- on CULTURE:
- "Which side of the supposedly all-encompassing 'nature versus nurture' opposition one adopts is far less significant than that in either case, one has assumed that individual propensities are the decisive level of the human drama--a doctrine which, if applied consistently, would unravel the whole thread of social and historical experience."
- "Universal tolerance...allows every culture to exist, but only so long as none of them matters--for if they were allowed to set standards and impose their strictures as all real cultures do, their simultaneous equality would be impossible."
- "Those who remain inside a culture do not perceive it as arbitrary, any more than speakers engrossed in conversation perceive their native language's grammar as arbitrary. They are right not to. For any one culture, however hybrid in origin, is a total world."
- "One's culture is not a particularism; rather, it is one's only access to the universal.... The fractured world of symbol and myth is where we live; 'cultural constructedness' is not a vanity to be derided but the human destiny par excellence."
- "To show the symbolic truth behind the religious or biological trappings is no debunking: symbols, in their own way, are just as strong as DNA."
...the most profoundly subversive essay
currently available on the Internet
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