Originally Posted by Botnst

The herd instinct
its benefits and its costs

Roger Sandall (assisted by Sir Francis Galton)

Descartes himself did not use the term “culture”. He spoke of “custom and example”. But the herd thinking of cultural collectivities is exactly what he had in mind. There are any number of synonymous phrases for “custom and example”—the way things are usually done, social precedent, traditional authority, accepted belief, customary thought, conventional wisdom—but cognitively they amount to much the same thing: all of them are sources of error.
In Gellner’s words, what Descartes challenged was the possibility that “the shared assumptions of an entire society, built into its way of life and sustained by it, should be deeply misguided. Entire societies are committed, with fervour and often with arrogance and with infuriating complacency, to blatant absurdities.” Epitomising what he sees as Descartes’ view, Gellner writes:

So individualism and rationalism are closely linked: that which is collective and customary is non-rational, and the overcoming of unreason and of collective custom are one and the same process…

Error is to be found in culture; and culture is a kind of systematic, communally induced error. It is of the essence of error that it is communally induced and historically accumulated.


More at: http://www.culturecult.com/sandall_dec06.htm