Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century British philosopher, described humans as selfish beings. He said that humans embrace what adds ‘vitality’ to their life and shun what threatens it. It is to this human instinct that all human progress can be credited. Humans pick up habits that add vitality and overtime those become culture. In doing so they also explore the ways that threaten vitality and warn against them, which also overtime in shapes of beliefs and myths become a part of culture. This human nature of picking up the beneficial and weeding out the harmful is what guides culture. Here new doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Culture is not an arbitrary code forced upon us. In fact, nothing arbitrary can be made a part of the culture as it is a product of human nature. Its primary rule as Hobbes suggests is survival. Culture is all those beliefs and practices that enable survival. Whatever that goes against the natural rule perishes. All the beliefs that add on to the tests of life is wilfully shunned by humans in favour of something that checks the burden of life. This is the raison deter of culture. Humans have wanted to live. All those attitudes, beliefs and practices that helped humans live get weaved together for the posterity to save them the effort to fight the same problems again. Culture is a sum of all this. It changes for only the practices that serve the human instinct of adding vitality or value.
Change is not inherently harmful. It is a necessity. But what matters is the reason for change. The change that comes from the resentment against the convention often is failure stealing moral superiority to justify victimhood. It is a student questioning the syllabi for his poor performance. But the change that simply makes life better makes itself obvious. It doesn’t need a deliberation. It is picked up and overtime become the part of the culture. Change doesn’t require votaries. Exigency is what dictates change not people and their whims.
The idea of new being better is a scientific necessity because Science works on cumulative knowledge. What is known to us today is better than what was known to us, say, a hundred years not just because its ‘new’, but because it is the result of hundred years of exploration. But that is not the case with life and humans. Despite the pride we take in ourselves for living in the 21st century we are the same humans who have existed for over 3 lakh years. Our fears and desires are premised on the same instincts. We are not equipped with anything new to process these. We have the same limitations. There are no life problems that we face that have not been faced before. Then why not pay heed to ‘how’ those problems were faced head on in the past?
