Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Sometimes I think I live in a different world than most people. I tend to be very future-minded, and navel-gaze frequently about what should be, rather than what is, and I often find the views of others quite shocking.
The view that I find most virulently destructive in society, and a view that is broadly held, is that nation states are the best and most efficient way to run the world. The reason this is such a widely held view seems to be that nation states are considered to be "just the way it's always been". Of course, this isn't true. The modern nation state has only been around for maybe 300 years, and were preceded by city states, and a few thousand years ago, the Roman and Greek empires. For the rest of the time since humans have been walking upright, borders have been very fuzzy.
Even in recent times, the concept this land is owned by people X and that land is owned by people Y is an alien concept for many cultures, and it's introduction has caused permanent cultural damage to countless communities. That fact is very evident and saddening here in the Pacific, but most people on the mainland will be familiar with it if they think back to what they learned in school about the "conquest" of North America.
In Australia, aboriginal culture does not view land as "ownable", and that the only thing a person truly owns is their path through space and time (think about your own travels, the things you've done, and the people you've interacted with, and it becomes a less new age-y, more practical idea). You own your own history and your own future, and no one, no event, can take them away from you. This is an important idea, and I'll come back to it.
Since the nation state is a recent, and arguably unnatural boundary for people, what other alternatives are there? In a world chock full of 7 billion people and counting, all of whom have different languages, values, and governance, what could possibly work better?
Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of the nation state:
Advantages
The other important factor to keep in mind is that through globalism, all cultures are changing. In the industrialized and industrializing countries, the internet provides unprecedented contact between various geographic and cultural groups. More and more, people are defining themselves less by ethnicity or language and more by their own individual interests and pursuits. For instance, I identify myself primarily as a geek, secondarily as an atheist (I was raised Catholic), thirdly as a feminist, and almost not at all as an English speaker of mixed European/American descent. Where my parents lived as children, and where their parents lived is totally irrelevant to who I view myself, so I often wonder why other people make such a big fuss over the physical location of their ancestors (usually these are the people who still live near the place they were born).
Globalism is often vilified, and rightly so, since it has blindly blitzkrieged over countless unique cultures, killed millions of people with diseases they had no defense against, and destroyed thousands of unique languages that will never be heard or spoken again. Collectively, we've lost a lot. However, since we are no more connected, and more aware of the entirety of the planet we live on, we are now both at the risk of destroying our home planet (as a geek, I do hope we branch out some day) and have the tools to manage it for thousands, if not millions of years to come (considering homo sapiens is 2 million years old already, and many other species have been around for 100 million years or so, saying that the human race could be around for a few more million years is not out of the ballpark, unless we self-evolve, which we also are beginning to have the power to do, but that's a different blog post).
To be able to effectively manage an entire planet, all, or at least a majority of cultures must work in a largely cooperative fashion. So far this has lead to pan-national bodies like the League of Nations and the United Nations (and to a lesser extend, NGOs like the Red Cross). For people like me (raised perhaps on too much Star Trek with it's Federation of Planets), I never really saw anything overtly negative about the UN. Even as a child I would question it's efficacy, but I never saw anything "evil" about it. It just seemed a well-intentioned step towards a mindfully managed planet (when I was four, before I realized Star Trek was fiction, my greatest ambition was to become a Starfleet Commodore. After four, every career option open to me seemed like a total letdown).
Other people, I would come to realize, felt that the UN was a harbinger of the end of the world, the end of individuality, and the end of freedom. I think the first part of that definitely has roots in religious dogma (specifically the Book of Revelations, apparently written from a trance or dream state -- so I'd think the reliability of the content is about nil), but it also springs from a very real fear that concentrating too much power in the hands of too few is a fool's gambit (and our past history suggests it's a very bad idea). How can a planet with one government possibly manage the cacophony of the cultures it rules?
Well, maybe one government is a dumb idea -- though I doubt it would even come to that. Even if the UN (or some similar body) took on a greater and more powerful administrative role, I highly doubt that local governance would go away. The minutiae of zoning, planning, taxing, and making specific legal judgments over a wide range of geographies might be too much of a burden for a planetarily centralized government. Homogenizing every culture into one culture is next to impossible (people have tried and frequently failed, even if on the outside it looks like people conform), and new cultures with modified values keep popping up anyway.
What then, may the future be?
Perhaps it is a stateless society. This is not anarchy, but the cacophony of cultures left alone to jostle and bump and find their own grooves. In a way, we have this now. Those of us who live a significant portion of our lives through and via the Internet know the comfort of connecting to our own kind, even if we never physically meet the other individuals who comprise "our kind". In our virtual communities, free speech is endemic (you really can't get away from it, for better or worse), and taboos, customs, and rules natural emerge and evolve with the needs of the community (often with plenty of debate, but sometimes new rules just start showing up and spread among members simply because the logic of the rule is totally obvious to everyone).
Another important characteristic is that no one is ever forced to be part of a virtual community, and you can always leave at will. This characteristic may be what ultimately causes the demise of the nation state. With so much freedom to transit between communities at will, without anyone's permission, and the freedom to belong to any number of virtual communities, why would anyone used to these freedoms be tolerant of the lack of the same freedoms in the nation state system? Why be bound by geography or culture tied to geography when it's irrelevant to you, especially when something more amenable to your individual values is just over the horizon?
In a stateless society, many self-governing communities overlap, and geographic boundaries are mostly irrelevant (land and water usage still needs the protection of geographically localized law, but people really don't need to be tied to it).Think again of the NGOs like the Red Cross. It's a self-governing non-geographical community with a specific, limited purpose, and it's viewed favorably by most people in the world. Or think of Kiva, a self-governing bank with a tiny infrastructure that stretches the globe, connecting wealthy individuals who lend money to poor individuals, regardless of where anyone is.
What is common is that these self-governing bodies have a focused, limited scope. They plan on doing one thing, then they do it well. Of course, this can also be used for ill, as with various terrorist groups, but as I'm an optimist, I think that the people who want to create far outnumber the people who want to destroy (the will to destruction can often be seen in historical context as revenge for some previous act of destruction -- this will only stop when everybody realizes this is an ouroboros, which isn't going to happen anytime soon no matter our system of governance).
By limiting scope in a self-governing community, many views can be accommodated in many communities without conflict, allowing naturally for emergent behavior and evolution of thought and values, and that seems to me, a logical way to progress in a globally-bound community.
The view that I find most virulently destructive in society, and a view that is broadly held, is that nation states are the best and most efficient way to run the world. The reason this is such a widely held view seems to be that nation states are considered to be "just the way it's always been". Of course, this isn't true. The modern nation state has only been around for maybe 300 years, and were preceded by city states, and a few thousand years ago, the Roman and Greek empires. For the rest of the time since humans have been walking upright, borders have been very fuzzy.
Even in recent times, the concept this land is owned by people X and that land is owned by people Y is an alien concept for many cultures, and it's introduction has caused permanent cultural damage to countless communities. That fact is very evident and saddening here in the Pacific, but most people on the mainland will be familiar with it if they think back to what they learned in school about the "conquest" of North America.
In Australia, aboriginal culture does not view land as "ownable", and that the only thing a person truly owns is their path through space and time (think about your own travels, the things you've done, and the people you've interacted with, and it becomes a less new age-y, more practical idea). You own your own history and your own future, and no one, no event, can take them away from you. This is an important idea, and I'll come back to it.
Since the nation state is a recent, and arguably unnatural boundary for people, what other alternatives are there? In a world chock full of 7 billion people and counting, all of whom have different languages, values, and governance, what could possibly work better?
Let's look at the advantages and disadvantages of the nation state:
Advantages
- protection for a group of culturally common people against opposing or conflicting groups
- protected use of resources within the boundary of the nation
- communal militaries to protect the boundaries
- reinforcement of shared values
- strong central governance, and (generally) uniform legal systems
- minority culture groups are often significantly marginalized, even with government protection, and this may be a constant source of internal friction (think Basque)
- imposition of majority values on minority groups
- extreme difficulty migrating into or out of the geographic boundaries
- geographic boundaries may intensify conflicts with opposing groups (think Kashmir)
The other important factor to keep in mind is that through globalism, all cultures are changing. In the industrialized and industrializing countries, the internet provides unprecedented contact between various geographic and cultural groups. More and more, people are defining themselves less by ethnicity or language and more by their own individual interests and pursuits. For instance, I identify myself primarily as a geek, secondarily as an atheist (I was raised Catholic), thirdly as a feminist, and almost not at all as an English speaker of mixed European/American descent. Where my parents lived as children, and where their parents lived is totally irrelevant to who I view myself, so I often wonder why other people make such a big fuss over the physical location of their ancestors (usually these are the people who still live near the place they were born).
Globalism is often vilified, and rightly so, since it has blindly blitzkrieged over countless unique cultures, killed millions of people with diseases they had no defense against, and destroyed thousands of unique languages that will never be heard or spoken again. Collectively, we've lost a lot. However, since we are no more connected, and more aware of the entirety of the planet we live on, we are now both at the risk of destroying our home planet (as a geek, I do hope we branch out some day) and have the tools to manage it for thousands, if not millions of years to come (considering homo sapiens is 2 million years old already, and many other species have been around for 100 million years or so, saying that the human race could be around for a few more million years is not out of the ballpark, unless we self-evolve, which we also are beginning to have the power to do, but that's a different blog post).
To be able to effectively manage an entire planet, all, or at least a majority of cultures must work in a largely cooperative fashion. So far this has lead to pan-national bodies like the League of Nations and the United Nations (and to a lesser extend, NGOs like the Red Cross). For people like me (raised perhaps on too much Star Trek with it's Federation of Planets), I never really saw anything overtly negative about the UN. Even as a child I would question it's efficacy, but I never saw anything "evil" about it. It just seemed a well-intentioned step towards a mindfully managed planet (when I was four, before I realized Star Trek was fiction, my greatest ambition was to become a Starfleet Commodore. After four, every career option open to me seemed like a total letdown).
Other people, I would come to realize, felt that the UN was a harbinger of the end of the world, the end of individuality, and the end of freedom. I think the first part of that definitely has roots in religious dogma (specifically the Book of Revelations, apparently written from a trance or dream state -- so I'd think the reliability of the content is about nil), but it also springs from a very real fear that concentrating too much power in the hands of too few is a fool's gambit (and our past history suggests it's a very bad idea). How can a planet with one government possibly manage the cacophony of the cultures it rules?
Well, maybe one government is a dumb idea -- though I doubt it would even come to that. Even if the UN (or some similar body) took on a greater and more powerful administrative role, I highly doubt that local governance would go away. The minutiae of zoning, planning, taxing, and making specific legal judgments over a wide range of geographies might be too much of a burden for a planetarily centralized government. Homogenizing every culture into one culture is next to impossible (people have tried and frequently failed, even if on the outside it looks like people conform), and new cultures with modified values keep popping up anyway.
What then, may the future be?
Perhaps it is a stateless society. This is not anarchy, but the cacophony of cultures left alone to jostle and bump and find their own grooves. In a way, we have this now. Those of us who live a significant portion of our lives through and via the Internet know the comfort of connecting to our own kind, even if we never physically meet the other individuals who comprise "our kind". In our virtual communities, free speech is endemic (you really can't get away from it, for better or worse), and taboos, customs, and rules natural emerge and evolve with the needs of the community (often with plenty of debate, but sometimes new rules just start showing up and spread among members simply because the logic of the rule is totally obvious to everyone).
Another important characteristic is that no one is ever forced to be part of a virtual community, and you can always leave at will. This characteristic may be what ultimately causes the demise of the nation state. With so much freedom to transit between communities at will, without anyone's permission, and the freedom to belong to any number of virtual communities, why would anyone used to these freedoms be tolerant of the lack of the same freedoms in the nation state system? Why be bound by geography or culture tied to geography when it's irrelevant to you, especially when something more amenable to your individual values is just over the horizon?
In a stateless society, many self-governing communities overlap, and geographic boundaries are mostly irrelevant (land and water usage still needs the protection of geographically localized law, but people really don't need to be tied to it).Think again of the NGOs like the Red Cross. It's a self-governing non-geographical community with a specific, limited purpose, and it's viewed favorably by most people in the world. Or think of Kiva, a self-governing bank with a tiny infrastructure that stretches the globe, connecting wealthy individuals who lend money to poor individuals, regardless of where anyone is.
What is common is that these self-governing bodies have a focused, limited scope. They plan on doing one thing, then they do it well. Of course, this can also be used for ill, as with various terrorist groups, but as I'm an optimist, I think that the people who want to create far outnumber the people who want to destroy (the will to destruction can often be seen in historical context as revenge for some previous act of destruction -- this will only stop when everybody realizes this is an ouroboros, which isn't going to happen anytime soon no matter our system of governance).
By limiting scope in a self-governing community, many views can be accommodated in many communities without conflict, allowing naturally for emergent behavior and evolution of thought and values, and that seems to me, a logical way to progress in a globally-bound community.
posted by KaOs at
9/30/2009 11:22:00 PM
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