Hegel said that the historical process is one in which spirit manifests itself more and more each generation in reality. Gizmos of all kinds—from pens and paper to keyboards, paper, and computer screens--have allowed your spirit and mine to thrive on input and have helped us inject our imaginings into the material world. "The material world" is a misleading phrase. Gadgets have allowed us to inject our imaginings into the public space of mass sociality and to reach individuals deep down inside. Those two—reaching the public and reaching the core of other individuals—seem opposite, but they’re not. The social is personal and the personal is social. Society is we—it’s you and me.

I see it as our goal--yours, mine, and that of other culture makers--to bring spirit more and more to life via cultural means. Literate culture is only 6,000 years old and is still in its infancy. Back in the days of Homer and the oral beginnings of the Old Testament, many cultural scripts gave humans only a very crude way of grasping their inner lives. Today we have crept ahead in our vocabulary of self-understanding and have made spirit a bit more capable of manifesting itself in the material world. But there is a long, long way yet to go. If you and I don't pave the road--and invent the new scripts and other forms of expression humans need so badly--who will?

The soul of a group is clustered around its history, its ideals, and around its symbols like the symbols like the city hall, court, and village green. All are mass bonding points, mass emotional sychronizers, and mass coordinators of personal imprinting. All are also badges of identity, badges of belonging to the same idea, habit, location, or family. Functional bonding, the bonding that comes from doing things together, does more to bond new tribes than does genes in fluid, large societies. Blood is thinner than the things on which we agree.

To stay alive, a culture, like an individual, needs a map of past and future. It needs its ancestors. It needs a strong connection to their values. And it needs its goals…future aspirations that the spirit of the ancestors have blessed. When a culture runs out of goals to reach and roots from which to stretch toward them, the society in which that culture resides can die.
These roots and goals--these maps of meaning--are tools we culture-makers, must provide.

...post comments in the Yahoo Forum

-Go to the weekly column archive-