Participatory Spirituality for the 21st Century
Have nation states not developed past the narcissistic teenage level? And if that is where their development is at; what are the consequences of giving this much money and technology to these states? Can someone post a link to a nationstate that they think is at mature levels of development?
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Here is one stream of thought on this:
PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND CULTURE: CROSS-CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF NATIONAL PSYCHOLOGIES IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.
KIM, Uichol; Kim; Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, U.S.A.
Psychological science, as conceived and practiced in the West, is assumed to be a value-free, universal, and objective search for Truth. Psychology, in actual practice, can be characterized as being deeply intenneshed with Euro American cultural valucs that champion rational, libcral, individualistic, and abstract ideals. Psychological science can be thus charilcterized as being value-laden, context-dependent, culture-bound enterprise (Kim & Bcrry, 1993).
When psychology is transported to, and transplanted in, other countries, American beliefs and practices that promote competitive, individualistic, and commercial mentality become explicit and clash with indigenous value systems. In the United States, the free exchange of ideas is valued and ideas are purportedly evaluated through public, open, and compelitive avenues. This belief affects how conferences are organized, research collaborations are developed, research are funded, and publications are accepted. Governing procedures, rules, by-laws, constitntions, and or~ani~ation structure, however, reflect Euro American cultural norms and are not universally applicable or acceptable.
The clash of culture becomes readily apparent in East Asia. With the phellomenal economic achievements, East Asian researchers now have the necessary resources, skills, ability, and confidence to articulate the limitation of General psychology and delineate alternative theoretical and methodological perspectives. In East Asia, human relationships, that can be characterized as being virtue-based rather than rights-based, occupy the center stage. Individuals are considered to be linked in a web of interrelatedness and ideas are exchanged through established social networks. Establishing trust and cordial working relationship are prerequisites for the free exchange of idea. The present author contends that psychological science is a cultural enterprise that must examine its implicit assumptions and integrate with other worldviews in developing a truly universal psychological science.
i think what I am aiming at here is a direct correlation between an individual and a nation state providing that a direct correlation is possible. i get the meme/spiral thing but that is not really what i am after here. I also get the nation states are made up of differing people. From what i can gather Iceland seems to be the most mature nation state on earth?
Auto Rebellion, Deluded Thinking, and Delinquency: They failed to mature and integrate so now they are stuck in the adolescent rebellion stage which leads to deluded thinking, paranoia, and suspicion of the entire adult world. The deluded mind, stuck in auto-rebellion, cannot make wise choices and thinks that "vice is virtue and virtue is vice." This leads to holistic disease, distress, and delinquency.
This does sound like the condition of modern nation states.
This guy seems to agree with me that the modern nation state is failed:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZYN3xioVGfUC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA...
One could also argue from what i read there a rather complete justification for oligarchy. If the nation state fails then corporate oligarchs rule.
It seems from what he says on page 10 that neoliberalism has actually retarded the development of the nation state; markets eclipse the polity and citizenry is diminished to consumerism.
Well, yes, he seems to be doing the disasters and dignity thing. Once again, though, his basic assumption is that civilization couldn't have developed in any other way. I would challenge that assumption and say the trajectory itself was manipulated. Bruce's video post earlier shows an altogether different trajectory, one that I would argue is much more holistic and integrative.
This book by Kamens is a decent read but I do find his general tone overly optimistic .
Giroux may be of some help here in balancing this over optimism:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page4/neoliberalism_and_the_machiner...
Since I have heard all my life that nations today are "teenagers" I am understandably reluctant to believe it. But that is very personal. What is more important is to distinguish age from maturity. An old nation might be forgetful, racist, grumpy, withdrawn, out of touch, etc. So that is not necessarily an improvement. Using "age" as the metaphor is always misleading.
And what if we use maturity? Developmental phases?
Well, that gets problematic in a whole other way. Countries and governments are not "holons". They are not organic wholes which enfold their constituents. They are names, heaps, references. It does not really make sense to think of nation-states as existing at the "narcissistic teenage level" or any other level. Nation-states are not entities.
Now we could argue that nations within (or across) nation-states might be natural collective holons. This is certainly what the American Republicans have often argued -- that "real Americans" have to "take back their country". Such an image indicates that their nation wishes to gain control of the nation-state. The two are not the same.
So the first thing we have to do in geopolitics is determine what the actual groups are. From a natural science point of view you do not get be in a group merely because you say so or get labelled as a member. Turtles are not liberty to "join" the zoological group of ravens. Their claims on the subject are irrelevant. We might, therefore, be able to make a decent evaluation of, say, the Kurds in Norther Iraq... we certainly cannot make a general evaluation of Iraq itself. The borders of the country are more or less arbitrary and do not indicate the type of people or the overall cultural organization and sophistication among each social zone.
Recent books on moral psychology demonstrate that the inhabitants of cosmopolitan cities around the world share more ethical understanding with each other than they do with the rest of the inhabitants of their countries. And this is true in "the West" as well.
Assuming we have a desire to share technology and money with more developed cultural zones we need to be thinking of "cities" and "peoples" and perhaps "eco-regions" rather than nation-states. We may complain that the legal, economic and military machinery of the nation-state bureaucracy makes this very problematic. True. But so do extra-governmental forces of various kinds.
When "we" (generally speaking") send money or arms to "the rebels" somewhere -- or alternatively support "the government" against some rebels we are making a choice. We have to make sure that choice is really the lesser of two evils. Even a very under-evolved situation is better than an even worse situations.
Thus in addition to targeting more precise zones than nation-states we need to be making our decisions based on relative comparisons between these zones.
I hear ya LP. I was kind of fishing here as I am not sure what I am trying to get at in inquiring along this line. What correlates with what is something I've never been too sure of. It does appear to me, though, the the global finance structure appeals to some of the lowest impulses within human nature. I have been wondering lately whether the global central bankers would willingly give up proselytizing one country to allow for an experiment within a nation state of a different kind of economy. I do believe they have the ability to allow this to happen and offer a cautionary tale on the most likely fact that they won't allow something like this to take place.
Here is a link on this topic:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/05/09/what-are-the-fu...
One of the major divisions within culture today is the rural/urban divide. I find myself being sympathetic to both strains of living. I'm certainly sympathetic to permaculture and paganism yet have mostly lived an urban life.
I see most geopolitics today as being manipulative more than being healthy attempts to integrate culture. IOW's, geopolitics today is about resource control within the corporatetocracy. Very lowly evolved, imo.
It is an important topic. Anyone with "integral instincts" is sympathetic in varying degrees to rural, urban and more. Regions (aboriginal), Villages (barbarian), City-State Nations (traditionalist), Metropolitan Cities (modern), Cosmopolitan Cities (post modern), etc. I believe I read that there is a number of population density in the United States that basically decides elections -- with none of the least dense regions voting democrat and none of the most dense regions voting republican. So these are critical "LR" dynamics which determine the situation as much or more than things like informed individual preferences.
Now "global central bankers" is a blurry group. We may or may not include in our definition those progressive groups of experimental financialists who wish to try things differently. On the whole, however, we must assume that they are ideologically bound by the system in which they find themselves succeeding.
Although it is commonplace to associate Democracy with modernism it is actually a post-modern spirit. What has too often been called Democracy is really just "non-sectarian oligarchy with flexible game rules". So we do, sadly, expect that the general adherents to the system of global capital are, whether they want to or not, reinforcing an oligarchic skewing of wealth through the various choices and requirements they make in "lending and selling" between nations. Of course we can point to the fact that modernist oligarchy expands wealth beyond what classical oligarchies would tolerate! But it actively works against improving beyond its own tendencies.
Part of the problem is clearly that high cognitive development can coexist with low levels of ethical, cultural and emotional development. Part of the problem is that nation-states are not agile, coherent or nation-y enough to impose the well-being of their ethos over the interests of international economic superpredators.
And yet we are already engaged in flows of international exchange and investment. And we are already making evaluations. So it does not do us any good to just critique this process and wonder if it has any integrative validity. Our goal must be to both generate alternative AND infiltrate and co-opt these existing procedures in order to skew them toward balance and evolution. So we should affirm them but move immediately from that affirmation into how these decisions can be done in a better fashion.
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