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Human Culturation & Civilization
Human culturation really refers to the process of becoming human in a world that otherwise is incapable of knowing itself. Life at every level, all around the world, lives and dies anonymously. We have no history or knowledge of the suffering of creatures on earth who by the mandate of nature must suffer and live their fates in the silent anonymity. But human reality is something different, something more and not nothing but this. This is what makes it so precious, so vital, so important in the universe.
Some things we know about the processes of human culturation, whatever form or function it may take and whatever consequence that may be forthcoming:
1. It is shared and is a product of sharing, primarily through human language and the conversational apparatus.
2. It is symbolically mediated, and articulates in terms of symbolisms that attach to material forms.
3. It is arbitrarily constructed and in this sense suffers the dilemma's of world-openness.
4. It is constrained by convention and tradition, and this constraint is both direct and indirect, and it follows a process of behavioral and social relational sanctioning.
5. It is a dynamic manifestion of human systems and has taken many forms throughout human history and prehistory.
We value human culturation as a process of becoming human because it has resulted in a consciousness awakening of possibilities in the universe. We are truly self-organizing systems in the sense that our culture is not just a product of stochastic development, but of deliberate design and intention, however underdetermined this may really be.
Human culturation is at the base of human civilization. And human civilization in its basic form knows no cultural boundaries, though cultural boundaries tend to restrict its development and limit its occurrence in many ways. When Americans, for instance, are smug of their progress and civilization, they perhaps should inquire how their own values and ethnocentric biases may interfere with their own development as well as that of others in the world.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
