Why a Universal Society Is Unattainable
nautil.us
nautil.us
Doesn't it? The origins of the EU were founded to end the endless wars between Europe's powerful nations and we haven't had a Franco-Germanic war since its inception. The wealth across the entire EU has increased with initiatives like the Schengen acquis, international relations are closer than ever and the freedoms European citizens have gotten out of it are unlike anything imaginable before. Many people inside of the EU are identifying themselves more as "European citizens" than as "German/Spanish/Polish" citizens.
It's fair to say that the EU has no traditions outside those necessary for keeping the government running, but traditions form over lifetimes and even just the origins of the EU are little more than 60 years old. Give it some time and humans will create their silly little traditions.
The EU's origin is not one of conquest, but one of peace and prosperity. If people cannot stand behind the EU because it was not formed by violence, then the problem is not with the symbols or stories themselves but with people's tendency to value righteous conquest over peace and prosperity.
Several countries, including my own, have always kept at a distance because they did not want to be dissolved into an overarching government or because they wanted to keep their cultural independence. The UK is one of the most extreme examples of those; they've tried to fight EU legislation tooth and nail against the union they've voluntarily joined. The way Britain behaved in the EU makes me feel that they should have stayed out and signed agreements like Norway and Switzerland signed instead, though I suppose the limitations of the power they could exercise to neighbouring states would not have been enticing.
What makes the EU awesome to me is precisely the fact that it's a nation-like structure without all the bullshit designed to tickle people's apeish tribal instincts.
The EU is not a country and I don't want it to be. It's a new kind of thing. I'm happy to be a EU citizen, but certainly not proud of it - that's just nonsense, I did nothing to achieve that.
And that attitude, plus deep curiosity and empathy for the ways of life of people who grew up differently is exactly how you do end up with what to me is close enough to a universal society.
I'd be very surprised if that were the case. Have any studies been done on that?
This isn't a symptom, it's the cause (imho). Brexit was only popular with nationalist English people. Because England has been submerged into Britain the longest (to the point that being English is almost synonymous with being British), and actually having any kind of English nationalism is actually pretty new.
The UK was always a reluctant, annoying member of the EU, because we basically thought of ourselves as The British Empire and the EU as a trade treaty and nothing more. Germany and France make no secret of their desire for political union, and that's not really compatible with the British. We have to get rid of the British Empire before we can properly join the European one.
So I believe that the UK will break up in the next 10 years or so. Scotland will be the first to go, and rejoin the EU immediately. That will trigger Northern Ireland (re)joining Ireland as it becomes clear the UK isn't actually a thing any more. The Welsh will take a good long look at themselves and decide to stay with England after all.
Then England-and-Wales (just "Britain" again I guess - the old Roman territory) will rejoin the EU. Now that the English are free of the dreams of Empire and are no longer submerged into Great Britain, we'll be able to contribute to the European Adventure and stop being such awkward holdouts.
That's my take on Brexit, anyway. I'll be fascinated to see how it all goes. Especially since I'm living in Berlin and it's starting to matter ;)
> While the erasure of borders may be laudable,
Just last year we saw how the lack of strong borders can lead to fatal consequences if no entity has the authority or power to restrict movement and travel. Within the US alone, we've seen countless cases of people spreading the coronavirus simply by going to visit family, attend some political event, going on vacation, and it's all because of this universal free movement.
Why have borders otherwise?
It seems very hard to disagree with, in principle, either premise: "universal" or "multipolar"; if the premise is granted its relevant impossibilities.
Would you prefer to live in a world which is necessarily maximally particular; or necessarily maximally universal?
Well, in either world, there would be no human beings. And whatever species would exist there could be designed to be maximally happy, flourishing, etc.
To a large extent, we already enjoy it. I'm Polish, but I spend most my day (and by now, I spent half my life) dealing with people from all around the world, I consume predominantly American media, waste my time on an American message board, and hell, I know more about US laws and politics than about my own... and the same is true to quite a large chunk of people on the Internet. A subset of these characteristics is true to a good part, perhaps the majority, of the people living in Western countries.
We're all living and breathing universal culture to a smaller or larger extent. Might as well have our organizational structures catch up with this reality.
- We could stop wasting massive amounts of time and resources on militaries.
- We could end the threat of global nuclear war.
- We could more effectively deal with planet-scale catastrophes like climate change and pandemics.
- We could get rid of all the inefficiencies caused by borders and trade barriers.
Into classes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_conflict
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_society
Marx and communism has everything do to with classes. That is to say in order for communism to work you must have a classless society. Soon as you have inequality based on anything, 2 classes form. Those with and those without.
It comes down to even a surplus of production.
We could theoretically have the same job but I work 40 hours/week and you work 20 hours/week. I will therefore be in a class higher than you. If I am not in a higher class, then I won't work those 40 hours and I'll go down to those 20 hours. OR I try to force you to work 40 hours.
>There is an entire spectrum of organizational bodies and humans need not (and probably cannot) abolish all of them to form some sort of universal civilization. Surely there are ways we can retain regional cultural uniqueness and small group identities while gaining the ability to cooperate and share values?
That adds a significant level of complexity.
That said, my point was we need not abolish all the many ways that people differentiate themselves in order to have (more) universal cooperation: involving mostly everyone and mostly everywhere, not necessarily on everything. And we need higher levels of cooperation to address the biggest challenges humanity faces.
> That adds a significant level of complexity.
Any system that aspires to unify a wide swath of humanity with all it's diversity and frailties will be tautologically complex.
And I find this view easier to square with reality. Especially in the last century, we can see how the "western culture" - which is better called universal culture - has reached and embedded itself in pretty much every nation on the planet. Almost everyone respects the dollar. Almost everyone has a McDonald's. As the economies of nations became deeply intertwined, we've entered the world where everyone's tools, foods, entertainment and habits start to look alike. I think it's just a matter of time before what we consider "local culture" will finally get reduced to a mere curiosity.
We've got more than enough resources to ensure a good and happy baseline existence for a large number of people but we don't have the systems to distribute it fairly or effectively.
Identity is something we fall back on when times are "bad" and we feel like there isn't enough to go around. It's far less important when times are "good" (but humans are hard-wired to survive scarcity rather than abundance).
Turchin’s elite overproduction is another, separate issue.
What is this supposed to mean?
What is 'enough' is relative. Present-day Western society would have looked like the literal garden of Eden to the average human from 2000 BC. There have never been, nor there will ever be, 'enough' resources for everyone: resources are limited, human desires are (thankfully) not.
In some ways. Sanitation and education are undeniably better. I'm almost sure physiological (food, temperature), safety, and equality are also better, though not solved.
Some worries both my great^70 grandparents and I share:
- Losing access to food, shelter, and medical care if unable to work.
- Occasionally fearing for physical safety of self or loved ones.
- Persecution/ostracism by community for traits or actions.
- Abuse by power structures (governments, churches, etc.).
The first worry is an economic problem that could be solved this year if all governments agreed to guarantee it. (The social problems are harder.)
In pretty much all ways, and unquestionably so in aggregate.
> Some worries both my great^70 grandparents and I share:
Sure, but the degree to which those are immediate worries to you is (on average) significantly less intense than it would have been at pretty much any other point in history.
My father's family skipped meals. My grandfather dropped out of school. Elementary school. I don't see how this is even a contentious point.
> The first worry is an economic problem that could be solved this year if all governments agreed to guarantee it.
If you're arguing that welfare is mostly broken for no good reason, I agree wholeheartedly, but by and large, in most of the Western world, it's overwhelmingly likely that you won't starve nor lose access to shelter or medical care, even if you're out of a job for an extended period of time.
[1] https://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/releases/2018/Q1/money-only-...
[2] More and more automation could get us there
The only thing that can work is if technology/automation is advance enough that everybody can live happily without depending on other people at all. That even 'other people' can be replaced by virtual people that indistinguishable from real one.
The problem is if everybody live like this, can it be still called society ?
"And, there was substantial variation across world regions, with satiation occurring later in wealthier regions for life satisfaction," Jebb said. "This could be because evaluations tend to be more influenced by the standards by which individuals compare themselves to other people."
Sure, it's 75k now. Is it guaranteed to stay at 75k? There isn't a universal constant by which you can assert "okay, this level of wealth is, and will always be, enough for everyone".
> We _might_ not have enough resources yet to provide that much for UBI.
That's... way more than the US GDP per capita...
(e.g. Newton needed to not be farming all day to be Newton.)
FWIW: this seems like a poor explanation for the current situation in the US, given that the people most angry with the direction of society are disproportionately wealthy, and the subjects about which they choose to fight are generally not related to personal wealth or resource distribution.
- There's still a lot of frustration in the lower classes: people without college educations, living near the poverty line (either over or under)
- A person's sense of poverty is unfortunately relative. 100 years ago, people didn't necessarily have running water, or access to any medical care whatsoever.
- There seems to be a lot of frustration with the makeup of the popular culture, and a misguided belief that an election can fix this. (eg, "I hate those elites in Hollywood, we'd better elect someone they disapprove of!")
Fairly sure that's not true. The insurrectionist hew from red states that are lagging the rest of the country hard. Less educated, under or unemployed, very little upward mobility, extreme feelings of powerlessness (hence the gun fetish to feel powerful) and truly are not really represented by anyone in government except their local officials and congressmen/senators. And they get disparaged by the coasts as dumb hicks. You'd be pretty chaffed if you were in their shoes, too. It doesn't excuse their behavior, but it explains it. If you want peace and a thriving nation, those people need their place, too.
And as far as the insurrection at the capitol: almost everyone arrested there has been an employed or retired middle class person, often in a white collar job. Which isn't surprising, of course: most people had to travel to be there.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/19/economic-divide-in-the-us-is...
I guess that maybe doesn't take into account cost of living differences and all that, though.
It also runs afoul of the problem of using median statistics in a distribution that isn't gaussian. In fact per this quick article I found trying to check out the conclusion in your link, it's bathtub-shaped: both the poorest and wealthiest counties trend strongly blue. https://qz.com/1919592/why-joe-biden-will-win-rich-places-bu...
...who the hell else should they be represented by in government?
We seem to have a similar problem now. A lot of the frustrated, disenfranchised people are heard quite a bit: by their local government officials, their Senate and House officials, and then by some sections of the news media. It makes me wonder that "we're not being heard" actually means "we can tell we're not considered mainstream in popular culture."
How do you know this?
> "But what might happen if people could forgo those traits that “mark” their identities or somehow put aside the drive to categorize each other by means of such labels—to separate us from them based on language, clothing, gestures, or religious beliefs?"
This line of questioning trivializes what religious belief means for many of us. I don't know much about the author, but there is an idea among many who are not religious that religion is an arbitrary "mark." While it certainly can be that and has often played that role in history, this oversimplifies differences in world view. I belong to a Catholic parish not out of accident but because of choice, and I seek friendship within my Catholic parish because our shared world view gives us a basis for understanding that I don't share with my non-Catholic and non-Christian coworkers.
------
> "its [the EU's] members have a history of conflict dating from the Middle Ages"
Perhaps this is a nit-pick, but sentences like this seem to reinforce that the Middle Ages was when conflict began in Europe. Europe had lots of conflict before the Middle Ages. Further, what fighting happened in Europe during the Middle Ages usually happened despite a stronger sense of a universal community (membership in the Christian church) then existed for hundreds of years later, demonstrating a counterexample of the author's hypothesis about some general trend toward universalization of society.
> A review of both the psychology literature and anthropological research on societies ranging from the ethnolinguistic groups of hunter-gatherers to tribes, chiefdoms, and states (less formally, “nations”),3 reveal that a universal society is unattainable.
Big if true!
The key supposition here is that the concept of a "nation", and thus an analysis of "nationalism" applies across human history (even pre-history!) and in all different localities.
Contrast this with the view that what we think of as nationalism is a distinctly modern phenomena, an outgrowth of the rise of capitalist social relations and print as a mass medium. On this view, nationalism is initially a curiously European phenomena and later spreads outward with the march of "print-capitalism". I find this analysis much easier to square with the early modern history of Japan or China, for example.
The biggest one is that it constantly confuses nationality with social affiliations.
That's BS to such a degree that it's amazing we're not actively making an effort to denationalize peoples of the world. There's nothing more damaging than having such beliefs (religion maybe, but I think I'll fold religion and nationalism into one since nationalists are often the ones to insist that a true scotsman has some specific religion).
Sure, there are differences, but they are differences that are taught and indoctrinated, not something we're born with, and we can "simply" stop doing that.
The best attempt at denationalization right now is the EU and their intent on creating a European superstate, not unlike the USA. Even still, I share a great deal of values with most of the EU citizens and will oppose the formation of an actual unified European state until at least values like "democracy" and the trias politica are shared across the country.
Perhaps total denationalization is a nice end goal for humanity, but it's unattainable as long as there are still significant groups in the world who don't believe in things like "women are equal to men".
I agree that connecting a nationality to words like "true" or "proud to be a" is often problematic, but you cannot ignore that there are differences between regions. You can pretty clearly see the border of Scotland on a Brexit vote map, for example; all of Scotland was, on average, anti-Brexit, and most of England was, on average, pro-Brexit. Does that mean that all Scots are inherently pro-EU? Of course not. But erasing borders will change very little about the attachment and emotions people feel toward the bit of land they were born in.
Nationality is not formed or defined by a (system of) government, quite the contrary, nations have a certain tendency to obtain a separate (system of) government - the desire for national self-determinism works against government systems that include other nations. The dissolution of Yugoslavia and USSR are some examples, but the instability of various regions in Middle East and Africa are also in part caused by national identities that do not map to the post-colonial set of governments and borders.
Furthermore, the national unity and values is not really defined by the current political system. Many nations have had multiple huge changes in political regimes over the last hundred years while unquestionably staying the same nation, and political values generally are not the core thing forming a national identity.
The 0.1% can get in their jet and go to New Zealand, or buy a Swiss passport with BTC...so sure, place is irrelevant to them. Not so for everyone else.
More or less the entire world is going to turn into a trashfire unless we unite and fix it, so that everywhere is a nice place to live, nationalism won't fix it, it prevents it from being fixed, because we've divided the globe into more and less desirable geometric shapes, it didn't work, next.
I am fully aware that what I describe cannot just be done, but it does not mean it's not the right thing to strive towards. Even the countries we have now have been split up into smaller, warring tribes if you go back far enough. It's always been the resistance, the hardships that have forced us to cooperate, and it mostly still is. Climate activism is a good example, there's a common enemy, "clearly" defined rules of what is right and wrong, it gets people together, even across nationality and religion. But while there are lots of proof that people can cooperate against a common enemy, there's no proof they can't cooperate without one, oftentimes it seems most resistance to that idea is people refusing to believe that others can do it, and then the suggested change itself becomes the common enemy, and prevents it from happening.. There may be some what to make people agree, it's just not been found yet.
You are making a lot of confusion between different things. Culture, ethnicity and nationality are not the same thing.
For example, you can go live in a different country and you will not magically forget your customs, language, favorite food when you cross the border.
You can learn a second and third language and it will not affect your taste for architecture.
It's shocking that we still have to explain such basic things.
Next step: realize that any sharp distinction between culture, ethnicity and so on is based on a completely artificial "line in sand".
I wrote "sharp distinction". It's the opposite of fuzzy.
> Everything isn't a uniform blob.
I never said otherwise.
> I don't understand how people can both glorify differences and pretend they don't exist.
How is this a reply to my points? Who are you talking about?
A tribe of a million members? Please! A tribe can't be larger the amount of people who can know each other, everything beyond that is something else, it's civilization.
That would mean that I'm equally at home in a crowded Asian city, an African village, or any small town in a flyover state as I am in a Western city. I'm not.
You may even find that your neighbor, who you've known your whole life, actually does not have any religion, or a different one, even though his ancestry goes back forever as natives of your geographical area, then you will no longer count him as your countryman?
So by following this train of logic, and remembering at each point that there really is no such thing as a true Scotsman, the logical reduction of this is, that what makes someone a citizen of your country is entirely and only defined by whether or not they hold a passport from your country, or whatever national identity identifier your country has.
Now, fast forward some generations of actually educating children, instead of indoctrinating them to think they're better or more right than others, but that people are people, and planet earth is home to people, and you end up with a society such as your current one (without the religion and racism), but one that entails the entire planet.
Show me a country, any country, and I will show you country.numberOfCitizens indiduals who actually don't agree on as much as they fool themselves into believing that they do, and yet somehow manage to find some mutual respect and regard for oneanother. There's no good (future) reason to base that regard on citizenship rather than on being human.
Exhibit A: Europe and the problem of migrants from Africa.