Quote:
Originally Posted by jcp123
Culture/tradition is what brought petty wars to Europe from the so-called dark ages up to the enlightenment. Literally neighbors fighting neighbors, disrupting trade and keeping everyone poorer than they might be.
Enlightenment stuff put a stop to a lot of that. The globalist/one world government thing doesn’t really feel like a thing, but without a doubt we are seeing a lot of nations benefiting at our cost. Just as we benefited after WW1 supplying the allies for a while while we drained their capital.
Neither extreme is really a good idea. Nationalism gets into a lot of dangerous race territory, plus reactionary mercantilism. Globalism isn’t really going to work until the proverbial first contact with an extraterrestrial species, when it’ll be pretty clear that we have to deal with another world as our own world.
In reality, almost nothing is this digital. There’s a lot of space in between the two, which is the space we should occupy instead of the poles. Getting out there on a polar extreme is basically begging for an us vs them dynamic where the game becomes zero sum instead of focusing on growing the whole pie so that everyone gets more of what they want.
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That is romanticizing the Enlightenment.
In truth it was a movement based in historical revisionism that titled the middle ages as "dark" and praised antiquity.
The main motive the Europeans had for doing this to find ways to justify the new petty gentry.
They were not made up of lords or nobility from the early second century, instead they were upper class peasants who won competitive leases on the farm land and were better able to allocate capital regardless of peasant politics.
The open field system guaranteed a certain safety net since farm hands would manage crop lines adjacent to someone else's which motivated cooperation and made sure crop failure in one part of the manor did not adversely affect only one set of workers.
They also had complete control of their own fields and were able to buy crafted good from merchants or make some limited such goods internal.
The only think the manor could do is tax their yield, and those were on average lower rates than what you see in a contemporary capitalist society.
Because productivity was static for most of this time (competitive investments didn't change much in the way of total output) and leadership was hereditary it cultivated a belief in noblesse-oblige among the patronage class who would not/ could not gain from over taxation (if they did then their manor would suffer).
This came along with the institutionalization of ideas like honor and chivalry which weren't just hypocritical excuses for people to gain rank, but a legitimate balance between meekness and bravery.
It became so important that much of the passionate loyalty you saw from the peasantry towards their regional families and heralds became cultural unifiers.
There were uprisings, but most of the largest ones was when the patronage system was being disbanded by wealthy peasants.
Its interesting in many ways but a lack of social mobility between the classes has a few upsides. Firstly it puts a tamper on personal ambition which is the central problem we have with our current crop of wealthy industrialists.
Second it internalizes most of the vices or ingratitude within us and helps to better set out a universal rule set and cultural identity that isn't reliant on global appeal or the need to reform one's personal image to fit a certain metric of popularity.
I don't know what field your in, but I think its none controversial to say most excess in society or "everyone get[ting] more of what they want" as you put it is a subjective good and therefore a subjective goal.
The enlightenment thinkers for all there good wanted practical decisions based on numerical values to weigh the decisions of society, but humans are irrational people and superstition or ancestry worship reevaluate what good or 'life quality' we hope to measure for.
Antiquity which was really borrowed from the Greeks did set up much of the imperial divisions, but when western Rome collapsed the same local magistrates and governors took charge, or the regional ethnicity heavily borrowed from their legal system and code.
Things evolved much like they would in the empire, and by the 1200s food security has shown the average peasant in the middle ages was larger than their counterparts during the Roman empire suggesting better nutrition on average.
It was a specific moment that allowed productive stability (little fluctuation between manors) and hereditary power exchange to codify beliefs in chivalry which were not wanted in the enlightenment area.
The serfs didn't face stiff competition elsewhere, and they were protected from rent seeking or land speculation by the petty gentry or money lenders. The Kings changed that as a more centralized system demands more taxes from the land.
None of this is to say it is the only system that works or that its particularly desirable, but its more complicated than simply saying one side is bad and the other is good.
Their were plagues and they lived in a pre-penicillin world; however lack of travel made regional populations somewhat immune to each other, and when death happened it was at the hands of nature as well as deadly diseases.
What I mean is the law of natural selection still applied to humans, so if you were born sick and blond or crippled, chances are you wouldn't survive very long, or at least not far along enough to breed more from your line.
Sounds awful right? Well again its more complicated than that. Medieval persons had a much more healthy perception of death since it was everywhere and people became much more accepting of the cycle of life and death.
But more to my point biologist today point out that because natural selection is a none factor today those with mutations or recessive alleles that don't show in their physical form spread and spread throughout the genetic pool.
They predict if this trend continues for over a hundred years (give or take) we will end up with a society that can only be feed tube food manufactured in a lab.
Could this be effective? Maybe, but there is more to society that effectiveness, there is also love and beauty and cultural monuments and dedication to nature and belonging. Does this sound like some Wordsworth BS? Well, maybe, but I don't agree with the modern consensus that what we all want can be measured in terms of revenue or profit or longevity and the only disagreement is how to achieve this globalized super state.
On things I much detest about the middle ages, Christianity is at the top, but not because it was a religious order. More so that the church/Vatican had a monopoly on religious practice and homogenized wide swaths of the continent.
Paganism was more regional and colored unique identities for every valley, region, or cliff side. It was also more elliptical with its teachings allowing for leeway or indulgences that a man like Savonarola would never allow.
Spiritualism has been a driving bedrock of every human cultural regardless of place, and it colors the aesthetic and community identity of everyplace.
It is best when its humble and unsure, at its worst when it is dominant and all opposing. The Abrahamic religions are the worst (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) because they purport to be the supreme god of all lands and all cultures. It is its own form of globalization and homogenization, and I think if you hate religious idolatry you could see the pitfalls of secular globalism as well.
The best examples of this divide are Mahayana Buddhism in Tibet and Theravada Buddhism in Myanmar (Burma). The former is an oppressed religion and somewhat unsure of itself (but still dedicated to its art and commissions new statues everyday).
I spoke to many of the monks along the rode to Shigaste, and stayed overnight at monastery in the base of Mount Everest that I think is the highest monastery in the world.
Most that I met openly joked about their own religion and rules but enjoyed following the traditions and rituals and beliefs (the butter tea was awful).
The latter is a much more established religious order in Myanmar and also infused with arrogance, confidence, and (as always) corruption (I think George Lucas made this point about the Jedi order).
In that case seeing the relocation of Muslims or violence against religious minorities becomes predictable.
Oppression itself has carried to much if a stigma as if it is a sole evil that needs to be destroyed. People will always be oppressed by one another, its a question of scale. Giving the individual total freedom to be and do whatever they want not only isolates society, but it also gives way to a sense of grandiose on infallibility among organizations of different sorts.
There are however two sides to look at this, and we were talking about nationalism.
Coincidentally nationalism was the tool used to industrialize western societies (and Japan) at the expense of the third world.
The Ottomans wanted to (and were succeeding at first) but the British forced onto them free trade policies that made them dependent and made it so their own weaker industrial base couldn't compete with the British so they disinvested and became weaker for it.
They same logic precludes our current supply chains. A gross simplification is this:
South America and the Middle East provide the commodities, Europe and North America are the consumers, East Asia is the manufacturing base, and Africa is the secondary market.
Well ironically this is your globalism at work, the multicultural force that is suppose to lift all boats. But if we look at the last example that is not what's happening.
Textiles and hand me down goods from the US and Europe are given to merchants in Africa at bulk who resell them in market places.
That includes donations to goodwill or recycled goods that are trashed. Besides the environmental cost (I think you can imagine) the influx in dumping goods has destroyed the local industries from developing in Africa and keeping them in a perpetual state of poverty.
Charity is a global institution now for humanitarians to meddle in foriegn affairs, but like the poverty industrial complex in our own country it does little and less to untie their dependency to international organizations.
You speak of not going to either extreme, but then you say we must work towards globalism and completely turn away from nationalism or any other backwards political/economic system.
It can be easy to assume the status quo are not extreme, but that is exactly what you describe.
It takes more than saying we must hope to achieve one set of goals at any cost. We must decide what values we wish to promote in society and look at the lineage of these systems.
Nationalism is a product of feudalism as much as Globalism is a product of Nationalism.
To belittle one or the other is to miss the point.
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