Cultural Diffusion Quotes

That’s all culture is, after all, the nutrients pervading the air we breathe, diffusing into and out of people, a passive process.

In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains "of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life" and feels his "amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless." He describes "subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression," "violent oscillations of self-esteem," and "a general inability to get along." He gains "a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported." Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living.

The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write. Cultural diffusion seems a less likely explanation for its occurrence in so many areas, many of them distant and isolated.

Culturally, diffusion is the mutual penetration of specific cultural phenomenon

In the vast perspective of human history, there was no other issue, because all history was and would be a record of power struggles and the success or failure of constant cultural diffusions.

Certainly, one of the greatest achievements of the human intellectual spirit was the Arabic Translation Movement. Over the course of about 100 years, virtually the entire Greek Scientific and philosophical corpus was either translated or summarized into Arabic (McGinnis, 10).

To put it briefly, there are two widely diffused human characteristics which are responsible for the fact that the organization of culture can be maintained only by a certain measure of coercion: that is to say, men are not naturally fond of work, and arguments are of no avail against their passions.

When the British invaders confronted the Iroquois on the east coast of North America, the British were able to draw upon technology, science, and other cultural developments from China, India, and Egypt, not to mention various other peoples from continental Europe. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the cultural developments of the Aztecs or Incas, who remained unknown to them, though located only a fraction of the distance away as China is from Britain. While the immediate confrontation was between the British settlers and the Iroquois, the cultural resources mobilized on one side represented many more cultures from many more societies around the world. It was by no means a question of the genetic or even cultural superiority of the British by themselves, as compared to the Iroquois, for the British were by no means by themselves. They had the advantage of centuries of cultural diffusion from numerous sources, scattered over thousands of miles.

Modernity, characterized by the diffusion of a written culture, has lost the memory of the oral origins of poetry; this insight is reaffirmed by Leopardi in 1831

Diffusion has an actual influence on the dynamics of culture

According to W. Hantand, diffusion is the borrowing of certain cultural element from one community to another community

developing and exercising their abilities in work that wins social esteem, sharing in a widely diffused culture of learning, and deliberating with their fellow citizens about public affairs.

Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious “Western” imperialist plot to hold down the “Oriental” world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of “interests” which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what “we” do and what “they” cannot do or understand as “we” do). Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with “our” world.

Our conditioning as members of a consumer society prevents us from abandoning hope that, with sufficient planning, we might yet be able to see and do everything. To move slowly and deliberately through the world, attending to one thing at a time, strikes us as radically subversive, even un-American. We cringe from the idea of relinquishing, in any moment, all but one of the infinite possibilities offered us by our culture. Plagued by a highly diffused attention, we give ourselves to everything lightly. That is our poverty. In saying yes to everything, we attend to nothing. One only can love what one stops to observe. “Nothing is more essential to prayer,” said Evagrius, “than attentiveness.

As yet, though we live in a culture in which images are the dominant currency of communication, we have been unable to form an adequate picture of the future. Despite the new electronic power to create instant image flow, the ability to see the more diffuse Postmodern connections . . . has become more difficult. . . . It is harder to visualize a multinational identity than a local entity. We can only see the world by forming a picture through various specialized mediations. . . . We now lack a convincing vision...

Georges Sorel, to whom fascism is so much indebted, wrote at the beginning of our century that all great movements are compelled by 'myths.' A myth is the strongest belief held by the group, and its adherents feel themselves to be an army of truth fighting an army of evil. Some years earlier, in 1895, the French psychologist Gustav Le Bon had written of the 'conservatism of crowds' which cling tenaciously to traditional ideas. Hitler took the basic nationalism of the German tradition and the longing for stable personal relationships of olden times, and built upon them as the strongest belief of the group. In the diffusion of the 'myth' Hitler fulfilled what Le Bon had forecast: that 'magical powers' were needed to control the crowd. The Fuhrer himself wrote of the 'magic influence' of mass suggestion and the liturgical aspects of his movement, and its success as a mass religion bore out the truth of this view.

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.

They learned about purity before they learned about sex, and they have a silver ring to prove it. They watched The Passion of the Christ, Soul Surfer, or the latest Kirk Cameron film with their youth group. They attended Promise Keepers with guys from church and read Wild at Heart in small groups. They’ve learned more from Pat Robertson, John Piper, Joyce Meyer, and The Gospel Coalition than they have from their pastor’s Sunday sermons. The diffusion of evangelical consumer culture extends far beyond the orbit of evangelical churches. Cultural evangelicalism has made deep inroads into mainline Christianity,

This natural division of labor was continued only at great cultural sacrifice: men and women developed only half of themselves, at the expense of the other half. The division of the psyche into male and female to better reinforce the reproductive division was tragic: the hypertrophy in men of rationalism, aggressive drive, the atrophy of their emotional sensitivity was a physical (war) as well as a cultural disaster. The emotionalism and passivity of women increased their suffering (we cannot speak of them in a symmetrical way, since they were victimized as a class by the division.) Sexually men and women were channeled into a highly ordered — time, place, procedure even dialogue — heterosexuality restricted to the genitals, rather than diffused over the entire physical being.

Diffuse cultural attributes are not meta-inventions. As examples, consider Western individualism and Chinese Daoism. The importance of the complex of beliefs that we call Western individualism is surely on a par with any other cultural development in history. Individualism is often argued to have been a decisive factor in the ascendancy of Western civilization, a position with which I agree and expound upon in Chapter 19. But individualism is a phenomenon with roots that sprawl across the Greek, Judaic, and Christian traditions. It manifested itself in different ways across different parts of the West in the same era and within any given country of the West across time. Similarly, Daoism, while technically denoting a specific literature identified with Laozi and Zhuangzi, labels a Chinese world view that permitted traditions of art, poetry, governance, and medicine that could not conceivably have occurred in the West—but, like Western individualism, it is grounded in such diffuse sources that to call it an invention stretches the meaning of that word too far. In searching for meta-inventions I am looking for more isolated, discrete cognitive tools.

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never had. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often went through before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? - or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being some-one represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? indeed: men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus. I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: 'Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another' - why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be. The sense of permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy. 'Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bower movement every morning after breakfast.' 'Billy just loves to read all the time...' 'Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.' 'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.' It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but... Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but ... And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn’t have to worry about how she looked . . . Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery. What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free - even of 'good' habits.

Pierre Eliot Trudeau's gift of an official policy of multiculturalism appeared in our midst in a period of rapid influx of third world immigrants into Canada, as well as in a moment of growing intensity of the old English-French rivalry....In this context the proclamation of multiculturalism could be seen as a diffusing or muting device for francophone national aspirations, as much as a way of coping with the non-European immigrants' arrival. It also sidelined the claims of Canada's aboriginal population, which had displayed a propensity toward armed struggles for land claims, as exemplified by the American Indian Movement (AIM). The reduction of these groups' demands into cultural demands was obviously helpful to the nationhood of Canada with its hegemonic anglo-Canadian national culture....It is not an accident that Bissoondath, who confuses between antiracism and multiculturalism, should fall for a political discourse of assimilation which keeps the so-called immigrants in place through a constantly deferred promise....As the focus shifts from processes of exclusion and marginalization to ethnic identities and their lack of adaptiveness, it is forgotten that these officially multicultural ethnicities, so embraced or rejected, are themselves the constructs of colonial - orientalist and racist - discourses.

Page 244: The Jewish involvement in influencing immigration policy in the United States is especially noteworthy as an aspect of ethnic conflict. ... Throughout much of the period from 1881 to 1965, one Jewish interest in liberal immigration policies stemmed from a desire to provide a sanctuary for Jews fleeing from anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe and elsewhere. ... There is also evidence that Jews, much more than any other European-derived ethnic group in the United States, have viewed liberal immigration policies as a mechanism of ensuring that the United States would be a pluralistic rather than a unitary, homogeneous society (e.g., Cohen 1972). ... Pluralism serves internal Jewish interests because it legitimates the internal Jewish interest in rationalizing ... Jewish group commitment and non-assimilation, what Howard Sachar (1992, 427) terms its function in “legitimizing the preservation of a minority culture in the midst of a majority’s host society.” ... Ethnic and religious pluralism also serves external Jewish interests because Jews become just one of many ethnic groups. This results in the diffusion of political and cultural influence among the various ethnic and religious groups, and it becomes difficult or impossible to develop unified, cohesive groups of gentiles united in their opposition to Judaism. Historically, major anti-Semitic movements have tended to erupt in societies that have been, apart from the Jews, religiously or ethnically homogeneous.

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

Yet the deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occurs from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites. The reason for this, as I have said, is that culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions. Over time, cultural innovation is translated and diffused. Deep-rooted cultural change tends to begin with those whose work is most conceptual and invisible and it moves through to those whose work is most concrete and visible. In a very crude formulation, the process begins with theorists who generate ideas and knowledge; moves to researchers who explore, revise, expand, and validate ideas; moves on to teachers and educators who pass those ideas on to others, then passes on to popularizers who simplify ideas and practitioners who apply those ideas. All of this, of course, transpires through networks and structures of cultural production. Cultural change is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality. This rarely if ever happens through grassroots political mobilization though grassroots mobilization can be a manifestation of deeper cultural transformation.

This curious effect was noticed as far back as 1892, when textbooks on mental illness noted a link between “religious emotionalism” and epilepsy. It was first clinically described in 1975 by neurologist Norman Geschwind of Boston Veterans Administration Hospital. He noticed that epileptics who had electrical misfirings in their left temporal lobes often had religious experiences, and he speculated that the electrical storm in the brain somehow was the cause of these religious obsessions. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran estimates that 30 to 40 percent of all the temporal lobe epileptics whom he has seen suffer from hyperreligiosity. He notes, “Sometimes it’s a personal God, sometimes it’s a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems suffused with meaning. The patient will say, ‘Finally, I see what it is all really about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the universe—the cosmic scheme.’ ” He also notes that many of these individuals are extremely adamant and convincing in their beliefs. He says, “I sometimes wonder whether such patients who have temporal lobe epilepsy have access to another dimension of reality, a wormhole of sorts into a parallel universe. But I usually don’t say this to my colleagues, lest they doubt my sanity.” He has experimented on patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, and confirmed that these individuals had a strong emotional reaction to the word “God” but not to neutral words. This means that the link between hyperreligiosity and temporal lobe epilepsy is real, not just anecdotal. Psychologist Michael Persinger asserts that a certain type of transcranial electrical stimulation (called transcranial magnetic simulation, or TMS) can deliberately induce the effect of these epileptic lesions. If this is so, is it possible that magnetic fields can be used to alter one’s religious beliefs? In Dr. Persinger’s studies, the subject places a helmet on his head (dubbed the “God helmet”), which contains a device that can send magnetism into particular parts of the brain. Afterward, when the subject is interviewed, he will often claim that he was in the presence of some great spirit. David Biello, writing in Scientific American, says, “During the three-minute bursts of stimulation, the affected subjects translated this perception of the divine into their own cultural and religious language—terming it God, Buddha, a benevolent presence, or the wonder of the universe.” Since this effect is reproducible on demand, it indicates that perhaps the brain is hardwired in some way to respond to religious feelings.

People have traditionally talked about civilization “spreading” from place to place and not happening by other means. This is the result, I think, of two forms of self-deception. First of these is self-congratulation. If we suppose—as people throughout history have regularly supposed—that the way we live represents the climax of human achievement, we need to represent it as unique or, at least, rare: when you find a lot of examples of something that you expect to be unique, you have to explain the effect as the result of diffusion. Yet, in reality, civilization is an ordinary thing, an impulse so widespread that it has again transformed almost every habitable environment. Peoples modest enough in the faceof nature to forgo or severely limit their interventions are much rarer than those, like us, who crush nature into an image of our approving. The attitude of these reticent cultures should therefore be considered much harder to explain than that of the civilized. The second self-deception is belief in what might be called the migrationist fallacy, which powerfully warped previous generations’ picture of the remote past. Our received wisdom about prehistoric times was formulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Europe was enjoying her own great imperial age. The experience of those times convinced self-appointed imperial master-races that civilization was something which descended from superior to inferior peoples. Its vectors were conquerors, colonists, and missionaries. Left to themselves, the barbarians would be mired in cultural immobility. The self-perception of the times was projected, almost without utterance, onto the depiction of the past. Stonehenge was regarded as a marvel beyond the capabilities of the people who really built it—just as to white beholders the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (see page p. 252 ) seemed to have been left by intruders, or the cities of the Maya (see page 158 ) to have been erected under guidance from afar. Early Bronze Age Wessex, with its chieftainly treasures of gold, was putatively assigned to a Mycenean king. The sophistication of Aegean palace life (see page 292 ) was said to have been copied from the Near East. Almost every development, every major change in the prehistoric world was turned by migrationist scholarship into a kind of pre-enactment of later European colonialism and attributed to the influence of migrants or scholars or the irradiation of cultural superiority, warming barbaric darkness into civilized enlightenment. Scholars who had before their eyes the sacred history of the Jews or the migration stories of Herodotus had every reason to trust their own instincts and experience and to chart the progress of civilization on the map. The result was to justify the project of the times: a world of peoples ranked in hierarchical order, sliced and stacked according to abilities supposed to be innate.

Under these circumstances the most anodyne book was a source of danger from the simple fact that love was alluded to, and woman depicted as an attractive creature; and this was enough to account for all—for the inherent ignorance of Catholics, since it was proclaimed as the preventive cure for temptations—for the instinctive horror of art, since to these craven souls every written and studied work was in its nature a vehicle of sin and an incitement to fall. Would it not really be far more sensible and judicious to open the windows, to air the rooms, to treat these souls as manly beings, to teach them not to be so much afraid of their own flesh, to inculcate the firmness and courage needed for resistance? For really it is rather like a dog which barks at your heels and snaps at your legs if you are afraid of him, but who beats a retreat if you turn on him boldly and drive him off. The fact remains that these schemes of education have resulted, on the one hand, in the triumph of the flesh in the greater number of men who have been thus brought up and then thrown into a worldly life, and on the other, in a wide diffusion of folly and fear, an abandonment of the possessions of the intellect and the capitulation of the Catholic army surrendering without a blow to the inroads of profane literature, which takes possession of territory that it has not even had the trouble of conquering. This really was madness! The Church had created art, had cherished it for centuries; and now by the effeteness of her sons she was cast into a corner. All the great movements of our day, one after the other—romanticism, naturalism—had been effected independently of her, or even against her will. If a book were not restricted to the simplest tales, or pleasing fiction ending in virtue rewarded and vice punished, that was enough; the propriety of beadledom was at once ready to bray. As soon as the most modern form of art, the most malleable and the broadest—the Novel—touched on scenes of real life, depicted passion, became a psychological study, an effort of analysis, the army of bigots fell back all along the line. The Catholic force, which might have been thought better prepared than any others to contest the ground which theology had long since explored, retired in good order, satisfied to cover its retreat by firing from a safe distance, with its old-fashioned match-lock blunderbusses, on works it had neither inspired nor written. The Church party, centuries behind the time, and having made no attempt to follow the evolution of style in the course of ages, now turned to the rustic who can scarcely read; it did not understand more than half of the words used by modern writers, and had become, it must be said, a camp of the illiterate. Incapable of distinguishing the good from the bad, it included in one condemnation the filth of pornography and real works of art; in short, it ended by emitting such folly and talking such preposterous nonsense, that it fell into utter discredit and ceased to count at all. And it would have been so easy for it to work on a little way, to try to keep up with the times, and to understand, to convince itself whether in any given work the author was writing up the Flesh, glorifying it, praising it, and nothing more, or whether, on the contrary, he depicted it merely to buffet it—hating it. And, again, it would have done well to convince itself that there is a chaste as well as a prurient nude, and that it should not cry shame on every picture in which the nude is shown. Above all, it ought to have recognized that vices may well be depicted and studied with a view to exciting disgust of them and showing their horrors.

Brian Chesky of Airbnb defines culture in a simple and concise way: “a shared way of doing things.” Clearly defining the way an organization does things matters, because blitzscaling requires aggressive, focused action, and unclear, hazy cultures get in the way of actually implementing strategy. Netflix cofounder and CEO Reed Hastings told me, “Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.” Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have done many wonderful things at Facebook, and one of them is building a unified culture that is devoted to aggressive experimentation and data-driven decision making, as summarized by Mark’s original motto “Move fast and break things.” Facebook’s culture helps employees understand that they shouldn’t be afraid to try things that might fail. This allows Facebook to move faster, and to move on from failed experiments quickly. Imagine if someone asked a random employee from your start-up the following questions: What is your organization trying to do? How are you trying to achieve those goals? What acceptable risks are you incurring to achieve those goals more quickly? When you have to trade off certain values, which ones take priority? What kind of behavior do you hire, promote, or fire for?

Weak cultures are diffuse; people act differently, and don’t understand each other, and it becomes political.

Traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and 'coincidence' doesn't even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we're looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, passed down from a single, remotely ancient source.

It was this hierarchy—so central to Western cosmology for so long that, even today, a ten-year-old could intuitively get much of it right—that was challenged by the most famous compendium of all: Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s eighteen-thousand-page Encyclopédie. Published between 1751 and 1772, the Encyclopédie was sponsored by neither the Catholic Church nor the French monarchy and was covertly hostile to both. It was intended to secularize as well as to popularize knowledge, and it demonstrated those Enlightenment commitments most radically through its organizational scheme. Rather than being structured, as it were, God-down, with the whole world flowing forth from a divine creator, it was structured human-out, with the world divided according to the different ways in which the mind engages with it: “memory,” “reason,” and “imagination,” or what we might today call history, science and philosophy, and the arts. Like alphabetical order, which effectively democratizes topics by abolishing distinctions based on power and precedent in favor of subjecting them all to the same rule, this new structure had the effect of humbling even the most exalted subjects. In producing the Encyclopédie, Diderot did not look up to the heavens but out toward the future; his goal, he wrote, was “that our descendants, by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier.” It is to Diderot’s Encyclopédie that we owe every modern one, from the Britannica and the World Book to Encarta and Wikipedia. But we also owe to it many other kinds of projects designed to, in his words, “assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth.” It introduced not only new ways to do so but new reasons—chief among them, the diffusion of information prized by an élite class into the culture at large. The Encyclopédie was both the cause and the effect of a profoundly Enlightenment conviction: that, for books about everything, the best possible audience was the Everyman.

mechanism. In their slow evolutionary ascent, proto-humans ‘found’ in this mechanism a ‘tool’ for controlling the mimetic escalations of interspecific violence, when imitation (stronger in humans than in animals) diffuses dynamics of reciprocal contention and revenge in a given social group.

This intensive two-year campaign by a public health worker in a Peruvian village of 200 families, aimed at persuading housewives to boil drinking water, was largely unsuccessful. Nelida was able to encourage only about 5 percent of the population, eleven families, to adopt the innovation. The diffusion campaign in Los Molinas failed because of the cultural beliefs of the villagers. Local tradition links hot foods with illness. Boiling water makes water less “cold” and hence, appropriate only for the sick. But if a person is not ill, the individual is prohibited by village norms from drinking boiled water. Only individuals who are unintegrated into local networks risk defying community norms on water boiling. An important factor regarding the adoption rate of an innovation is its compatibility with the values, beliefs, and past experiences of individuals in the social system. Nelida and her superiors in the public health agency should have understood the hot-cold belief system, as it is found throughout Peru (and in most nations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia). Here is an example of an indigenous knowledge system that caused the failure of a development program.

In the previous chapter we attempted to clarify Wilhelm Schmidt’s use of the culture-historical method of ethnology, which led him to the recognition of a number of culture circles around the globe. These integrated complexes of cultures were due to the migrations of people groups as well as other means of diffusion of cultural forms such as trade or imitation. The most common pattern was that when a later culture arrived in an area occupied by an earlier culture, it would either absorb or displace the older culture, oftentimes including the people who held it. By a careful analysis of the forms of culture manifested by different groups in different areas, Schmidt constructed chronological sequences, with the least sophisticated cultures (those whom Schmidt called “Primitive”1) as the ones most likely to resemble the original culture of human beings. His conclusion was that the people in the lowest position with regard to their material culture occupied the highest level of spiritual culture if one were to apply an evolutionist’s hierarchy. They were monotheists.

Ultimately, archaic religion and Christianity are structurally similar because man, even at the most archaic level, has always worshipped his own innocent victims, without being aware of it. This is, the unity of religion lies: it centres on the worshipping of the victim. The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence. The evidence is all there under our eyes and we don’t have to resort to theology to understand it, for it is purely anthropological. The discovery of his innocence is unwelcome because it coincides inevitably with the discovery of our guilt. The continuous teaching of Christ’s message through the diffusion of the Gospels is as important as this revelation. It is exactly what transforms the world, not in a sudden and abrupt way, but gradually, through a progressive assimilation of his message, which is often readdressed to be used against Christianity itself with

Archetypes versus cultural transmission Those who reject the archetypal hypothesis remain unimpressed by the discovery of parallel themes in myths derived from different parts of the world, maintaining that these can be explained just as well by human migration and cultural diffusion as by an innate predisposition.

The fact is that, right up to our own time, language has surpassed any other form of tool or machine as a technical instrument: in its ideal structure and its daily performance, it still stands as a model, though an unnoticed one, for all other kinds of effective prefabrication, standardization, and mass consumption. This is not so absurd a claim as it may at first seem. Language, to begin with, is the most transportable and storable, the most easily diffusible, of all social artifacts: the most ethereal of cultural agents, and for that reason the only one capable of indefinite multiplication and storage of meanings without overcrowding the living spaces of the planet. Once well started, the production of words introduced the first real economy of abundance, which provided for continuous production, replacement, and ceaseless invention, yet incorporated built-in controls that prevented the present-day malpractices of automatic expansion, reckless inflation, and premature obsolescence. Language is the great container of culture. Because of the stability of every language, each generation has been able to carry over and pass on a significant portion of previous history, even when it has not been otherwise recorded. And no matter how much the outer scene changes, through language man retains an inner scene where he is at home with his own mind, among his own kind.

This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual's prospects of success. Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present. Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing, sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next generation.

Le premier point à prendre en compte est le fait que la production globale actuelle est quantitativement suffisante pour assurer l'alimentation de l'ensemble de la population mondiale. La disponibilité alimentaire mondiale est de 2 790 calories par jour et par personne (données de 2001-2003), ce qui pourrait être suffisant. La sous-alimentation qui affecte aujourd'hui un milliard d'individus pourrait être éradiquée par ure réorganisation de la production, notamment avec une réorientation vers la multiplicité des cultures vivrières et par un rééquilibrage du stock calorique, fort mal distribué (3 490 calories par jour et par personne dans les pays développés, contre 2 254 en Afrique subsaharienne). Quant à la malnutrition (carences en vitamines et minéraux) et à son envers, l'obésité et le surpoids (provoqués essentiellement par la diffusion des habitudes alimentaires promues par le secteur agroalimentaire et la grande distribution), qui affectent chacune un milliard d'individus, ils pourraient être résorbés, sans augmentation quantitative globale, par une réorientation vers une agriculture paysanne développant des pratiques agro-écologiques. Si l'agriculture industrielle actuelle fait valoir de manière tronquée sa supériorité, notamment en termes de productivité par hectare, une évaluation plus globale, incluant l'ensemble des coûts directs et indirects (notamment écologiques), invite à faire pencher la balance de l'efficacité du côté de l'agriculture paysanne. De fait, l'agriculture industrialisée est entraînée dans un cercle vicieux, marqué notamment par l'épuisement et la salinisation des sols, la multiplication des insectes résistant aux pesticides, la hausse des pathologies du bétail ; en outre, elle provoque une baisse du pouvoir nutritif des produits, notamment des fruits et légumes à croissance rapide. Enfin, il faut indiquer que les surfaces agricoles consacrées à des cultures non alimentaires (agrocarburants notamment) doivent être restituées à leur vocation initiale, ce qui offre une marge de manœuvre importante pour assurer à l'ensemble de l'humanité une alimentation quantitativement et qualitativement satisfaisante. On dispose également de deux leviers importants pour atteindre et maintenir cet impératif élémentaire : d'une part, une limitation de l'élevage, particulièrement glouton en énergie et en surfaces (40 % des grains actuellement produits sont destinés à l'alimentation animale) et écologiquement dangereux (importantes émissions de gaz à effet de serre) ; d'autre part, une élimination du gâchis alimentaire (évalué à 30 % au moins dans le système alimentaire industriel mondial, et à 100 milliards de dollars par an uniquement aux États-Unis). (p. 190-192)

He summarizes these two impulses as "missions as translation" and "missions as cultural diffusion." The former is the missionary impulse that learns the local languages and seeks the successful indigenization of the gospel. The latter is the impulse that imposes a foreign language and merely replicates Western cultural religious forms. Sanneh argues that while both have been present, missions as translation has been the "dominant mode of operation."13

The arrogant minority of liberals clamoring to consolidate its victories and crush dissent in our cultural battles is plainly exaggerating its power and ignoring the very trends—the diffusion and fracture of our older moral consensus—that have made its recent successes possible. It

we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it. We do not like or trust groups. We believe that committees and meetings are a waste of time and that group decisions diffuse accountability. We only spend money and time on team building when it appears to be pragmatically necessary to get the job done. We tout and admire teamwork and the winning team (espoused values), but we don’t for a minute believe that the team could have done it without the individual star, who usually receives much greater pay (tacit assumption). We

The dominant culture of the Global North in the twenty-first century combines casual materialism with diffuse spiritual sensibility. This combination does not provide the spiritual spine for a sustained struggle for justice.

Children are - and this seems to be a cultural if not a biological necessity - terrorised by the adult experience of life, which, glimpsing it obliquely, at times of stress, and in fragments which makes no sense, they try to ignore. Many fantasy and sf readers are living out a prolonged childhood in which they retain that terror and erect- in collusion with professional writers who themselves often began as teenage daydreamers - powerful defences against it. Thus they prefer fiction which, like "hard" sf, ignores adult experience or ropes it off in a reductivist way; or which, like fantasy and horror fiction, diffuses and defuses it through fairytale and myth; or - perhaps most characteristically since the New Wave, "inner space" and the soft sciences- which generalises and politicises it. (Post New Wave readers, especially those who consider themselves most adult and intelligent in their use of the genre, seem not to fear experience so much as individual experience. They are not frightened of life so much as life's particularity. The trap is circular. The less you engage your own adult experience, the less you value it, and the more you tend to rely on systematic ideological validations of it. This is no better than the school playground, with its establishmentally validated experiences and sociative norms, you believe you have left behind.)

United States represents the hegemonic "culture of terrorism," providing the central model and leading example emulated by every other nation involved in state terror around the world ... The structures, tactics, and technology of state terror have been diffused, in fact aggressively marketed and exported as a form of "military aid" to developing countries. A focus on state terror at the level of individual countries tends to obscure the fact that it is a global phenomenon supported by an international structure or network, and local cases are only comprehensible within this encapsulating context.

A fad is an innovation that represents a relatively unimportant aspect of culture, which diffuses very rapidly, mainly for status reasons, and then is rapidly discontinued.

Chinese democracy matches Diffuse relations to Community responsiveness. When we combine these two, we get democracy as dialogue & learning to understand.

There has been a classic debate over whether the spread of agriculture was a “demic” or “cultural” diffusion—that is, whether farming populations replaced hunter-gatherers or hunter-gatherers adopted farming technologies. The pendulum has swung back and forth, and the truth clearly involves some mixture of both. But as ancient DNA has come to loom large in the debate, the demic explanation has found strong support.

Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present.

Trained as a sociologist, I’ve always been more disposed toward structural, macro change targeting policies and institutions over more diffuse cultural transformation that directly engages individuals. I tend to wince at self-help-style books, trainings, and gurus. But in trying so hard to push back on individualistic approaches to empowerment, I went to the other extreme for a while, losing touch with the importance of everyday decisions and actions—what my colleague Imani Perry calls “practices of inequality”—as an essential part of social transformation. Commenting on the many forms of racism that resurfaced during the pandemic, Imani tweeted, “That white male doctor who strangled and assaulted a black girl child for ‘not social distancing’ is also a sign of what African Americans confront in the health care system. It’s not just ‘structural’ racism folks.” This was a needed punch to my disciplinary gut, as I had been trained to critique “the system” and “systemic inequality,” as if these were divorced from everyday human decisions and actions. After all, the doctor, not “the system,” made a choice to violently assault a Black girl child. Yet at the same time, we can uphold unjust systems without physically attacking another person; that, for me, is the risk in highlighting the most obvious cases of brutality: it can let us off the hook. Ultimately, then, this is not a book for those interested primarily in policy, however important policy remains. Rather, this is a call to action for individuals to reclaim power over how our thoughts, habits, and actions shape—as much as they are shaped by—the larger environment.

Putin does not dream of conquering Warsaw or re-occupying Riga. On the contrary, his policies, to repeat, are an expression of aggressive isolationism, an attempt to consolidate one’s own civilizational space. They embody his defensive reaction to the threat to Russia posed by global economic interdependency and digital interoperability as well as the seemingly unstoppable diffusion of Western social and cultural norms.

The most essential requirement of a Pan-Africanist history, like an Aryanist or Pan-Germanic history, is a moment of pure origin from which all subsequent developments derive their character, whether as triumph or decline. Diop turned Negritude and older Pan-Africanist elements into a complete theory of civilization, with the diffusion of a vital and superior black culture to the rest of the world. Diop divided humanity into two types: southerners (Negro-Africans) and “Aryans,” which included Semitic peoples, Mongoloids, and American Indians. Aryans formed patriarchal societies, characterized by the political suppression of women and a lust for warfare. They celebrated materialism, individualism, and pessimism. Southerners, by contrast, were matriarchal, creating a unified community of free and equal people who were creative and idealistic and who lived by the rules of social collectivism instead of competitive capitalism. In every aspect

Through impressive growth from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, evangelical Christianity, although anchored in the South, became the dominant, most dynamic expression of American Christianity. Leading church historian Charles Marsden estimates that in the late nineteenth century, over half of the general population and more than eight in ten Protestants were evangelical. When southern Methodists rejoined their northern brethren in denominational reunification in the late 1930s, they brought their Lost Cause theology with them into what was at the time the largest Protestant denomination. By the second half of the twentieth century, Southern Baptist had become the largest single denomination in the country, claiming more than sixteen million followers at their apex. And beginning in the late 1970s, white Catholics received a powerful infusion of this theology through their involvement with the Christian right movement, which fortified their own existing streams of colonialist theology. As I show in chapter 5, even though white evangelical Protestants have begun to shrink as a proportion of the population in the last decade, the diffusion of their theology into white Christianity generally has meant that their particular cultural worldview, built to defend their peculiar institution, holds influence far beyond their ranks today.

All men of any degree of responsibility had begun to speak for the record, for the unseen audience, and old intimacies had withered because closeness must depend upon the exchange of the innermost thoughts. Orwell, in 1984, had not considered the consequences of such a diffusion. An ever-watchful Big Brother could be outwitted, but a gnat-throng of little brothers could only be endured. Miniaturization of electronic circuitry was effecting that great change in human relationships which, in other cultures, had been created only by using secret arrest, imprisonment and torture to turn brother against brother.

Another scene from universal myth unfolds -- here powerfully reminiscent of the Underworld quests of Orpheus for Eurydice and of Demeter for Persephone. The ancient Japanese recension of this mysteriously global story is given in the Kojiki and the Nihongi, where we read that Izanagi, mourning for his dead wife, followed after her to the Land of Yomi in an attempt to bring her back to the world of the living: 'Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto and entered the Land of Yomi ... So when from the palace she raised the door and came out to meet him, Izanagi spoke saying; 'My lovely younger sister! The lands that I and thou made are not yet finished making; so come back!' Izanami is honoured by Izanagi's attention and minded to return. But there is one problem. She has already eaten food prepared in the Land of Yomi and this binds her to the place, just as the consumption of a single pomegranate seed binds Persephone to hell in the Greek myth. Is it an accident that ancient Indian myth also contains the same idea? In the Katha Upanishad a human, Nachiketas, succeeds in visiting the underworld realm of Yama, the Hindu god of Death (and, yes, scholars have noted and commented upon the weird resonance between the names and functions of Yama and Yomi). It is precisely to avoid detention in the realm of Yama that Nachiketas is warned: 'Three nights within Yama's mansion stay / But taste not, though a guest, his food.' So there's a common idea here -- in Japan, in Greece, in India -- about not eating food in the Underworld if you want to leave. Such similarities can result from common invention of the same motif -- in other words, coincidence. They can result from the influence of one of the ancient cultures upon the other two, i.e. cultural diffusion. Or they can result from an influence that has somehow percolated down to all three, and perhaps to other cultures, stemming from an as yet unidentified common source.

Perhaps the major tenet of Pinpoint is that GPS barely exists—not just because the signal itself is so weak, but also because GPS is a remarkably diffuse concept. At root, GPS is just a radio signal, maintained and perfected by a vast infrastructure that is ultimately linked to the United States Department of Defense.

Somewhere in that volume we would surely find a chapter on the place of the opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination. It’s well known that many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with them from Egypt. What’s harder to know is precisely what role these psychoactive plants may have played in the revolution in human sensibility we call romanticism. The literary critic David Lenson, for one, believes it was crucial. He argues that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create,” an idea whose reverberations in Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium

This view is supported by ethnologists,17 who find the same pattern of shamanistic practice not only in Asia and the Americas but in Africa, Australia, Oceania, and Europe. The historical diffusion of such teachings—and perhaps the prehistorical as well—is supported by striking consistencies in the practice of what Westerners, having lost the secrets, refer to with mixed fascination and contempt as “mysticism” or “the occult” but which for the less alienated cultures, past and present, is only another aspect of reality.

….ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

There is something odd, suspiciously odd, about the rapidity with which queer theory–whose claim to radical politics derived from its anti-assimilationist posture, from its shocking embrace of the abnormal and the marginal–has been embraced by, canonized by, and absorbed into our (largely heterosexual) insti- tutions of knowledge, as lesbian and gay studies never were. Despite its im- plicit (and false) portrayal of lesbian and gay studies as liberal, assimilationist, and accommodating of the status quo, queer theory has proven to be much more congenial to established institutions of the liberal academy. The first step was for the “theory” in queer theory to prevail over the “queer,” for “queer” to become a harmless qualifier of “theory”: if it’s theory, progressive academics seem to have reasoned, then it’s merely an extension of what important people have already been doing all along. It can be folded back into the standard practice of literary and cultural studies, without impeding academic business as usual. The next step was to despecify the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or transgressive content of queerness, thereby abstracting “queer” and turning it into a generic badge of subversiveness, a more trendy version of “liberal”: if it’s queer, it’s politically oppositional, so everyone who claims to be progressive has a vested interest in owning a share of it. Finally, queer theory, being a theory instead of a discipline, posed no threat to the monopoly of the established disciplines: on the contrary, queer theory could be incorporated into each of them, and it could then be applied to topics in already established fields. Those working in En- glish, history, classics, anthropology, sociology, or religion would now have the option of using queer theory, as they had previously used Deconstruction, to advance the practice of their disciplines–by “queering” them. The outcome of those three moves was to make queer theory a game the whole family could play. This has resulted in a paradoxical situation: as queer theory becomes more widely diffused throughout the disciplines, it becomes harder to figure out what’s so very queer about it, while lesbian and gay studies, which by con- trast would seem to pertain only to lesbians and gay men, looks increasingly backward, identitarian, and outdated.

The space of circulation, a diffuse orality, free movements, the end of classified classes, disparate distributions, the serendipity of invention, the speed of light, the novelty of both subjects and objects, the search for a new reason. . . . The diffusion of knowledge can no longer take place on any campus in the world, which are themselves ordered and formatted by the page, rational in the old manner, imitating the camps of the Roman army. This is the space of thought where Thumbelina, in both her body and her soul, spent her youth.

Personal accountability matters greatly. When one person stops taking responsibility for their actions, the unspoken implication is that they are expecting others to take responsibility for them. This is a toxic mentality for a platoon, as responsibility is slowly diffused until there is none at all. It is equally toxic for a society, where more and more people begin to believe that others should bear their burden, that the government is responsible for their happiness, and that personal responsibility is nothing but a nostalgic throwback to a bygone era. The increasing popularity of an unaccountable existence should worry us. The pinnacle of failure is the refusal to take responsibility for mistakes and transgressions, and instead blame external factors. It has a societal impact, because an increasing number of unaccountable individuals make up an increasingly unaccountable society. Our culture begins to popularize the narrative that we are always victims of circumstance, rather than victims of personal shortcomings. Outrage culture is built around this sense of victimhood in the face of failure.

Anabaptist movement arose from the Swiss Brethren. The origins are dated quite specifically to January 21, 1525, when Conrad Grebel baptized Felix Manz in the home of George Blaurock in the Swiss canton of Zürich. This view generally argues that Swiss Anabaptism was transmitted to southern Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and northern Germany, where it developed into its various branches. This remains the dominant view for the historical origins and diffusion of Anabaptism.

The psychological effects of wet-nursing are usually thought pernicious by modern experts, but it must be remembered that the Romans had a much more diffuse notion of family than that in the post-Industrial Revolution West. Child-minders were a fact of life in a culture that regarded marrying for love as eccentric, even deviant, and whose kinship boundaries were constantly shifting; divorce and remarriage among aristocratic families may have reached 50 per cent.64