Limited Learning of the Predicate
The ethics of memory can be in this sense problematic if the ethical evaluations lead to a greater or lesser value on the perspectives included within the ethical values we impose upon our memory.
Humanity has a species does have certain altruistic qualities and some aggressive qualities. The absence of one or the other probably creates a barrenness in one’s behavior. But whether this absence is a genetic or a learned absence is one of those things that somehow probably reigns in the more than at the moment.
And yet learning must play a part in both as well. In the formation of our memories we must have developed our approach to our perspectives. Even so, there may more than learning in this regard that retains a strong genetic tendency to how we respond in situations that might lend themselves towards more agility in transferring from altruistic mode to aggressive. They now claim their is a genetic factor that triggers us to switch from hunter to hunted. It can be the same with altruism and aggression. But this triggers can be altered in a personality. The hunted may instead try to hunt the one who is hunting him, it has been known to happen, sometimes in war leading to extreme acts of heroism, but perhaps sometimes leading to extreme acts of folly.
Certainly between heroism and folly lies the social bonding process that might see actions of violence a perceived different group of persons as a heroic presentation but becomes a social folly that splinters one’s own experiences to frequently experience the perceived other through the lens of the ideology rather than the reality of the experiences.
Perhaps nothing is more demonstrative of how we learn to develop our memory more than the biases of prejudice that can design how we might meet the experiences with whatever we are prejudiced against.
Richard Wilk in Altruism and Self Interest: Towards An Anthropological Theory of Decision Making writes:
“I suggest that the classic problem can be recast and reframed in a way that changes it from a philosophical issue into an empirical one. It can then be approached as a practical problem rather than one that tests our underlying faith or philosophical (and idealistic) conclusions about humans.”
The self-interested rational individual, "economic man," has been a feature of social science since Locke. Modern economic theorists assume that people maximize their individual utility, even when they may appear to be altruistic. Much of anthropological functionalism, as well as formalist economic anthropology, takes this as a starting place. A social theory begins with the idea that humans are trained to identify with a group and are motivated by the interests of the collectivity-household, clan, class, nation-state. Understanding action means studying norms and the solidarity and continuity of the group rather than individual self interest. Motive becomes no more than the illusion of self-will allowed by society, and it loses its theoretical importance.
The study of moral motivation-in the sense of action shaped by culturally specific belief systems and values-was once the concern of most of the humanities.
Moral theory assumes that people maximize culturally defined concepts of value that are embedded in common systems of classification and interpretation. Symbolic systems and cognitive categories of right and wrong, good and bad, define the realm of the possible and shape choice. Economic anthropology has been the scene of often passionate debate among proponents of all three views of human nature. Let me illustrate how these three paradigms of motive and their attendant scientific clothing work in practice, with an example familiar to most anthropologists. The potlatch has been a point of contention in anthropology for almost a century. Kwakiutl chiefs competed with each other by throwing feasts at which they gave away large amounts of food and goods to important men of other villages.
Helen Codere Fighting with Property suggests this is a ritual to maintain status by the Kwakiutl chiefs and if a chief couldn’t thrown a more elaborate feast his status, and therefore his chiefdom, would decline.
On the other hand in Smoke From Their Fires, Wayne Suttles argues it’s function is to moves surplus goods to areas that need them, and evens out though long-term variation by its redistribution of goods and so the chiefs are viewed to be acting for the benefit of all Kwakiutl.
And yet Ruth Benedict would write in 1934 in The Patterns of Culture that the personality of the particular complex of traits and attitudes of the cultural practice defined the individuals within it as the successes, misfits, or outcasts of the society demonstrated through its rituals,, in this case, of the potlatch and the behavioral occurrences of the personalities in the giving and receiving within the confines of the ritual.
The modern perspective of the paradigm of the utility function within the household can often be based on what Suttles might presume to be to the overall benefit of the community when their is an assumption of patriarchal altruism.
While we might see Codere’s perspective play out as a struggle between the the inequality and the drive to maximize the status of each member within the household.
Overall the significance of the sociological categories of family types doesn’t come that much into question when the social context of “choice of mating” is usually taken as given, without recognizing that social contexts are themselves the products of choices that are outlines of what choices are supposed to be made in order to responsibility “teach” human offspring. This often leads to said offspring becoming properties of the parental family and responsibility of teaching behaviorally well-developed evolves solely to the caregivers, or parents.
Of course the fact that property seldom needs to be taught to behave responsibility unless the property is human further increases humans servitude as the property of society. In this sense the outcast and/or rejected are those that do not develop a behavioral decorum within the role that they become propertized. Or if they try to break their propertied status that begins within the propertied status of children to the parent.
If one considers for the moment that the normal grammar is to have subject and predicate. The subject is the owner of the actions while the predicate of a sentence is not just the action being done, but the object upon which the action is being performed. John hits Mary; John is the subject, while “hits Mary” is the predicate. It is supposedly benign acting if John teaches Mary; but “teaches Mary” is still the predicate and the teaching is being done to Mary.
Why, one might ask must Mary have to be activated upon to gain knowledge. What can we reflect that such an action is not as beneficial as “Mary learns” where Mary learns as the subject who is doing the learning. If Mary has to be acted upon by teaching her; then Mary’s capacity to learn has become diminished.
In this sense, as part of the predicate, Mary has become verbified and loses her identity as the subject. Herein lies the beginning of a learning deficit and the defaulting of human awareness of his own subjective consciousness into a phenomenon of predification that defines the person as an object that needs to be acted upon.
Mary must be represented by another; Mary cannot represent herself. Mary must be identified as poor or wealthy, black or white; but Mary’s ability to identify herself is frowned upon. By placing the individual into the predicate being acted upon we avoid the fundamental theoretical issues of becoming one’s potential self, by using unvalidated categories to measure arbitrary forms of expected learning and behavior.
This the leads to a question if real decisions can be made by such as who is not his own subject. Are the predicates of a society actively capable of changing structural arrangements in their own self-interests?
The issue is not then one of free will versus determinism; of selfishness versus group interest. This is uncomfortable territory because it requires that we pry into the details of whatever might be any basis of social community if the individuals are only objects of the community.
A related system attempts to classify people according to the values they express and the needs that motivate them. So we can now differentiate types of personalities who might be selfish and/or antisocial; or those who might be generous and/or socially giving. We can determine the cause of these personalities on the basis of their psychological makeup. Households, and thus the learning process that results can be classified by their predominant mode of bargaining or their degree of conflict.
When we reduce personalities to exogenously inherent variables called their "attitude" of being individually non-conformist or individually traditional participants in behavioral normatives, we end up trivializing the everyday empirical experience of the development of personalities in a meager exercise of exorcizing the very objectification processes we have used to develop personalities.
Quite silly on its face to expect individuals to be subjects in their own right if there learning has been they are the only objects being acted upon.
If this encountered objectification of the individual personality development becomes antagonistic to the social dimension of behaviors to which he has become the predicate; then the social dimensions that includes the size of the group that a person considers himself to be included within that after self can become limited or can include the totality of all humans on the planet depending on the degree his learning has predicatorized him.
The dyadic nature of family, friends, nation–or race, sex, religion, or categories of worth designated by money, education, occupation or authority then can empirically limit the expansion of personalities to be other than included in the dyadic classifications limiting his personality from growing beyond any inclusive perspective other than what his learning has limited him to.
Moral precepts of all kinds urge humans to consider others when taking action, but such individual actions are frequently limited by his own learned objectification or actions of refutation to his acceptance of that learning of objectification of himself; thus labeling him a misfit; or the self-retreat into “mental illnesses” or becoming sterilized of both his classified self and the ability to become the subject of his own objectified status and the values placed upon him.
In the long run, as Wilk points out “both Marx and Adam Smith fail, and we need to turn to "history"-which turns out to include some cultural evolution and a lot of anthropological particularism.”