Universals of the Human Condition 2: Part Two

It’s pretty obvious that all humans share with all other humans various but fundamental universals. We all have a biological mother and father for example. One normally however associates every human being and every human society as unique in terms of their worldview. Yet there remain certain universals (like mom and dad) seemingly shared across the board by the great majority of individuals comprising any and all cultures. Some of these universals were explored in an earlier essay. Now let’s explore several more universals common to the human condition, which are innate to our internal psychology and/or based around external realities. 

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Social Animal: Hermits are relatively few and far between. We voluntarily associate in large clusters usually like-with-like. That sometimes resulting in ghettos and/or ethnic neighbourhoods (like Chinatowns) which usually wasn’t quite the social issue in ancient history that it has tended to be in the latter three centuries. That the human species are a social animal is nowhere more dramatically brought to the fore than with the modern phenomena, something bordering a on pure obsession, of having to be in contact 24/7/52. People produce seemingly endless streams of emails; love the use of cams; blog the most trivial of trivia’s;  engage in so much text messaging that arthritis rates among the young are bound to skyrocket; engage in near endless mobile phone use; make posting after posting on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter (and similar sites), etc. We throw parties; dine together; attend all manner of functions with our peers, and on and on it goes. Such social activities aren’t confined to any one sex or age group or nationality. 

Sports: Contests, whether as harmless play, as a more formal and structured competition (be it amateur or professional) has been the case in all societies from the year dot through to the present day. The ancient Greeks had their Olympic Games; the Mesoamericans their ball-court contests where you just wouldn’t want to be on the losing side; Americans have their national pastime (baseball); other countries/cultures go fanatically mad over all manner of other sports be it rugby or soccer or ice hockey. One doesn’t even have to be a fan of or participate in team sports. Chess and wrestling just require one opponent; golf and tenpin bowling don’t even require that. Sporting contests have to rate as one of the most universal of human universals ever. 

Superstitions: This hardly requires any lengthy comment. From black cats, to walking under ladders, to Friday the 13^th, to breaking mirrors, avoiding stepping on sidewalk cracks, to Charlie Brown suiting up for his baseball games in a just so manner, etc. Every culture has had (and often still has) endless superstitions and rituals to ward them off, which we might shrug off as harmless nonsense today but which we’re not always taken with a proverbial grain of salt thrown over the shoulder. More than a few felines and women suffered the most horrible of tortures because of superstitions. 

Taboos: Every society everywhere at every time has had some set of taboos – some of which made sense like incest (inbreeding is bad from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective), but many that didn’t. For example, only the ancient Chinese emperor or empress was allowed to have the image of a dragon on their clothing; for everyone else that was taboo under penalty of death. Some foods are forbidden; some only forbidden or allowed on certain days – most illogical, unless for health reasons which usually wasn’t or isn’t the rational. And although all societies have or have had taboos, there’s often little consistency between them, or even within them. Royal families often engaged in incest even while being taboo among the commoners. But some societies allowed, even encouraged polygamy while others tabooed the practice. Go figure!

Territoriality: Animals usually stake out and defend a certain amount of territory, that amount of space required to sustain itself, space enough to find a mate in, sufficient territory to sustain and raise a family in. Animals rarely require more than that. They don’t grab territory just for the sake of grabbing territory and for bragging rights. Too large a space is indefensible anyway. You can only patrol so large a space with the resources at your command. Humans are obviously territorial. We defend our personal space. We’re uncomfortable if someone we don’t know gets within a certain distance of us. A man’s home is his castle, and we don’t care for trespassers. If foreign nations threaten or invade our country, we up the nationalistic fever and do our patriotic duty. And while the number of conflicts and wars have perhaps been given too much prominence in our history texts, it’s fair to say that many a nation has invaded many another nation(s) in order to acquire and expand their own territory. That’s usually for a practical purpose(s) – few go to war just for the hell of it. Often that reason(s) is obtaining required natural resources including human resources (slaves), or eliminating a potential threat before they eliminate you, or to provide more space for your expanding population to expand into. When it comes to expanding your territory, there are some less self-serving practical rationales with emphasis instead on more political, cultural, and/or religious reasons include unification – replacing say paganism with your brand of Christianity; communism vs. democracy.  

Treasure: Quite apart from pirates and buried treasure, bank robbers and stashed loot,  prospectors who keep losing the mother lode, or pharaoh’s grave goods (you can take it with you they thought) all societies have their cultural treasures, often in part composed of precious metals, jewels, pearls, jade, ivory, etc. but not always. Treasure to an entire culture or to an archaeologist does not always mean gold doubloons and X marks the spot! When societies are threatened by outside forces, an all too frequent occurrence in human history, they often hide or move those movable valuables comprising those cultural treasures. In the turmoil that follows, sometimes documentation becomes lost or destroyed, the items, scattered in diverse locations, also become lost as the mists of time thicken – and so you have lost treasure. If cultural treasures are looted by invaders, the fate is often the same – scattered to the four winds – some ending up in private collections; others stored/buried away and ultimately forgotten about. Valued objects are also lost by accident. There a lot of valuable cultural artefacts lost at sea when ships were sunk and there’s roughly three million shipwrecks worldwide; a lot of gold (and similar items) was lost in transport to the Old World from the New World including treasures of all sorts of interest only to archaeologists and historians. Some treasure ships (however you define them) have been uncovered and recorded; much more remains. The upshot is that there is an awful lot of treasure that remains unaccounted for, hidden, buried or just plain lost, and every culture can relate to that. But it’s not just treasure that’s universal in human civilizations. The whole concept of treasure is fascinating, even riveting to us as individuals, whether that treasure is modern or ancient; local or sited halfway around the world. And so it has been and probably forever will be.