Explore more in Culture, Values, and History

Book excerpts

What is the Patterning Instinct? Is it unique to humans?​

How culture sculpts our brains – before we even know it

Are we "ensnared in an inescapable web" of culture?

Videos

The Conundrum of Admiral Zheng He and Christopher Columbus

Humanity's Changing Metaphors of Nature

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Why Did Europe Dominate the World...
​ And Not Asia? 

The same century that Columbus discovered the New World with three barely seaworthy boats, Admiral Zheng of China sailed as far afield as Africa with the greatest armada in history. Yet it was Columbus who changed the course of history, not Zheng. Why?

Many modern approaches to history assume there are no intrinsic differences between cultures – that history is ultimately shaped by the brute forces of geography. The "geographic determinism" approach is a welcome improvement on the old-style, triumphalist view that there was something innately superior in Western culture. But it ignores important drivers of history that have been instrumental in constructing today's world.

The Patterning Instinct takes a different approach, proposing that cultures shapes values – and those values shape history. Even if Zheng had discovered America, it argues, the Chinese would never have conquered the New World as the Europeans did, because they were driven by a fundamentally different set of motivations.

As The Patterning Instinct unfolds, it reveals an underlying pattern to Western cognition that is responsible both for its scientific and industrial revolutions, as well as its devastating destruction of indigenous cultures around the world and our current global rush towards possible catastrophe.

By recognizing the importance of culture in history, we can better understand the patterns of thought that brought the world to its current state. That understanding can empower us to consciously change some of those patterns... and by doing so, shape our future.

Cultural Root Metaphors

Throughout history, humans have tried to infuse meaning into the universe using root metaphors. These root metaphors constructed the cultural patterns that have shaped the course of history. 
Explore these root metaphors below:
​Hunter-Gatherers | Everything Is Connected
Early hunter-gatherers formed their worldview around the first pattern of meaning: everything is connected. The natural world was infused with spirits, while the earth was seen as intimately involved with their activities, like a parent. [Read more...]
Agrarian civilizations | hierarchy of the gods
Hierarchies and wealth. Property and land ownership. These new notions only arose when foragers began settling in one place, beginning about ten thousand years ago. The hierarchical structure of agrarian societies helped shape a new conception of the universe. A hierarchy of the gods emerged, stratified and distant from ordinary people, mediated by priests. Prayer, worship, and sacrifice became crucial parts of the human endeavor to propitiate the gods, who could take terrible retribution on those who failed to honor them. [Read more...]
European civilization | Split cosmos, split human
 ​In ancient Greece, philosophers split the human experience into two by proposing a divided cosmos, with a heavenly domain of eternal abstractions and a worldly domain polluted with imperfection. This split cosmos was paralleled by a split human, with an eternal soul temporarily imprisoned in a physical body destined to die.
   Christianity combined the Hebrew vision of a single all-powerful god with the divided cosmos of the Greeks to create the world’s first systematic dualistic cosmology. Early Christians struggled with the self-hatred and existential fragmentation arising from their new conception of humanity. And the metaphor of a split cosmos led to a new understanding of the world as merely a desacralized theater for the human drama to be enacted. [Read more...]
Chinese civilization | harmonic web of life
The  early Chinese saw themselves embedded in a harmonic web of life, which led to the view of a cosmos where the purpose of life was not to seek everlasting salvation, but to harmonize one’s existence within the hierarchical network of family, society, heaven, and earth. [Read more...]
modern civilization | conquest of nature
The language of the Old Testament, giving man dominion over the animals, was perceived in Europe as a clarion call for the scientific conquest of nature, framing the pattern of meaning that has encompassed the world through the present day. 
   More recently, the Western capitalist model has enveloped the globe, catalyzing a dramatic increase in the consumption of natural resources, with its implicit promise that the future offers greater prosperity and happiness for all. In recent decades, this rampant consumption has begun to take its toll, raising such specters as a massive extinction of species, a global freshwater crisis and runaway climate change. [Read more...]
The Future | the web of meaning?
This pattern has not yet emerged. Humanity’s possible future trajectories span the grimmest to the most dazzling. What lessons might apply when we consider how earlier civilizations drove themselves to collapse? Will technology be our savior?
   How might artificial intelligence and genetic enhancement affect our experience of being human? Will it exacerbate the chasm already existing in today’s world between the haves and have-nots, possibly even leading humanity to bifurcate as a species?
  What is the possibility of a transformation of global norms based on a realization of our intrinsic connectedness with each other and with the natural world? Might a greater understanding of our cognitive patterns help us to construct a more integrated worldview that could put humanity on a sustainable path? [Read more...]