The Myth of Cultural Overrun

People opposed to supra-national political integration often cite a “threat against national culture” as their primary reason.

A classical Marxist response is that “national culture” is a political construct designed to protect a ruling social class, rather than a cultural heritage. 

Fortunately, once every four years, a far simpler rebuttal to those fearing political integration presents itself.

Tonight Spain plays Italy in the final of the Euro championship hosted in Kiev, Ukraine.  Spain and Italy are both members of the European Union, with a shared supranational constitution and an open border policy.

Yet anyone in attendance at the Olympic stadium tonight will be under no illusion that cultural distinctiveness between the nations is alive and well. There may be a common passion for football, but diversity in language, music and cuisine remains along with a strong sense of national pride.

In fact, cultures seem to strengthen and grow from exposure to other cultures. As MK Ghandi said “No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive”.

Like all things, cultures need to evolve to survive and evolution requires pools of diversity from which newer and better cultural practices can emerge.

Even the cultural explosion of the Renaissance was, in large part, the result of a rising merchant class in Italy stimulating demand for art at the same time as the West established significant contact with the East and global trade lanes expanded.

The belief that "they" will overrun us, or even turn us into "them" is a fear shared by two groups: the ruling class, who want to preserve the status quo, and members of the working class who have been taught to fear change by the ruling class.

Is a United States of Earth Possible?

The process for forming an international union of states is a well-established one in history.
 
Leaders of states come together with a common purpose to negotiate a treaty and a framework of governance (constitution) for their new union. They then take the concept back to their electorates and hold referenda to let citizens decide whether they wish to ratify the treaty, join the union and adopt the contents of the proposed constitution.

Citizen referenda are under-utilized instruments of democracy. While historically, it was possible in small, localized communities for each member to have a direct say in the affairs of their community, across larger communities and distances, it was more practical to elect representatives to meet and decide on issues at a centralized point of government.

However, this traditional justification for indirect representation has been substantially eroded by the ease with which online surveys and polls can efficiently canvass the views of huge numbers of people across great distances.

These new polling tools have been emphatically embraced by the private sector to support relatively trivial decision-making processes, like whether contestant A or contestant B should progress to the next round of a reality television show. Unfortunately, major policy decisions very seldom put to a direct citizen vote. In fact, in some cases, citizen referenda are not even legally permitted, including in the case of the United States of America, when voting on decisions to go to war.

However, the United States of America remains the prime example of the successful formation of a union that arose from thirteen formerly colonial states uniting on the 4th of July 1776 behind a truth they held to be self-evident: that all persons are created equal and with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The process of negotiating and concluding an international treaty for the constitution of a United States of Earth seems likely to be a long and challenging one but it is a process that will surely follow from increased population and demand for more equitable access to the planet’s shrinking natural resources.

5 Minutes to Midnight

A few years ago, astronomer Martin Rees published a book called “Our Final Hour”.  In it, he estimated a 50% chance that humanity will be extinct by 2100.  (Why he did not call the book “Our Final Century” I do not know). Terror inducing title aside, his forecast was based on an assessment of the probability of either a malicious or accidental release of hugely destructive technology during the 21st century.

His views gave rise to a second theory: that we Earthlings have not come into contact with populations from other planets simply because any such society would first develop the capability to destroy itself and then accidentally or intentionally do precisely that in the long period before it develops any means to safely travel to other solar systems or galaxies.

Given that there appear to many, many, MANY more planets in our universe than we previously thought (the latest estimates exceed 160 billion in our Milky Way alone) it strikes as increasingly unlikely that life should only have evolved on planet Earth and nowhere else.  If global warming is inconveniently true, then Rees’ theories are uncomfortably plausible.

Giving further credence to Reece’s assessment is the the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who this month moved the minute hand on their doomsday clock one minute forward to 5 minutes to midnight.  The symbolic clock was first set up in 1945 by University of Chicago scientists who had worked on the Manhattan project to develop the first atomic weapons.  The current group of scientists running the project, which includes a list of Nobel laureates, released a statement last week saying: “Two years ago, it appeared that world leaders might address the truly global threats that we face. In many cases, that trend has not continued or been reversed."

Given that North Korea now appears to be run by a trust fund kid, not to mention the political grandstanding of republican party candidates in describing exactly what sort of commander-in-chief they would be if elected later this year, perhaps these scientists and, more astoundingly, the Mayans, might be right after all.

It’s getting INSANE, I know. Let it not be true.

Moving in the right direction

2011 draws to a close with financial instability and climate change topping the agenda of global issues to confront in 2012. The signs are, however, clear that a co-ordinated, multi-governmental approach to problem solving is an emerging trend, if a hotly debated one, with developments of the past week underlining the increasing relevance of intergovernmental approaches to problem solving.

Yesterday, new capital disclosure templates were published for comment by the members of Basel III, the latest in international regulatory standards for banking, requiring banks in more than 30 countries to use a common format for disclosing the size and quality of their capital safety margins to investors.

Last week, the COP17 summit gave birth to a new agreement that commits all signatories to developing a future framework for legally binding carbon emission reductions, bringing hope of an eventual remedy to one of the key deficiencies of the Kyoto protocol.

However, in the same week, Britain elected to abstain from participation in a treaty intended to protect to the European market, leading to wholesale domestic re-evaluation of Britain’s role in an evolving European Union.

The debates will continue in 2012 with the evolution towards intergovernmental co-operation being resisted by nationalists sounding somewhat outdated calls for increasing independence in an increasingly inter-dependent world. Because rationalism tends to favour harmonisation, trends towards integration are seldom opposed on rational grounds but rather through messages of sound and fury, fear and loathing.

When Southern States began advocating for secession from the United States to preserve their "economic interests", Abraham Lincoln famously pointed out, three short years prior to the commencement of the US Civil War, that “a house divided against itself cannot stand”.

Provided that the slow evolution of international co-operation and regulation never comes at the expense of freedom of culture or expression, or the principal of subsidiarity (a principle that affirms that a more centralized level of government should exercise only those responsibilities that cannot be more effectively handled at a local level) then latter day nationalists should hopefully, ultimately, and without necessity of war, come to understand that they have little to fear from a more co-ordinated approach to solving the big problems that affect everybody equally.

For all the contemporary criticism leveled against the European Union, none of these critics lived through the continents’ great wars and nothing in their criticism can trump the truth: from the time European supra-nationalism was first introduced, major warfare amongst member states became unthinkable.

Let’s hope 2012 sees our global body politic keep moving in the right direction.

Kent Cops Out

Peter Kent, Canadian Environment Minister, says India and China are amongst the world’s biggest pollution emitters. He uses their “developing nation” exemption from the emission reduction standards of the Kyoto protocol as a possible basis for Canada’s withdrawal from the treaty. 

But here’s the irony: while Canada might have previously committed itself to carbon emission reduction targets of the Kyoto Protocol, in the last decade Canada’s merchandise imports from India increased by over 60% and imports from China have risen to over $44 billion per year. 

From a horse of such giddying height as the one he obviously saddled before cantering into Durban, can Peter not see that where a nation commits itself to emission reduction targets, if it then simply increases its imports of goods from the very developing nations it criticizes, it’s not actually reduced the level of carbon emitted into the atmosphere, but simply shifted production from its own back yard to somebody else’s? 

Climate control has descended into a debate between developed and developing when, in truth, there’s only one atmosphere and everyone will lose from a negotiation stalemate. Kent suggests that the Green Climate Fund is a “guilt” payment demanded by developing nations when it is simply one proposal to finance cleaner power in developing nations. The Fund and the global carbon tax are strong ideas that deserve rational consideration – perhaps Kent’s projection of morality and guilt onto the negotiating floor belies his own state of mind more than anything else, especially after Greenpeace produced this terrific piece of satire about him earlier this year.

Occupy Wall Street: Demand # 1

It’s been very impressive.  The commitment, the organisation, the sheer tenacity.  But having taken Wall Street hostage, it’s time to send through at least one clear demand.  

This would be my proposal:

Demand # 1: Nationalize the Federal Reserve.

Social Media - New Kid on the Evolutionary Block

Within any adaptive system there are considerable advantages to the development of information and communication (neural) networks between system components to enable the adaptive response and re-organization of the system.

If the Universe itself is an adaptive, responsive, system (as it seems to be) then Social Media should probably be understood as the new kid on the evolutionary block.

While still just infants now, social media platforms will mature to offer more highly aggregated content services and the streaming of an increasing amount of sensorial, neurological and positional data in real time. 

Eventually bionic sensory organs will even make it possible for people to literally see what others are seeing and hear what others are hearing in real time. If this seems too far-fetched to you for now, consider the fact that cochlear implants can already capture sound and directly stimulate cochlear nerves by electronic impulses (making it possible for persons with damaged hair cells on the ear’s basilar membrane to hear) and that implanted retinal devices enable light to enter micro-cameras, bypass damaged retinas and electronically stimulate optical nerves (enabling some blind persons to see).

 It doesn’t require a major conceptual leap to recognize that these electronic devices will one day record the sights and sounds they can sense and that these recordings could ultimately be relayed by micro-wireless transmitters, streamed to websites and shared with other people. Microsoft has already purchased the patent to transmit data using the human body - you can view the patent itself here. 

Humanity seems destined to benefit from increasingly reliable and replaceable bionic organs and if all the sensory information directed at a person is recorded and redirected towards a person’s social media page, then anyone accessing that person’s site will be able to take a real-time walk in that person’s virtual shoes. 

Hopefully all this sharing of "what's on our minds" will lead to greater empathy and understanding between us but an increasingly important issue to debate and address will be the degree to which users can personally control what information to stream and precisely when to stream it.  Privacy has already become the wild new frontier of social psychology with different social media behaviors currently being flame-tested for social acceptability.

While it may seem frightening at first, the gradual collapsing of the boundaries of self-consciousness and the progressive ease with which we will identify ourselves and others as parts of a collective body of consciousness are evolutionary processes in themselves and social media should be understood as the evolutionary development of new neural pathways in our systemic consciousness.