How Alike Are We?

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz says something profound about studying other cultures, as quoted in an article in The New York Review of Books. Hat tip to Powerline Blog for the link.

We are trapped, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz once put it, between “the consoling piety that we are all like to one another and…the worrying suspicion that we are not.”

Humans are hardware, culture is software; hardware sets limits, within which software charts a course. The human hardware is relatively similar, the cultural software is not.