I think it is accurate to say that as a nation we have no culture -- because we are a melting pot, which, as with so many things, is both our strength and our weakness. Perhaps we have no national character either. Yet just as there are many subcultures within our shores, there are many persons of much character. I would count you and ma…
I think it is accurate to say that as a nation we have no culture -- because we are a melting pot, which, as with so many things, is both our strength and our weakness. Perhaps we have no national character either. Yet just as there are many subcultures within our shores, there are many persons of much character. I would count you and many others on these pages, and elsewhere, also.
I agree that there are those who tolerate evil and bad behavior because they hope one day to be among those wealthy and powerful who destroy with gleeful abandon. I pray they are not even a scant majority. I tend to think, or at least hope, it is more an apathy or the fact that life is hard and therefore distracting, than it is a lack of fundamental character. And I think the intentional dumbing down of education, particularly in re citizenship (like Civics classes), has played a part. And both parties have contributed, one deliberately, one in ignorance or blindness.
But when you say "we reward cruelty, ambition and selfishness," while I agree in principle, I wish to say "speak for yourself there" or "who is this WE of whom you speak?"
I know you said it is just a partial answer. Perhaps "who is this WE?" is a part of it?
There area lot of people that tolerate bad behavior. I would argue that it is a majority (and indeed a sizable majority) of the population. I say this on the basis of who we elect to office and the bar that we set and the behavior that we expect from them. This also applies to the corporate sphere.
People either tolerate it by voting for them or by not actually bothering to vote. People tolerate it by giving their custom to businesses that behave badly. People tolerate it by allowing laws to be written that allow these things. By allowing those who commit crimes or other bad behaviors to sit in judgment upon themselves, if they happen to hold political office or have sufficient wealth.
WE do reward cruelty, ambition, selfishness--the WE in this case is society as a whole--because the rules and norms are set up as such that (regardless of whether you actively acquiesce in the reward) the whole does, in fact , reward such behaviors.
There are a number of reasons for this. You touch upon some of them. This is part of the larger cultural narrative that pardons segments of society from the norms (and even often the laws) that individual (and poor and powerless) members of society must adhere to--that writes the laws the way the laws are written (given the understanding that the law represents, in its essence, the bare minimum requirements for participation in society).
All of this stuff is INCREDIBLY complex and layered. I am doing the Reader's Digest condensed version of the Reader's Digest condensed version (and add in several more iterations of that) here.
What you talk about WRT education (dumbing down and lack of civics education) is a common trope in arguments about societal/cultural collapse. it has become a part of the larger explanative narrative of why things are they way there are. I don't think it actually has much validity--at least in the sense that you are using it and not rooted in that in the manner that most people believe.
Education has not (in content terms) been dumbed down--in fact the reverse (if you look at the standards). My state REQUIRES Civics for graduation (where I grew up in the 60s/70s did not). Indeed, there are far more requirements now than in the past, far more things that are supposedly required (including critical thinking).
What has changed is:
1)the ability and willingness to enforce those requirements;
2)The perceived societal function of education;
3) the commodification of society and, in particular, education.
As a society, we are no longer willing or able to enforce many requirements--this is an outgrowth (in simple terms) of the redefinition of freedom/liberty/autonomy and the prioritization of the individual over the communal.
2 and 3 are outgrowths of the industrial revolution, commercialization of society and (again) the elevation of the private commercial choice over the communal.
Few people REALLY care about education in the classical sense (even though we attempt to provide an education). The priority is on education as certification for earning money. Students are not particularly interested in learning "useless" things--nor are parents necessarily all that interested in those things being taught. This has crept its way throughout our educational system (all the way to the post-graduate level).
We are, in general, not interested in being or becoming better people (especially if that requires a lot of effort), merely interested in becoming successful people (according to the larger societal definition of success--which in the case of America means making money and gaining social status).
Again, an incredibly simplified presentation of something incredibly complex.
Ok. (I really want to think about this a while -- and I will -- meanwhile....) If "WE" is Society, then how does a segment of society change society as a whole? Is the Tea Party an example of that? Can it only be a political answer? What does the majority do when the tyranny of the minority is under way? And, also, is this unique to American society? Perhaps because we're a melting pot? Or because we have a mythical view of ourselves?
I take your excellent points about education. And about society, for that matter. So how is societal change effected? (I would argue that the social contract has completely broken down in the past 6-10 years; how is it glued together?) Because it certainly looks like a minority has broken the whole.
I saw earlier someone on tv saying it is the fault or result of the past decade of social media, the FBs of the world. If that is true or if it is more complex as you say or both, it seems humans are more like lemmings than individuals.
Society changes in a variety of ways. The most recent example is the effects of the introduction of web-based social media on society--the ultimate effects of which are not clear at this point... but they do not look good.
Given the complexity of society and its nature, pretty much ALL societal change is in essence, an unintended consequence (not the right phrase but I can't come up with the right phrase at the moment).
What do I mean by that?
X has a plan to change society (X can be an individual or a corporate entity--when I say corporate entity I mean a group, not necessarily a business entity). That plan has a particular end in mind. They utilize a variety of methodologies, rhetorical and material (ad campaigns, political lobbying, altering/creating institutions and policies, and so on). Their methodology is based upon the latest research and methodologies.
It is HIGHLY unlikely that they will achieve their end. They WILL change society--the problem is that society is, in a sense, alive. It will resist change or twist/alter it. The number of variables is simply too high as are the range of potential responses and (thrown in on top) the accidents of history.. a plague, a war. an economic collapse.
Remember also that there are a lot of actors with THEIR own plans--so you are actually engaged in something more akin to war--because there WILL be opposition.
And then someone invents a widget that puts 10% of the population out of work--which has its own knock on change effects.
Do you begin to see how complex all of this actually is?
People try and change society all of the time--and they always succeed (if change = success).. what that change is, however, is unlikely to be what they were planning on.
There will always be some form of a tyranny of a minority--often less blatant than what we have, but sometimes moreso. The vast sweep of recorded history is far more often an example of the tyranny of minorities than of majorities.
Usually the majority sucks it up and accepts it unless or until it becomes too objectionable or burdensome--then the revolution comes and guess what you get--a new tyranny of the minority (just a different minority).
It is VERY far from unique--it is almost a norm.
It is not that humans are lemmings it is more that they lack the drive or attention or energy (or all three) to exercise larger scale, substantive agency except in rare cases. It is easier to go along to get along, so long as things do not get too bad. There ARE limits, but those limits are far broader than most people think or even suspect.
I think there are unintended consequences to almost every action. Unanticipated results. "Pluck a flower, kill a star." Social media may yet destroy Western society. J. Haidt has an interesting piece in The Atlantic. Yet Russia's hackers seem to have been very successful in achieving their ends of disrupting Western society in general and our 2016 election in particular, and to sew deep division overall, via social media. They seem to be achieving their goal. But perhaps we cannot see the end since we are still in the middle. Maybe the better example of unintended consequences is Putin's war against the West and in Ukraine, at least for the moment. He must be very surprised if he is aware of what he has caused.
Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I sometimes am foiled by assumptions I have held without noticing and it is always good to be nudged out of them.
Russia did not change our society--IOW, that was not their goal. They took advantage of what our society IS.
Creating chaos, distrust, and division is easy... and democracies are weak in that they can only tolerate so much division and distrust before they collapse. If you want to destroy a society, the reality is that you do not have to do much--it will tend to fall apart by itself over time as the various groups separate themselves from each other (a natural tendency) and each pursues what it perceives to be their own interests.
It takes a LOT of work to maintain a society and you can't ever stop working on maintaining it.
None of this happens fast (we have been working our way to where we are basically since the 60s, in terms of proximate causes).
What I present here is a particular narrative, based upon MY reading, observation, and thought over the last 30 years or so. There are biases in it and blind spots--I don't pretend to fully understand any of this. I don't think anyone fully understands all of this.
Correctly tends to mean "the same as me'" Given the nature and plasticity of language this is not fully possible--although there can be a great deal of congruence.
What is key is understanding what the other person means when they say X (to the best of your ability)--the understanding is, I think, more important than the congruence because it establishes a basis to build congruence--it is prior.
I think it is accurate to say that as a nation we have no culture -- because we are a melting pot, which, as with so many things, is both our strength and our weakness. Perhaps we have no national character either. Yet just as there are many subcultures within our shores, there are many persons of much character. I would count you and many others on these pages, and elsewhere, also.
I agree that there are those who tolerate evil and bad behavior because they hope one day to be among those wealthy and powerful who destroy with gleeful abandon. I pray they are not even a scant majority. I tend to think, or at least hope, it is more an apathy or the fact that life is hard and therefore distracting, than it is a lack of fundamental character. And I think the intentional dumbing down of education, particularly in re citizenship (like Civics classes), has played a part. And both parties have contributed, one deliberately, one in ignorance or blindness.
But when you say "we reward cruelty, ambition and selfishness," while I agree in principle, I wish to say "speak for yourself there" or "who is this WE of whom you speak?"
I know you said it is just a partial answer. Perhaps "who is this WE?" is a part of it?
There area lot of people that tolerate bad behavior. I would argue that it is a majority (and indeed a sizable majority) of the population. I say this on the basis of who we elect to office and the bar that we set and the behavior that we expect from them. This also applies to the corporate sphere.
People either tolerate it by voting for them or by not actually bothering to vote. People tolerate it by giving their custom to businesses that behave badly. People tolerate it by allowing laws to be written that allow these things. By allowing those who commit crimes or other bad behaviors to sit in judgment upon themselves, if they happen to hold political office or have sufficient wealth.
WE do reward cruelty, ambition, selfishness--the WE in this case is society as a whole--because the rules and norms are set up as such that (regardless of whether you actively acquiesce in the reward) the whole does, in fact , reward such behaviors.
There are a number of reasons for this. You touch upon some of them. This is part of the larger cultural narrative that pardons segments of society from the norms (and even often the laws) that individual (and poor and powerless) members of society must adhere to--that writes the laws the way the laws are written (given the understanding that the law represents, in its essence, the bare minimum requirements for participation in society).
All of this stuff is INCREDIBLY complex and layered. I am doing the Reader's Digest condensed version of the Reader's Digest condensed version (and add in several more iterations of that) here.
What you talk about WRT education (dumbing down and lack of civics education) is a common trope in arguments about societal/cultural collapse. it has become a part of the larger explanative narrative of why things are they way there are. I don't think it actually has much validity--at least in the sense that you are using it and not rooted in that in the manner that most people believe.
Education has not (in content terms) been dumbed down--in fact the reverse (if you look at the standards). My state REQUIRES Civics for graduation (where I grew up in the 60s/70s did not). Indeed, there are far more requirements now than in the past, far more things that are supposedly required (including critical thinking).
What has changed is:
1)the ability and willingness to enforce those requirements;
2)The perceived societal function of education;
3) the commodification of society and, in particular, education.
As a society, we are no longer willing or able to enforce many requirements--this is an outgrowth (in simple terms) of the redefinition of freedom/liberty/autonomy and the prioritization of the individual over the communal.
2 and 3 are outgrowths of the industrial revolution, commercialization of society and (again) the elevation of the private commercial choice over the communal.
Few people REALLY care about education in the classical sense (even though we attempt to provide an education). The priority is on education as certification for earning money. Students are not particularly interested in learning "useless" things--nor are parents necessarily all that interested in those things being taught. This has crept its way throughout our educational system (all the way to the post-graduate level).
We are, in general, not interested in being or becoming better people (especially if that requires a lot of effort), merely interested in becoming successful people (according to the larger societal definition of success--which in the case of America means making money and gaining social status).
Again, an incredibly simplified presentation of something incredibly complex.
Ok. (I really want to think about this a while -- and I will -- meanwhile....) If "WE" is Society, then how does a segment of society change society as a whole? Is the Tea Party an example of that? Can it only be a political answer? What does the majority do when the tyranny of the minority is under way? And, also, is this unique to American society? Perhaps because we're a melting pot? Or because we have a mythical view of ourselves?
I take your excellent points about education. And about society, for that matter. So how is societal change effected? (I would argue that the social contract has completely broken down in the past 6-10 years; how is it glued together?) Because it certainly looks like a minority has broken the whole.
I saw earlier someone on tv saying it is the fault or result of the past decade of social media, the FBs of the world. If that is true or if it is more complex as you say or both, it seems humans are more like lemmings than individuals.
Society changes in a variety of ways. The most recent example is the effects of the introduction of web-based social media on society--the ultimate effects of which are not clear at this point... but they do not look good.
Given the complexity of society and its nature, pretty much ALL societal change is in essence, an unintended consequence (not the right phrase but I can't come up with the right phrase at the moment).
What do I mean by that?
X has a plan to change society (X can be an individual or a corporate entity--when I say corporate entity I mean a group, not necessarily a business entity). That plan has a particular end in mind. They utilize a variety of methodologies, rhetorical and material (ad campaigns, political lobbying, altering/creating institutions and policies, and so on). Their methodology is based upon the latest research and methodologies.
It is HIGHLY unlikely that they will achieve their end. They WILL change society--the problem is that society is, in a sense, alive. It will resist change or twist/alter it. The number of variables is simply too high as are the range of potential responses and (thrown in on top) the accidents of history.. a plague, a war. an economic collapse.
Remember also that there are a lot of actors with THEIR own plans--so you are actually engaged in something more akin to war--because there WILL be opposition.
And then someone invents a widget that puts 10% of the population out of work--which has its own knock on change effects.
Do you begin to see how complex all of this actually is?
People try and change society all of the time--and they always succeed (if change = success).. what that change is, however, is unlikely to be what they were planning on.
There will always be some form of a tyranny of a minority--often less blatant than what we have, but sometimes moreso. The vast sweep of recorded history is far more often an example of the tyranny of minorities than of majorities.
Usually the majority sucks it up and accepts it unless or until it becomes too objectionable or burdensome--then the revolution comes and guess what you get--a new tyranny of the minority (just a different minority).
It is VERY far from unique--it is almost a norm.
It is not that humans are lemmings it is more that they lack the drive or attention or energy (or all three) to exercise larger scale, substantive agency except in rare cases. It is easier to go along to get along, so long as things do not get too bad. There ARE limits, but those limits are far broader than most people think or even suspect.
I think there are unintended consequences to almost every action. Unanticipated results. "Pluck a flower, kill a star." Social media may yet destroy Western society. J. Haidt has an interesting piece in The Atlantic. Yet Russia's hackers seem to have been very successful in achieving their ends of disrupting Western society in general and our 2016 election in particular, and to sew deep division overall, via social media. They seem to be achieving their goal. But perhaps we cannot see the end since we are still in the middle. Maybe the better example of unintended consequences is Putin's war against the West and in Ukraine, at least for the moment. He must be very surprised if he is aware of what he has caused.
Thank you for taking the time to clarify. I sometimes am foiled by assumptions I have held without noticing and it is always good to be nudged out of them.
Russia did not change our society--IOW, that was not their goal. They took advantage of what our society IS.
Creating chaos, distrust, and division is easy... and democracies are weak in that they can only tolerate so much division and distrust before they collapse. If you want to destroy a society, the reality is that you do not have to do much--it will tend to fall apart by itself over time as the various groups separate themselves from each other (a natural tendency) and each pursues what it perceives to be their own interests.
It takes a LOT of work to maintain a society and you can't ever stop working on maintaining it.
None of this happens fast (we have been working our way to where we are basically since the 60s, in terms of proximate causes).
What I present here is a particular narrative, based upon MY reading, observation, and thought over the last 30 years or so. There are biases in it and blind spots--I don't pretend to fully understand any of this. I don't think anyone fully understands all of this.
:)
The words of the ideals are widely shared. The understanding of those ideals and the definitions of those words are not.
Correctly tends to mean "the same as me'" Given the nature and plasticity of language this is not fully possible--although there can be a great deal of congruence.
What is key is understanding what the other person means when they say X (to the best of your ability)--the understanding is, I think, more important than the congruence because it establishes a basis to build congruence--it is prior.