When we approach a natural metaphor with honest senses, we can conclude nothing teleological about it. It simply is. Nature exhibits no apparent aims to its chances and cycles except those imposed by an observer. For this reason the metaphor of a plant’s growth and reproduction seems particularly apt for human culture, taking culture to mean something both personal, and interconnected among individuals.

A seed finds fertile conditions, sprouts, and grows tenuously to a seedling. The seedling weathers adversity by putting down deep roots for anchorage, sustenance and nourishment. A tall stem grows upward to the light, with wider leaves to catch the energy of the sun. The leaves and roots trade water and food. New branches and leaves unfurl, building on the structure that came up underneath them. Finally when the season is right, at the very tips and heights of the plant bright buds appear. At great expense, and with tremendous preparation, the plant sustains the buds, as the buds open into brilliant flowers of signature varieties. They cross-pollinate with other plants, and before they pass away, produce seeds of tremendous variation, some of marvelous potency. Most seeds effectively imitate the plants which have produced them, others have mutated the line through other influences, or might remarkably hold within themselves some unprecedented qualities. The seeds which fall down on unreceptive soils are left to perish. Only a few of many seeds will scatter and take root in soils conducive to their germination. From those rare beginnings however, whole new plants — cultures, in various senses — will grow. And this history will repeat, but differently.

Now what can a ‘naturalist’ of cultures claim was the aim of a culture? When we consider that all those many who play the parts of roots, leaves, and stems build on the patterns established by seeds, we might understandably conclude that making definitive “seeds” would constitute the purpose of a culture. Not only does a culture follow in the pattern laid down by its founders, but through its propagation in seeds, a culture often lives on in similar forms.

And, perhaps we would add the “flowers” to that purpose for being instrumental in the creation of the seeds that follow in the wake of their brilliant and colorful season. And observing that the precedence of flowering involved a massive contribution and focus to draw up the superfluity of energies evident in the sexual outburst of the flowers, and their casual self-sacrifice, we might conclude that although the flowers of a culture lead ephemeral lives their transcendence supplies the aim of the whole effort — whether those playing the parts of striving continually in support know it or not, or perhaps grasp it in the vaguest notions of “posterity” or “my children” or “living on through my descendants.”

But is it not also true that without those playing roots, stems, and leaves to the young buds, such an act — such an existence — would have been impossible? So much goes into a life of individual glory, that many lives must precede heretofore as though to prepare, with a cultivation of far too much complicated chance to trace. And then it is usually those who follow a precedent who establish the next rejuvenation, after these “seeds” lie fallow for a while, and then establish a whole new pattern of life like the old, but new, and renewed. In turn this growth will sanctify its great efforts in the service of those valuations held as important by the lineage — held aloft to the sun, as it were, on display for all to see, and for fulfillment again in the seeds of the future.

All in this cycle play instrumental roles. There can be no fertility without a plant — a decadent one sometimes, and thus desperate to survive, yet always commanding resources sufficient for ‘superfluous’ expenditure, and more if healthy. Similarly, there can be no plants made of many without fertile ones, potent ones, differentiable ones. Therefore it would seem natural for the many to help the remarkable with special effort; it also would seem natural for the remarkable to be especially dependent on the efforts of supporters before them to make them possible, and followers after them to realize their propagation.

Specific cultures we can certainly assess, but we can make no abstract judgment of rank among the roles adopted by each type of person, simply because we are often predisposed to notice one kind over another. And so, the observer of the thrust of cultures of every kind and size, from the group of a few to a civilization, can only step back without such judgment and marvel at the complexities of nature in its infinite recombinations and growths.

In the real world the difficulty of understanding cultural ecology is not only that a. the cultures I have likened to organisms influence one another unpredictably, in cooperative, competitive and indeterminate effects, and not only that b. growth and change seem invisible or difficult to observe — an acceptable history of a given idea or school of thought might involve hundreds or thousands of scrutable regenerations, and more inscrutable ones — but also that c. the growth of cultures large or small cannot be isolated. Rather the roles of individuals overlap extensively in complex ways, presenting a forbidding and impossibly tangled overgrowth of jungle to the social observer. In the complex ecology of cultural interdependence, one who plays the root for one context might become the seed to another, later or at the same time. We might find a flower and its seed in different stages of the same figure. The types do not sort themselves for our convenience (although nature takes care of itself, it seems). It is for this reason that most simplify the process of understanding at the cost of a tremendous biases and myopias, probably either towards the more singular figures akin to flowers and seeds, or to the collective assumptions of soils and plants as falsely-distinct wholes, masses, and historical processes, made faceless.

Some Exercises in Applied Thought and Discussion

1a) Take for example Socrates as the flower, and Plato as the seed, not only in the sense of propagation, but also mutation. Assume for the moment the validity of the analogy (which is certainly debatable). Consider this application of the metaphor as outlined above.

1b) If we consider this metaphor further, who were the people who formed the instrumental, supportive plant compared to the famous figures of Socrates and Plato? Secondly, what generation of plant, flower, and seed came before their own plant? Thirdly, what soil and conditions proved receptive to the seed of Plato’s influence?

2a) Alternately, consider Jesus of Nazareth as the flower, and Paul of Tarsus the seed, not only in the sense of propagation, but also mutation. Assume for the moment the validity of the analogy (which is certainly debatable). Consider this application of the metaphor as outlined above.

2b) Again, try to identify the plant in the metaphor — who else was instrumental, besides the famous figures of Jesus and Paul? Secondly, what generation of plant, flower, and seed came before their own plant? Thirdly, what soil and conditions proved receptive to the seed of Paul’s influence?

3) Consider the possibility of Socrates and Plato as the first generation, or “first coming” of the dynamic between Jesus and Paul centuries later — or at least an earlier instance of a cycle that would repeat.

As thinking points, here are some possible parallels in relationships between a) Jesus and Paul and the precursor b) Socrates and Plato:

• Both Plato and Paul founded or spread mystical or religious cults, Platonism and Xtianity.
• The student of each pair had wider influence than the mentor.
• Paul was influenced by Plato (directly and/or unconsciously), as indicated by apparent similarities between Platonism and Xtian metaphysics.
• Distortion of teachings is a common allegation against both Plato and Paul.
• One can charge that revenge for mentor’s persecution and murder was an influence on both Plato and Paul's life works, for the sake of whose philosophies said murder was interpreted as a sacrifice.

4) Would a similar kind of analysis to that applied above in 1) and 2) apply to other examples of cultural influence, writ large or small? What about Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, for instance? Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud? Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson? Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett? Aristotle and Ayn Rand? Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill? Laozi and Zhuangzi? As you think through any of these cases, remember not to think of them simply as a duo in isolation, but as inheritors of previous or parallel cultural generations as well.

5) Instead of Socrates and Plato, what about applying the analogy to Plato and Aristotle? Rather than Aristotle and Ayn Rand, what about Nietzsche and Ayn Rand? Or, for readers familiar with my writing, what about Nietzsche and myself? See if you find that questioning the validity of the horticultural analogy of cultural influence in a particular historical case helps to clarify the depth and nature of such connections.

6) Suppose you take one recognizable, and clearly significant figure — say Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has been linked to socialism, environmentalism, social contract theory, and many other strains of thought in cultural dynamics — and then look for the rest of the metaphor. Do you find a place for Rousseau in the growth of a culture? If so did you classify him as a seed, flower, or otherwise? Or, did you decide that the horticultural metaphor model did not fit, and that trying to fill it in would distort the facts? What if you could put Rousseau in more than one role? (If you haven't the slightest idea of how to do any of this with Rousseau, pick some other significant figure who interests you more and try this exercise again.)

7) I have focused on major figures in the history of ideas above, but most if not all readers will probably have an easier time with specific examples of culture familiar to them personally, which may or may not involve famous names. (Even those very well educated in history will often lack too much information about others' distant lives to make educated guesses.) For example culture can include arts and media of all kinds. Culture includes basic operative ideas, sensibilities, and behaviors which might be acquired from family, friends, mentors, authorities or adversaries in the course of life. Think of what kinds of culture personally interest or otherwise affect you most, and think about their sources in terms of the fertile analogy employed previously. Who cultivated these cultures, and in what roles? Finally, what parts in the cycles of your cultures would you prefer to play?