" Every human society possesses its own cultural myths that help hold it together. This assumes that *culture is something that one can or even should measure or define. It also seems to imply that myth is stronger than reality... I'm not sure I agree... but let us continue...
Darwinian fixations on competitions notwithstanding, humans are at heart a cooperative animal, and a commonly shared structure of beliefs in fundamental truths provides the social glue that binds a culture. It gives rise to a definition of "a culture", it doesn't necessarilly "bind" people together. Those "notwithstanding competitions" are said to have the same effect. It's quite self serving, in this case, to leave them standing outside... all alone.
The beliefs don't have to be true to be effective. Yeah, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Every culture believes itself to be unique in that its own beliefs are true, of course, and it appears that ours is little different. Different? Yes. But not unique and certainly not bound by beliefs.
Well, yes, we do claim to be different in that we attempt to check out what we believe against reality. Even if this were true, it certainly wouldn't make us different.
But as we have seen, [In his book] it turns out to be all-too-easy to proclaim the verdict as being what we "know" it ought to be, or would have it be, rather than what reality actually says, laying the idealized scientific paradigm open to the charge that some cynics have made of Christianity and socialism: A good idea: somebody should try it sometime." I'd thought Gandhi said that about "civilization", not those specific forms.
