cultural traits as a system of molecular biological genetics and we are equating experiments with artificial life e.g. genetic algorithms with self-reproduction in organisms and treating both exactly as creation and transfer in cultural systems.

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