NATURE/NURTURE
I have gotten myself into a corner again. It starts with a personal assumption, without really understanding the science of genetics, that I have embedded within my DNA visceral drives to eat, drink, keep warm and protect myself as well as drive to love, drives to understand, sex drives, drives to protect my identity and much more. A few days ago I wondered if the drive to concentrate and the pleasure this gives me is a built in drive. Now I am wondering if these buried drives projected out are what create culture and cultural conventions, the nurture part of nature/nurture, what we teach our children as a family and a tribe.
All along I have avoided the issue of nature and nurture. So far I have stumbled along with my personal, intuitive understanding of human nature. Now I am going to take this one step further and wonder about one way that nature and nurture seem to be connected within me in my personal attempt to make sense of things. Making sense of things is one natural drive that seems very real to me. So here goes. I’ll start with mythology and religion.
I am greatly influenced in this search by the paintings in the Louvre that I look at every day on my iPad. I stroll through the Louvre as I sit here and write on my other iPad. These paintings are are arranged by century with all the way from the 2nd to the 13th in one set and then sets century by century up until the 19th century. There must be 500 paintings. There are no 20th and 21st century paintings. For my purposes these modern paintings don’t matter so much because mythology is not the subject of many paintings in the 20th and 21st century. But in all the preceding centuries mythology is a dominant theme, although by the 19th realism with landscapes and portraits and historical events has largely taken over.
But what I am wondering about is the power of the life of Jesus over painters, which is painted in great detail from stories which have become very powerful in the lives of believers. This power is similar to the power of the Shiva lingam I wrote about in the Somesvara temple and in the photographs of images of Hindu deities I photographed in Varanasi.
What seems to make sense to me once I start with the assumption that most of my unconscious visceral drives are embedded in DNA and are drives over which I have little conscious control is that these inner visceral genetic drives and the worship by whole tribes of people are directly connected and that what is most intense in religious worship is a result of what is most intensely responded to within us as individuals, projected out.
For me, right now, this is how this seems. Certain objects and people and human activities strike me as being intensely alive. The reason is because something archetypal (hard to describe something that is unconscious) within me responds intensely to certain people in my family or friends with a feeling of acceptance and love, something responds to females who are young and of childbearing age with feelings of sexual stimulation, something within me responds to males who are powerful and can threaten me with feelings of fear or awe or envy or a desire to subdue them. These are just examples. And they are personal. Other people don’t respond to the same people or activities in the same way. These intense feelings are personal and idiosyncratic and apply only to me.
But not always. Sometimes my little tribe, my family, the most important support I have, responds to things that stimulate a visceral response in the same way. This can be a response to certain family members, or the houses we have lived in, or shared memories through photographs. When this happens, when we all respond to an object or a person or an activity with similar intensity that object or person takes on a kind of glow, almost like the halos around the heads of some Biblical characters in paintings.
And if a wider tribe finds this person or object to make them feel intensely alive the object, actually this god in the case I am pursuing, seems intensely alive. The more people who agree and focus on the god and worship the god the more intense stories become associated with the god including elements of intense individual responses. The stories grow and grow. And image of the god is set in a place and the place becomes a holy place. There are holy places with images of the gods all over India. But in some places the power of this god to touch people is especially intense and a temple is built to house and honor the god. And over the centuries the temple is rebuilt larger and larger and is surrounded by by other shrines. And then over time it turns out that these gods begin to coalesce and individual local godlings turn out to be either different incarnations of the same great god or turn out to actually all be the same great god, such as the 10 incarnations of Vishnu. And slowly the god becomes universal and takes on the power of Shiva with Parvati his wife and his son the elephant headed god, Ganesh, all of which are present in the Somesvara temple which is kind of a miniature Varanasi which is the home of Shiva.
It is easier to see this proces in India and in the Somesvara temple if you are not a believing Hindu, to see it as an outsider. And it is probably easier for a believing Hindu, as an outsider, to see it in the worship of Jesus.
In either case the power of the god is intensely powerful to worshippers, so powerful that in the case of the Somesvara temple the rock takes on sacred significance and power and has to be brought from India, from a sacred source. And the architecture itself takes on a sacred power and has to be executed in just the right way. And the images of the gods take on so much power that they have to be circumvented in just the right direction, just the right number of times with the worshipper touching or not touching the images in just the right way. The priest has to be consecrated and bathed in just the right way with the right markings on his forehead and be in the right frame of mind.
What starts out for me as an inner visceral individual archetype that is stimulated by certain objects, people or activities has become a shared visceral response by a tribe that is now itensely powerful as if the focus of individual unconscious visceral responses built into their DNA have now become fused together in a joint tribal response that takes on a life of its own and becomes so powerful that it is the universal power of God.
When this power becomes universal within a culture or a tribe the power is very intense. It no longer can be seen as a personal, individual drive but feels as if has an independent outer presence that is impossible to resist. People live within the power of that god as if the god is the most real thing there is, much more real than the individual projections that produced the god. People’s identity is formed by the presence of this god the shift from nature to nurture is complete. For as long as that culture exists the gods, or sometimes coelesced into a single God, is all powerful and supremely real. But when the shared cultural identity wavers and then disintegrates all of the aspects and power of the language, the Gods, the cultural customs also vanish and the all powerful gods, like the gods of ancient Egypt, the gods of Ancient Rome, the gods of other Palestinian tribes, mocked and denied by the Jewish tribe that created the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, the Norse gods and even the gods of the Rg Veda, the gods of vanished cultures around the world who were the center of people’s lives and identities for centuries, they all disappear.
But the visceral inner drives embedded in our DNA don’t disappear and again and again the things that are so powerful for individual visceral response coelesce with the powerful drives of other individuals and new cultures form with new languages, new forms of government, new mythologies and stories and new gods. Our tribal way of coalescing individual drives embedded in our DNA does not vanish either, because the drive to tribal identity is also embedded in our DNA as it is with so many animal species. The constructions of nurture are the projected visceral emotions embedded in nature. From an individual perspective both of them are intensely real with nurture feeling even more real than nature. But the source of nurture, the source of culture, is nature, what is embedded in our genes.
Or at least this is the way that I explain things, at least right now, to myself.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 