Cultures, Wars, Wiping Asses off the Planet

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Joe Varo writes:

> I'm going to tentatively dangle a toe into the waters of this thread of
> conversation and pose a question.

> Is it so much "our own culture's misguided tendency" to wipe other
> peoples' asses off the planet or is that just a side-effect of the
> Technology (i.e. fire-power) we have?

Paul Kennedy has written a very readable history `The Rise and Fall of
the Great Powers' whose thesis is that imperial power cycled around
the great powers in the wake of (military) technological advances. It
covers the various empires from abour 1400 to the present. It's a
great read, its only major fault being that it leaves off at 1985
(just before it was published), hence does not deal with recent
developments in the Soviet Empire and China.

  . . .

> To be perfectly honest, I'm not sure this is a valid question.  Perhaps
> Culture and Technology are too intertwined...perhaps Technology shapes
> Culture to some extent...is there a Culture resistant to the shaping power
> of Technology?

Pynchon definitely argues that technology *does* radically shape
culture - at least, in US and European culture it has. And I don't
think he believes that any culture is resistant to it. He is very
scathing about systems and their ability to deal with the
unpredictable (I'll not say the random - handling the tension between
unpredictable, random and unknown is what is at the heart of his
distrust of the application of systems on a large scale).

I think Pynchon would expect every culture to be susceptible to a
rigidification of response as a correlate of the maintenance of a
social order, any social order. And that rigidity leaves the society
non-isotropic. It's strength is aligned along the particular
dimensions of experience which the culture promotes and profits by.
This strengthens the society's ability to deal with forces which are
aligned with the culture but weakens it to forces which are not
aligned along the relevant vectors. Technology merely ups the odds by
allowing the handling of larger and larger forces, the imposition of
greater and greater tensions. When a cross blow hits a technological
society, by virtue of its higher specialisation to local circumstances
is all that much less well prepared to avoid fracture.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.