Videos by topic: CULTURE

Getting back to culture being invisible and omnipresent, we think about intelligence or emotional intelligence, but we rarely think about cultivating cultural intelligence. In this ever-increasing global world, we need to understand culture. All of this research has been trying to elucidate not just how we understand other people who are different from us, but how we understand ourselves.

MICHELE GELFAND is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World. Michele Gelfand's Edge Bio Page

It’s twenty-five years later from the time that I started working on this, and we understand something quite different about the Gospel of Thomas. What it looks like more than anything else, when you put it in context with other historical material, is Jewish mystical thought, or, Kabbalah. Kabbalah, we thought, was first known from written texts from the 10^th to the 15^th centuries from Spanish-Jewish communities. Before that, there was a prohibition on writing about secret teaching. It was mystical teaching that you were not supposed to write about because you don't know what fool could get ahold of it if you did. So, there was a prohibition on teaching anyone mystical Judaism before he was thirty-five, and certainly not to women. People were old by thirty-five, so you had to be a mature Jewish man to have access to that kind of teaching.

I, and others who study Jewish mystical thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, suspect that this tradition goes back 2,000 years. This text says it’s Jesus’ secret teaching. Could it be? It could be. I don't know if it is or not, but it’s fascinating to see that what rabbis called “mystical thought” was labeled by Christian bishops in the 4^th century to be heresy. That’s when I realized how religious imagination and politics coincide, because of the politics in the 4^th century when Christian bishops were beginning to ask who this Jesus of Nazareth was. Jesus was God in human form, and he’s the only one who is the Son of God in human form. So, you can create a monopoly on divine energy and power with a religion that has the only access to the only person in the universe who ever channeled God directly, or was God and became human. That works very well for Orthodox Christianity. . . .

These discoveries are changing the way we understand how cultural traditions were shaped and how they became part of the culture in very different forms than they had begun. I find that enormously exciting. They involve everything from attitudes about gender and sexuality to attitudes about power and politics, about race, and gender, and ethnicity. That’s why I began to write about Adam and Eve. I mean, who cares about Adam and Eve? You realize that those traditions still play out in the culture—in the laws of the United States, or the laws of Britain, or the laws in Africa, the laws against homosexuality, and the ones that claim that the only true marriage can be a marriage between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreation. The Defense of Marriage Act was written by Professor Robert George at Princeton for G.W. Bush. These things still resonate, often very unconsciously, in the culture.

ELAINE PAGELS is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author, most recently, of Why Religion?: A Personal Story. Elaine Pagels' Edge Bio Page

The relationship between parents and children is the most important relationship. It gets more complicated in this case because, beyond the children being our natural children, we can influence them even beyond. We can influence them biologically, and we can use artificial intelligence as a new tool. I’m not a scientist or a technologist whatsoever, but the tools of artificial intelligence, in theory, are algorithm- or computer-based. In reality, I would argue that even an algorithm is biological because it comes from somewhere. It doesn’t come from itself. If it’s related to us as creators or as the ones who are, let’s say, enabling the algorithms, well, we’re the parents.

Who are those children that we are creating? What do we want them to be like as part of the earth, compared to us as a species and, frankly, compared to us as parents? They are our children. We are the parents. How will they treat us as parents? How do we treat our own parents? How do we treat our children? We have to think of these in the exact same way. Separating technology and humans the way we often think about these issues is almost wrong. If it comes from us, it’s the same thing. We have a responsibility. We have the power and the imagination to shape this future generation. It’s exciting, but let’s just make sure that they view us as their parents. If they view us as their parents, we will have a connection.

We need to acknowledge our profound ignorance and begin to craft a culture that will be based on some notion of communalism and interspecies symbiosis rather than survival of the fittest. These concepts are available and fully elaborated by, say, a biologist like Lynn Margulis, but they're still not the central paradigm. They’re still not organizing our research or driving our culture and our cultural evolution. That’s what I’m frustrated with. There’s so much good intellectual work, so much good philosophy, so much good biology—how can we make that more central to what we do? 

CAROLINE A. JONES is professor of art history in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Caroline A. Jones's Edge Bio page