> This fundamentally has to do with the embrace of relativism at all levels of society.
Oh, dear Dog.
That's a cliched reframing of decades of social change. Which is the deeper rejection of the Almighty? Strip malls or McMansions? Skyscrapers or Tiny Homes?
If you start with a narrative, and squint hard enough, anything can be about Relativism. It usually isn't though.
> Our way of life, as it stands today, will not survive. That's not bad, just different.
What do you mean by way of life?
Even if we are only talking about supposedly purely subjective things (like fashion) or seemingly arbitrary things (like 60 hertz power), or social agreements (like driving on the right side of the road), almost everything has implications.
I reject the notion that people should punt on value judgments.
Even if you subscribe some kind of moral relativism, it is wiser to reserve judgment until you see what happens.
I don't subscribe to moral relativism. Some value systems work better than others in specific contexts.
> I would argue that relativism is in fact the fundamental construct
Then you pretty much agree with any practice that is currently-bad-but-wasn't-in-the-past? After all, it was relatively ok at the time, and can be again.
> To me, "moral relativism" just means the recognition that different societies had and have different moral ideas, and that even within a single society rules are murky and fluid, and often outright undefined.
That’s just a sociological trick. You redefine X to mean “what people think X is” and come to “profound” conclusions. That’s like saying that the laws of the universe has changed when Einstein invented relativity.
Moral relativism is, for example, when you think that being a slave owner in 1800 in the US wouldn’t be bad but being a slave owner in 2023 in the US is bad because of specific cultural background that is different then and now. It’s not about people disagreeing on what constitutes bad actions or conditions per se. Everyone understands that people disagree on stuff. It doesn’t make one a moral relativist in any useful notion of that word.
> axial age ideas of loving your neighbour/all being one
Sounds like the 90s. The world coming together in a return to “nature” was the hip thing back then - from what I heard and experienced as a teen. It can be seen in media of the era like Return To Innocence by Enigma. It was mostly superficial though - there was no real deep engagement with other cultures; else they would have seen the incompatibilities and experience the “clashes” we see today.
> than the status quo where most people do not care that these things don’t make sense.
I don’t think people are “OK” with things not making sense. I think most people feel the world makes sense to them. However each person’s internal model of the world is probably very different from each other’s. We no longer share a “common reality” as much as in the past.
>Do you think of Western culture as a blind primate hierarchy?
Honestly? I used to think of it as an edifice of enlightened human thought... HAHAHAHAHA.
>Is not that very perspective part of the problem?
Don't think so. I'm not even sure there is a problem.
>I'm all about actually changing things
Oh, I wish things were different, too. But IMHO all I can possibly ever change are my local circumstances, and even that is not always particularly tractable. Intentionally "changing the world for the better" kinda sounds like a single cell of your body arbitrarily changing the laws of physics under which it operates. (Stretch that metaphor a bit and you get cancerous ideologies. We saw how well that worked...)
The world can evolve, though. Over feedback loops that take generations.
>So perhaps "rebooting" is clumsy language, if you're suggesting that a new boot will simply take its place :) Maybe de-booting is what we're after?
Now that's some pretty cool wordplay - the world needs more of that, so you made a positive change right there :) The Butlerian debooting :D
>It's just my impression, and I could be mistaken, but this sounds overly pragmatic. Living life this way leads to getting entrenched in local maxima.
You find a lot of people who suffer from severe social maladjustment and view life as a zero-sum game all over the place (I blame the rise of using game theory to model real situations without a finite turn limit). It's very rare you'll be able to "argue" these people into conceptualizing other humans as unique individuals, it pretty much always comes from problematic upbringings
> Why am I judging what is acceptable for them to do in their neighborhoods and communities?
There is a nihilistic rabbit hole this can take you down. Values are suspended in air, only there because we want them to be. Why is it unacceptable for people in their own neighborhoods and communities to murder others in cold blood?
Is it all relative? Is that a choice a community can take, that is equally valid as all other choices? Or should there be a preferred community, which all humans should strive towards. A civilized platonic ideal.
I'm okay with taking the more chauvinistic view that our way of living is better. Not the best. But better. I'm willing to claim that they would be better too if they became more educated, learned to understand it's best to not kill people based on witchcraft. This does involve me thinking that I am more civilized and above them on a hierarchy of values. I'm okay with that. I think you should be too.
> wonderful collections of weirdness, with no way to discern truth
So just like real life, then.
To be clear, I believe that objective truth exists. I also believe that people have a lot of stories. I'm from a small town, the size where you could learn a story about pretty much every family, and a lot of the stories would intertwine, or be very similar to each other, forming a shared reality among neighbors. I'm sure we could talk a good long time about the social implications of that sense of shared reality.
I think there's something deeply uncomfortable about having too many people available in your life to form a shared reality. I feel like that discomfort is a big driver of modern angst.
> People live up to what you expect them to live up to.
> If you expect a 6 year old to run the grocery store you own while you're away, then they will...
One of the problems with our society is the tendency to take a kernel of truth and then oversimplify and take it so far that it just becomes a total falsehood. Like your example of the 6 year old and the grocery store, there are certainly stores/communities where that's reasonable, but also lot of stores/communities where it isn't. There's no general rule there.
> The infantilization of people has caused far greater harm than almost any other thing.
...and then there's the the hyperfocus that leads to a total lack of perspective.
Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.
So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.
> You misunderstand. The question is whether individual value structures converge/approximate to a superstructure outside every individual, not whether individuals can use environment, history, each other etc as an inspiration for their custom tailored lives.
You misunderstand. They of course converge, there is no other alternative but for society to be a reflection of their individuals. You don't like the answer so you pretend what they converge into is not worthy somehow because it doesn't adhere to some high societal morality standard which by the way just so happen to be the morality you ascribe to, which is of course nonsense.
> I take that as a compliment because one of the things I aspire to is to not get dissolved in the blind allegiance to achievement and excess positivity.
> It usually gets unnoticed but when people excessively project themselves to achievements and future growth; they turn into massive narcissists. And I am not using that in the pejorative sense; they lose a grounded sense of themselves.
> Dogma and ideology are even worse. They provide us with the answers, and put boundaries around our thinking. Ignoring the dogma invites ridicule, or even punishment. I suspect that's why more ideological societies are less innovative.
Is it still permissible to say this? (asking as an earnest question) This was once a core tenet of silicon valley but somehow the opposite has happened and I’m not sure you can even say this anymore
> it's about deciding what we want the world to look like, and settling for no less
Perhaps it's about accepting people for who and what they are, even when they fail to satisfy your own biases, and building an understanding of the social world on that basis -- rather than being about privileging your opinion of how the world ought to be over your perception of how the world is, and bridging the gap between there and your thesis via the post hoc fallacy.
> But those communities are less geographic and much more ideological. The communal bond these days happens more in ideas and beliefs than in physical proximity.
If your sense of "community" is so warped that you honestly believe this then I feel sorry for you.
What you're describing isn't a community at all, it's a bunch of strangers who happen to have something in common.
> Feudalism doesn’t get pluralities excited, so how does that mainstream narrative change in a manner that feels like everybody is part of the journey instead of an exploit?
The problem is not the need for a narrative change. The need is actual change.
> Societal pressure can be even more convincing than violence.
this is true, these communities are walking on a thin rope. They are constantly in danger of falling out of balance.
> somethings not quite right with your faith. Else you would not fear independent thought.
I disagree. There is no indication that rationality and independent thinking are what is best for an individual. They have been hugely positive for humanity, but there is also freedom in submission. Being in a healthy community where you fully understand your role in life seems a lot better than being a nihilist (not the only outcome, but also not the worst one).
> There is a common view of cultural norms as at worst tyrannical or at best random and arbitrary, rather than the sophisticated and curated product of billions of human lives.
Examine any of these “fundamental norms” and see that they were not so fundamental after all. With their narratives built to enforce cultural norms today, not genuinely explore lessons from the past.
My grandma will _insist_ that homosexuality simply didn’t exist when she was younger. This is the “sophisticated” product you speak of - a blatant denial of reality.
Oh, dear Dog.
That's a cliched reframing of decades of social change. Which is the deeper rejection of the Almighty? Strip malls or McMansions? Skyscrapers or Tiny Homes?
If you start with a narrative, and squint hard enough, anything can be about Relativism. It usually isn't though.
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