DWill wrote:It would appear that what put our team over the top was the complexity of our symbolic systems, just as Harari says.
I am having some trouble with Harari's way of talking about the advantages of symbolic systems. By exaggerating "stories" and "fiction" he skips over the functionality which is obvious when he gives examples of the beginnings of this theme.
This may be partly because I am concurrently reading "The Horse, the Wheel and Language" about the origins of Indo-European culture. It is mostly a dry, tedious work with one foot in the world of scholarship, but it tells some important stories from the heart of anthropological learning. For example, the author just made the vital point that raising domestic animals required a delay of gratification that the surrounding hunter societies might have found pointless and beyond their self-control (at least at first).
An even more important point is that cultural practices spread across cultural boundaries (which are usually also ecological boundaries) as a result of higher status. So for example the herders could throw big feasts, which the hunters could not, giving the herders a status advantage. And of course feasts became central to the rituals and artifacts of religion.
In terms of the success of the species, what became the ability to declare fiat money and define nation-states did not start with such grandiose feats of imagination. More likely it had to do with the location and timing of salmon runs, or the greater durability of tanned leather, or some such highly tangible matters. What we are really talking about is the ability to conceptualize things not present by using words about them. Language is so ubiquitous among humans that it absolutely has to have a genetic basis, probably a quite direct genetic basis.
DWill wrote:In the roughly 6 million years of the homo genus' development, climate changes were more frequent and pronounced than at any time previous.
I had not heard that. Of course we have all heard about the ice ages, but were they really uniquely dramatic in fluctuation?
It certainly does suggest some possible advantages to the communication systems that Harari says were evolving. That enormous investment of energy may have paid off in knowing how to shelter or where to flee to, or in making possible other adaptations to the shifts. Even the idea of being able to conceptualize "things are getting colder, let's go where it's warmer," etc. would be an advantage - somehow one doubts that the great herd migrations work off of knowledge and planning.
DWill wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:Harari makes the excellent point that a nation is a fiction, an imaginary idea. The USA is held together by its constitution, the myth of the founding fathers and the military. These are excellent imaginative institutions, but their capacity to sustain shared purpose has its limits.
Christianity might serve better as a social glue, with its themes of love, truth and redemption, except that the churches are hypocritical, constrained to adopt a conservative stance by the need to oppose the aggressive secularity of the political left.
I wouldn't have chosen religion as myth suitable to make a nation feel bound together. Well, maybe if we're talking about a single religion for all, but otherwise hasn't religion been more a reinforcer of division?
Sorry to be tedious, but America pioneered the idea of tolerating a variety of religions, (along with Netherlands, which did have an established religion). There is a lot of cohesiveness and good will fostered by religion to go along with its divisiveness and triumphalism. For every Ted Cruz there is a Ben Carson, and for every Robert Jeffress there is a Rick Warren.
Religion opens a door to vocabularies of common purpose. Whether it be city on a hill, better angels, mighty fortresses or inner lights, the ability to hook concepts which inspire (a religious concept) is one that is vital to the American experiment. America, from the beginning, was building a nation from many backgrounds, unified not out of the mutual defense to which the clan has almost no alternative, but (if at all) out of the common purpose of building a society of opportunity.
DWill wrote: What might work just as well as one religion would be no religion, which is the condition we're told applies in northern Europe, an area that has high levels of social cohesiveness. It might be that agreement on secular goals is easier to reach than agreement on matters of faith.
The current cleavage is between the small town world of traditional white culture and the more anonymous, individualized culture of the cities. The suburbs are the battleground, and their churches are at the center of the culture wars.
The cities are winning, not surprisingly, but they have neglected the matter of binding wounds, acting as though winning is the point rather than building a society which functions well.
Note that African-Americans, who arguably provided the margin of victory to Obama, have natural sympathy on both sides. Most of us also feel some pull of patriotism and nuclear families and trade protectionism. If the cosmopolitans reject those basics, they abandon the emotional center of society. The same applies to religion. The result would be a decapitation of American society.
DWill wrote: At any rate, I don't think the U.S. has ever been characterized by either social or religious homogeneity. We may feel today that we are particularly splintered, but could that concept of the past be a myth in itself? It could be, or we could be harkening back to an exceptional rather than a typical period, say the confident and complacent 1950s.
To say the least, we have never been homogeneous. The 50s were the time of McCarthyism and Little Rock, of the integrated military and quotas on Jews at universities. Anti-Catholicism was strong, and lynchings were frequent.
DWill wrote:What held the U.S. together might be the myth of opportunity. As long as people felt free to pursue their own vision of happiness, it didn't matter so much that people thought and worshiped differently. The myth was strong enough even to give hope to people who seemed stuck in hopeless conditions.
I think that's the idea. But the stories of opportunity should not disparage the stories of cohesion. Phrases like "Capra-corn" are tribal put-downs from the cosmopolitans, and they could lose the superior attitude without losing opportunity.