Reply #101: An assay from another forum I post at. [View All]

[Odin2005]

My views are similar to this poster's:

I largely agree with this. IMO, we have been using basically the same vehicle for community bonding since the fourth millennium BC. It is the use of myth to emotionally and politically bind a large group together that is larger than a genetic family. This myth binds this community together by positing an unlikely absolute familial relation ("we are all descended from Jacob"), claiming common adherence to a divine figurehead ("we all follow the emperor, the direct descendent of the sun goddess), or declaring a common ideal ("We the People . . ."). Things of this nature.

Another aspect of this demotic level is often the phenomenon of moral enforcement via divine authority. E.g., "If I steal my neighbor's goat and eat it, he may never know it was me, but Yaweh will". This creation of a self-policing aspect to society helps large numbers of people live together in an urban environment -- a people-dense environment our paleolithic evolution never designed us for. Otherwise, civilization ("the building and maintaining of cities") would not have been possible.

Up that point, an actual reality of relatedness was usually involved with clans and smallish tribes often with no more than a few degrees of consanguinity encompassed. In short, the previous level of community bonding, the human family, had reached the furthest extent of it's use as a leading-edge basic mode of existence.

That in turn replaced the Hominin troop by expanding intimate family bonding from simply mother and child to include a father/male-mate to the equation. The inclusion of a second parent was necessary to support the development of children in the prolonged childhood necessary for the species' new strategy of employing cultural/technological intelligence to thrive in its niche. This new family and its proximate consanguine relatives, which probably developed with the start of Homo erectus, formed the basis for a new level of community that served us well until high population densities developed in certain ecumenes like Mesopotamia.

The most advanced expression today of the narrative-bound Demos is the nation-state. But it is becoming clear that this expression is dysfunctional for the tasks of our developing global reality. Certain limitations, such as language and unreconcilable myths, prevent it from solving our current pressing problems.

So it seems likely a crisis, or series of crises, will push us to evolve (mostly unconsciously) a new platform for human community. This new community will not eliminate the nation-state (or at least certain forms of mythic Demos) but transcend and include it, negating mostly just the aspects not conducive to allowing the larger entity.

Neither is it likely that this new community will come to be based on international (or even transnational) action, but rather something that transcends the nation-state altogether.

Demos did not replace the family (or even in some cases the tribe), nor did it come about by a federation of families -- perhaps in some cases, but then the new entity quickly became something more than a union of tribes in and of itself). Also, what passed for "tribe" in many societies after the advent of civilization often utilized this new mythic tool to breach consanguinity in some cases. The Mongol and Amerind "tribes", for example, were to a large extent arguably just nomadic Demos.

And the new paternally-inclusive human family did not replace the mother-child bond by any stretch of the imagination.

I agree with Akham that something new must, and will be, coming. I don't necessarily agree that civilization is "decrepit". Just not up to the task now before it.

That all said, I see nothing immediately developing or available to become this new mode or vehicle of community. I have a few candidates in mind, but nothing available now. And whatever it is will probably surprise the hell out of us anyway.

So in the meantime I contend that the nation-state, and a community of nation-states, is all we have to work with at the moment, and we might as well make the best of it. That is one reason why I am so against postmodern and multicultural prescriptions -- they would damage or destroy all we have to work with at the moment while nothing is yet available to replace it. And what they would replace it with is worse than what we have now.