Theme: Religion

http://johnquiggin.com/2014/02/15/the-tooth-fairy-and-the-traditionality-of-modernityMYTHOLOGY AS ADAPTATION TO CHANGES IN THE STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION

I wanted to respond to John Quiggin’s wonderful post on the ‘traditionality’ of modernity.

–“The traditionality of modernity: It’s striking, if you’re not aware of it already, to observe that Christmas, as we now know it, was invented in the 20 years or so between 1840 and 1860, However, what is even more striking that it’s barely altered in the succeeding 150 years. Even the complaints haven’t changed in decades.

And what’s true of Christmas is true of most of the favourite examples of invented tradition. Clan tartans were invented out of whole cloth (as it were), as soon as the actual clans had been destroyed by the Clearances, but this process was pretty much complete by 1850, and the system is now as inflexible as if the Scots wha’ wi’ Wallace bled had done so in defence of a dress code. Moreover, at 150 years or more of age, these traditions really can claim to be ancient (at least in the eyes of a non-indigenous Australian).

A variety of cultural niches, once subject to the cycles of fashion, seem now to have been filled once and for all. Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and James Dean have all been dead for decades, but all are more instantly recognisable than any putative successor.

More significant institutions show the same kind of stability. Political systems and national boundaries are becoming more stable over time, not less. The collapse of the Soviet Empire led to the breakup of some federal states, but nothing like the wholesale resurgence of irredentist claims predicted by many.

One obvious factor assisting all this is technology. Just as printing has fixed languages once and for all, radio, TV and recorded music and video have a powerful effect in fixing cultural traditions of all kinds. Of course, this is the opposite of the usual story in which technology drives us to a postmodern condition of constant change. But that’s enough for me. It’s time to see what’s on at the (75-year-old) Commonwealth Games.”–

MY RESPONSE

1) The Structure of Production (Industrial Revolution) determines demand for mythos, morals, ethics.

2) The high point of English civilization (Victorian) looked to the past for a new identity and found it’s pagan origins (starting with the collection of ancient fairy tales)

3) The Germans as well tried to create a new mythos (example is Nietzsche and Wagner).

4) These two efforts almost succeeded in reversing the christianization of Europe. And would have, had the communists, socialists and marxists not produced a greater incentive to build a new mythos around the state.

5) Christmas evolved and was commericalized with santa clause because people celebrated their new ability to consume cheap industrial goods. Christmas will likely persist as long as this does not change, because all the incentives for it to persist remain.

5) Elvis etc: These characters have no durability, and will not survive past the 100 year marker (the roman Saeculum). However, the mythos that they represented, again was an alteration in the structure of production: the addition of the middle and upper proletariat into the consumer class in the postwar era.

6) My long term bet is that your last comment on boundaries is wrong. Those boundaries were made possible by the finances of the nation state, during a period of rapid change in world power structures, and the invention of industrialized total war. I am pretty sure the englightenment and socialist programs are coming close to an end, becuase the experiments with democracy and social democracy conflict with heterogeneous populations. If, as northern europeans had outbred,our large corporate-states (to distinguish them from nation states) outbred, then that would mean these boundaries will persist. However, it appears that not only do populations fail to integrate, but that the friction overwhelms the democratic political process wherever we try to use it. (We failed to understand that europeans have been a genetially homogenous people for thousands of years, and our ‘differences’ marginally indifferent so to speak.)

So my rough guess, is that starting between 2020 and 2025, (or, it’s starting now) we will see rapid alteration of borders and governments for a period of as long as one hundred years.

AT that point the incentives that were created by the industrial revolution, and the relative wealth of that made less social friction possible, will have been exhausted by the near elimination of the value of labor, and pervasive demand for the restructuring of status signals, politics, and the legal structure that supports production in that new context.