And as so often, I’m wondering how we build a “space age” culture, or really cultures. I don’t want a global culture. I want many rivers. I want to retain as much genuine diversity as possible.
We are of course wearing the world down, for good and bad. Our movies travel everywhere and spread both our good and our bad ideas. Commercialism is bad, but it is not bad when compared to war and rapine. Tolerance of diversity is good, I think, in general. People forget how bigoted most of the world is even today. Much of the world would laugh at political correctness.
I feel I would be a conservative wherever I happened to be. If I were a Hindu, I would be a conservative Hindu. If I were Muslim, I would be a conservative Muslim. I would see the change on the horizon, and not precisely fear it, but not not fear it either. I would dive deeply into my own tradition.
But of course, as an American mutt, I have no tradition. My tradition is distraction. I have nothing to cling to, other than our political traditions. Those are, however, quite important.
And I will recall to your mind my heuristic that “culture” as I define it, is a collective and shared solution within a specific social domain of the problems of what is true, what is valuable and meaningful, how to manage and distribute power, and how to create and distribute resources. Roughly: religion/philosophy, science, politics, economics. All are blended of course in pretty much all traditions, but this heuristic allows you to see that different problems are being solved in most cases with the same solutions. Your religion might tell you who should rule, what is true about the world, and how your economic world should be organized.
Historically, of course, religion controlled “science”, which never really existed in its modern form until perhaps 400 years ago in the West. Now science is trying to control religion. But they remain discrete problems. Science cannot tell us what is necessarily intrinsically worth doing. It CAN tell us how we are most likely to feel in different scenarios, and it CAN measure what happens, in gross form, but it will never replicate human consciousness in a lab. Such is my belief. Our brains and minds are severable. That itself, is a scientific claim I would like to see validated more carefully than has been done heretofore.
Be all that as it may, I got to thinking about de Tocqueville’s complaint that we don’t create “Great Artists.” When someone from the cultural modern West makes such a complaint, it occurs to me what he intends is “someone who describes conflict”. This is especially true in modern literature, which consists in little but drama.
What would we think of art which says nothing more or less than “I am Happy” and “My world is at peace” and “I love my neighbors”? I think sometimes we create drama so we can be dramatic, so we can generate tension that we then resolve. This is a loop with unnecessary steps. It is a sort of emotional contract/release, but if we start from a place of balance it is not needed.
I am rambling here as I do. There are no ready answers to these questions. Culture tends to evolve from many inputs. There are Manu’s, and Mose’s, and Lycurgas’s here and there in history, but there is no reason to suspect such a thing is even possible in such a large interconnected world.
I guess I need to resurrect for my own use the metaphor of surfing. I don’t know where it is all going, but it’s quite interesting, and it may be someplace fantastic.