geo wrote:Both metaphors [sudden melting of permafrost and earthquakes] serve to show that social unrest and tribalism can erupt without warning, caused by unseen and perhaps poorly understood mechanisms that lie beneath the surface.
Earthquakes well illustrate the ‘tipping point’ concept used in climate theory. Tectonic plates generate steadily increasing tension until they reach a sudden release with a major realignment. The San Andreas Fault has average movement between the Pacific and American tectonic plates of two inches per year, so if there is no surface movement for fifty years, the release of built-up tension will generate an earthquake with expected plate movement of eight feet. If the fault runs through your house that puts the kitchen where the bathroom was, but not as a neat renovation. The vast quantities of earth involved make the destructive energy of such a sudden massive movement immense.
Earthquakes are “without warning” in the sense that we can’t know which straw will break the camel’s back, but ‘with warning’ in the sense that engineers know that adding straw upon straw will eventually collapse a rigid structure, with probabilistic prediction equations.
Similarly with culture, a caste system can lock in a political model of ordinary social interaction that prevents reform of race relations. The constant additions of small humiliations create pressure for change, although a big issue with religious caste is how the cultural hierarchy makes these insults socially acceptable. If the system hypocritically pretends to be based on merit, it will generate tensions that remain largely unseen to the dominant caste, building up similar destructive potential as an earthquake. But if the system accepts it is not based on merit, it stands in conflict with fundamental ethical principles, such as claims in the US Declaration of Independence of self-evident truths.
Going back to how the climate change metaphor links to caste, it occurs to me that the Indian caste system was partly effective and sustainable in the past, in that family traditions of vocation enforced through religious expectation provided a stable and reliable way to maintain expertise. The metaphor with climate change comes from the fact that many people are excluded from these guild caste traditions, and this exclusion generates pressure to break down the rigid conventions. With climate change, our fossil fuel system looks sustainable and effective like a caste system when viewed from within, but when the larger views of its systemic effects is considered, the externality of global warming means that a system that looks good on the surface requires urgent reform.
geo wrote:Mythological metaphors may be better suited to help us connect to these underlying sociological currents. I think Joseph Campbell might spring up during these discussions. And I was intrigued reading Robert Tulip mention of Carl Jung's Wotan essay to explain the irrationality of Trumpism and to the rise of Hitlerism as well. Some may think the comparison to Hitler is unfair, but I see obvious correlations. There are primitive emotions at play, what Jung calls a "rustling in the primeval forest of the unconsciousness."
Thanks Geo, Jung interprets cultural and political trajectory by theorising an underlying direction. What you call ‘sociological currents’ relate to identity and values that have strong causal momentum that are not easily explained in terms of rational motive. I find the Indian concept of karma useful as a way of aggregating the hidden factors of social causality, not to suggest anything supernatural, but rather just to say that the karma of a person or a group is the integrated causal influence of all the known and unknown factors of their situation.
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus expressed this karmic causal principle with the aphorism 'ethos anthropoi daimon', Ηθος Ανθρωπος Δαιμων, interpreted to mean our ethos is our guardian angel, or character is fate.
With Hitler, Germany’s catastrophic explosion that he instigated was in this sense a karmic result of the fate of national character, although we can’t tell if the accidents of history mean these explosive berserk energies could have been contained and channeled into constructive directions. The underlying theme was that overweening pride in cultural identity sought confrontation in war.
The USA did the same with the Vietnam and Iraq wars, which were both insane on any rational cost-benefit analysis, since vastly better outcomes could have been achieved at far lower cost through sensible dialogue and investment. But caste systems rest upon religious pride, and US pride about its secular religion of pioneer individualism failed to see how that anti-communist mentality has to be balanced against collective needs.
Wotan is one of Jung’s most important contributions, exploring how the spiritual roots of cultural identity generate rigid political blockages. Such blockages produce a public inability to analyse problems dispassionately, hence also the relevance to
Caste of Freud’s
Civilization and its Discontents.
geo wrote:
There are indeed complex unconscious mechanisms gurgling beneath the surface, very much like the anthrax released by the thawing of the permafrost. As shocked as many of us were when Trump was elected, really we should have expected it all along. As they say, history repeats itself.
And as Mark Twain aphorised, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.
The legacy of Nixon, Reagan and Bush has pushed the American right toward the polarising confrontation of emotional pride seen in Trump. If he hadn’t won in 2016, he probably would have in 2020, through his Hitlerite capacity to generate resonant myths of cultural fantasy, such as the Big Lie of the Lost Cause of electoral fraud.
The Trumpian boil of distorted belief in manifest destiny and exceptional providence summed up in the MAGA meme would only have festered and grown during a Hillary Clinton Presidency, which would have been the object of sustained massive cultural and political attack.
How well Biden manages to lance that boil through managing caste-based sentiments will be an interesting challenge. Biden now has the advantage of global experience showing that strong central states relying on scientific knowledge have been most effective in managing the pandemic, while the viral meme of liberty has brought capitulation to the real virus.