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I like this perspective. There are so many folds to it, though. First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddh

by bckr 5y ago

I like this perspective. There are so many folds to it, though. First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality. Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes. Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean. Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions. Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.

StopTheWorld 5y ago
In Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he traces shifts in culture and family to shifts in the forces of production, and makes a pretty convincing argument. Some have followed on this work. The modern version would be: 50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines. 10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines. 2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church. Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities. Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea. The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune. If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago. And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
I would add that the ‘crumbling’ is a matter of perspective. Every (expired) empire on earth has been a blip on the radar of the oldest continuous organization in recorded history (the Roman Catholic Church). Most demographers are actually predicting a precipitous drop in the population of ‘non-believers’ since secularists choose to have so few children. It might be an evolutionary dead end, so to say.
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by bckr 5y ago

StopTheWorld 5y ago

In Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he traces shifts in culture and family to shifts in the forces of production, and makes a pretty convincing argument. Some have followed on this work. The modern version would be: 50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines. 10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines. 2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church. Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities. Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea. The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune. If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago. And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

I would add that the ‘crumbling’ is a matter of perspective. Every (expired) empire on earth has been a blip on the radar of the oldest continuous organization in recorded history (the Roman Catholic Church). Most demographers are actually predicting a precipitous drop in the population of ‘non-believers’ since secularists choose to have so few children. It might be an evolutionary dead end, so to say.

deleted 5y ago
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