For the past several years, we have been inundated with arguments about “the value of cultural knowledge”. I want to make a couple of points about this “value”. Knowledge of culture, what it is, how it operates and how we as humans construct it, goes well beyond the use value that is often assumed to be the basis for measuring value. Not that I have anything in particular against Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians, indeed, I quite like some of John Stuart Mill’s work, but there is more to the “value” of culture than is apparent in most of the recent debates.

This transcendant value of culture is very nicely summed up in a short blog entry by Chris over at Historicus which is worth quoting in full:

Patrick at Kings of War plugs his eventual book while discussing the problems with the U.S. military assumption that concepts of honor and compensation after family members are killed by coalition forces is somehow exotic or uniquely “Arab”. While how these concepts work in Iraq may be different than in the United States, he brings up a valid point: when a family member is killed by trigger happy goons in the pay of a foreign power, how many Americans would be satisfied by a nominal cash pay-off without, with no apology or promise to do better. With no recourse to law, we’re likely to take things into our own hands, and play it off as justice done, or reference it back to the mythical “Wild West”.

This, to use my friend Jerome Barkow’s term, is the problem of Universals. Put simply, there are some environmental situations (like rampaging goons killing your family members) that will engender a particular reaction not because of a “cultural response” but because of an evolutionary programmed response. In this case, people who let their kin (and para-kin aka friends) get killed tend not to survive for long.

Where “culture” comes in is in the simple fact that humans, as a species (homo sapiens sapiens for those who want the technical name of our species), have the capability of transcending our evolved psychologies via mitigating cultural institutions which then take on a life of their own. In the case of rampaging goons killing your friends and relatives, this tends to be via some form of legal system which guarentees (a “social contract”) that these goons wil be hunted down, tried and punished.

In the earliest days of our species, this legal system was tied into our kinship system: “kill me and my brothers and cousins will hunt you down and kill you”. Not quite the “Bellum omnium contra omnes” beloved of Hobbes - rather more a permanent MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) system based on clans and tribes rather than ICBMs. And, like the latter version of MAD, most cultures developed a way of stopping these feuds. Some of these cultures developed a legal code that was written down and enforced by the meanest clan of all - the king (see Gourney O.R. The Hittites; Penguin, 1961 for one example of this).

Today, we no longer (in many cultures and societies) rely on a central strongman to enforce a legal code. In his (or her) place, we have a complex tradition of international law, conventions on human rights, and all sorts of interlocked traditions that do the same. Indeed, half of the basis for intervening in “failed states” relies on one of these conventions (the UN Charter on the right to human security).

My point in this is that the “culture” to secure us from “rampaging goons” already exists, so the utilitarian version of “the value of culture” has to do with not starting a chain of action that would require a legal intervention. But Chris’ entry points to a much deeper understanding of “value” than this utilitarian understanding: a personal “value” wherein the study of culture serves as a way for individuals to understand themselves and their own culture.

What is this personal “value” in understanding culture? I believe it lies in the ability to become aware of the sub-conscious cultural constraints we all have and, by becoming aware, we now have the possibility of transcending them should we so choose. This is similar to the point made by St. Paul (Romans 7:7) when he said “I had not known sin, but by the law” and, really, is a basic point in epistemology: you have to have a frame, or map, in order to

• abstract that which is “important” from the totality of sensory input, and
• to assign “value” to that sensory input.

Having a knowledge of culture, how it is produced, how it operates, how it affects different individuals, gives you, as an individual, a framework that allows you to perceive its effects on both others and yourself and this, to my mind, is the true value of cultural knowledge.