Stats for nerds
2recommend
10mentions
5people
2012–2017years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Trying to grow wings is different from inventing a flying machine.
Sure, but no one is talking about brain implants. Is encouraging certain behaviors like growing wings? Political action has been phenomenally effective over the ages in shaping behavior. Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process[1] (1939) is a wonderful study of how behaviors (and even feelings) we now deem natural are just the result of a long chain of social change.
But what matters most isn't underlying sentiments (the feeling of us vs. them) but rather behavior (behaving as us vs. them). The fact that the intensity of us vs. them behavior has changed considerably (in both directions) throughout history, shows that we're not talking about essential human nature, but how that nature is channeled.
> What is the "we" you speak of? If you check around you'll see that not everyone agrees with you.
"We" is society, and I don't think anyone disagrees that societies work to improve the condition of their members. Deciding which improvements we should make and how we should make them is precisely what political debate is about, but I don't think that the ideal of improving our lives is controversial in the least.
> Us v. Them surfaces again, strangely in the context of advocacy against it.
I completely disagree. The context of us vs. them isn't the existence of groups who disagree, but the belief (and the subsequent behavior) that assumes that the debate is a zero-sum game. I don't necessarily frame the (sometimes vehement) debates I have with those I disagree with as ones where if I win they lose and vice versa.
- > What benefit is it for a group to have themselves incarcerated?
I don't understand what you're referring to.
> However, a Chinese study showed that >80% of women won't consider dating a man if he doesn't own his own apartment and earn above a cultural set amount... Does this mean that women in such culture are the one in power, and that they just happen to give up power in the work force since its in their best interest to have men with high income?
But that is the whole point of the power discourse. Power shapes social norms.
> Its not easy comparing two asymmetrical reproductive strategies and asking which one are in more control
I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
> The question is then, where that power ever part of the group or was it just granted?
The power is "a part of the group", but it ebbs and flows. Government is a mechanism that interacts with power (like all social mechanisms). If the government structure is binary, i.e. only one party can be in control at any one time, then this will naturally amplify power fluctuations because that's how binary mechanisms work.
> it is also less rigid in its predictions.
It's very hard (or even impossible) to make predictions in an intractable dynamical systems. That's just a mathematical reality. That's why social science doesn't try to make predictions on a large scale and over long durations, because that's just mathematically impossible. Similarly, biologists are unable to make predictions about evolution. They have no choice but to be content with retroactively explaining the dynamics.
> The thing that would disprove culture as the culprit of power, is if a group had power to change such culture. Do you know of any such case?
Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power. More recently, feminism has changed cultural norms dramatically. It was once believed that women don't have the (biological) mental faculties to be good doctors or lawyers. The deeper and more internalized cultural norms are, the longer the process. There is an amazing book called The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias that chronicles the gradual social development of disgust. It shows how things we perceive to be visceral are actually the product of social processes.
- > It sounds like you're perfectly fine with my original reductio ad absurdum that it would be ok to force everyone in a wheelchair, or force everyone to shave their head, etc.
How do you figure? I don't follow.
> No it's not. When you or I own something we are not using force at all.
Of course we are! We've just internalized it[1] are so we don't notice it (which is why we need to learn about power in order to see it), but it's there:
Suppose you have a lot of money and I want some. So I hack your bank account and take it, except you don't let me because you call the police who arrest me, or maybe just the threat of arrest deters me. Either way, you are using force to restrict my freedom to take the money lying there in the bank. Now, if you say that you didn't give your consent to my taking the money, and it was I that used force when taking it, then we will get into a very long discussion about what consent means, and I will say that consent or coercion are not binary but a spectrum and a person is almost never at either extreme (as various psychological experiments have shown).
For ownership to be effective it must be enforced by violence or the threat of violence towards those who want to violate it, hence -- it requires force, and is therefore a restriction on freedom.
[1]: Internalized mores and self-supervision are in themselves very powerful forces that have been studied extensively, but I'm not going to discuss them here. For a beautiful demonstration of how we've gradually internalized things over history to the level where they seem "natural" to us, see Norbert Elias's seminal work, The Civilizing Process (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process)
- I think most historians would disagree with you. Actually, there's one quite famous study that touches on this topic, The Civilizing Process[1] by Norbert Elias. It is a fascinating work, but debated by most historians. One interesting subtopic there is the internalization of the feeling of disgust. Elias shows how disgust -- which we often experience physiologically -- is a social construct that evolved through the ages.
Other than that, it is well accepted that some societies have built large, faceless institutions, and evolved from a face-to-face society to a society of strangers. It is a profound change, but no one claims that such a society is more rational than a face-to-face, let alone its members. The behavioral state you're referring to is largely accepted to be nothing more than social norms in a society of strangers.
- For anyone interested, Norbert Elias (1897-1990) wrote a very enlightening book "The Civilizing Process" describing how these small social structures evolved into States as we know them in Occident [1]. Excerpted from a summary [2]:
According to Elias, monopolization, and especially the monopolization of physical force and violence warranted more self-restraint from both the government and the individual. In "The civilizing Process" Elias talks about "a chain of mutual dependence" which makes people dependent upon each other in order to perform various tasks and achieve their goals. This, according to Elias, explains why societies required more stability, regularity and supervision. Transportation and the development of markets increased human interactions between people who found themselves dependent on each other even without direct contact. This according to Elias has led for the need to coordinate actions and establish the "rules of the game". Playing by the rules meant a growing demand for self restraint.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civilizing_Process
[2]: http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.fr/2012/04/norbert-elias-...
- > I don't understand what you're referring to.
The swirling mustached man who in western culture symbolize evil and criminality. If men as a group has all the power, why would men as a group allow men to be incarcerated in higher rate than women? We have similar situation with the phrase "women and children first". Why would the group with power sacrifice their life for members of a less powerful group?
> I think it is fairly obvious that men have more power in most cultures.
In the context of dating? Social science looks at outcomes, and women are more discriminative and have more decision of the outcome. Outside of some extreme local situation where some elderly religious male leader decides whom a woman will form a religious bond with, which in my country is highly illegal and carry prison sentence, I can't say there is much signs that men decide the outcome of dating. Looking at proxies for dating culture (ie romantic movies), that impression is further reinforced that women decide the out come of dates and men only have the option to try date enough women until one will accept him.
But any conclusion must come with the consideration that men and women has asymmetrical strategies when it comes to dating.
> Power shapes social norms.
Or social norms shapes power. If men must be bread earners in order to be successful in reproduction rituals, those who are more inclined to do so will reproduce at an evolutionary higher rate than others. Such incentives should, through not guarantied, impact the power balance in the work force. In cultures that do not have such culture should as a result have a distinct different power distribution in the work force. I would guess (since I don't have the data) that Chinese society has a more extreme gender segregation in the work force than countries where income has a lower impact on dating.
> Government is a mechanism that interacts with power
One could easily think that it is the citizens that control the government that votes a party into power. The common phrase, S/He who pays the piper calls the tune, implies a power relation. Naturally, a political party has power, but revolutions general happens to parties that travels too far from the cultural structure. Somewhat ironically, cultural changes often happen in the turmoil.
> Plenty. The French revolution has dramatically changed cultural perception of aristocracy and hereditary power.
I might be mistaken, but it wasn't aristocracy and hereditary power that was in control of the French revolution. It seems that the group in power did not get their way, and the cultural changes came from the less powerful groups working together.
Old style feminism did change cultural norms, and most what I have read and seen was caused by the goal to create change by targeting cultural values. They were not the group with power, and the change was not cause by getting the most powerful group to change culture. Instead culture was changed from within by changing gender norms and expectations. There is plenty of old Swedish movies that illustrated 1980s parents that attempted to eliminate gender identity as a concept, switching or removing gendered clothing and toys.
New feminism, which is a style of feminism I strongly oppose, is the idea that men and women have different strengths, perspectives, and roles in society. Difference feminism success seem to mostly be about pinning groups against groups and causing what people call the gender war. Old feminism advocated that everyone are human and differences in society is caused by a harmful culture, one that they had a good track record in fixing. Since everyone are human, they even managed to make the word feminism to be a synonym to the word equal, which seems quite hijacked by new feminism.
The Civilizing Process sounds interesting and valuable read, but not sure how it links back to the concept that a powerful group shapes society and culture. Going back to racism, the initial proposition was that the group with most power deciding what the culture is. My view is that the culture decide the power balance of groups and culture is formed by everyone in society. In order to fix a bad culture, one need to change society norms and expectations, and you can't do so by only addressing the most powerful group.
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