Tag Archives: cultural evolution

FTAC: A Note on Faiths, Political Attitudes, and Beliefs

23 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics, Psychology, Religion

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What happens when friends talk and compare notes, and discover they’re no long “on the same page”?

Attitudes rest on beliefs, and beliefs don’t always rest on empirical evidence nor good conscience and empathy.  Beliefs may be grown on lies, and when it comes to the once Soviet-engineered “middle east conflict”, there is a cultural Petri dish loaded up with lies to induce, motivate, and sustain anti-Semitism in the Arab world and in the world at large with a focus on Zionism.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/social-grammar/

When a friend changes the conversation so abruptly, the conversation has a chance to change.

The sun did not revolve around the earth.

And the earth was found to be other than flat.

Lo and behold . . . .

In addition to the early and academically relaxed BackChannels page on “Social Grammar” — how we learn the ropes around family, clan, tribe, and nation in the process of language uptake and with it the ingestion of the culture into which we have been borne, there are couple of other pieces quietly alluded to the in above note from the awesome conversation:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/10/03/palestinian-kgb/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2017/04/09/ftac-reprise-how-isil-serves-moscow-damascus-and-tehran/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/12/ftac-tip-to-the-kgbs-amplification-of-middle-eastern-anti-semitism/

Online, there’s telling BBC interview involving the Soviet instigating of Somalia’s Ogaden War:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03pk9c1

Around the world — and not least in the United States with President Donald J. Trump’s rants about “Fake News!” — the world may be having a quiet conversation — a social back channel consideration of which this post is a part– behind the storms of news that concerns itself with the authenticity, validity, and reliability of what is delivered to it in media.

For a few moments “back there” in time — perhaps only some months to years — I was getting word of a “post-constitutional America” and coming across such “lovely” (bogus) concepts as “illiberal democracy” (ain’t no such thing as the first principle in the establishment of democracy has been and remains that of embracing “classical liberalism”, a dignifying, loving, magnanimous, and magnificent view of humankind that speaks to every person’s potential nobility in freedom and in power) and “post-fact” world (facts, like red traffic lights and the dangers of leaping from heights) appear to persist despite their “post-modern” dismissal.

Democracies are not illiberal.

The world is not “post-fact”.

And while Muhammad may have had the final word on God as enforced by war in his place and in his day, the world with its nearly 7,000 living language cultures persists in proving greater than any one perspective on God, nature, and the universe or the many curses and miracles that accompany our human experience.  The evolution of our species — Homo Sapiens sapiens in its totality — and within it the emergence of human awareness, self-awareness, and the development of conscience may prove a thing greater than the observations and arguments of the many prophets and shaman who have accompanied and determined mankind’s cultural history.

–33–

Link – A Modern Intercultural Experience – Qanta Ahmed – Technion Chat With Peretz Lavie

28 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Islamic Small Wars, Links, Philosophy, Politics

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Posted to YouTube July 26, 2015.

Above : Modern

Below : Feudal

Posted to YouTube July 27, 2015.

Should I have resisted juxtaposing these two images, the Janus coin that is one side modern (and good) and the other deeply medieval (and heartbreakingly evil)?

“Shimmer” — a term of art on this blog — has not changed, but one hopes the numbers of those arrested in yesterday have diminished while those who come forward, who have stepped forward into their own next world, have grown.

Where are the political and social scientists on change?

I don’t know where they or their numbers — observable, measurable cultural and political topology — are today.

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“One Earth, Many Worlds” – From Anti-BDS to Arab Shift, A Note on Intercultural Adjustment

03 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philology

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The resolution, which is expected to be signed next week by Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, declares that the BDS movement is “one of the main vehicles for spreading anti-Semitism and advocating the elimination of the Jewish state,” adding that BDS activities in Tennessee “undermine the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, which they are fulfilling in the State of Israel.”

Furthermore, the resolution states that the BDS movement and its agenda are “inherently antithetical and deeply damaging to the causes of peace, justice, equality, democracy and human rights for all the peoples in the Middle East.”

Algemeiner.  “Tennessee General Assembly Becomes First State Legislature to Condemn BDS.”  April 22, 2015.

The story appeared on the Facebook page of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations. Congruent with the above, which was published two weeks ago, comes this from last week:

It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

PJTN.  “Arab youth use social media to send message of support for Israel.”  April 30, 2015.

In a world where every day is somewhere a first day, the mind of the world goes through its day magnificently housed in about 7,000 living languages.  As it seems to BackChannels easier to lose a language than to invent one, the idea of preserving the library — what constitutes an “us” if not a language? — might come first.

While that sounds delightful — for what dual-language reader would care to be confined to the lingua franca that has been English? — our languages and the spirits represented in them come freighted with some heady components and related cultural ambitions and habits, and not all awake feeling harmonious.

Those that do, however, have some work ahead of them.

One Earth, Many Worlds

The new global intelligentsia — have we not all just shaken virtual hands over the past seven common broadband and about 20 popularly connected years or so? — has now to revisit its multicultural, multilinguistic packages, the beliefs, histories, myths, morals, and values contained within each separable ethnolinguistic enclave, and fundamentally adjust to a true changed revolutionary circumstance.

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FTAC – Multiculturalism – Comment – Age of Dissent

07 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philology

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Modern standards may link to a better informed perception of demarcations between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. It hasn’t anything to do with affluence: we just know better. Cultures that maintain an earliest onset standard (or worse) may well be regarded as backwards and, frankly, stupid (uninformed) or stubborn or both. As with “honor killing”, we may recognize the anthropological and cultural evolution of the social behavior (we’re a wild species, after all, and we invent ourselves and pass on our invention through generations), but we don’t have to validate it or otherwise fit it into modern terms.

The topic was childhood marriages and related abuses, and the above paragraph was my thread-killer response.

While worldviews needs must shift with boundary changes and knowledge in the world, evolving cultural self-concept may involve selective discarding of no longer useful assumptions or habits of mind.  Why hold on to what is not true?  Or to what failed to work?  Or what is not working?  Or what is needlessly, uselessly dangerous or painful to another?

None sail without casting off lines and leaving old ports of call.

From another thread in response to not being dictated to by the U.S.:

Independence in curiosity and thought may not be dictated. Those attributes would seem within the province of the adventurous and bright across cultures and across time. However, exploration, illumination, insight, surprise, and vision may may be bound together in the complete intellectual tour.

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FTAC – The Idea of Justice – Not On A Whim

10 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Politics

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That contemptuous phrase “the whims of man” applies well to autocratic societies in which, indeed, the whims of one man control a great swath of humanity, but with those, one knows the methods: to those who humiliate themselves before their regimes: bribery, nepotism, and patronage: i.e., those get fed like dogs; to those who threaten such regimes: blackmail, intimidation, murder.

In contemporary realpolitik, the path ends with the suffocation of the constituent humanity or the overthrow of the regime.

Syria’s a good case in point today: I cannot figure out on whose side God has appeared. From the survey of that unfolding tragedy, He would seem altogether absent.

One more thing: the struggle for truly just systems of law beneficial, invested in, and trusted by all has not come about through whim.

The struggle for decency in human relationships by way of ethical and moral argument that finds expression through the law has a millennial existence, one that would seem to have its roots in the depths of tragedies, small and large, attending the human experience across oceanic time.

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FTAC: Conflict, Language, and Pricks

07 Friday Dec 2012

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philology, Psychology

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A Facebooker said, “Conscience does not work in vacuum. Impact of incidents do occur over our reasoning and may even our truthfulness get shattered.” [STET].

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We may be more organized and programmed by the possession of language than we know.

The behavior itself is transparent (unless deliberately observed); the arrangement of associations between symbols may be taken for granted (“Everyone knows that . . . .”) until interrupted by a work of art, poetry, or war; the social grammar — what is good to say, what is not, and when or under what circumstances — of a language (language culture) has also a transparency to it as the earliest embedded thoughts, positions (attitudes), and behaviors (from how to greet to when to lie) have a “low level” or essentially subconscious life in the mind.

Those who study or work with acknowledged or well accepted as existing psychopathology (DSM present and approved, one might say) frequently apply a term to whether a person afflicted (e.g., by bipolar disorder; schizophrenia; narcissistic personality disorder, and so on) recognizes the presence of his problem. If he does, we say he “exhibits insight” and that’s helpful; if not, “he hasn’t a clue” — and others may be invited or obligated to intervene for the health of (now) the patient and for the defense of everyone in his path.

As psychology takes an interest in the life of the mind of the person, the field enjoys a convenient restriction: the concern is with the person. However, the person may turn out a leader of others, one well enough to charm and seduce, and then demonic, wicked, or wild enough to make a mess. The smaller figures — e.g., Charles Manson — are easily the subject of conversation; the larger ones — e.g., Constantine — become a little less touchable.

We have to find our way.

I feel the species will tend toward health and survival on a cooperative basis elicited by, no better word than this one, pricks.

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A smaller world with more potent weapons bodes ill, but the challenges may be met by a rapidly globalizing consciousness — in large numbers, we’re working with one another across innumerable barriers and miles, and that’s going to have an effect on normative behaviors and on the invention (through language) of a global culture sufficient to rein in or shape what in earlier days would have been more isolated events with equally isolated cultural antecedents.