Universal People

[Triple Zero]

Q: hey tripzilch, do you ever write any of that interesting stuff yourself?

A: nope.

so, i'm still reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct and this bit here is just right out awesomely fascinating:

------ (pg.413) ------

Inspired by Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG), Brown has tried to characterize the Universal People (UP). He has scrutinized archives of ethnography for universal patterns underling the behavior of all documented human cultres, keeping a skeptical eye out both for claims of the exotic belied by the ethnographers' own reports, and for claims of the universal based on flimsy evidence. The outcome is stunning. Far from finding arbitrary variation, Brown was able to characterize the Universal People in gloriously rich detail. His findings contain something to startle almost anyone, and so I will reproduce the substance of them here. According to Brown, the Universal People have the following:


Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, bodyparts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least "one", "two" and "more than two"), proper names, possession. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binarary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including "not", "and", "same", "equivalent", "opposite", general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (infering the presence of absent and invisible entities from their perceptible traces).

Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting intention from behavior. Recognized facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking, modifying or mimicking facial expressions. Displays of affection.

Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary behavior, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year, strangers. Fear of snakes. "Oedipal" feelings (possessiveness of mother, coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Play, including play fighting.

Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational. Shelter. Decoration of artifacts.

A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built around a mother and children, usually, the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children coping their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.

Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of laber by sex and age. More child care by women. More agression and violence by men. Acknowledgment of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always non-dictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.

Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty. Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals, including rites of passage. Mourning the dead. Dreaming, interpreting dreams.


Obviously, this is not a list of instincts or innate psychological propensities; it is a list of complex interactions between a universal human nature and the conditions of living in a human body on this planet. Nor, I hasten to add, is it a characterization of the inevitable, a demarcation of the possible, or a prescription of the desirable. A list of human universals a century ago could have included the absence of ice cream, oral contraceptives, movies, rock and roll, women's suffrage, and books about the language instinct, but that would not have stood in the way of these innovations.

Like the identical twins reared apart who dipped buttered toast in their coffee, Brown's Universal People jolts our preconceptions about human nature. And just as the discoveries about twins do not call for a buttered-toast-in-coffee gene, the discoveries about universals do not implicate a universal toilet-training instinct. A theory of the universal mind is doubtless going to be as abstractly related to the Universal People as X-bar theory [part of universal grammar--000] is related to a list of universals of word order. But it seems certain that any such theory will have to put more in the human head than a generalized tendency to learn or to copy an arbitrary role model.

----- (pg.415) -----

yikes i might get RSI from all this typing

[Payne]

Some of that is really interesting actually.

Not very funny, but interesting.

Now what do we do with this model of the Universal Person?

Are we looking to use it as a basic floorplan for our various projects? Are we thinking about adding/removing/adapting attributes?

Or something else entirely? (as in no use, just an interesting look at the human condition, here for it's own sake?).

[Requia ☣]

Thank you so much for reminding me I hate Pinker.

[Triple Zero]

Some of that is really interesting actually.

Not very funny, but interesting.

Now what do we do with this model of the Universal Person?

Are we looking to use it as a basic floorplan for our various projects? Are we thinking about adding/removing/adapting attributes?

Or something else entirely? (as in no use, just an interesting look at the human condition, here for it's own sake?).

well the problem is a bit, what it says in the second-to-last paragraph, where he pretty much takes a dive into PC-ness and sort of tells that you can't really draw any conclusions whatsoever from the list.

the question is of course if we wanna believe that.

[Verbal Mike]

One application I can think of is to use this as a sort of check-list for Human behavior. If ever we want to make up something outrageous, you can just take an item off this list and say some group does the opposite. I'd guess the instinctive reaction to anything of the sort will be one of shock.

[Cain]

This also reminds me of Jack Cohen's distinction between barbarian and tribal human groups.  This reads almost exactly like tribal behaviour, as he outlines it.

Which I guess, makes us the barbarians.

[Triple Zero]

which "us" are you refering to? (not meant as the default "dont lump me into a group" reaction, but actually curious)

you mean discordians? or the people on this forum? western society? or just anyone going out of their way to not behave according to the more "social" elements of the above list?

and verb, that sounds like an interesting idea.

[Cain]

Whoever is willing to take the label.  I was thinking more along the line of people at this site, Discordians, but whoever, its not exclusive.

I found the book just now, so I'll transcribe the section.  They're talking about how tribes use adolescent torture rituals to select the breeders within their society and how this is counterbalanced by a barbarian mindset:

Don't get us wrong here, we don't mean torturing adolescents is barbaric.  It's not, from the tribal point of view.  Its an entirely proper way to get them accepted into the tribe.  'We've done it ever since god-on-high made the world, and to prove it, here's the holy-circumcision-knife we've always used.'  No, from the tribal point of view, the barbarians we have in mind are awful; they dont have any rules or traditions...Even the Manky Tribe, a couple of miles over there, is better than them.  At least the Mankies have traditions, even if they are different to ours.  And we've stolen some of their women and they have the most amazing tricks....

The problem is that lot up on the hillside, the young men who have been expelled from the tribe because they failed the rituals, or went of their own accord (and so failed the test anyway)....Oh they're alright on their own; its when they're in that gang together, all doing their hair in that same funny way to be different, that you lock up the sheep and let the dogs loose.  They've got these funny words like "honour" and "bravery" and "pillage" and "hero" and "our gang".....

In any cowboy film we find the message that barbarism is opposed to tribalism, that honour and tradition are not good bedfellows.  And that, having selected themselves for imagination and the ability to endure pain for future pleasure, Homo sapiens is now prepared to die for his or her beliefs, his or her gang, for honour, for hatred or for love.

Civilization, as we know it, combines these elements of both ways of human culture, tribal for tradition and barbarian for honour and pride.  Nations are internally tribal, but present a barbarian face to other nations....Shakespeare is the ultimate civiliser, in this view.  His plays were composed against a barbarian background, in a city where you could see heads on sticks and ritually dismembered bodies; all of them were set on the tribal, traditional base that is most of human life, most of the time.  He tells us very persuasively that evil fails in the end, that love conquers and that laughter - the greatest gift that barbarism brought to tribalism - is one of the sharpest weapons, because it civilises.

...

Tribesmen aren't 'proud', for them everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden, so what is there to be proud about?  You can praise your children for doing the right things, or admonish or punish them for doing the wrong ones, but you can't take pride in what you - a fully fledged member of the tribe - do.  That comes with the territory.  However, you can be guilty about not doing the things you should have done.

...

Extelligence operates by putting ever more sophisticated stories into the Make-A-Human-Kit.  It pulls us up by our own bootstraps: we could climb from tribal to barbarian to civilized.

Shakespeare shows us doing it.  His period was not a rebirth of Hellenistic Greece, or Imperial Rome.  Instead, it was the culmination of barbarian ideas of conquest, honour and aristocracy, codified in the principles of chivalry, meeting its match in the written principles of a tribal peasantry, and disseminated by printing.  This kind of sociological confrontation produced many events in which the two cultures met head on.

..

This kind of confrontation between the barbarian nobility and tribal peasantry is protrayed precisely in many of Shakespeare's plays, as an illustration of low-life, with its folk wisdom as comic relief and pathos, set against the lofty ideals of the ruling classes - which often leads to tragedy.  But also, to high comedy.

Other religions, notably an extreme version of Islam, promise heaven as a reward for a martyr's death.  These ideas are more closely assosciated with a barbarian's view of the future than tribal ones: paradise, like Valhalla for the Norse heroes, will be full of heros rewards, from perpetually renewed women to ample food and drink and hero's games....Barbarians, for whom glory, honour, power, dignity, breavery and love are meaningful concepts, get plus points for denying authority and shaping events to their own desires.  They have, among their gods and heroes, the mischevious and unpredictable ones, like Lemininkainen and Puck.

Barbarian nursery stories, like their sagas, laud the hero.  They show how luck is associated with certain attitudes, especially a pure heart that does not seek immediate or ultimate reward.  There is often a test of purity, from helping a poor blind cripple who later on turns out to be a god in disguise, to curing or feeding a desperate animal who then comes to your aid later....People, especially heroes or aspiring heroes attain control over these supernatural beings with the assistance of magic rings, named swords, or merely their own inner nobility.  This changes their fortunes, and luck comes to be on their side; they win battles and bouts against long odds, they climb tall mountains, kill immortal dragons and battle with monsters.  No tribal thinker would ever dream stories like these.  For them, fortune favours the well prepared.

[Triple Zero]

cool, that was interesting, thanks.

[Reginald Ret]

A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built around a mother and children, usually, the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children copying their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.

Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of labor by sex and age. More child care by women. More agression and violence by men. Acknowledgment of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts. Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always non-dictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.

@ 000: some typo's.

@ verb: give me an example because i can't seem to get it to work, telling people that the republicans never play doesn't do anything for me.

@cain: i read that before... what is the name of the book? or did you post it before?

[Verbal Mike]

Well, if you tell people that Afghanis prefer to have sex in broad daylight on the street and have a tradition of killing anyone eloquent enough to gain political power, that should get some effect.
The concept needs some work, of course.

[Cramulus]

origins of horrormirth ITT