"Cultural Psychology" Gives An Answer
We based this axiomatic situation for THE PROGRAMME on the first question of the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism: WHAT IS YOUR ONLY COMFORT, IN LIFE AND IN DEATH? To Zacharias Ursinus and his fellow German Reformed theologians, the comfort of the individual was of the first importance. According to the Catechism, the only comfort is that one belongs not to oneself but to Jesus, who died for all one's sins.
From the point of view adopted by THE PROGRAMME, this answer is correct. But it is not so because it is necessarily a statement of the final, objective truth about the reality of the world. It is correct because it provides a tale that indeed gives comfort to the believers. They are sitting in the catechetical class or in the church sanctuary together. They are agreeing with each other that this is so. From that socially bonding experience, they take the comfort that they desire. This enables them to face the threatening conditions of their lives. Their comfort is that, as a result of their shared assent to the answer, to the story of Jesus's sacrifice for the sake of humanity, their world makes sense to them and thereby gains an appearance of manageability.
When we gave top priority to the process of the talk rather than the content, we did not mean that the content is unimportant. There is a relationship between the anxious-ridden feeling of those sitting around the fire and the story at hand. That relationship matters more than any supposed relationship between the story and the "truth" of things in the forest. Those huddled beings seeking comfort from one another want to believe the story being told. They will do so when it seems to make sense of the frightful unknowns out there and the feelings they have of danger. When it does not, they will stand by for another story, or make one up on their own.
We think of at least two problems arising from this scenario at the heart of THE PROGRAMME. First, of course, it leads to a lack of grounding in an objective reality. It leads to a merely pragmatic affirmation of anything that works to make for comfort. This lack characterizes the postmodern approach and sets it apart from modernism, which sought to peel away the veil of ignorance hiding a final reality that was believed to exist. We do not in this essay seek to defend this position but merely underline it.
The second problem with our scenario is its stipulation of the polarity of comfort/discomfort as the fundamental driving force of conscious human existence. We have no evidence for such a stipulation. We have failed to take account of classic formulations wrestling with the issue of fundamental human drive--the Freudian conscious/subconscious dialectic grounded in repressed early experience; the Judeo-Christian soul derived from a judgmental deity to which the individual is accountable; the creative will to power which seeks self-made joy in a nihilistic condition; the Eastern search for escape from suffering in a round of departure and return, generated by desire. It was because of our omission of an accounting for these classic explanations that we felt it useful to focus on "comfort" from a classic religious text, the Heidelberg Catechism. If it was good enough for Zacharias Ursinus as a start, it ought to be good enough for us--the logic went.
A book review by Clifford Geertz recently reminded us of our too-easy comfort with these omissions and this short cut. Geertz's review of Jerome Bruner's The Culture of Education (Harvard Press) in the 10 April 1997 issue of The New York Review of Books (pages 22-24) came as a sort of gift to THE PROGRAMME: it glossed our crude picture of the folk around the fire with a new depth of significance. We have yet to read Bruner's book; and we take Geertz's report at face value. That report provides an underpinning for THE PROGRAMME that we embrace uncritically at this stage. It gives us new comfort, as it were.
Bruner (we learn from Geertz) offers "cultural psychology" as a fresh path for understanding the motivations for human learning. Bruner depicts learning as a social process by which children "make meaning" by paying attention to the narratives (stories) told by others in formal (disciplinary) as well as informal social modes. "Telling stories, about ourselves and about others, to ourselves and to others, is [says Bruner] 'the most natural and the earliest way in which we organize our experience and our knowledge.'" Narrative is "the hermeneutics of everyday life."
Geertz says that Bruner offers cultural psychology as a synthesizing turn for the discpline of psychology, which remains in tension because of differing theories and emphases. Cultural psychology as set forth in the article resonates comfortably (!) with the contextual, particularistic themes in postmodern thinking; it avoids a totalizing theory to explain all behavior but rather depends upon the ongoingess of narrative to continue making meaning for the subjects of a time and place. Geertz suggests that the coloration of a Brunerian cultural psychology makes it more explosive than ameliorative within the discipline of psychology. It runs against two other growing rivals in psychology--cognitive studies on the information-processing model and neurobiology (we are in "the age of the absolute gene," Geertz suggests).
Geertz elaborates: "To argue that culture is socially and historically constructed; that narrative is a primary, in humans perhaps the primary, mode of knowing; that we assemble the selves we live in out of materials lying about in the society around us and develop 'a theory of mind' to comprehend the selves of others; that we act not directly on the world but on beliefs we hold about the world; that from birth on we are all active, impassioned 'meaning makers' in search of plausible stories; and that 'mind cannot in any sense be regarded as "natural" or naked, with culture thought of as an add-on'--such a view...[is] radical, not to say subversive."
However radical or subversive, the cultural psychology described in this article offers THE PROGRAMME a useful expansion of its primordial picture of "folk around the fire." It emphasizes "intersubjectivity." It has a pragmatic ring to it. It is evolutionary. It does not deny that some stories might even accurately account for "what the devil is going on," as Geertz puts it, even as they give the comfort of making the strange familiar.
Of course we must read Bruner's book. Then we must revisit the congruence we have found between our "folk around the fire" and Bruner's account of cultural psychology. In the meantime, it makes us feel pretty comfortable.