This is an email discussion from a Think Tank.
Dear J
I have felt for a long time that culture is a major determinant of the fate of civilisations. However I don’t see it exactly as you do. And the problem is from my standpoint that cultures like a medical prescription need to be routinely re-written so as to engage with the dominant challenges of the day (the specific diagnosis). This is a job that requires facilitated citizen community development. As you say “culture is the principal determinant of a community’s ability to be materially successful and to live in relative peace and harmony. Culture affects: people’s goals and aspirations; the way they understand reality (and thus how they go about solving problems and whether they can develop technologies); their ability to learn to cope with risk and to change; and (to maintain or change) the institutions (of) their society.”;
One problematic issue in your theory is that cultures with common roots can manifest in almost opposite ways: eg contrast Catholicism in Spain at the time of the Inquisition and of course the Crusades or during Franco’s or Pinochet’s time with Wesleyan Methodism or the Quakers’ invention of capitalism (R.H. Tawney’s book) where the Quakers did well by doing good. Likewise we can contrast the liberating ‘brotherhood’ effects of Islam in Cordoba in Spain and in Alexandria with the then-contemporary European ‘dark ages’ as against of course the current extremist or dehumanising authoritarian Islamism which in a way mimics the style of the Inquisition.
The important thing as I see it is the operational values at play across the culture. I left the Anglicans at a young age because the organised church in the behaviours of its clergy and so many members bore no recognisable relation to the values espoused by Jesus. I also fairly soon became agnostic about the idea of a human-centric God in the universe but I remained persuaded as an agnostic that most of what Jesus was on about was very relevant at a human level. I have subsequently found most of the same values within Buddhism; but could see that beyond their useful method for following a correct personal path the protestant Christian tradition had also the relevant idea of ‘morally motivated activism in the world’ and these two aspects have governed what I have done in my life..
In the decades after Australia recovered from the Great Depression (1929-1946) and the War we did well in terms of material success and social harmony but my experience with church as a teenager probably in hindsight foreshadowed the great social deterioration that has occurred in Australia over the last forty years. And the US’ religiosity has in no way protected them from the current and probably permanent collapse of that civilisation.
Thus the point I have reached is to see that what matters is the operational cultural prescription at any given time in relation to the societal challenges of that time. One of the major current human challenges is to drastically cut our population in every country and at global level; but there is nothing in Christianity that authorises such a thing – in fact the opposite applies.. The same cultural problem applies in cultures such as India and China even though there’s nothing similar to encourage plague behaviour in their religious traditions. And the global religion of ‘materialist economic growth’ makes it worse.
So my prescription now is that we must act at societal level to develop our emotional intelligence in a parallel way to the improvements we’ve made since cave-man days in our cognitive intelligence. As there are well-developed ways now for doing this one can see that it is just the low level of our emotional intelligence – as a culture – which primarily stands in the way of our re-writing ourselves an effective cultural prescription and having a sustainable future.
Cheers — N.
On the resistance to change and the counterproductive competition between the various ‘well-developed ways’ for achieving emotional intelligence (EI) – yes that proves that the lack of emotional intelligence remains real! There are folk who want to believe EI is attainable via purely cognitive input rather than experientially – which sadly it just isn’t. There are others who follow a specific conferencing process – which is experiential and when it works does so for that reason – but who avoid getting into the specific experiential-and-cognitive theory of human emotion. A third category use process but teach also an operational theory of human emotion and thus leave clients able to operate permanently in front of where they were. As you say this competition elicits a negative effect among outsiders and is slowing the introduction of a cultural shift that I see as vital for our sustainable future.
Cheers — N.
Social Developers‚ Network (SDN) & Nurturing Evolutionary Development (N.E.D.) Foundation
Dear R
I reckon that particular factors such as a culture of self-centredness and greed can exist only in conditions of low-level emotional intelligence. Yet there’s no need for cultures to clash: it simply means there’s low-level emotional intelligence on one side or both. (Look at contemporary politics here in Australia)
Agrarian cultures led to the growth of populations way beyond what was feasible before but their effectiveness depended on much more tight forms of social organisation – maintaining canals storing grain distributing it etc. etc.. This meant bureaucratisation and the growth of centralised power hierarchies; and that meant the loss of the participatory democracy by which small tribes had prospered and spread across the Earth. It also meant the beginnings of openings for covert free riders injustice and greed and that in turn prompted the emergence of the first prophets and philosophers. But in the context of a generally low-level of emotional intelligence prophets and philosophers were easily done over and/or their message co-opted and distorted to support imperialism.
Adverse life conditions can certainly be a driver of cultural change. But through history and the collapse of all previous civilisations that shift has been probably universally a downhill shift into conditions of failure of collapse of complexity and sophistication and into much lower standards and qualities of life. In every such case the level of emotional intelligence has been too low to allow of transcendence. Now that the US has exhausted the bulk of its resources social and material from which it initially prospered its future is highly problematic.
If ever deteriorating life conditions are going to be a driver of some more transcendent type of cultural change then now is the time!
In modern industrial society some may have thought that the individual was now more important than the community (mainly only those running the power hierarchies) but that was an intellectual and moral error ignoring the ‘both-and-and’ rule where all factors governing an ecosystem have to be given equal importance and kept in balance to maintain a living ecosystemic whole.
As you pointed out earlier the Iraq war was a greed-governed error that would be committed only by people of low-level emotional intelligence who were also ignorant of the complexity of social ecosystems. I guess also if your assumption were correct about the Afghanistan war being more about an oil pipeline than about terrorists then again we can see a similar lack of emotional intelligence at play. That then raises the question as to what the Russian ‘communist’ imperialists were in there for before we were…
Certainly the prospects are challenging! As you say obviously each of us has to be the change that is required. — N.
And yes indeed there are there are many “well-developed ways” but not everybody is interested in making necessary changes and unfortnuately there’s a lot of undue competition between the practioners of said “ways.” And I reckon this “competition” creates much confusion among those who would otherwise be interested in or even enthusiastic about making some positive changes.
Cheers
R ;-D
R. wrote:
Another field of thought on the changing of culture claims that life conditions are the driver of cultural change. Modernist aspirations are few in an argarian culture. Those with such aspirations will become outiers and likely depart to more agreeable suroundings.
I suspect emotional integence decreased when we moved into the modern industrial world where the individual is more important than the community. The very fact that it a subject of discussion now is due to not the driver of present cultural change.
R.
E. wrote:
This is a very interesting topic for me.
I want to question the notions about western individualism. The notion of people having karma that they need to work off is quite individualistic. More individualistic than traditional Christian morality perhaps.
It was western societies where public health and society-wide concerns emerged. Not in the hindu/buddhist cultures.
For me the Christian tradition is about the mix of the classical and jewish cultures (the classical analytical and the jewish mode of story for instance). The first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis which compares Genesis and Homer is very interesting about this.
Rosenstock-Husey and a guy from Sydney Uni who recently wrote a history of western science both see the investiture crisis (three different claims for papal legitimacy) of the medieval church being decisive for the development of the West – and a need for a rationality beyond dogma.
I think we are reaping the results of the Enlightenment faith in scientific method – that it isn’t adequate to give reasons/purposes. The idea that we can simply make up our meaning seems woefully inadequate to me (I think creation and discovery are different) and remarkably dangerous politically (if every meaning is equal guess whose meaning will win).
The guts of the issue I think is our view of the person. I think we need to see people as part of our nature (our possibilities for transcendence also being natural) and also that our individuality has a social dimension – my way of saying this (admittedly a fairly clumsy one) is that we are social individuals not individual-individuals.
E.
Thanks E. I agree on your formulation: ie.. we need to be individualistic but also we all need to be linked into and responsive to the productive socialising relationships that are required for success by a collective species. This is another example of the eco-systemic principle of ‘both-and’.
So as I see it society needs us citizens to be our authentic self-aware individual and socialised selves so that by our participation we enable the ecosystem of our wider society to find its way through constant unexpected change.. An item sent to me today relates to this I think and further clarifies why cognition and facts alone so long as we are being governed emotionally and unconsciously by outsiders (ie. with no internal autonomous spiritual guidance systems) has caused the current collapse of the global economic system and worse probably destroyed the living resource base of planet Earth on which humanity depends. Hugh Mackay’s current book WHAT MAKES US TICK?: Ten Desires That Drive Us 2010 Hatchette Australia Sydney paperback 319pp mentions the question ‘Why do we talk as if we’re rational but act as if we’re not?’
If we are to be governed by our internal guiding values – a potential provided either by God or by evolution take your pick but anyway needing us to work to develop that kind of internal basis for judgment just as we work to develop our competence to think – we have each first to become aware of our own flawed externally imposed unconscious emotional programming. Only then can we receive and distinguish genuine spiritual guidance ‘in the NOW’ as they say from our external conditioning for conformism and thus become able to make authentic emotionally intelligent individual decisions fearlessly respectfully but independently.
It seems to me that only when we do this will we as citizens make the necessary rational and emotionally cogent arguments to turn society away from where our flawed extrinsic dependency as described by George Monbiot’s article has led us. Encouragingly clearly the recent elections both here and in the UK suggest that at some intuitive level most citizens no longer accept the outdated version of reality that governs most (externally driven) political parties most media most business and most advertisers. In Australia both the untried Greens and the Independents received resounding support. Others’ thoughts please.
Cheers — N.
Dear R.
Thanks for your approval! Always welcome because of the many years pushing (as they say) ’shit up-hill’.
The ‘social development institute’ has become the Nurturing Evolutionary Development Association incorporated in the ACT with eight Board members and with tax free charity status. Thus far we don’t have Deductible Gift Recipient status however. And our relatively small funds are used as seed funds to help new citizen initiatives get off the ground or to take the next step up when the time is ripe.
Your book on SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES: Bushwick NYC US Reflections sounds great and we should add info. on it to that on your Habitat Foundation on our website. And the ‘Sustainable Communities Manual by the end of 2011’ sounds great too!
Cheers — Ned.
J. wrote:
… advantages that would follow if philosophers bothered to seriously consider the practical consequences of differences in cultural assumptions (see Moving Australia Beyond Traditional Multiculturalism
Regards J.
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