Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Less neurosis in coordinating culture with biology


There are physiological indications in biofeedback studies, begun by Dr. Elmer Green years ago, which suggest that when there is a clash between cultural values coming in from the newer cortex system and the goals, memories and drives stored in the more primitive limbic system of the brain, this can cause regulation problems in the hypothalamus, which controls or regulate most of the body's activities. According to behaviorists much of neurotic activity seems to stem from these physiological regulation or coordination problems.

We might this way define much of neurosis as the failure to adjust or coordinate our biological nature with our psychobiological nature, or the failure to coordinate real human nature and culture. "Psychobiology” would be as Freud defined it, anything that is cultural and not biological.

When we define human nature the way sociobiology defines human nature we can say the our cultures need to adjust and coordinate with our biological human nature, which means being kin-centered, gender defined, age-grading, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection, and so on.

This seems to affirm much of what is called traditional culture, that is, paleoconservative culture, which I think is better defined as ethnopluralism. This would appear to be the best way of coordinating physiological or biological values with cultural values, leading to less neurosis and healthier people, and evolutionary cultures.

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