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Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

#159: May - July 2018 (Non-Fiction)
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Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Part Three: The Unification of Humankind


Please use this thread to discuss the above mentioned section of Sapiens. :tease:
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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geo's last post prompted me to say something about Part 3, which if my notes are correct is called "The Unification of Humankind." Sounds positive, but Harari doesn't commit to this unification having a general positive outcome when all different perspectives are taken into account. He says that history has a direction, that the "arrow of history" describes an arc starting from many, many worlds and ending at a single world. This isn't the moral arc spoken of by some theologians and leaders like Lincoln and Obama. It just means that by now just about everyone in the world shares the same basic assumptions, a statement that cuts against the grain of the common narrative of clashing values and even clashing civilizations. Harari says no, what we see if we pan out from the particulars is a clear pattern of growing homogeneity. He's a contrarian. He throws in a claim that contradictions, aka cognitive dissonance, are "inseparable parts of every human culture," and that without them cultures would lack all dynamism. We might cite as an example the American ideal of liberty alongside the belief that it's ok to enslave blacks. The point is that the ideal will never be realized, and it might be blatantly hypocritical, but it can provide powerful direction for the culture nevertheless.

Other animals have no concept of themselves as members of a species, but Sapiens uniquely is able to at least imagine (that word again) that humanity is all one. Over the ages, three forces have brought humanity to this brink of unity: money, empire, and religion. Since we have a religion discussion going on anyway, I'll try to give the gist of his breakdown of religion. Religion doesn't become a big unifier unless it is "universal and missionary. " This implies that before the major monotheistic and natural law religions came around, polytheism was less effective at melding different groups together under a single rule. For the Romans, perhaps it was empire more than religion that bound faraway people loosely to Rome. Roman gods were installed, but the locals could keep their own, too. Harari says it was not common for people to be killed over religion when polytheism held sway. A misconception Harari says we have about polytheism is that there wasn't a supreme force over all. There was, say Fate for the Greeks and Atman for the Hindus, but these operated without concern for humans, so there was no sense in supplicating them. The lesser gods had interests that could be appealed to through sacrifice and prayer.

When the Jews decided that Yaweh wasn't just one of the gods but the only God, the game changed. The supposed existence of other gods became an affront to the believers in the One. Jews now had a universal God who made the gods of other nations false ones. The Jews, however, didn't want to spread the faith beyond the ethnic tribe; that missionary role was left to the later Christians and Muslims. And, of course, the killing began.

The old Christian religion was withered in many parts of the world, and a large percentage of Westerners identify as "nones." We might assume from Harari's next move that he disagrees that so many have no religion. They nay not profess, but they subscribe to "the worship of man," also known as humanism. Liberal humanism, based on the sanctity of the individual, is the unacknowledged religion or ideology (to Harari they are about the same). There are no dictates from above compelling belief. Liberal humanism is a natural law religion whose dictates arise from common understandings of what is needed for human thriving. Nazism, too, was a humanistic, natural law religion devoted to the perfection of the human race through eugenics. Although I balked when Harari said that, it does serve the purpose of clarity. What does humanism normally signify when people give it as their type of faith, except "what the good guys believe"? It seems to me as though the most liberal Christians have moved the center of their belief from what God requires of them to the liberal humanist notion of what is good, which locates God within the individual as well.
Last edited by DWill on Tue Jul 24, 2018 12:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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DWill wrote: He says that history has a direction, that the "arrow of history" describes an arc starting from many, many worlds and ending at a single world. This isn't the moral arc spoken of by some theologians and leaders like Lincoln and Obama. It just means that by now just about everyone in the world shares the same basic assumptions, a statement that cuts against the grain of the common narrative of clashing values and even clashing civilizations. Harari says no, what we see if we pan out from the particulars is a clear pattern of growing homogeneity.
This apparent contradiction (growing homogeneity vs. clashing civilizations) can probably be resolved in terms of the difference between growing ambitions of exclusivity for worldviews, on the one hand, and the limit on ability to actually exclude due to competing worldviews on the other. The ambitions came first, and the monotheistic religions were pretty successful. But they clashed with each other (by force of arms! empire was arguably more involved than religion), and neither one triumphed.

On the other hand, neither did very well in Asia.

The organizing ideology in much of Asia is communism. Buddhism has a strong role, but it has little ambition to determine politics, so it plays little role in Japan or SE Asia in determining how the social system will function.

Harari sort of cops out at the end with the assertion that syncretism has beaten all the others. While that makes for a poor summary, it has an interesting implication for the relation between secular humanism and monotheism. Most monotheists are suspicious of secular humanism, yet they end up adopting its language in making the public case for their values.

There is some limit on this, such as we see when advocates of "religious freedom" argue for silliness such as institutionalizing Protestant Christianity in schools. The contradiction between their obvious triumphalism and their own language based on humanism is too great to sustain.
DWill wrote:Other animals have no concept of themselves as members of a species, but Sapiens uniquely is able to at least imagine (that word again) that humanity is all one. Over the ages, three forces have brought humanity to this brink of unity: money, empire, and religion.
This is actually the part I want to launch a little thought about. The first issue on which people had to think of themselves as a species was nuclear war. We did a poor job of it, but at least it got started. As time has gone on, we have had more and more of them. Population, climate change, water stress, energy markets, ozone depletion, plastics in the ocean, mass extinction, the list is getting longer and longer.

It used to be that population would sort of regulate itself with poverty. Malthusian effects. Key resources would be exploited more effectively, followed by more population growth until wages returned to subsistence level. Then the astonishing Demographic Transition happened, starting at the time of the French Revolution but not really getting going until after WWII and not hitting the broad mass of humanity until the 80s. Instead of population being limited by deaths, it began to be limited by prosperity and the pursuit of quality of life.

But it is still happening outside the purview of thoughtful choice, unless you count China's One Child policy (recently abandoned, if you hadn't heard) and perhaps the World Bank push for gender equity in education. Nobody really wants to advocate a world policy that imposes such restraints, but neither is it very sensible to just rely on uncoordinated individual decisions to respond to systemwide effects.

The social choice to be made in the 21st century is between the Chinese Model, which gives power to a single Party which can take the overall view of system effects, vs. the Western Model, which trusts a democratic system to make the necessary choices in its own self-interest. Frankly, it looks to me like the latest elections show the Western Model failing. We are putting power not in the hands of Putin and his cronyist authoritarian divide-and-rule model, but in the hands of the Party Elite model of China which seems more capable of coming to grips with systemic problems. They have managed to combine competence at the enterprise level with competence at the system level. It remains to be seen if the West can manage that feat.
DWill wrote:Liberal humanism, based on the sanctity of the individual, is the unacknowledged religion or ideology (to Harari they are about the same).
They are the same. Creationism and other such foolishness has distracted people from the obvious fact that religions and ideologies have always worked the same way. Ideologies don't usually create rituals of common practice, though elections and Fourth of July celebrations and National Anthem playing and Memorial Day are not nothing. Nor do they speak the language of the supernatural. But those are fairly superficial (except elections) compared to the way they both guide people to coordinate with strangers in supporting a particular set of ideas about how society ought to manage itself.
DWill wrote:Nazism, too, was a humanistic, natural law religion devoted to the perfection of the human race through eugenics.
Umm, there is some truth to that but it is leaving out a lot that motivated and shaped Naziism.
DWill wrote: It seems to me as though the most liberal Christians have moved the center of their belief from what God requires of them to the liberal humanist notion of what is good, which locates God within the individual as well.
While there is some truth to this, it overlooks major points. First, the notion of what is good in the New Testament is very similar to a universalist humanism. The major exception is that it promoted the view that God takes a special interest in the poor, but this has been labelled as a "social insurance scheme" by some who try to use modern concepts to explain it. Needless to say, that's kind of universalistic humanism, except that today we have different concepts of how much prosperity may be available to all so we think in terms of empowering rather than sharing.

I agree that mainstream, liberal Christians do not mainly reason directly from what God requires of them, but they do tend to define God's requirements in very humanistic ways.

Second, saying that God is located "within the individual" completely overlooks the intersubjective aspect, which is surely critical to mainstream Christianity. Okay, God is not a rain-making storm god "above the firmament" or a distant judge with gates policed by St. Peter. But Christianity and Judaism have actually been major sources for the modern critique of Enlightenment individualism, especially the communitarian critique.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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Happy to poke into this set of issues again. I think Harari is very good at putting the big issues into perspective. I have lots of complaints about his treatment of this or that minor issue, but his Bigthink is first-rate.

He lays out a real arrow of history, that holds up: unification. As we have learned more and gotten more effective, we have overcome the distance that made humanity into a set of small tribes, speaking different languages and mutually distrustful. With the shrinking of the world we have both sought to increase our ability to dominate others and increased our urge toward universalized morality and justice. I give credit for the latter to the deep urge to harmonize reason's insistence on a universalized sense of meaning with the gradual evolution of a mode of production (as Marx would say) which in principle is infinite due to capital's producibility rather than finite due to land's dominant role.

Gradually the urge to dominate is passing. America, and to some extent Europe before her, showed that prosperity is more effectively cultivated by cooperation and by empowering others than by dominating and ruling them. The Marshall Plan was not just the most unsordid act in history (I am told Churchill was actually referring to Lend-Lease, but the apocryphal version is more enduringly true.) It was the landmark of unsordidness in history, falling at the same time as Dresden and Hiroshima marked the high water mark of mindless destruction.

The major counterexamples today, especially Putin, the African National Congress, Hungary's Orban, and Syria's Assad, are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are backwater representatives of resource-based power grabbing, exploiting weaknesses in the liberal system to perpetuate domination systems which in turn suppress the natural dynamism and social flourishing of their citizens. Such separated, competing domination systems will gradually fade, and the resilience of the liberal order to confront them will capture the insight of the Long Telegram that such power dynamics are best controlled by containment.

A more difficult case to analyze is China. As an ancient society with a somewhat different social psychology, radically dragged into the 20th Century by the leadership of the Communist Party, it represents not a domination system but an elitist model with a heavy dose of social control. The Party has represented those with education and a sense of civic duty for a long time, even though it also incorporated Stalinist thuggery at the same time.

I think the contest between Chinese-style adaptive centralization, with a large dose of social control, and Western-style bureaucratic decentralization, will come down to whether there is more need for system-wide policies (such as carbon taxes) or more need for the natural impulses of human flourishing. I think I bet on the second, but not with heavy odds.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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Harry Marks wrote: The social choice to be made in the 21st century is between the Chinese Model, which gives power to a single Party which can take the overall view of system effects, vs. the Western Model, which trusts a democratic system to make the necessary choices in its own self-interest. Frankly, it looks to me like the latest elections show the Western Model failing. We are putting power not in the hands of Putin and his cronyist authoritarian divide-and-rule model, but in the hands of the Party Elite model of China which seems more capable of coming to grips with systemic problems. They have managed to combine competence at the enterprise level with competence at the system level. It remains to be seen if the West can manage that feat.
Thanks for your entire response. This claim struck me in particular because in my reading I haven't seen the "China question" framed in quite this way. Perhaps I've just missed the larger point of the debate over whether China or the U.S. will win. Win economically, is how I've read the argument. Who will have the larger GDP in 15 years? But if we widen the scope to cover the challenge of getting the world population to middle class while not completely trashing the planet, the political implications bearing very closely on dearly held freedoms in the West come into the picture. We still don't know if the Chinese model combining communism and market economy will be successful, for example in managing the environment, but as you say our own efforts are beginning to look faltering.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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Harry Marks wrote:Happy to poke into this set of issues again. I think Harari is very good at putting the big issues into perspective. I have lots of complaints about his treatment of this or that minor issue, but his Bigthink is first-rate.

He lays out a real arrow of history, that holds up: unification. As we have learned more and gotten more effective, we have overcome the distance that made humanity into a set of small tribes, speaking different languages and mutually distrustful. With the shrinking of the world we have both sought to increase our ability to dominate others and increased our urge toward universalized morality and justice. I give credit for the latter to the deep urge to harmonize reason's insistence on a universalized sense of meaning with the gradual evolution of a mode of production (as Marx would say) which in principle is infinite due to capital's producibility rather than finite due to land's dominant role.

Gradually the urge to dominate is passing. America, and to some extent Europe before her, showed that prosperity is more effectively cultivated by cooperation and by empowering others than by dominating and ruling them. The Marshall Plan was not just the most unsordid act in history (I am told Churchill was actually referring to Lend-Lease, but the apocryphal version is more enduringly true.) It was the landmark of unsordidness in history, falling at the same time as Dresden and Hiroshima marked the high water mark of mindless destruction.
I start off completely by-the-way. The house where Marshall lived, his "retirement house," is in Leesburg, Virginia where I used to work. It took him a while after moving there in 1941 to achieve retirement, obviously. I like the house because, while beautiful and stately, it's also far from ostentatious, not something to ooh and aah over like many houses today. The home seems to fit what is known of the character of the man, who didn't even want his name attached to the plan to rebuild Europe (at least according to the docent).

Harari seems to indicate at times that unification means progress, but at other times he wants to hedge. Is that your impression as well? We have difficulty seeing "unification" as anything but positive, but that could have its dark side, and has, I suppose, throughout history. Not everyone will be happy with unification, that much we already know by such movements as Brexit and conservative hatred of the UN. I've also worried about the loss of diversity that comes with globalization, fewer languages and distinct cultures surviving, species disappearing at far more than the background rate of extinction. All of that seems to contradict the notion that the world is growing ever more complex. I suppose it really doesn't mean that, at least culturally, since it's the connections between things that determine complexity. A thousand disconnected items might be less complex than a hundred very connected ones.
The major counterexamples today, especially Putin, the African National Congress, Hungary's Orban, and Syria's Assad, are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are backwater representatives of resource-based power grabbing, exploiting weaknesses in the liberal system to perpetuate domination systems which in turn suppress the natural dynamism and social flourishing of their citizens. Such separated, competing domination systems will gradually fade, and the resilience of the liberal order to confront them will capture the insight of the Long Telegram that such power dynamics are best controlled by containment.
No "Trump's U.S."? I take it the omission was deliberate, to show that we have a wannabe at this point, with still a chance to erase most of his attempts at authoritarianism. Like you, I see no reason why Harari would not see the current Western backwardness as a dip in the rising trend line.
A more difficult case to analyze is China. As an ancient society with a somewhat different social psychology, radically dragged into the 20th Century by the leadership of the Communist Party, it represents not a domination system but an elitist model with a heavy dose of social control. The Party has represented those with education and a sense of civic duty for a long time, even though it also incorporated Stalinist thuggery at the same time.

I think the contest between Chinese-style adaptive centralization, with a large dose of social control, and Western-style bureaucratic decentralization, will come down to whether there is more need for system-wide policies (such as carbon taxes) or more need for the natural impulses of human flourishing. I think I bet on the second, but not with heavy odds.
Harari dismisses "clash of civilization" scenarios. Yet you've got me thinking that whatever level of clash we might call the West vs. China, co-existence of the worldviews might not be possible in the long run.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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DWill wrote:
Harry Marks wrote: The social choice to be made in the 21st century is between the Chinese Model, which gives power to a single Party which can take the overall view of system effects, vs. the Western Model, which trusts a democratic system to make the necessary choices in its own self-interest.
They have managed to combine competence at the enterprise level with competence at the system level. It remains to be seen if the West can manage that feat.
Thanks for your entire response. This claim struck me in particular because in my reading I haven't seen the "China question" framed in quite this way. Perhaps I've just missed the larger point of the debate over whether China or the U.S. will win.

I am striking out pretty much on my own on this, so don't feel you have "missed" something. I have been fascinated by China for quite a while now, having read parts of "Fan Shen" and "Shen Fan" back when these were considered uniquely insightful due to the author's access to China at a time when that was difficult.

We in the West have tended to see China through the lens of totalitarianism, oppression and Stalinism for some time. Mao pretty much guaranteed that would be the set of questions we brought. But a better lens is actually East Asian culture, including Japan, Korea and Singapore. It helps to understand that China was ruled by outsiders, the Manchu Dynasty, before Sun Yat-Sen, and that the Nationalists were closely associated with the coastal drug lords of Shanghai and Hong Kong. ("The Soong Dynasty" is a good read and lays it out reasonably well.) So unlike Japan, they had no institutions of concern at the top level who wanted to see China functioning for ordinary people. The Communists were the people who cared, including Teng Hsiao-Ping who said we don't care if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

As a result a semi-feudal system of domination by local landlords (similar to India's, but without the caste issue mixed in) was overthrown by the Communists who brought modernity much more than they brought equality as an ideology.

It is safe to say the Party does not grasp the idea of liberty very much in the same way that Brett Kavanaugh does not understand what patriarchy is. Their lives have been busy planning, deciding and controlling in order to bring prosperity. When the Inner Circle decided to allow people to get rich organizing economic activity for profit, and then to allow foreigners to invest for the sake of employing their hundred million workers being fed without having productive jobs, the party shrugged and went along because they were all steering toward the horizon of prosperity. All in all they are likely to feel the decisions were made correctly.
DWill wrote:Win economically, is how I've read the argument. Who will have the larger GDP in 15 years? But if we widen the scope to cover the challenge of getting the world population to middle class while not completely trashing the planet, the political implications bearing very closely on dearly held freedoms in the West come into the picture.
There is no question China will have the larger economy. And it is likely that Europe and the U.S. together will be larger than China. Nobody needs to worry about being dominated.

The issue is not which is "more effective" in the sense of feeding a military. Few issues that really matter are decided by military force anymore, especially when superpowers are involved. The issue is which is more appealing, in the sense of persuading others that it functions well. If, for example, the armed forces continues to make plans for rising sea levels, because, you know, they rise whether you plan or not, but sees the civilian government continue to engage in denial about it, you have to wonder how long they are going to see civilian control as a bedrock idea.
DWill wrote: We still don't know if the Chinese model combining communism and market economy will be successful, for example in managing the environment, but as you say our own efforts are beginning to look faltering.
Well, the question of whether they do a good job environmentally is a very good one. The Party has allowed the environment to deteriorate dreadfully, and only in the last five years seems to have gotten serious about things like Beijing air quality that are major issues. On the other hand this is a well-known pattern, that a country has to reach a certain standard of living before it seems worthwhile to alienate some capitalists with serious constraints on what they can do to the environment.

China is at that level now, so the question becomes whether its institutions can function well in making the necessary interventions. They may be even worse than the West, which wasn't all that good at responding to environmental toxicity and is completely dropping the ball (especially the U.S.) on Greenhouse Gases.
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Re: Sapiens - Part Three: The Unification of Humankind

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DWill wrote:The home seems to fit what is known of the character of the man, who didn't even want his name attached to the plan to rebuild Europe (at least according to the docent).
I am tempted to say that Marshall's character, like that of Omar Bradley and even Eisenhower, is a characteristic of American culture that represents its contribution to the world. Because Americans can generally feel secure in their home and community, they tend to promote those who focus on getting the job done, rather than those who ride or control the political currents with some kind of manipulative persona (e.g. MacArthur or Patton).

On reflection, though, it is true of other nations as well. For every blustering Montgomery or de Gaulle among the allies there were more straightforward commanders such as Harold Alexander who got the job done. For every Mao filling little red books there is a Chou En-lai and a Deng Xiaoping. In the eternal contest between those seeking to recruit others to their vision and those who pragmatically wish to do well what they do, the best one might say for America is probably that its relative freedom from competing domination systems allowed the pragmatists to show the potential unleashed by cooperation.
DWill wrote:Harari seems to indicate at times that unification means progress, but at other times he wants to hedge. Is that your impression as well? We have difficulty seeing "unification" as anything but positive, but that could have its dark side, and has, I suppose, throughout history.
Well I think it is clear in his writing that material progress has enabled unification. I have been reading with an eye to my issues, especially the issue of domination systems elevated for me by Zinn (but also by Crossan and Borg in a Christianity context).

Technology changes the balance between the advantages of defending one's home and the advantages of going out to dominate others. Empires in the Iron Age, and then nation states in the era of Louis XIV, had advantages that we economists think of as "economies of scale", and so the powerful rulers of the countries seeking dominance of Europe suppressed the individual differences in Wales, Brittany, Provence, etc. to "forge" a nation (a telling image.)

In the late 20th century soft power moved to the forefront of these contests. The ideological fabric created by communism is an example, but so is the large scale support of scientific research that has made English the language of the educated in every country. If someone asks today how many divisions are wielded by Lady Gaga, the answer might come back that there are more votes on Reddit every week than in an election in the United States.

To see Roger Ailes and Donald the Trump manipulating divisiveness to leverage grievance into attacks on the freedom and rights is frustrating to me in part because I tend to agree with Fukuyama that liberal democracy will "inevitably" triumph, because, among other reasons, gut-instinct tribalism is a complete loser compared to trade and interconnectedness. The divisiveness represents the pushback by the rich against post-War social democracy, and that's all fair in democracy, but what is sinister about it is its wholesale adoption of deception as an approach. As long as they can count on Fox and friends to play the victim card against truth, the Sheldon Adelsons of the moneyed classes feel they can seize "territory" back inch by inch from the "conquests" by democracy.
DWill wrote: Not everyone will be happy with unification, that much we already know by such movements as Brexit and conservative hatred of the UN. I've also worried about the loss of diversity that comes with globalization, fewer languages and distinct cultures surviving, species disappearing at far more than the background rate of extinction.
It might pay globalists to think about how to cultivate local richness and the diversity that comes with it. I am loving "Our Towns" by James and Deborah Fallows about various ways small cities and even towns are entering the modern world with local economic vibrancy. The French, ever the ones to design a central solution, have an elaborate system of fostering and enriching "terroir", the local foods and drinks that make each part of France a culinary adventure. The French can enjoy going on holiday within France in part because the government now consciously leverages diversity rather than trying to unify.

I truly believe in diversity and preserving the separate cultures, not as some pristine museum-piece but as an active center of complexity, in which the lovely variations in human interaction can reach toward a healthy particular identity that emerges from their past. My introduction to the issue was probably Tony Hillerman's Navajo novels, which I heartily recommend to anyone curious about such matters. But we have to get used to the fact that each culture will now have leadership that has fingers reaching into the globalized dominant culture, which so far is mainly European. (But we have Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder as well.)

The independent centers of diversity are not necessarily localized, either. Gaming culture, stock car racing, antiquing, and on and on, represent rich cultivation of social inventiveness. It isn't the pace of innovation that matters, it's the contact and the conversation.
DWill wrote: All of that seems to contradict the notion that the world is growing ever more complex. I suppose it really doesn't mean that, at least culturally, since it's the connections between things that determine complexity. A thousand disconnected items might be less complex than a hundred very connected ones.
That's an insightful way to go analytical on the issue, which I appreciate. At the same time, we should recognize the particulars of the process and the ways they matter. Radio and then television have led to blending and standardization in the world. Terroir, or bluegrass music, or tulip festivals, tend to be regarded as quaint relics that either can be commercialized or can't be. It's difficult to find people in the South who can't "talk Yankee" or black people who can't "talk white" any more.

But what I see in Europe is that it's possible for the dominant global culture to respect and even celebrate the local variations that preserve themselves ever more self-consciously. Everybody here (exaggerating some) speaks two or three languages. That is one of the things that cars and schools have brought to the world.

If I can stretch the points a bit, I suspect that quaintness is the wave of the future - that is, that people don't really get their sense of meaning from making wars and dominating others, or even from "making it" out of their inbred and socially constrained home towns, they get it from feeling common enterprise with the people in their lives. I won't go into the economics but I think it supports that claim.
DWill wrote:
The major counterexamples today, especially Putin, the African National Congress, Hungary's Orban, and Syria's Assad, are the exceptions that prove the rule. They are backwater representatives of resource-based power grabbing,
No "Trump's U.S."? I take it the omission was deliberate, to show that we have a wannabe at this point, with still a chance to erase most of his attempts at authoritarianism.
What we have is a narcissist. He has trouble recruiting additional narcissists because, despite the occasional success of a Devin Nunes play or a Lindsey Graham tantrum, people don't easily shift into narcissist mode. It's one thing for people to pat themselves on the back for finessing a fight (Orrin Hatch and the Bush clan have been demonstrating that for a while), but it's another to full-on deny your gut instincts about integrity for a real abandonment of democratic principles.

I think the People of Principle (POP) in our society need to start thinking about managing the Manipulative Agents of Divisiveness (MAD) like we manage corrupt foreign dictators, outmaneuvering them without buying into the conflictual model they thrive in.
DWill wrote:Yet you've got me thinking that whatever level of clash we might call the West vs. China, co-existence of the worldviews might not be possible in the long run.
Well, if Harari's instincts about syncretism are correct, and I think they are, we will gradually come to blend the systems. We already have a bureaucracy that thinks of itself a lot like the Party thinks of itself in China. Professional agents of efficient progress, recruited for skills, not politics, and expected to put in place the policies of whoever has most recently persuaded a majority of the electorate.

The Communist Party in China is learning to accept rule of law, and the American people will learn, one way or another, that they have to address common problems through government. Cultural differences will mean some differences persist. But the framework for viewing the issues and deciding the policies will probably come to be more and more similar between the two. That may not be a good thing, of course.
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