Reddit mentions of Mirror for Humanity: A Concise Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

>So is subjugating females, waging wars, genocide, inventing blatantly fictive deities to explain shit, slavery, and what-not.

What I meant to say is that traditions and rituals are universal in human behaviour and are found within all human cultures. With the exception of war and deities, none of the things that you listed above are universal in human behaviour or culture. And even then, the amount and focus of those two things varies greatly across cultures.

>We would've been better.

Define "better". Our emergence of intelligence and sentience is what inevitably gave rise to the things that you're trying to tell everyone is bad for some ungodly reason. Without these things we would have still been wild animals roaming around and struggling to survive. Sure, one could make the argument that humans would be better off stupid and not damaging the planet, but would it really be better? What if another animal became intelligent enough to form sentience and form traditions and cultures? Would they be better or worse than humans? Who knows really.

>It's to argue against one of the many human flaws; humans aren't the embodiment of perfection and have much to improve upon you know?

This is getting into a deeper argument of whether or not humans are inherently good or not. Although I do agree that humans do have flaws, as do all other species on the planet, I do not believe that traditions are one of them. Let's look at how traditions have affected humans throughout the years shall we?

First off, the things that I keep repeating over again (traditions and culture) most likely arrived millions of years ago with the emergence of the first stone tools found 2.5-3 mya, most likely made by Australopithecus, commonly referred to as the Oldowan stone tool culture. Even though these stone tools were extremely simplistic, they spread rather quickly throughout the groups, the knowledge being passed down through generations via parents teaching their children what these are for and how to use them. This doubles as a survival tactic as well as a tradition. Australopithecines most likely lived in small, band-like groups and this knowledge, and tradition, was passed down with the enforcement from members of that band. Already in the Oldowan culture, one can see regional variants beginning to emerge. The reason that this happens is most often to form a sense of community and belonging to the group (referred to as "communitas"), which strengthens social bonds and positive feelings within the group. This trend of making stone tools because other people make them, having regional variants of stone tools because other people do them, continued for millions of years. These traditions then extended into clothing, art, buildings, food, etc. Then with the spread of worship and humans looking to a higher power to explain the world, things like holidays and celebrations came around. These also had the positive effect of bringing a sense of community and closeness with the people around you. Hell, I'm willing to bet that you celebrate things like your birthday, Christmas/Hanukkah, New Years Eve, or any other holidays. True, traditions do occasionally lead to conflict and clashes in opinion, but please tell me what doesn't. It is an accepted risk that hominins took when they decided to live in groups. It has its positives and negatives, just like the opposite situation (living alone and without traditions).

Looking at the evidence found throughout millions of years, the benefits of traditions FAR outweigh any negative repercussions, so I have no idea what you mean when you say that it's a flaw. In that logic everything is a flaw. If that were the case, it wouldn't be a thing today. These things exist for a reason. They help us to survive and thrive. Even with this giant wall of text, you might still think that traditions are useless and have no benefit, for some reason. In that case, fucking practice what you preach. Take all your clothes off, don't celebrate any holidays, go live in a cave, forget English, use no tools, and see how far you get.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3049103/

Some of my textbooks for my Anthropology major:

https://www.amazon.ca/Anthropology-What-Does-Human-Canadian/dp/0199012865

https://www.amazon.ca/Human-Voyage-Exploring-Biological-Anthropology/dp/0176531912

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Humanity-Introduction-Cultural-Anthropology/dp/125981842X