Thoughts on Acculturation:

Received

Culture

Thomas Girvan’s mountainside encounter with destiny resonates as an integral element in the transmission of a system of knowledge which we humans receive early in our formation, at a time when we are simply sentient beings who depend completely on the human components of our social environment.

-(How his encounter has come down through the decades since 1865 to some of his descendants in the twenty first century.)

-(The distribution of empathy for the parties involved in a precarious series of events which require an immediate ‘existential choice’)

Acculturation

–The transmission of knowledge, facts, points of view and judgements

–A provisory perspective on a wide range of human institutions

–A generative system which we humans use to evaluate what is desirable and …

–We receive templates from the mentor agent (family and friends and information from trusted sources, institutions of education and of moral guidance

–These developments occur early in our formation, at a time when we are simply sentient beings who depend completely on the human components of our social environment.

–As troublesome one’s choice from this time forward, this dependence will expand from purely physical, for protection and nurture, to encompass a bewilderingly wide gamut of knowledge and protocols in a bewilderingly wide gamut of domains of human existence called ‘culture’.

Internalizing progressively this complex web of  ideas and concepts as we develop within the system … (actions and perspectives and points of view prescribed and proscribed),  we will carry this network forward in our lives unless we intervene deliberately to modify the data within the ensemble of complex networks which comprise the process of acculturation). If we do not intervene deliberately, we will have accepted the elements of acculturation as sufficient and appropriate to our life.

Received Culture: Elements of the family’s culture: (Many micro-cultures within the larger Post Colonial British culture, sports, economic political, religious, music and class and class consciousness). We, as individuals, choose selectively some of the micro-cultures and are absorbed into others involuntarily.

-Religion

-Desirable qualities of being

-Social Acceptability

-Respectability

-Social standing

-Behaviors

-Morals

-Behaviors in the sexual domain

-Conformity to accepted codes, Christianity, laws

-Dress and personal hygiene

-Sanctions

Lessons that I learned

–Hand-me-down institutions from colonial era are at the base of everything, including memories and impressions of ancestors, sometimes idealized.

–In the absence of instruction about these many facets of living, we simply observe our mentors as they go about the business of living. We then become increasingly able to extrapolate behaviors in specific situations after internalizing ‘approaches’ to other similar situations in one domain of human activity. (The go-to, the starting point to a wide range of ‘matters’ (What would our mentors do,  what would Jesus do? What would Allah do?) Internalizing progressively as we develop within the system …

Factors that intevene/interfere with cultural transmission

–Scepticism and systematic doubt=Pyhrronism

-(Humanity hung up between Divine laws (Religious texts), where ecclesiastical  authority is the measure of virtually everything, and humanism, where mankind becomes the measure of everything).

What about the twenty first century and onwards? Will the algorithm, and its application AI, now become the measure of everything? God help us, if that becomes the case!

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