The essence of the American ideal is not the idea that we have always been perfect, but that our system is perfectable. If you look at, say, Medieval Europe, what you had was a static system, that mapped the social order onto the order of the universe, as something given, unchanging, and unchangeable. Obviously, this was wrong, but social reform is not something anyone could initiate without a severe risk of premature death or imprisonment.
Look at the civil rights movement. Who led it? Americans. Who opposed it? Also Americans. Who wanted us in Vietnam? Americans. Who opposed our involvement there? Americans.
The use of excessive abstraction when it comes to complex social and personality systems often leads to perceptual errors. Academics call this “essentializing”, as in “the essence of the American project is racist imperialism”, or “the essence of the American project is enlightened political and social liberalism.” Pointing out the contingency and potential fallibility of the “big story” was the reason I coined the perhaps infelicitous term “tubaforms”. You know, you need tubas in a marching band, but most people don’t find them beautiful.
The point to be made here, though, is that the question should never be who we “are”, but who we WANT to be, and how we plan to get there. Progress depends on a plan, and plans that will actually work in complex social systems have to be based on principles that people actually hold.
What I term Regressivism does not work because it does not have actual principles. They are quite often like the retarded mechanics in “Brazil”, the movie, who take a working system and completely destroy it, even after being told it was in perfect working order, since “things don’t just fix themselves.”
Here is the final scene of the plumbers, who present a nice metaphor for a system which is broken, but which cannot be fixed (normally: Gilliam allows us a nice fantasy here).
There was no person outside the central power authority in the Soviet Union who could fundamentally change anything. There is no one in China outside the few hundred men who rule it who can fundamentally change anything. The system was immune to reform, since it was presumed to be perfect, in exactly the same way that medieval Europe was presumed to be perfect; and it was held in check by the same combination of indoctrination and overt use of terror (torture) and power as that of the Catholic Church.
Cultures are always organized locally. They always consist in people doing things in ways that make sense to them. The people of northern England behave just a bit differently than those in the South, and this is the way it should be.
Culture, too, is internal. It is what you actually believe. It cannot be mandated, although those interested in mind control have no doubt spent much effort trying to make that happen. Behavior is external. Behavior, in large measure, CAN be compelled through the use of power.
Morality is culture. Legality is power.
No system can self organize in a condition of excessive legalism.
This–and the last couple posts–have been a bit meandering, but are hopefully helpful to someone.
Hell, since I’m already doing figure eights: I’ve always wanted to be an artist, but seem to lack talent in artsy things. I recently realized, though, that THIS–what I do here and on my other site–meets the goal I had set, which was the creation of new objects that were an expression not just of me, but which were connected in an interesting way with reality.
It is like I’ve created a download that adapts itself to the personality and tendencies of the person downloading it. “Culture”, per se, does not exist. It is a reification of the discernable patterns of masses of people in motion, which vary constantly, but in largely predictable ways. I like to think of myself as injecting little tumblers, or “chakras”–little spots of compressed, complex light–into this system, such that they expand and alter the proverbial flow of water and air.
This is what I enjoy doing, and I’m vain enough to think I’m good at it.