This topic reminds me of this essay on The Culture: http://sciphijournal.org/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/ http://sciphijournal.org/why-

This topic reminds me of this essay on The Culture: http://sciphijournal.org/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciation-of-iain-m-banks/ http://sciphijournal.org/why-the-culture-wins-an-appreciatio... It starts off describing the fictional world of The Culture, a socially-liberal post-scarcity utopia (metaphorically, the west), and the Idirans, who are more authoritarian (metaphorically, those other countries, especially religious theocracies). > This is, I think, where Banks draws upon his most sociologically astute observation, again extrapolating from contemporary cultural trends. There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move away from _ascribed_ toward _achieved_ sources of identity. The idea is rather simple: in traditional societies, people were defined largely by the circumstances that they were born into, or their ascribed characteristics – who your family was, what “station” in life you were born to, what gender you were, etc. There were a strict set of roles that prescribed how each person in each set of circumstances was to act, and life consisted largely of acting out the prescribed role. A modern society, by contrast, favours “choice” over “circumstances,” and indeed, considers it the height of injustice that people should be constrained or limited by their circumstances. Thus there is a move toward achieved sources of identity – what school you went to, what career you have chosen, who you decided to marry, and the lifestyle you adopt. “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into. > There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The advantages of choice, for people living in an achievement-oriented society, are too obvious to be worth enumerating. But there are disadvantages. Under the old system of ascribed statuses, people did not suffer from “identity crises,” and they did not need to spend the better part of their 20’s “finding themselves.” When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation. > ...Because of this, there is a very powerful tendency within liberal societies for the development of precisely the type of “secular evangelism” that Banks described. It acquires a peculiar urgency, because it serves to resolve a powerful tension, indeed to resolve an identity crisis, within modern cultures. It often becomes strident, in part due to a lingering suspicion that it is not strong enough to support the weight that it is being forced to bear. Thus the Culture’s “prime directive,” as carried out by the Contact section, has a quality similar to that of the Idiran religion.18 This is why the war became so destructive – with 851.4 billion casualties, and over 91 million ships lost. Each side posed an existential threat to the other, not in the sense that it threatened physical annihilation, but because its victory would have undermined the belief that gave the other side its sense of meaningfulness or purpose in life.