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Toothy McBeard posted:I appreciate the fact that you are calling into question the assumption I am making about us needing to find a new culture that unifies. I mean I'd say that no we don't necessarily. Difference of ideas is not really a problem I don't think in a great many ways, consensus is required only to facilitate needful changes, but so much of society concerns things that aren't especially important one way or another, or at least they pale in importance to things which, traditionally, we have a deep lack of unity on.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:25
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Toothy McBeard posted:This is a good point. 1) Probably not, technology is not all pervasive and as pervasive as it is, it is not all-replacing, unless everyone gains the ability to teleport at will geography will still dictate a lot of our environment. 2) Already got that in some ways, e.g capitalism. Basically everyone sees that as the way to live in a pretty significant way whether or not they agree with it, it's ingrained into our lives, and serves to limit a lot of our thought in that we would find it easier to conceive of being higher up in that particular social order rather than changing it completely. 3) Depends what you mean by ideology, for a coherent society you need enough common ground for people to interact and feel somewhat integrated, as well as to desire to support the society and each other against outside predations such as antisocial people and the threats of attrition to communal edifices (state institutions, laws, working currency, that sort of thing) We have laws and money and people don't kill each other because we all work together to support those things. You need that communal effort to have a functioning society so what you would need for a global society is something the entire global population (or a sufficient critical mass of it) is willing to support. That doesn't have to be a dictatorial ideology necessarily in as much as I would hesitate to call the common human desire to not murder each other most of the time an ideology, it just has to be something people will defend and support of their own volition. 4) The rest of people's ideas can differ how they like, you can have all sorts of stances on a lot of social issues and the underlying society still functions, regardless of whether you have slavery, gay marriage, abortions, redistribution of wealth, wars, religions, the death penalty, conscription, all sorts of things that people have traditionally sought to enforce very rigid conformity on, across the population. But in terms of whether a society basically functions, none of that is really very important.
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Sep 13, 2016 21:49
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I would suggest that the "presiding cultural hegemony" as you put it isn't really a directed thing, it's emergent. It's the sum effect of all sorts of different pressures from different sources that no individual or organization has a very compelling degree of control over. To use again the marxism analogy, no individual can entirely control the culture of even a single nation, or to the degree they can, they are very limited in what they can actually achieve. The ideal goal is stateless communism but nobody has an effective method of getting there because nobody controls the environment of a nation sufficiently to produce people for whom that mode of social organization would be stable, and to the degree people can control that environment you end up with things like the USSR which run up against the limits of exactly how much and in what ways you can control a person's environment enough to create a coherent ideology, and even on the national level you run up against international issues where a wildly ideologically divergent nation would be necessarily opposed to all other nations, and thus a lot of its ideology would be necessarily a sort of siege mentality which would impede global integration. I would essentially argue that the "presiding cultural hegemony" is hegemonic because it isn't directed. It's emergent as a result of material circumstances and simple ideas. We live in societies with laws the world over because laws are a very simple solution to organizing groups of people in an orderly manner, even if the laws themselves differ. Industrialization and the concept of property ownership that comes with it shape the way we work and live, and until you replace industrialization for some reason you're likely to see that continue. So everyone reacts to these immanent material circumstances in similar, simple ways, and the more complex variations on that (what laws do we have, who specifically owns what) can be wildly variable because they don't really change the underlying systems. So the idea that anyone can effect significant change to that seems... kind of odd because everyone else in the world, individually, is pushing back. Because they've experienced the same common material circumstances and have the same fundamental responses to it. If you're looking to change something based on those basic responses to the world you're going to have a lot of trouble unless you can do something to change the material circumstances of the world, as the industrial revolution did.
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Sep 14, 2016 00:32
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