Cicero of Winds of Change.Net considers a world in Flux:

But while old borders are lowered, I wonder if new ones are raised. I wonder if all this social technology will just tribalize our society into a myriad of globalized subcultures. It simply might be unavoidable. In so doing, people might come to de-emphasize the validity and necessity of nationhood. It’s too early to say, and there’s not a thing that can be done to stop it. But I think sovereignty is on the wane in the long run — and what’s happening on the Web today is the seed. Just a hunch.

He’s responding to a depressed Peggy Noonan, describes her despair with a metaphor:

With respect to the Peggy Noonans of this world, who I share a lot of solidarity with, I can only relay an image I have in my head. It’s of a King and his son, the Prince. They go for a walk outside their castle on the hill, overlooking the vast plains of the kingdom. The sun is setting, and geese are honking overhead, flying south for the winter. It’s the end of a long, resplendent day. The King puts his arms over his son’s shoulders, sighs, and tells him: “Son — someday, none of this will be yours.”

These are both very interesting ideas…

Ra(is)[z]ing Borders

The first is strikingly similar to something I wrote in one of my earliest blog entries, an entry written in response to a critique made by a former fellow blogger (and childhood friend) of Christine Rosen’s assertion in The New Atlantis that the explosion of communications technologies has produced widespread insularity:

Raymund Eich at The Transhuman Comedy picks on Christine Rosen of The New Atlantis for suggesting that the individualization of telecommunications programming, via TiVo and the like technologies,

[encourages] not the cultivation of taste, but the numbing repetition of fetish. And [such technologies] contribute to what might be called “egocasting,” the thoroughly personalized and extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste.

[Rosen]

Raymund reads Rosen’s position as being anti-technology: Rosen thinks, “Things were better in the past, and have since changed for the worst.” Raymund thinks we have always had a certain freedom to choose our stimuli; there was no golden age. [Techno-Fetishism? or the Same Old Same Old?]

Rosen’s basic premise is that “egocasting” allows users of such technologies to narrowly define their interests in highly idiosyncratic ways while ignoring much of the other culture around them. By using TiVo or customizable downloads of music, etc., young people in particular but all people in general may specialize their interests, and this has led to extraordinary insularity: subcultures which have formed around specialized entertainment have little reason to interact with one another.

This formation of insular subcultures may be a reflection of the “new” borders Cicero mentions at Winds of Change, or of tribalism on a global scale. For an American example of such insularity, we might look at certain conservative or liberal subcultures in America: How many people have watched Fahrenheit 9/11, approving of the movie, but have never seen its rebuttal, FarenHYPE 9/11 — and never want to see the rebuttal? How many Midwestern farmers have any understanding of the meanings behind Eminem’s lyrics, or Madonna’s? Who has watched, and who will never watch under any circumstances, the Left Behind movies? [or read the books?] With the large variety of media sources, Americans can pick and choose according to their preferences and keep quite busy and entertained without ever choosing entertainment outside their comfort zones. We often associate the Internet and the large number of cable and satellite channels with multiculturalism and greater interaction; but the variety and accessibility of these media also allow for greater insularity, or specialization.

(Re)[Con]silience and the Conservative

It is too tempting to take the second paragraph cited above and deride the feudalistic terror that multiculturalism and democracy inspire in the lord of the manor, who must not only contend with his rising serfs (and perhaps, slaves) but also must forsake his stewardship control of resources which ensure his power. Cicero might not have intended such a reading, but the wording is pregnant and quite important. Forget for a moment the stereotypical association of conservative with ownership of property, and consider instead the ownership of ideas, the loss of which is really what’s behind Peggy Noonan’s existentialist dread. When all the old forms start dissolving, those who have the greatest stake in the old forms begin to fear their absence.

Conservative thought tends to have a high level of resilience but much lower levels of consilience. Whatever ideas are formed from the principles behind the conservative philosophy may be altered, refuted, proven inadequate; but the core principles remain in effect, strong as ever. After a successful refutation, the core principles may reorganize and give birth to new ideas, different ideas, but they themselves rarely change. To the degree that these core principles have been formed from an observation of the environment the conservative thinker has hitherto inhabited, they are dependent on a stable world (or a stable milieu.) A world of high flux presents widespread attacks on secondary and tertiary ideas (etc.), and the conservative thinker might find herself unable to reorganize or fill the resulting gaps left by the dissolving ideas. This, of course, can lead to high levels of confusion and a sense of having no control or no power to act.

In essence, a high degree of flux may lead to a loss of stewardship control of the resources of thought, because those resources are overburdened or inadequate for operating within the flux. Indeed, a lost conservative might feel as if others who are acting have inherited the world — without being able to understand how this can be. The reason behind this inability to understand other actors is the generally low level of consilience in conservative thought. The conservative’s core principles have been more than adequate for decades — perhaps, for centuries — and the possibility of needing to add new core principles, or relegating some old core principles to secondary or tertiary status while incorporating new core principles is not something a conservative is well equipped to do. Most of the time, such a drastic revaluation of core principles is unnecessary; but in a world of great flux, it is essential. The efficient actors who are not understood by the conservative might be other conservatives who just happen to have a different set of core principles — core principles formed from different life experiences or already formed to meet a current level of flux. (Indeed, the “current level of flux” might not quite be flux for the misunderstood conservative.) These two conservatives might meet each other and quite misunderstand each other; or one might be understood while the other is not; or, there may be degrees of understanding if some core principles are shared.

Para(digm)[dise] of the Believers

Christine Rosen’s idea of “egocasting” is prescient, but the insularity that occurs as a result of egocasting can take many forms and will perhaps take these forms simultaneously. While insular subcultures may develop and the members be bound more strongly as a result of media, these are not subcultures as we normally think of subcultures. In the 21st century, the members of a particular “subculture” or “sub-subculture” may be separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, unlike subcultures of the past (and still, some in the present) which have formed largely as a result of geography:

Nowadays, the “communities” are fractured at the individual level more than at any time previously in human history. A community might be composed of individuals who live hundreds of miles apart. These communities are, geographically speaking, intermixed: Take ten random individuals in a neighborhood, and they may hold wildly varying aesthetics. This produces some interesting effects. Not only do we find that we have little to say to our neighbors, beyond a discussion of the weather, but we are also often geographically isolated from those with whom we share similar core values. Because we are geographically isolated from our fellows in the shared-community, we don’t need to hold to the expectations of that community when we are not in communication. (We don’t bump into one another on the street.) Finally, because our neighbors are often strangers to us—they are strange in comparison to others who share our aesthetics or core values—we might tend to become insular on the individual level in our day-to-day lives, not communicating with the neighbors and not communicating but infrequently with the members of our community. [T-F? or the S O S O?]

In geographically limited communities, when the forms of entertainment were fewer, many different personalities within that community would nonetheless share in entertainments. Variations in personality, outlook, and philosophy among the members would have more chance of swaying or influencing other members — but at the same time, cultural integrity would accrue as a result of shared forms of expression. Within such a system, resilience would be high but consilience would be low for the simple fact that the forms of expression are limited (and most likely, would become regulated.) An explosion of forms of media, via communications technologies, would seem to introduce more opportunities for consilience, and possibly for expanding core values or the reconstitution of sets of core values and realignment of core values; but if consilience does not occur, individuals may become insular on the individual level at worst or form weak connections locally as well as distantly on the basis of a few (but not many) shared core values.

So-called “multiculturalists” make the mistake of assuming that a few shared core values can lead to strong connections within a society. A certain form of mania might form around one or a small number of core values shared between two [lust] or many [fads, mob activity], but though such connections are strong when they occur, they are not likely to last. [Support for the invasion of Iraq.] On the other hand, a limited set of core principles might reinforce and strengthen bonds even at great distances if the environment surrounding the members of a community does not assault their few principles or the many ideas springing from those principles. [al Qaeda, which finds support wherever the members go, since they are opposed to all but their own paradigm.] So in one respect, I tend to believe — as Cicero suggested — that national integrity in high-tech, democratic societies will gradually weaken until it disappears. But I doubt the formation of strong global subcultures to fill the role once filled by national identity. Weak global subcultures, yes, and many of them: the believers are many, and so are the forms of paradise.

I would expect confederate factions before I’d suspect anything that could be considered strong global subcultures. But even these factions would end, or implode, once their reason for being disappeared…

With enough consilience, a more stable form of resilience would probably develop, over time and globally. What comes after that, I cannot guess.