Human nature is not a fixed ideal—it is indeterminate and manifests in an unfolding future, recursively-shaped by culture and history. We must not underestimate the power of culture to shape our identity; nor, underestimate our capacity to create a culture that supports flourishing. By creating a culture that supports the expression of our full humanistic potential, we create a culture that helps each of us flourish.

Topics below:
Culture shapes our very sense of being
The limits of self-expression
Increasing our cultural wisdom
Words do matter
The law as culture
Culture and consciousness

Culture shapes our very sense of being.
We create culture and culture creates us, in an endless recursive loop. Our values, and the choices we make based on those values, shape our culture. In turn, those very values come to us from the culture. Our self and identity is imbedded in a process of constant change, where cultural change alters our identity leading in turn to changes in our culture.

The self is a process of mind that shapes our entire worldview, including our very sense of being. The self is a dynamic composition of beliefs and values. In the course of our life, this self-process organizes all our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. As we interact within our cultural environment, both the self and the culture become defined and reified. This process is recursive. Our values, beliefs, and identity become depicted in our cultural landscape, giving us feedback and perspective. This cultural enactment provides a perspective that can help us alter our values and beliefs, creating the next cultural enactment and subsequent change in our values and beliefs.

Our sense of self includes an identity that we construct over time in response to changes in cultural contexts. This identity is built-up out of the values and morals embedded in the cultural landscape. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor uses cultural historicism to show us how our sense of self emerges from the recursive interactions of morality, psychology, and culture. Just as the content of our identity is culturally constructed, so is the very manner in which we experience reality. Changes in our outer world effect not only what we think about, but also our mental processes, and the very way in which think.

The nature of our consciousness is embedded in our cultural landscape. In pre-modern times the sense of self was totally embedded in the group, there was no individual identify outside of one’s function in the clan or community. Such a pre-modern self was experienced in the context of being embedded in a fixed and determined hierarchical context. The emergence of the modern, autonomous self arose from the interaction between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The culture embedded in the Enlightenment was one based on objectivity and science. The Romantic culture valued subjective emotional experience. These combined cultural compositions gave rise to the modern personhood of self. We experience our modern identity as an intact isolated essence that creates values and meaning out of our subjective experience. These subjective values evolve into the basis for exploration of the objective values of the Enlightenment. In this way, subjectivity and objectivity merge to create an experience of objective truth and valid moral principles, often without reference to the external contexts within which they were created.

The autonomous consciousness associated with the modern sense of self is a profound differentiation in human consciousness over the premodern, embedded self. However, it is not immutable or irreversible. The self is in a continuing process of creation and change, emergent to the cultural environment in which it is embedded. The autonomous self created in the Enlightenment-Romantic cultural amalgamation is now interacting with contemporary twenty-first-century culture. Our challenge is to maintain a cultural landscape that is evolving in a manner that continues to support the expansion of the self-awareness and consciousness initiated in the eighteenth century.

The limits of self-expression
In our contemporary western culture, the autonomous self is mostly experienced through self-expression, which comes to define our identity. Self-expression rises to the highest value for many people and is taken as an articulation of one’s inner élan. Striving to freely express yourself becomes the ultimate goal. A culture supporting such self-expression can fuel and enrich our sense of self. However such a culture, when it acts to exclude deliberation about the cultural and moral context of our self-expression, can devolve into a primitive, expressive culture. For example, self-expression is treated as if it were a unique expression of our nature, even though the content of that self-expression is generally determined by life’s contingencies, not our nature.

A cultural landscape comprised of rigid-self expressionism might not be able to support self-awareness or deeply reflective self-consciousness. The autonomous self, when taken to the extreme of a self defined by experiences, could become embedded in discrete expressivity. Such a focus could undermine our sense of having a self embedded in time. We are apt to become entirely identified with the events of our life that have been entirely defined by the prevailing cultural landscape.

This highly situationally-determined identity is vulnerable to the cultural definitions of what constitutes a significant experience. In such a case, we become diminished when unable to have the experiences valued by the culture. Rather than unique self-expression, individual identity becomes rigidly defined by cultural definitions of what constitutes the right experiences. Such a rigid self is strongly embedded in culture, behaving and thinking in a conformist manner. Deviations are not seen as uniqueness, but as moral deficits. The sense of self may be felt as autonomous, holding a strong sense of individuality, but the acceptable range within which to express this individuality is very narrow and highly, externally defined. Thus a paradox emerges: there is a sense of strong individuality, but the moral choices for the expression of that individuality are tightly constrained by the culture.

A culture that fails to support enriched deliberation between multiple value systems could result in expressionism that is solely focused on the current, experiential moment. Our sense of self comes to be embedded in our immediate needs and desires lacking a connection with time. Without a connection to time our sense of self risks becoming a momentary phenomenon.

The expressive self has an identity based on doing and experiencing. We become defined by the specific events of our life without any narrative of being in time with meaning. Such a self is typified by individuals that define themselves by events. In a self-expressive cultural landscape, a lack of self-expression would result in a loss of self, a feeling of alienation, or worse, a feeling of annihilation.

Increasing our cultural wisdom
Our challenge is to increase our cultural wisdom. This does not mean returning to prior moral hierarchies, but to create an enriched cultural landscape with a depth extending beyond mere self-expression. Our cultural wisdom must expand beyond holding autonomous identity as the highest definition of self. Such enrichment might include appreciating that human nature longs for not only self-expression but also for purpose and a sense of historicity.

Pragmatic Humanism is a contemporary philosophy that sees human flourishing as emergent to our humanistic potential emerging in a supportive cultural environment. Human beings are continually evolving works of nature. By harnessing the recursive creative power of culture, we can each grow toward our fullest potential. A humanistic culture supports individuals in active deliberation of how various aspects of our social environment can be utilized to enhance our sense of meaning, value, and purpose.

Words do Matter
The constructs embedded in a culture are constrained by the available language. The subtle complexities in our language afford us the reward of being able to conceptualize the nuances of our experiences. Art, literature, and religion become more relevant to us through an enriched language. Where our language is limited so is our ability to deepen our experiences. Meaningful self-reflection requires feeling, as well as thinking. The depth of that exploration is determined by the breath of our usage of language according to John McWhorter. The words we use make a difference in how we perceive ourselves and the world.

The Law as Culture
The philosopher of jurisprudence, Lawrence Friedman, in A History of American Law, asserts bluntly, “law is a product of society.” The societal mores of a culture come to be codified as law. Understanding the historical contingencies of our laws gives us a perspective from which to create laws that can support humanistic development.

Culture and Consciousness
The nature of our consciousness emerges from our psychological capacities recursively engaged with culture and environment. The powerful influence of contingency on our human nature is the focus of Julian Jaynes in his classic book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. According to Jaynes, self-consciousness was an adaptation made in response to cataclysmic, environmental events in the ancient world that profoundly disrupted established cultural strictures.