Keeping Focus: "If you want peace, work for peace.

[fromderinside]

The above quote from political scientist Joshua S. Goldstein coomes at the end of an article about Steven Pinker and his new book (2011) "The better angels of our Nature" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/s...a1&adxnnlx=1322530112-1kDSxKhRWQRmeuqtbWKygw&) and http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/b....html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Kinder and Gentler&st=cse.)

Better angels is about drops in all kinds of killing over the last few thousand years. What the book gets down to is that our natures through our cultures through our genetics are clearly focused on getting the most from our selves through getting the most people from our cultures in the most effective ways for us to advantage ourselves in the world in which we live.

We do it by adjusting our cultures through our natures to the end of paying the lowest prices for surviving, reproducing, with a brain that features our equally potent nature of discriminating us from them, and in a world that is uncertain.

That isn't what the articles, from which I leverage says, it is my take given the continuing tension between dominance of us and them in cultures. When the lowest price is perceived to come from order and and doctrine there will be tendencies to limit who is us. When the lowest price is perceived to be from openness and sharing the tendency will be to limit them.

We can see this tension in our local, federal, and international compacts and we can easily detect when us or them is becoming the dominant social theme.

So there we are. A framework and some literature from which to launch ourselves int a discussion about whether cultural-social norms are actually underpinned by long ingrained, inherited, human tendencies, or whether cultural conditions drive social behavior, more or less on their own.

So if it is true that "if we want peace we must work for peace" does that come from resolving our grouping versus discriminating tendencies and is that software already in place, or does that software develop because we live in particular conditions?

Of course you can take this thing anywhere you want. Just take it somewhere.

 

[Perspicuo]

A framework and some literature from which to launch ourselves int a discussion about whether cultural-social norms are actually underpinned by long ingrained, inherited, human tendencies, or whether cultural conditions drive social behavior, more or less on their own.

That's like: "Is the chicken the cause of the egg or the egg the cause of the chicken?" Culture is to a large degree the massification of instinct-driven responses to practical matters. The fact that Mexican hat brims are wider than Canadian ones is not necessarily due to a difference in instinct, but both are responses to them. Some responses may be impractically complex or even problematic in themselves. This is due to instinct being pre-programmed instead of intelligently designed. Anyhow, culture evolves eventually, very slowly. Lately the rate has increased due to communications and other developments.

 

[doubtingt]

Anyhow, culture evolves eventually, very slowly. Lately the rate has increased due to communications and other developments.

IT is an interesting question as to whether modern communication technology results in culture merely "evolving" at an increased rate or is also actually dissolving culture, at least in some senses in which it existed in the past. I am referring to the sense of culture that refers to the shared set of ideas, assumptions, and ways of behaving that are common among a group of people and reinforced though informal and formal rules and customs. For such a web of integrated, widespread, and deeply held assumptions and ways of being to cohere and take root would likely require some degree of environmental stability and isolation from external influence and sources of viable alternatives. In human history, groups of people were exposed to largely the same relatively narrow set of information from their environment. Today, we are not only exposed to way more information than we can process, but every person is exposed to a different subset of information, thus there is too much unshared experience and dissimilarity for culture to congeal. Being barraged with countless alternative ideas and ways of being, combined with high levels of mobility not only threatens the viability of an existing culture to stay the way it is (i.e., prompts cultural evolution) but it creates conditions that are not conducive to the formation of new cultures in this sense. We could try to say that it is just a new type of culture but that might be as invalid as saying that atheism is just another religion or that a person has an ideology of doubt.

 

[fromderinside]

IT is an interesting question as to whether modern communication technology results in culture merely "evolving" at an increased rate or is also actually dissolving culture, at least in some senses in which it existed in the past. I am referring to the sense of culture that refers to the shared set of ideas, assumptions, and ways of behaving that are common among a group of people and reinforced though informal and formal rules and customs. For such a web of integrated, widespread, and deeply held assumptions and ways of being to cohere and take root would likely require some degree of environmental stability and isolation from external influence and sources of viable alternatives. In human history, groups of people were exposed to largely the same relatively narrow set of information from their environment. Today, we are not only exposed to way more information than we can process, but every person is exposed to a different subset of information, thus there is too much unshared experience and dissimilarity for culture to congeal. Being barraged with countless alternative ideas and ways of being, combined with high levels of mobility not only threatens the viability of an existing culture to stay the way it is (i.e., prompts cultural evolution) but it creates conditions that are not conducive to the formation of new cultures in this sense. We could try to say that it is just a new type of culture but that might be as invalid as saying that atheism is just another religion or that a person has an ideology of doubt.

Good post, good points. On the bolded though I think that more information with everyone, more views with everyone,leads to more, not less, sharing. Sharing off commonalities across cultures, sharing of information differences handled by different mechanisms in cultures, etc. I posted a paper about public information, that information about us that we use to act publicly on the morality:instincts thread "Public Information: From Nosy Neighbors to Cultural Evolution"(http://www.edanchin.fr/plugins/fckeditor/userfiles/file/Danchin et al Science 2004.pdf) One observer criticised that article as simplistic so I added "Evidence for mirror systems in emotions" (http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1528/2391.full.html). the two combine to get at the idea that from what we use to construct morality, a basis for culture, comes from systems used resolving fundamental seek/avoid (Schneirla), us/them (Pinker, Harralson, Olds) conflicts, that actually lie at the base of autonomic and sympathetic innervation to some extent.

Adding fundamental processes like mirror cells and systems, descending control, and the like puts us in pretty good stead for parsing out what capabilities and liabilities we have as brained social organisms for making societies.

Whee 150.

 

[fromderinside]

Culture is to a large degree the massification of instinct-driven responses to practical matters. The fact that Mexican hat brims are wider than Canadian ones is not necessarily due to a difference in instinct, but both are responses to them. Some responses may be impractically complex or even problematic in themselves. This is due to instinct being pre-programmed instead of intelligently designed. Anyhow, culture evolves eventually, very slowly. Lately the rate has increased due to communications and other developments.

I don't see how interjecting instinctive into nature/nurture adds anything. I'm not going to get up on a stump now and proselytize my view of evolution on you. Just be assured the only behavioral programming we see are chemically related and survive in species of task designed members like ants and termites - any wonder why Wilson ad Dawkins, ant study-ers, are so hard over on instinctive/genetic interpretations - while chordates went another route even with imprinting birds, three spined stickleback, and even honey bear apparent exceptions. Our NS are centralized and our senses are grouped and the sense processing, olfactory sense perhaps excluded, and our processing depends on advantaging neuronal information processing properties more than using chemical messages directly (my generalization which may not be a familiar one).

 

[doubtingt]

Good post, good points. On the bolded though I think that more information with everyone, more views with everyone,leads to more, not less, sharing. Sharing off commonalities across cultures, sharing of information differences handled by different mechanisms in cultures, etc.

We're using different senses of "shared". It is true as you say that tech means the one person is more likely to convey information (share it) with more people, especially those outside their social circles. However, there is so much info coming at us that we only wind up attending to a fraction of it, so most people who have access to it won't actually get it, pay attention to it, make any use of it, etc.. What that means is that even though you and I are next door neighbors, the .00001% of all available information that attended to today is not the same as the .00001% that I attended to. So of all the information that you and I each have collectively, only a small % of it is info we both have (i.e., what social psychologists call commonly held or "shared information"). IF we draw the venn diagram, with the size of two circles representing how much information each of two people have, the circles are bigger than past eras (more info) but the % of the circles that overlap is smaller (less shared relative to unshared info). People are increasingly more likely to have more commonly held information with virtual internet communities than their physical neighbors, co-workers, etc.. One might say that internet communities can form a "culture" but I'm not sure about that. I suspect that actual physical interaction and the ability to use socializing rewards and punishments is vital to the creation of a real culture.

 

[fromderinside]

Another good post. I believe I understand your point.

That said, here is my criticism of your point based on what I envision is happening. The spectacular increase in information circulation(s) is not only generating wider circles, for the heck of it let's call them acceptance and rejection circles, but they are also smoothing, adding information to what earlier segregated cultures practiced (accepted and rejected) providing a truer (refined) image, if you will, of what cultures actually convey to those immersed within the understood inforamtion. these effects can be seen as ripples running through cultures amplifying some precepts and attenuating others.

So my take differs from yours in that the magnitude of information common among cultures is drowning out uncertainty and unknowns within existing cultures even while the overall or zeitgeist set is becoming,like the genetic color browner, less white, yellow, and black. (sorry about the splaying of metaphors).

So rather than just increased information per individual being a smaller proportion of overall information, the overall information is permeating all the individual information samples making them more emerging reality based. Among the results are that Putin is exposed where Hitler wasn't, good economic practices are modifying traditional models making quality of work ever more important as modifying the notion of race to the bottom. Whether these things are going to hold is uncertain. For instance I'm a bit worried that religiosity is also becoming more effective as Muslim, Christian, Hindu commonalities are understood and methods are employed to keep individuals in camps as they become more purely defined.

I believe my acceptance and rejection circles may be the arena where your reward and punishment (motive and decision) may be the actors. I'm pretty sure we agree that uncertainty is the reason reward and punishment and acceptance and rejection circles exist.

 

[doubtingt]

Another good post. I believe I understand your point.

That said, here is my criticism of your point based on what I envision is happening. The spectacular increase in information circulation(s) is not only generating wider circles, for the heck of it let's call them acceptance and rejection circles, but they are also smoothing, adding information to what earlier segregated cultures practiced (accepted and rejected) providing a truer (refined) image, if you will, of what cultures actually convey to those immersed within the understood inforamtion. these effects can be seen as ripples running through cultures amplifying some precepts and attenuating others.

So my take differs from yours in that the magnitude of information common among cultures is drowning out uncertainty and unknowns within existing cultures even while the overall or zeitgeist set is becoming,like the genetic color browner, less white, yellow, and black. (sorry about the splaying of metaphors).

So rather than just increased information per individual being a smaller proportion of overall information, the overall information is permeating all the individual information samples making them more emerging reality based. Among the results are that Putin is exposed where Hitler wasn't, good economic practices are modifying traditional models making quality of work ever more important as modifying the notion of race to the bottom. Whether these things are going to hold is uncertain. For instance I'm a bit worried that religiosity is also becoming more effective as Muslim, Christian, Hindu commonalities are understood and methods are employed to keep individuals in camps as they become more purely defined.

I believe my acceptance and rejection circles may be the arena where your reward and punishment (motive and decision) may be the actors. I'm pretty sure we agree that uncertainty is the reason reward and punishment and acceptance and rejection circles exist.

I think I see what you are getting at. I agree that there is some information that is so important and so clearly superior in its validity that it impacts all people. Thus, it is harder to hide some truths or to get away for long with blatant lies and injustices than it used to be. This will lead to some ideas being more common and universal than before, so they are "shared" with a more of humanity than most ideas were in the past.
I agree with that. I guess I would argue that those aren't enough to constitute a "culture". They are largely piecemeal ideas that don't really gel into a coherent and shared worldview and way of life. Also, I would argue that the subjective sense of uncertainty and unknowns are vastly greater now than in the small isolated cultures of the past, even if our objective knowledge is greater. For example, science objectively reduces uncertainty compared to ignorance, but a creationist has a greater subjective sense of certainty than does the scientist who accepts evolution. It seems likely that it is more than shared knowledge but a shared subjective certainty in the same basic "Truths" is a key element of a cohesive culture. We are losing a narrow, cohesive, and certain worldview, and to what extent is that critical to "culture" in the sense I originally described?
Take the "hipster" "culture" for example. All over the US, there are cities in which gourmet doughnut shops are opening and people are lining up waiting for them to open in order to spend $3 on a single doughnut. The internet is why this is being "shared" so quickly across groups of people with no direct contact with each other. But in a year the trend will die and they will go back to not giving a crap about doughnuts. So, were gourmet doughnuts with bacon on them ever part of a "culture"? Not in the sense that particular foods are defining features of historic cultures. It is more like a hodgepodge of fleeting shared experiences than culture (which I don't mind because bacon doughnuts are awesome and culture becomes tradition which reduces the quality and variety of just about everything, including food).

 

[Perspicuo]

I don't see how interjecting instinctive into nature/nurture adds anything. I'm not going to get up on a stump now and proselytize my view of evolution on you. Just be assured the only behavioral programming we see are chemically related and survive in species of task designed members like ants and termites - any wonder why Wilson ad Dawkins, ant study-ers, are so hard over on instinctive/genetic interpretations - while chordates went another route even with imprinting birds, three spined stickleback, and even honey bear apparent exceptions. Our NS are centralized and our senses are grouped and the sense processing, olfactory sense perhaps excluded, and our processing depends on advantaging neuronal information processing properties more than using chemical messages directly (my generalization which may not be a familiar one).

What I was referring to is what you are describing. I use the word instinct in the widest sense possible: such as finding certain body ratios sexually arousing. Inherited factors affecting behavior as opposed to culturally programmed. Culture acts upon these factors and finds motivation in them. For example, a parent can instill gender bias behaviors in his offspring by means of the promise of love and relief from humilliation, which are ultimately inherited species-wide centrally controlled factors that affect behavior.

 

[fromderinside]

Thanks again.

... some information that is so important and so clearly superior in its validity that it impacts all people. This will lead to some ideas being more common and universal than before, so they are "shared" with a more of humanity than most ideas were in the past.

I agree with that.

<On the other hand>

I agree they don't constitute a culture. I disagree they are piecemeal overall. They may be piecemeal with respect to local or even some regional cultures. Take for instance language as a delimiter of culture. In the time since nationhood in Italy most every community had a dialect and some very interesting variations on regional and national cultures up until the end of WWII. From that time forward communities tended to maintain dialects, but most community uniquenesses are now relegated to pageants and special holidays. Regionalisms remain in somewhat muted form where we still see Sicily, Basilicata, Tuscany, Roman, and Milan characters. But nationally, probably with the standardization of English as the business language, it is hard to see differences in media, governance, or business aspects of Italian culture. Oh sure Naples is still a bit thuggish, Rome is corrupt, Florence is superior, and Milan is business like, but these are sales points rather than cultural clothing.

Pinker and others have pointed to the leviathan (large secular government) as dominant civilizing forces so my point is the stronger influence on forming culture will follow the national, in this case Italy stereotype, in emerging culture there.

As one who lived through the entire cold war I find my subjective sense of uncertainty is much less that it was when I kept with me the ready impulse of "duck and cover" every day until well into the '80s. Nine eleven produced only slight uncertainty after we identified Afghanistan and bin laden as tokens of fear. By comparison, as a person who had met his military obligation, Vietnam was real, daily unsettling, since it was big and personal (several hundred of my friends and acquaintances died or were maimed there) and I was in my twenties. This was during the beginnings of the information age, the green age, the age of American dominance, but, the information there still took hours and days, even weeks to get to those of us who were interested.

By comparison we got the twin towers live, identification of the bad guys in less than three days, and satisfaction of attacking the perps in two months. Later Shock and Awe was probably the highest rated TV experience in the Bush era up til the end when down came wall street. the point here is the magnitude of emotions, the sustaining of jitters, the reflexive fear had just about been eliminated by the time Iraq whereas I was reminded every day,thought aboutit sometimes every hour during Vietnam. It was in me, my friends, neighbors, even distant enterprises in the '70s while it was much more of a local event for individuals not too strongly shared by the community during Afghanistan or Iraq or even the collapse on Wall Street here in the 2000s.

While your observation about objectivity and fantastic belief is true and shifts in attitudes from being driven by humanistic reality and acceptance to Theistic belief certainty and punishments is a very serious probability I remain confident that as long as we extend this thing to more people it will continue to become more steady, calm, and reliable.

Fads, your example "hipsters", are artifacts of local culture extended by information to many as you observe. But popular flare ups of these fads as long they are not strong enough to turn in the direction of mistrust or punishment or application of force - and this to force thing is still happening among blacks and poor - I'll remain sanguine. When this force thing begins to revert to physical punishment sponsored by the state rather than just negative economic bias with some state sponsored withholding (imprisonment, lack of utilities, public disfavor) it'll be too late , but at that time we should all jump up and insist on democratic rights based solutions. In other words, the world is not losing or retrenching from a humanistic, democratic worldview.

 

[fromderinside]

This is really rewarding

Inherited factors affecting behavior as opposed to culturally programmed. Culture acts upon these factors and finds motivation in them. For example, a parent can instill gender bias behaviors in his offspring by means of the promise of love and relief from humilliation, which are ultimately inherited species-wide centrally controlled factors that affect behavior.

Or inherited factors are extremely responsive to Public Information. What is sensed by individuals from nearby displays of social behavior influence how the individuals behave. If there is a larger agent, church, ruler, democratic government that guides activities to benign ends such as removing knives, restricting access to guns withholding, supporting equality among different groups and individuals the culture will veer toward being more peaceful, accepting, because public behavior will be responsive to those in power. It they are us and if us are guided or intent to be peaceful, accepting, empirical, rational, calm we have a good culture. It they are us and we are filled with fear by our beliefs are responsive to punishing those who we believe are hurting us we'll have a culture like we had as little as 100 years ago.

If you've been following my recent posts you'll probably notice I've attached myself to some more of Pinker's world. Hard to not do since we were educated in similar fields with similar motivations at about the same time. Talk about Zeitgeist. Now, if I could only write.

 

[rousseau]

They're co-dependent variables with an effect on one another. Social behaviour will always be tinged in some way by evolutionary traits, but it's also influenced by evolving cultural conditions themselves, being pushed forward as our bubble of knowledge grows

Not too sure what point you're getting at, but what I glean from the thread title I'm not sure the premise holds. I'd rephrase it to something like: "If you want peace, let time pass by".

 

[fromderinside]

Not too sure what point you're getting at, but what I glean from the thread title I'm not sure the premise holds. I'd rephrase it to something like: "If you want peace, let time pass by".

I'm not sure passively waiting for cultures to change works. Populations that remain the same size in essentially the same conditions over time disappear or die or are assimilated by cultures that have adapted. If populations increase and resources remain fixed cultures wind up feeding on themselves and die or get eliminated by other cultures that have adapted. If populations increase and resources increase cultures adapt IAC with how or what something has been added. If that adaptation gives them advantage over other cultures the other cultures are eliminated.

So I'm pretty sure waiting doesn't cut it.

What I'm looking for is a discussion of the alternatives I just presented and as many other alternatives as participants can come up with to find some thread that makes sense to pursue as an agent of cultural adaptation. I suspect it's some combination gene group principle that permits human culture to drive toward inclusiveness through some principle of productivity surplus that allows humans to ignore fear more and more.