Re-Imagining Cultures

[Politesse]

That may also have been my fault, I miss very few opportunities to recommend it...

There was also a time recently when I was researching Sociology much as I am now. I actually took Economy and Society out of the library in the past few years, and carefully studied my own copy of The Social Construction of Reality. But one Covid hit I got locked out of the goldmine. Now I'm finally giving in and actually purchasing the stuff.

Ah, I do like Berger and Luckmann's classic as well. Did you find it enlightening?

I've been missing my local library, though with the size of my "to read" pile, I hardly need it as a source of books per se.

 

[rousseau]

That may also have been my fault, I miss very few opportunities to recommend it...

There was also a time recently when I was researching Sociology much as I am now. I actually took Economy and Society out of the library in the past few years, and carefully studied my own copy of The Social Construction of Reality. But one Covid hit I got locked out of the goldmine. Now I'm finally giving in and actually purchasing the stuff.

Ah, I do like Berger and Luckmann's classic as well. Did you find it enlightening?

I've been missing my local library, though with the size of my "to read" pile, I hardly need it as a source of books per se.

I consider it one of my major influences. Lots of perspective on the history I'd been reading for years before, and I came away with sympathy for pre-modern cultures and why they were the way they were (and why we are the way we are). I actually made notes in it as well, probably worth going through again and checking those out.

I've amassed a bit of to-read pile myself but I'm a bit flighty with topic and most of what I want to read isn't in there.

 

[fromderinside]

Maybe another trend: we instinctively build systems that promote homeostasis. We often do a shitty job of it, but the overall effect averages out as population growth.

I don't think we can avoid thermodynamics when we study human cultures. Since we are here by random process cooking in other random processes it is little wonder that we observe conservation of energy in our attempts to manipulate and prolong them.

 

[rousseau]

Maybe another trend: we instinctively build systems that promote homeostasis. We often do a shitty job of it, but the overall effect averages out as population growth.

I don't think we can avoid thermodynamics when we study human cultures. Since we are here by random process cooking in other random processes it is little wonder that we observe conservation of energy in our attempts to manipulate and prolong them.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few years studying the rise of the nation-state. It's interesting when you put it in the perspective of Thermodynamics. A couple nations did it, then within the course of a few centuries the entire Globe followed suit. Crawford Young wrote much about this process in Africa, and how states across the continent followed, roughly, the same trajectory.

It raises some valid questions about agency. We are free, but not free from broader cultural forces.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Maybe another trend: we instinctively build systems that promote homeostasis. We often do a shitty job of it, but the overall effect averages out as population growth.

I don't think we can avoid thermodynamics when we study human cultures. Since we are here by random process cooking in other random processes it is little wonder that we observe conservation of energy in our attempts to manipulate and prolong them.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few years studying the rise of the nation-state. It's interesting when you put it in the perspective of Thermodynamics. A couple nations did it, then within the course of a few centuries the entire Globe followed suit. Crawford Young wrote much about this process in Africa, and how states across the continent followed, roughly, the same trajectory.

It raises some valid questions about agency. We are free, but not free from broader cultural forces.

We're as free as those baboons, or just as deterministic.

 

[rousseau]

I've spent a lot of time in the past few years studying the rise of the nation-state. It's interesting when you put it in the perspective of Thermodynamics. A couple nations did it, then within the course of a few centuries the entire Globe followed suit. Crawford Young wrote much about this process in Africa, and how states across the continent followed, roughly, the same trajectory.

It raises some valid questions about agency. We are free, but not free from broader cultural forces.

We're as free as those baboons, or just as deterministic.

T.G.G. Moogly ask yourself why people like playing the lottery? What would large sums of money do for a person?

I'm not that interested in re-hashing determinism, what I was getting at with the post is that human agency doesn't (and can't) exist in a vacuum, even on the scale of macro-politics. Cultural pressure is ubiquitous and ever-present, and can't be separated from human behaviour. Put another way, culture is a cause of human behaviour, just as much as the individual is.

 

[fromderinside]

.... Cultural pressure is ubiquitous and ever-present, and can't be separated from human behaviour. Put another way, culture is a cause of human behaviour, just as much as the individual is.

Reads like you have a bad case of Wynne-Edwards "Group Selection" to me.

 

[rousseau]

.... Cultural pressure is ubiquitous and ever-present, and can't be separated from human behaviour. Put another way, culture is a cause of human behaviour, just as much as the individual is.

Reads like you have a bad case of Wynne-Edwards "Group Selection" to me.

Na, I don't think so, but I think you could argue that human cultures are akin to an ecosystem of sorts. Laws and norms set the framework for behaviour. I haven't read the book yet but I believe Giddens touched on this in Structuration Theory.

The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based on the analysis of both structure and agents (see structure and agency), without giving primacy to either.

A small example to demonstrate: you walk down a street with people everywhere, culturally what are you free and unfree to do? Some behaviour is not possible. In reality this is no different for any other animal, living anywhere, but for us the sphere of rules and norms is a bit more complicated.

I don't think this has anything to do with group selection, but it does set the frame that the individual has to adapt to or fail to survive/reproduce. The African example was interesting because on some level even a global culture existed that leaders had to adapt to. A new, more efficient norm became prominent and everyone followed suit.

 

[fromderinside]

So you actually agree that one's position in any grouping is the result a series of consequences and not the result of some group friendly 'trait'?

 

[rousseau]

So you actually agree that one's position in any grouping is the result a series of consequences and not the result of some group friendly 'trait'?

Yea, maybe I haven't worded some of my posts well (this happens with 11 month old in tow). But group selection wasn't in my mind when making any posts in this thread. In the original post I mentioned progress, which might have suggested that, but it was only a reference point to understand this historical pattern. That's my main interest: understanding patterns of cultural change across time. In the OP I'm highlighting a pattern: as a species we continually build on what was before, rather than re-thinking what's there.

We strayed from that and got into thermodynamics, then cultural pressure which is another thing entirely. My later argument is that a specific culture is analogous to an ecosystem: a place where people habitate, and have to adapt to, to survive and reproduce. Selection still happens at the genetic level, but behaviour is largely constrained and channelled by the culture. I don't really know how group theory would fit into this, but a more robust culture would facilitate a better life for it's inhabitants.

 

[steve_bank]

In form us humans are like screeching feces flinging chimps. Just watch politics. Constantly throwing shit in each other's face.

There is a Pacific island where traditionally men and women go bare chested. Saw it on an old PBS series Globe Trekwer. It is the exposed thigh that is considered sexually provocative. Western male sexual fascination with female breasts is cultural.


In chimp culture an agumrnt can end with one male allowing brief dry humping by another as a sign of submisiion. Maybe the UN n try that. Males can be observed maturating each other. We can sure learn a lot from oter species....

Part nature and part nurture.

Cultural conditioning is the root cause of a lot of human conflict. We see it right now between Israel and the Palestinians.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I've been reading some Max Weber recently and it's really got my wheels spinning on the Sociology/History paradigm.

Over time I feel like I'm piecing together human nature and how it intersects with any given culture, and lately I feel like I've come to a stark realization about the topic (assuredly a realization that someone, somewhere has probably already had).

And the realization is that once institutions become so embedded in any given community that they're taken for granted as they way things are most people don't even think to question them. In an average human life we're born into a world, that world feels normal to us, then we die. Change happens, but generally slowly, and under the assumption that the way things were before is the way things were supposed to be.

For example, if you look at something like the liberal / conservative paradigm in politics. This feels normal, but why does any given politician need an affiliation at all? If the idea behind democracy is that we make an informed vote, why don't we look at the policies of our specific choices of representative and vote without any party lines? But because we've always experienced this paradigm no one even thinks to question it. It's an embedded institution that is just taken for granted, not even noticed.

So I think this reality lends itself to a kind of socio-historical paradigm where we're continually building on the old without really questioning or completely re-imagining what was already there. Really a major constraint of human nature on any kind of significant progress.

Thanks for listening to my rambling.

Party politics is by design. It's not a flaw. It's to create an obstacle for lazy and uniformed people to randomly pop by and screw up the work of informed opinion. In a completely open market for ideas will always create a tilt towards the stupid and simplistic.

I'm a big fan of party politics. I think it's great. I think the current western democratic system is the closest we will ever come to utopia.

But yes, humans are creatures of habit. I talked to a historian who specialised in the Nazi concentration camp system. I asked her why nobody reacted to it. She said, "once people got used to it, they stopped reacting. It became a normal and acceptable part of life"

 

[rousseau]

Cultural conditioning is the root cause of a lot of human conflict. We see it right now between Israel and the Palestinians.

I'm inclined to think it goes deeper, and can be boiled down to a basic survival instinct - the need to acquire power for oneself.

Any behaviour at all, in theory, should offer some type of payback, and the payback usually comes in the form of material incentives. This manifests itself in politics that veils itself with 'morality', but is ultimately about power acquisition. Most of us don't know how to think in any other terms - the idea of just giving freely for no reason is completely foreign to us.

Sometimes, by coincidence, there is no need for conflict, but when there is a need the instincts quickly set in.