A Defensive System Against Anxiety

Culture as a Defensive System Against Anxiety -- Gil Prost

When assigned to the Mikasuki (Miccosukee) language project in South Florida in 1984, it was providential. Unexpectedly, I discovered that the Mikasuki (Miccosukee) had a dual set of pronouns. The discovery provided linguistic evidence that human existence is dual. This dual kind of existence manifested itself in two kinds of selfhood. The transcendent-self expressed by the pronoun -ele, 'I,' and the material-self expressed with the pronoun cha-, 'I.'

The -ele pronoun positioned the self outside of Nature in the sphere of Culture and freedom and under God; the cha- pronoun positioned the self in Nature, the sphere of stimulus-response behavior. Contrary to what the materialists say, the dual pronoun system declares that man is more than a body and a brain. This natural duality supports what the Word of God declares in Psalms 8: 5-6.

You have made him a little lower than yourself.

You have crowned him with glory and honor.

You have made him rule what your hands created.

You have put everything under his control.

--- Psalms 8: 5-6

In nature there exist human needs which must be satisfied if man and society are to survive. This means only man can contemplate his future existence and sense that his long term security may be threatened. When threaten, man and society become anxious.

Because these threats to our existence are real, men everywhere make decisions regarding economic, political, social, technological, and ecological pressures that affect their well-being. For example, since people are not some KIND OF animal, they do not instinctively store away their seed corn if they hope to survive the following year; rather, by deductive reasoning they arrive at the proper choices.

Unlike animals, people positioned under God were created to calculate, reason and think logically, and make plans regarding their existence regardless of their environments. When diverse linguistic groups left Babel and began to fill the earth, they entered territories where natural environments were very different. Some lands were arid and dry and if one was to survive, the land needed to be irrigated. Others lands experienced a great deal of rainfall and the infertility of the soil compelled communities to pack up and move to another area after a few years since the land no longer produced a good crop despite the abundant rainfall.

Anxiety, the Fountainhead of Cultural Diversity

It slowly became obvious that human anxiety caused by environmental pressures was the Mother of Cultural Diversity. What a particular cultural life-way is all about is also what the society is anxious about. Man, in his struggle to eliminate anxiety from daily life, has consequently busied himself in designing socio-economic-political-religious systems that would hopefully achieve that goal.

In fact, cultural diversity is nothing more than a manifestation of the various kinds of defensive schemes mankind has devised for reducing human anxiety over existence apart from God’s decrees and providential care. In the words of psychoanalyst Géza Roheim, “defensive systems against anxiety are the stuff that culture is made of."

Anxiety Reduction Man's Way

Historically, the primary means for reducing a society's existential anxieties has been through the creation of a cultural defensive system based on kinship. In the words of anthropologist Robin Fox, the stuff of these defensive systems were needs based. They were “responses to various recognizable pressures within a framework of biological, ecological, and social limitations. ...they are there because they meet certain needs."

The first step in creating a defensive system against anxiety begins by rearranging the internal structure of the nuclear family. It occurs when a society replaces the covenantal dyad of husband-wife with one of the following biological dyads (father-son, father-daughter, mother-son, mother-daughter, brother-sister, brother-brother, and sister-sister). Depending on the need, this is followed by the merging of mutually exclusive status positions and the rejection of the Law of Identity.

Such merging gave birth to what anthropologist call the CLASSIFICATORY KINSHIP SYSTEM.

For example, when Israel entered the promise land, Jehovah spoke to Moses, saying: "You must not carry out the practices of the land of Egypt, in which you lived, and you must not carry out the practices of the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you; and you must not follow their statutes" (Lev. 18:3). But what exactly were these "practices"?

The context gives us the answer. It is all about maintaining the moral integrity of the basic unit of society a.k.a the nuclear family. Rejecting the nuclear family as normative, they are guilty of creating new types of "families."

Israel lived in a social environment in which every nation had reconfigured the internal structure of the nuclear family. Each had created a new kind of "family" types. This they did by merging mutually exclusive status positions as manifested in what constituted the Egyptian family. The Egyptians, at least the ruling class, had classified cousins and all uncles and aunts as "brothers" and "sisters." (See: Campagno, Marcelo. March 2009. Kinship and Family Relations: In: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. Los Angeles. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zh1g7ch)

Now if Israel had followed the practice of restructuring the nuclear family as was the custom of the surrounding nations, it would have signaled that they no longer believed that Jehovah could "bless them with abundant provisions and supply the poor with bread" (Psalms 132: 15). Rejection of the Divine Ideal in which the nuclear family serves as the foundation of society has consequences. Society's anxiety over existence will compel man to suppress the universal and construct a new type of "family," one structured to satisfy specific needs and values.

Now the number of defensive systems based on the merging of status positions, each designed to relieve some existential anxiety and meet particular needs staggers the imagination. The function of each "family" type that exists in the world exists to specifically achieve certain goals and relieve certain anxieties which were shaped by environmental pressures.

The only kinship system which is not shaped by environmental pressures is the Biblical Kinship System sketched out in Leviticus 18. It rejects the merging of status positions as the means to relieve existential anxieties. But man estranged from his Creator use his freedom and violates the rules of logic whenever he rejects the Law of Identity and begins to merge mutually exclusive status positions in order to increase the size of his "family."

Convictions:

The FALL gave birth to anxiety. And from that Memorial Day forward, man's needs were met by primarily by "the sweat of the brow," the rejection of the "one flesh" principle of husband-wife, and the restructuring of the nuclear family. SOCIAL EXISTENCE began to replace PROVIDENCE.
As mankind began to fill the earth after the Tower of Babel, defensive family forms began to be shaped by the character of the environment, supporting Géza Roheim definition that “defensive systems against anxiety are the stuff that culture is made of."