#human universals

[adzolotl]

It was a day for celebration.

The sound of music and the smell of fried food filled the air. One of my neighbors, already visibly drunk, handed me a cup and smiled. I joined them to watch the parade go by, all elegant clothes and pounding drums; the leader of the procession wore an impressively decorated hat. It was midday, but a few people were already assembling wood for the bonfire.

A couple children wandered past, not looking where they were going. One of them had a piece of string and was teaching the other how to play cat’s cradle. Some younger children nearby were tracing their hands in chalk on the side of a house. A dog barked. An older boy was showing off his knife to a friend. I heard someone telling a story, and someone else laughing at it.

I saw my cousin and greeted him warmly.

“What continent are we on?” He asked me.

“Could be anywhere,” I said. “What millennium is it?”

“No way of knowing, really.”

[lazer-horse]

Human Universals: The Things We All Share • Lazer Horse

At a time when division seems more common than conciliation, thinking about the traits shared globally by all humans seems rather timely; and important. Here, we list some so-called human universals.

[principleofplenitude]

[s33]

Cross Modal Synesthetic Abstraction

From a worthwhile thread on Quora.

"Below are two shapes. One of them is called Kiki and the other is called Bouba.

Almost all respondents when asked say that the jagged one is kiki and the rounded one is bouba. This can be observed across cultures. This is an innate ability of our brain by which one mode of sensation can cross over into another."

This is a useful little nugget for my TOE, MSR. A computer would have to be programmed specifically to correlate the names with the shapes, and such a correlation would be arbitrary from a programmatic perspective. By contrast, our cross-modal, cross-cultural preferences cohere intrinsically, by feel. Feeling is not a collision of objects, it is an aesthetic presence - it is our own participation in a discernment of subjects. The anthropological universality of certain linguistic-phonetic qualities and their association with other kinds of qualities (hard sounds, hard angles, sharp edges, etc) are rooted in deeper universals of sense - deeper than evolution, deeper than matter even. If it didn't run that deep, (to the absolute bottom/top), then there would be no sense in sense at all. We would be like a computer, linking syntactic fragments together arbitrarily by statistical relevance rather than experiential content.

[themailboxattheendoftheinternet]

The Sentimental (But False!) Notion of Human Universality

In my popular culture class, we did a reading called "The Great Family of Man," in which the author, Roland Barthes, discusses class inequality and the lyrical idea of universality.

We like to think, as humans, that despite our cultural and personal differences, underneath everything we are all the same. We all are born and we all die, we laugh and eat and work and play. We are all a great family of man.

But are we really? Would everyone agree with that?

It all stems from a sort of sentimentality, a nice notion for ourselves that seems to be an ancient wisdom and the will of God, since it is found in the Bible. Barthes quotes M. Andre Chamson:

"This look over the human condition must somewhat resemble the benevolent gaze of God on our absurd and sublime ant-hill."

So, like Barthes says, skin color is superficial, institutions are relative and these variances only show God's richness and power. It comes from the eternal, wise and poetic verses of the Bible: there is an underlying essence of humanity and its nature.

But these universals are not poetic; they are simply fact. There is no deeper meaning or ability to criticize them: "For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of true knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to our human criticism." But not so here. To put emphasis on these universals is simply tautological, restating natural facts- there is no deeper essence or resonance behind it.

While we may all die, the circumstances around death vary. Some die young, some die under circumstances that they cannot control and which others are not subject to. Skin color is not superficial; as Barthes says, I bet Emmett Till's family would not believe we are a great family of man.

So we are different. And that's okay. But there are deep injustices and inequalities behind those differences. Some are at the top and live out lives of luxury, others live life in struggle and poverty and die from these unequal circumstances. The notion of universality is sentimental, but untrue.

Thing I Like Now: "The Riff-Off" from Pitch Perfect

[zerogate]

Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology (emeritus) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."