Necessity is the mother of invention, but culture was begat by a penis sheath and a silly hat.
Undercover
Some things are best out of sight, out of mind. We love eating in company, as long as said company can handle the food inconspicuously, hiding the necessary grinding an salivating of the forage. Eating noisily with your mouth wide open is frowned upon, as is the public display of the area where the comestibles eventually exits your system.
This negating the obvious is a true beacon of culture. The earliest trace of civilization is, besides interesting embellishments and crackpot theories about afterlife and the Nature of Things, a fig leaf of some kind. Possibly, when the male hominids first stood erect, the protruding details of procreation looked so outright silly that the upright protohumans of the flock invented the loin cloth lest they be the ridicule of the still crouching, less developed cousins. Thus, penis hiding may be the decisive achievement in the creation of Modern Man; culture doesn´t necessarily mean inventing new things, but rather veiling the old ones.
Under a Hat
To create a tribal identity means to exclude the non-members, therefore it isn´t enough just to come up with new practicalities, since they, if they are truly useful, will be copied by others. Instead you must perform really useless actions and develop hideous ornamentation to provide telltale signs of belonging: e.g. tattoos, silly hats and ingenious ways to hide the instruments of nativity. If you believe this to be a phenomenon occuring only amongst far away headhunting tribes, you´ve still got a lot to learn about the driving forces behind today´s fashion industry. One might also contemplate the utility of neckties.
On a more profound level we do encounter more complicated memes, i.e. sets of beliefs, prejudices and crackpot theories about afterlife and the Nature of Things. These will clearly influence our way of perceiving the world and invade the language with which we think and communicate our thoughts. These alterations in our tools for understanding will of course help corroborate the underlying sets of beliefs that originally created them. Hence our firm belief that even the most unproductive little quirks in our cultural behavior answers to Laws of Nature. Wearing pants is the natural thing to do.
- The World
- The Picture
- Tabula Rasa
- Pinx.
- Logos
Culture, The Fig Leaf Layer Layer
Necessity is the mother of invention, but culture was begat by a penis sheath and a silly hat.
- Undercover
- Under a Hat
