Technical Culture Research Articles

Self-fulfillment, asceticism, and the function of authority

The question of the motivation of the individual's pursuit of mature self fulfillment can best be analyzed in terms of the phenomenon that has tradition ally been called askesis. We should be aware that this phenomenon is basic to human development and is not limited to religious applications. Thus Marshall McLuhan speaks of literacy as "an abstract asceticism that prepares the way for endless patterns of privation in the human community."1 The idea of privation for the sake of attaining bodily excellence, prizes, or fame is, of course, the basis for the training program (askesis) of the athlete. More complex goals sometimes involve a collective asceticism. Thus our technical culture, like the monastic culture of the Middle Ages, presumes a vast heritage of behavioral conditioning in which punctuality, teamwork, postponement of rewards, mechanical apti tudes, and discipline are all essential parts.2 Individual and collective ascesis both require that something that is itself relatively good be sacrificed for the sake of something considered more valuable. For example, the beauty of the creative work of the individual artist-craftsman, something quite definitely good in itself, has had to be sacrificed to a great extent in the course of the development of industrial society.3 The idea of ascetical practice is usually connected with projects of a long-term nature involving goals that are intended to give man a sense of having realized a higher form of human existence. The philosopher is defined by the goal in life that he has assigned to himself, namely, the pursuit of wisdom. The Greeks put great value on the attainment of kalos kagathos, the great and worthy man; Epictetus spoke of the "freedom of the sage who acts without hindrance in choice"; the Orphies and Pythagoreans chose ritual purification, while the Cynic-Stoic popular tradition opted for detachment in a search for a more human existence. Ascesis as a religious experience has been characterized by strict methodology and often minutely regulated practices involving much austerity, self-denial, and even self-infliction of pain.4

Scientific and Humanistic Study of Religion: A Comment on "Christianity and Symbolic Realism"

Professor Bellah's paper is sensitive and eloquent. 1 An internal criticism picking at slight flaws would be unworthy of it. I will begin by responding to Professor Bellah on the ground he has chosen, that of religion as a system of action. Later I will return to my own ground, that of the study of religion as a system of knowledge. Professor Bellah opens with a dirge for our fragmented culture. The split between theological and social scientific language about Christianity, an expression of the split between religious and scientific man, provides his illustration. It is fashionable to trace some painful social conflicts we now endure to a hiatus between technical and moral culture and then to reason that (1) technical thought and evaluative thought each has its academic guardian and that (2) the broad cultural split is not unrelated to the bureaucratic division of labor in the academy. It is difficult to believe that the world perspectives of contemporary scientists and humanists could be more disjointed than those of huntsmen, pastoralists, and agriculturalists have been throughout history. Further, while we do seem to drive our technology with adolescent morality, the main lines of contemporary social cleavage are not those of that cultural cleavage. The warring groups in our society do not want for communication with or understanding of their opponents. Articulateness about and empathy for the antagonists' philosophy and interests are foreplay to debunking those philosophies and attacking those interests. Mutual understanding between executioners and victims is the tragedian mark of our time. As for the academic division of labor, Durkheim's affirmation of it as a source of social integration rather than as a source of social fragmentation still has a ring of validity.

Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations

Property is far more important in rural stratification than in urban stratification, where occupational position predominates. There is less similarity of the property systems in commercialized agriculture than there is in urban occupational structure. In agricultural production for markets, the main types of property systems are commercialized manorial systems, plantation systems, and ranching systems. Each of these produces a distinctive pattern of class relations, determining the sharpness of differences of legal privileges and style of life, and shaping the distribution of technical culture and political activity.

Book Review: Work and Education: The Role of Technical Culture in Some Distinctive Theories of Humanism

Book Review: Work and Education: The Role of Technical Culture in Some Distinctive Theories of Humanism

The Peasant Movement in Norway: A Study in Class and Culture

rN ALL parts of the Western World, indeed wherever Western civilization is making its influence felt, the increasing mechanization in technical culture, i iparticularly in means of transportation and communication, has brought about a radical change in the ecological situation of the rural locality group. From a rather stable condition of relative isolation and economic, social, and cultural self-dependence, the rural community has been thrown into a highly labile situation of inter-communal and inter-regional contact and interdependence. In this situation, it became part and parcel of a large-scale society which is highly domislated by industrial production, commercial trade, and the urban way of life. This radical change in the ecological situation has had the most profound influence on the whole character of the rural community and rural society, affecting its social patterns and its basic norms and values no less than its more conspicuous technical culture. Not only was the constant flow of culture traits from the urban centres out into the rural hinterlands highly increased through rapid transportation and other mechanic means of communication. Becoming an integral part of a major social system, the rural community passed, ill the words of Ferdinand Tonnies, from a predominantly Gemeinschaft type of society to a society where interaction and its underlying norms are more prevailingly of the Gesellschaft nature. The necessary adjustment of the rural community to this new situation is still in progress over the greater part of the Western World. The resistance to change offered by the well-established and, for the most part, highly-refined and integrated rural cultures, particularly in the Old World, has everywhere created conflicts of norms and values as well as of loyalties. Not infrequently were these conflicts crystallized into diNerentiations and segregations of groups, the patterns, norms, and values of each culture type serving as sytthols of group identification for larger or smaller fractions of the population. In this way, the urbanization process in many instances gave rise to a social situation which shows striking similarities to the inter-group culture contact situation and even to the dominant minority group relationship, where likewise 63