Friday, October 02, 2020

A better way to look at the cultural life of man than through the artistic dualities of rational Apollo and wild Dionysus

In early Nietzsche's “The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music” the Apollonian gives form to the formless Dionysian and both were needed to create a whole man in a whole culture. Later Nietzsche more or less rejected the rational Apollonian in favor of the wild Dionysian, which was a mistake. But the duality was unclear to begin with.

Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson told us that "the genes hold culture on a leash. The leash is very long, but inevitably values will be constrained in accordance with their effects on the human gene pool...” Human nature is biologically kin-centered and ethnic-centered, even xenophobic, as well as being genetically gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual, marriage-making, hierarchical, and religious-making, with group-selection and ethnic selection as the primary unit of successful selection, followed by individual selection.

Professor Raymond Cattell found that new cultural creations tend to be the work of genetically/culturally superior intelligences and are developed in two main ways: cultural creations as outlets for frustrations, such as poetry, music, drama (p-culture), and cultural creations that are more adaptive to fit us to the environment, engineering, medicine, science (r-culture), not “merely” an “outlet.” These cultural inventions from superior intelligences tend to require more complex adjustments for the general population than the general population tend to be genetically suited for---Cattell calls this “genetic lag.”

Cattell suggests that we deal with these frustrating discrepancies by improving the genetic composition of a population to help reduce the frustrations, which can spill over into many social problems, including revolutions. It's like having foresight that can lesson the morbidity rate of the group rather than as we see today where people and cultures just painfully die.

I think that is a better way to look at the cultural life of man than through the artistic dualities of rational Apollo and wild Dionysus. Then we can add religion featuring the material evolution of life to ascending levels of Godhood as the sacred goal of all life and create cultures even superior to the ancient Greeks.

No comments:

Post a Comment