This is pretty good. My only comment would be in the analysis of Chinese civilization/culture/whatever you want to call it.
If you made these same observations about Chinese FAMILIES, it falls apart, or at least fragments into a much larger conversation. For a few (or more) millennia, Chinese society was organized around family, lineage, clan, village (which was usually clan), and then State, which most folks here have always had a tangled and troubled relationship with.
"Let the state be small and the people few: So that the people . . . fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances and, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them. So that the people . . . will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful, will be content with where they live and happy in their customs. Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.".....Daode jing (The Way and Its Power): a favorite passage of the founder of the Ming, the Hongwu emperor (reigned 1368–98)
If one starts with the basic unit of Chinese society, an entirely different view becomes clear. The State has always attempted to both atomize and isolate societal units, while also attempting to form it into a single coherent entity. The Chinese "word" for State is "Guo Jia" 国家...with 国=country and 家=family. "Country Family" IOW, there is an inherent contradiction in the basic cultural unit and the State's intentions.
If one viewed the family, lineage, or clan through the same lens as the micro-view Youtube videos, an entirely different picture emerges. You would see all energy and resources poured into helping and addressing the afflicted.
Until only a couple generations ago (and in many areas, a single generation) the country was still largely rural and formed into essentially autonomous villages, with entirely different governance structures than those imagined by the West. To begin understand those governance structures and the society that emerged from them, I recommend reading "From The Soil", Fei Xiaotong's groundbreaking sociological study of Chinese society. Mr. Fei was soundly berated by the CPC and took a lot of heat for having the audacity of describing society, which was considered the strict overview of the CPC. But, current sociologists and cultural observers still acknowledge his contributions. The idea did not die, which also runs contrary to CPC dictats.
The grand problem for the current government....and if anyone has studied and understands governments, "current" applies as all these structures are cyclical and in a state flux...excuse me, I digress...the problem of current government is attempting to mold this highly fragmented and atomized society into a single unit.
Overcoming millennia of strict societal organizational efforts is the exciting story. The observations and isolated instances of cultural coldness is not the exciting story. The exciting story is watching a government attempting to form a State while maintaining inherently contradictory principles and actions that run counter to a society's millennia old inclinations.
(I could go through this and edit and pick and choose to make changes, but it's written in one blast of highly caffeinated early morning extemporaneous rambling.)
Thanks muchly for the reading tip, I have ordered the book.
There are quite a lot of Chinese Australians, and they are notably polite people. Overseas Chinese generally are regularly mortified by the rudeness of mainland Chinese. So, there is something going on re:manners and civility.
The not-helping-in-public may have deeper roots, even though behaviour in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore is different: that may be down to the colonial influence.
The point about an atomised society and the Chinese state wanting it both ways is a powerful one. I discussed it a bit in this post, https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/in-the-shadow-of-the-state-2. The above post would have been better if I had included that. You have expressed the tension well.
It's funny you bring up mainland Chinese rudeness. My wife emigrated with her family from Hong Kong in the 90's and we married in the early 2000's. Asians we spent time with around Philly were the stereotypical type: very courteous, polite, maybe a little shady, but very nice to be around.
Now, living in a more expensive area 20+ years on, and the Asians are... not. Not openly rude in the sense of doing stuff that will get them punched, but entirely indifferent as to whether they are causing problems for others, in that self centered "why even wonder about that?" kind of way.
Spitballing here... The average Asian is subjected to similar...not the same, but similar and possibly more subtle...types of insults and humiliations other non-white citizens experience, which turns them off. I'm old enough to recall when I could still have a conversation with American Blacks, but over time that's gone away. They're conditioned to not liking or trusting White folks, for understandable reasons. Those Asians that are dismissive, might be working through social issues and don't particularly care about White folks feelings or concerns.
Second spitball... If they're mainlanders transplanted to America...it's nuts over here (in China). The sorts of close contact, tight spaces, and navigating extremely tight and congested conditions, both social and political, makes them insensitive to the average Americans need for buffer zones, big spaces, quiet, and uncongested operations. They very possibly not seeing what they're doing.
The evidence strongly suggests race relations were getting very much better, then the West started going through its own (mild, but inspired by the same ideas) cultural revolution while more Chinese who were downstream of the Cultural Revolution turned up and …
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that if you are dismissive of other people based on skin color, you are an asshole.
Further, the insults and humiliations of Asians in the previous century were certainly greater than they are now, so it seems unlikely that is the difference.
I have no data to support or deny the possibility. There is that thing where Asians were being discriminated against in Harvard admissions, which I wouldn't call a data point, but.... The reasoning was obfuscated into various ideas and projected traits, but...Chinese I know think it is racism.
Sure, but it is unclear how that applies to regular people just at the store or play ground. It isn't clear why adult Asian immigrants would have a grudge against all white people, or other Asians for that matter, over the Harvard thing. Honestly, if they did, it wouldn't really excuse their behavior, either.
Thanks. It was an in the moment improvisation on very complicated ideas in a state of over caffeination. The mainland is complicated. There were several highly publicized incidents in the not distant past where innocent bystanders trying to help were dragged into the situation as active participants and not as concerned citizens, and goofy laws tied them to the event for years, often ruining lives. I've even had my wife tell me to not get involved in some situations. Example...We were in Enshi, I witnessed a young woman get full on whacked by a car in a street crossing, I rushed in to help, and I was the only one. I started screaming at people to call an ambulance, and only by my hectoring did anyone else begin taking notice. It might have been because I was a foreigner; foreigners get special recognition in weird ways. Someone finally called, the ambulance arrived, things were ok, but the general disinterest by the many people around was unsettling.
Have you read both volumes of Decline of the West? It really is spectacular. Spengler acknowledges the whole thing is just a bombastic Germanic rant with nothing backing it but his own eye, but like Nietzsche that's the whole point.
It's greatest strength is the complete evisceration of the things we hold in the west to be objective and real (but are really just ridiculous abstractions from other cultural perspectives), and the way he links all our modern tripe with ideas long ago established in Gothic times.
His predictions have also been pretty accurate, which is really what is technically useful about comparative history.
I think the reason they aren't taken up in the academic mainstream is because they directly challenge the secular religion of the modern west; Progress. They have certainly been taken up outside the mainstream and in the halls of power. Henry Kissinger wrote a thesis on Spengler in college.
Yeah I get you, but if it is possible to make accurate predictions on this really zoomed out level, then not paying any attention to it misses a powerful tool, and this is really the point of analysis.
It's important to note Spenglers whole thing was to take aim at any sort of historical analysis that rests on causality. Because he pointed out that it is completely arbitrary on the behalf of the historian, they are slicing off a piece of time and excluding everything else. This tendency is all through our culture, our science with this experiments is the same idea, same with our jurisprudence.
This is an act of faith, that philosophically has little support outside of the historians assertion. He hammered this point all the time, that there can be no concrete theory of historical causality, and destiny is just as valid a proposition.
Therefore he did away with cause and effect and just went with a Goethe like analysis of comparison of Great Cultures/Urban civilisations, which he acknowledged is completely arbitrary but no more arbitrary than any other type of history.
The contingency of history is a thing, deeply connected to the contingency of democratic choice, which makes “proper direction of history” views inherently anti-democratic.
I much prefer scenario building, but if there are patterns, there is causation. The trouble is there are lots of dynamics all going on at once, and so we are back to the contingency of history.
Polities within a civilisation are likely to have similar strengths and weaknesses, but civilisations can be porous to so many influences, that further directs attention to lower order dynamics.
Yeah but go the next level up philosophically. Namely, the problem of time and it's directedness. Time as we experience it is irreversible, an unending decimal number that never repeats, so outside of abstract reasoning in the mind, causality can't be proven for or against destiny, and 'what ifs' only exist in our head. The future could be said to causing the present just as easily as the past is.
For our modern western rational culture that is completely based off Kantian thought (and our inherent cultural obsession with free will) this is anathema but it is an unconquerable problem. It just sort of gets ignored, but that was Spenglers point, you can't have sole claim to being reasonable and rational when your base assumption is an utter leap of faith.
Therefore all that matters regarding science, analysis etc is its technical usefulness in the real world, so if a system produces accurate predictions/results then it is 'correct' regardless of theoretical basis, and often theory is just a mask for deeper religious narratives that get clothed in secular drag.
The Carroll Quigley style of civilizations analysis wasn’t carried on because almost immediately after Quigley’s work the social sciences made taboo any kind of sweeping historical analysis and/or comparative cultural analysis. I think that’s because such analysis necessarily makes The West look good, and the social sciences new goal was to tear down Western Civilization. I think the world would be better off if the insights from Quigley’s Civilization analysis were taken more seriously. But I’m a big Carroll Quigley fan. I think Quigley was an improvement on Toynbee, providing more concrete definitions and mechanisms, and further analysis could have further improved the field.
Quigley’s main insight was that entrenched interests cause a stagnation that eventually leads to decline unless there is some sort of shake-up. Mancur Olson dove into this idea in much greater detail (The Rise and Decline of Nations). But even though one might consider Mancur Olson to be following up on the Quigley analysis, Olson could only cite Quigley in verbiage dripping with disdain because the social sciences had already decided Quigley was anathema.
I liked Quigley’s instrument v institution point, although his terminology is a lost cause, given how ‘institution’ has come to be used.
Quigley’s book was published in 1961, and a lot of that turn in the social sciences you mentioned happened somewhat later, varying depending on the discipline.
The question I have is what do you gain by abstracting beyond the level of individual polities? Similarly structured polities in proximity are likely to have similar problems somewhat in sync. But Lieberman in Strange Parallels pointed out that such can happen to polities in different civilisations who are unaware of each other.
Quigley taught this stuff in his course at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, aiming to give a foundational understanding of the world to future leaders. I’m not part of that generation, but his students speak very highly of the impression he left on them (most prominently, and interestingly, Bill Clinton mentioned him in his DNC acceptance speech). Culture is a central idea in Quigley’s analysis, and culture crosses political boundaries. Civilizations might make more sense in a sociological discussion than in a geopolitical one - but I take that back! A Quigley-style civilizations framework was very apparent in JD Vance’s address to Europe, bringing up questions like What are our shared values? If we are in this together, who are “we” and what are we in, together, exactly? What are we fighting for, culturally speaking? And once we figure that out, what are, ultimately, the cultural forces we are fighting against? These are questions Quigley tries to answer, and which can best be answered at a higher level of abstraction than political units. These are also questions of extreme importance today as our culture is seeming to fragment into many micro-cultures. What are we losing in this process?
Is some of that rudeness also existing in villages and not just more congested urban areas? Just how dense is the population and social interactions in the village realm?
Some of this also syncs with David P. Goldman's representation of China as a wild mix of languages and clans and groups who barely get along without an overarching central government to control them. Something of a Mafioso situation? Any validity to that viewpoint?
Is there any equivalent evidence about rudeness relating to the Indians of India, who presumably also have a lot of high density living spaces to maneuveur within?
"The problem is that civilisation is not a useful unit of analysis. ... unit of action."
Another one of your great connecting-of-dots that those of us with deficits in the humanities appreciate.
So we really do need to stop seeing the forest for the trees, and refocus on the trees. "Forest management" then becomes consideration of dealing with the underbrush, creating fire lanes, having suitable fire protection equipment and personnel available, analyzing (or analysing) the mix of species types, sizes, condition, etc.
But then I started to wonder about "mind" as the emergent result of 10^11 neurons and 10^15 synaptic connections. Is the mind also a "forest" or a "civilization" [aka civilisation]? Will we discover more about the mind from examining the collective subsets of neurons? Their interconnectedness. What sensory inputs they have received when, how, from whom? What chemistry aids or hinders its optimal performance? Or is the mind an entity that really is greater than the sum of its parts, aka an emergent entity?
From 1990 to 94, I did an undergraduate degree in economics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás, a very provincial and not exactly first-rate institution in central Brasil. Though communism was collapsing everywhere else, Marxist was still the LATEST THING there, and all the serious students (mostly female) made sure to copy it all down neatly in their notebooks. Did any those bright girls grow up to become hardcore commies? No. They mostly passed civil service exams and became career bureaucrats, or just got married.
I only read the first part(?), which seems accurate. Gerhard Lenski is the solution (or one of many) to these categorization schemes.
Developmental theorists such as Robert Kegan (and evolutionary psychologists like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke or sociobiologist E.O. Wilson) are others. Their developmental levels/stages do get close to being "orienting generalizations" (Ken Wilber) that are almost like the legacy categorization schemes, but are anchored in the specifics of evolution.
Here is some legacy Wilber, explaining that Marx was right about one important thing, but that "absolutism" of material causes and rational systems ("exteriors" in Wilber's jargon), to the exclusion of the "interiors" of meaning, is the big imperfection of Marx.
This is pretty good. My only comment would be in the analysis of Chinese civilization/culture/whatever you want to call it.
If you made these same observations about Chinese FAMILIES, it falls apart, or at least fragments into a much larger conversation. For a few (or more) millennia, Chinese society was organized around family, lineage, clan, village (which was usually clan), and then State, which most folks here have always had a tangled and troubled relationship with.
"Let the state be small and the people few: So that the people . . . fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances and, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them. So that the people . . . will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful, will be content with where they live and happy in their customs. Though adjoining states be within sight of one another and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.".....Daode jing (The Way and Its Power): a favorite passage of the founder of the Ming, the Hongwu emperor (reigned 1368–98)
If one starts with the basic unit of Chinese society, an entirely different view becomes clear. The State has always attempted to both atomize and isolate societal units, while also attempting to form it into a single coherent entity. The Chinese "word" for State is "Guo Jia" 国家...with 国=country and 家=family. "Country Family" IOW, there is an inherent contradiction in the basic cultural unit and the State's intentions.
If one viewed the family, lineage, or clan through the same lens as the micro-view Youtube videos, an entirely different picture emerges. You would see all energy and resources poured into helping and addressing the afflicted.
Until only a couple generations ago (and in many areas, a single generation) the country was still largely rural and formed into essentially autonomous villages, with entirely different governance structures than those imagined by the West. To begin understand those governance structures and the society that emerged from them, I recommend reading "From The Soil", Fei Xiaotong's groundbreaking sociological study of Chinese society. Mr. Fei was soundly berated by the CPC and took a lot of heat for having the audacity of describing society, which was considered the strict overview of the CPC. But, current sociologists and cultural observers still acknowledge his contributions. The idea did not die, which also runs contrary to CPC dictats.
The grand problem for the current government....and if anyone has studied and understands governments, "current" applies as all these structures are cyclical and in a state flux...excuse me, I digress...the problem of current government is attempting to mold this highly fragmented and atomized society into a single unit.
Overcoming millennia of strict societal organizational efforts is the exciting story. The observations and isolated instances of cultural coldness is not the exciting story. The exciting story is watching a government attempting to form a State while maintaining inherently contradictory principles and actions that run counter to a society's millennia old inclinations.
(I could go through this and edit and pick and choose to make changes, but it's written in one blast of highly caffeinated early morning extemporaneous rambling.)
Thanks muchly for the reading tip, I have ordered the book.
There are quite a lot of Chinese Australians, and they are notably polite people. Overseas Chinese generally are regularly mortified by the rudeness of mainland Chinese. So, there is something going on re:manners and civility.
The not-helping-in-public may have deeper roots, even though behaviour in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore is different: that may be down to the colonial influence.
The point about an atomised society and the Chinese state wanting it both ways is a powerful one. I discussed it a bit in this post, https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/in-the-shadow-of-the-state-2. The above post would have been better if I had included that. You have expressed the tension well.
It's funny you bring up mainland Chinese rudeness. My wife emigrated with her family from Hong Kong in the 90's and we married in the early 2000's. Asians we spent time with around Philly were the stereotypical type: very courteous, polite, maybe a little shady, but very nice to be around.
Now, living in a more expensive area 20+ years on, and the Asians are... not. Not openly rude in the sense of doing stuff that will get them punched, but entirely indifferent as to whether they are causing problems for others, in that self centered "why even wonder about that?" kind of way.
Spitballing here... The average Asian is subjected to similar...not the same, but similar and possibly more subtle...types of insults and humiliations other non-white citizens experience, which turns them off. I'm old enough to recall when I could still have a conversation with American Blacks, but over time that's gone away. They're conditioned to not liking or trusting White folks, for understandable reasons. Those Asians that are dismissive, might be working through social issues and don't particularly care about White folks feelings or concerns.
Second spitball... If they're mainlanders transplanted to America...it's nuts over here (in China). The sorts of close contact, tight spaces, and navigating extremely tight and congested conditions, both social and political, makes them insensitive to the average Americans need for buffer zones, big spaces, quiet, and uncongested operations. They very possibly not seeing what they're doing.
Or, maybe they're assholes. It's possible.
The evidence strongly suggests race relations were getting very much better, then the West started going through its own (mild, but inspired by the same ideas) cultural revolution while more Chinese who were downstream of the Cultural Revolution turned up and …
I am going to go out on a limb here and say that if you are dismissive of other people based on skin color, you are an asshole.
Further, the insults and humiliations of Asians in the previous century were certainly greater than they are now, so it seems unlikely that is the difference.
I have no data to support or deny the possibility. There is that thing where Asians were being discriminated against in Harvard admissions, which I wouldn't call a data point, but.... The reasoning was obfuscated into various ideas and projected traits, but...Chinese I know think it is racism.
Sure, but it is unclear how that applies to regular people just at the store or play ground. It isn't clear why adult Asian immigrants would have a grudge against all white people, or other Asians for that matter, over the Harvard thing. Honestly, if they did, it wouldn't really excuse their behavior, either.
Thanks. It was an in the moment improvisation on very complicated ideas in a state of over caffeination. The mainland is complicated. There were several highly publicized incidents in the not distant past where innocent bystanders trying to help were dragged into the situation as active participants and not as concerned citizens, and goofy laws tied them to the event for years, often ruining lives. I've even had my wife tell me to not get involved in some situations. Example...We were in Enshi, I witnessed a young woman get full on whacked by a car in a street crossing, I rushed in to help, and I was the only one. I started screaming at people to call an ambulance, and only by my hectoring did anyone else begin taking notice. It might have been because I was a foreigner; foreigners get special recognition in weird ways. Someone finally called, the ambulance arrived, things were ok, but the general disinterest by the many people around was unsettling.
Have you read both volumes of Decline of the West? It really is spectacular. Spengler acknowledges the whole thing is just a bombastic Germanic rant with nothing backing it but his own eye, but like Nietzsche that's the whole point.
It's greatest strength is the complete evisceration of the things we hold in the west to be objective and real (but are really just ridiculous abstractions from other cultural perspectives), and the way he links all our modern tripe with ideas long ago established in Gothic times.
His predictions have also been pretty accurate, which is really what is technically useful about comparative history.
Spengler is such an excellent writer, the delicious prose is well worth the effort, regardless of other considerations.
Successful prediction is always impressive. At worst, it suggests good intuition.
I haven’t read Spengler, or Toynbee. Not my sort of thing. Hence limiting myself to noting their framings were not taken up.
I think the reason they aren't taken up in the academic mainstream is because they directly challenge the secular religion of the modern west; Progress. They have certainly been taken up outside the mainstream and in the halls of power. Henry Kissinger wrote a thesis on Spengler in college.
Possibly. I still find civilisation not a very useful unit of analysis, rather than there is interactions of lower level agents.
Yeah I get you, but if it is possible to make accurate predictions on this really zoomed out level, then not paying any attention to it misses a powerful tool, and this is really the point of analysis.
It's important to note Spenglers whole thing was to take aim at any sort of historical analysis that rests on causality. Because he pointed out that it is completely arbitrary on the behalf of the historian, they are slicing off a piece of time and excluding everything else. This tendency is all through our culture, our science with this experiments is the same idea, same with our jurisprudence.
This is an act of faith, that philosophically has little support outside of the historians assertion. He hammered this point all the time, that there can be no concrete theory of historical causality, and destiny is just as valid a proposition.
Therefore he did away with cause and effect and just went with a Goethe like analysis of comparison of Great Cultures/Urban civilisations, which he acknowledged is completely arbitrary but no more arbitrary than any other type of history.
The contingency of history is a thing, deeply connected to the contingency of democratic choice, which makes “proper direction of history” views inherently anti-democratic.
I much prefer scenario building, but if there are patterns, there is causation. The trouble is there are lots of dynamics all going on at once, and so we are back to the contingency of history.
Polities within a civilisation are likely to have similar strengths and weaknesses, but civilisations can be porous to so many influences, that further directs attention to lower order dynamics.
Yeah but go the next level up philosophically. Namely, the problem of time and it's directedness. Time as we experience it is irreversible, an unending decimal number that never repeats, so outside of abstract reasoning in the mind, causality can't be proven for or against destiny, and 'what ifs' only exist in our head. The future could be said to causing the present just as easily as the past is.
For our modern western rational culture that is completely based off Kantian thought (and our inherent cultural obsession with free will) this is anathema but it is an unconquerable problem. It just sort of gets ignored, but that was Spenglers point, you can't have sole claim to being reasonable and rational when your base assumption is an utter leap of faith.
Therefore all that matters regarding science, analysis etc is its technical usefulness in the real world, so if a system produces accurate predictions/results then it is 'correct' regardless of theoretical basis, and often theory is just a mask for deeper religious narratives that get clothed in secular drag.
The Carroll Quigley style of civilizations analysis wasn’t carried on because almost immediately after Quigley’s work the social sciences made taboo any kind of sweeping historical analysis and/or comparative cultural analysis. I think that’s because such analysis necessarily makes The West look good, and the social sciences new goal was to tear down Western Civilization. I think the world would be better off if the insights from Quigley’s Civilization analysis were taken more seriously. But I’m a big Carroll Quigley fan. I think Quigley was an improvement on Toynbee, providing more concrete definitions and mechanisms, and further analysis could have further improved the field.
Quigley’s main insight was that entrenched interests cause a stagnation that eventually leads to decline unless there is some sort of shake-up. Mancur Olson dove into this idea in much greater detail (The Rise and Decline of Nations). But even though one might consider Mancur Olson to be following up on the Quigley analysis, Olson could only cite Quigley in verbiage dripping with disdain because the social sciences had already decided Quigley was anathema.
I take it back. Olson refers to Toynbee with disdain, and barely mentions Quigley, which I take to be a slight, given the similarity of the ideas.
I liked Quigley’s instrument v institution point, although his terminology is a lost cause, given how ‘institution’ has come to be used.
Quigley’s book was published in 1961, and a lot of that turn in the social sciences you mentioned happened somewhat later, varying depending on the discipline.
The question I have is what do you gain by abstracting beyond the level of individual polities? Similarly structured polities in proximity are likely to have similar problems somewhat in sync. But Lieberman in Strange Parallels pointed out that such can happen to polities in different civilisations who are unaware of each other.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/strange-parallels/0C2FAED1DB111C4094B37054B65DF39C
Quigley taught this stuff in his course at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, aiming to give a foundational understanding of the world to future leaders. I’m not part of that generation, but his students speak very highly of the impression he left on them (most prominently, and interestingly, Bill Clinton mentioned him in his DNC acceptance speech). Culture is a central idea in Quigley’s analysis, and culture crosses political boundaries. Civilizations might make more sense in a sociological discussion than in a geopolitical one - but I take that back! A Quigley-style civilizations framework was very apparent in JD Vance’s address to Europe, bringing up questions like What are our shared values? If we are in this together, who are “we” and what are we in, together, exactly? What are we fighting for, culturally speaking? And once we figure that out, what are, ultimately, the cultural forces we are fighting against? These are questions Quigley tries to answer, and which can best be answered at a higher level of abstraction than political units. These are also questions of extreme importance today as our culture is seeming to fragment into many micro-cultures. What are we losing in this process?
For our Chinese knowledgeable commenters:
Is some of that rudeness also existing in villages and not just more congested urban areas? Just how dense is the population and social interactions in the village realm?
Some of this also syncs with David P. Goldman's representation of China as a wild mix of languages and clans and groups who barely get along without an overarching central government to control them. Something of a Mafioso situation? Any validity to that viewpoint?
Is there any equivalent evidence about rudeness relating to the Indians of India, who presumably also have a lot of high density living spaces to maneuveur within?
"The problem is that civilisation is not a useful unit of analysis. ... unit of action."
Another one of your great connecting-of-dots that those of us with deficits in the humanities appreciate.
So we really do need to stop seeing the forest for the trees, and refocus on the trees. "Forest management" then becomes consideration of dealing with the underbrush, creating fire lanes, having suitable fire protection equipment and personnel available, analyzing (or analysing) the mix of species types, sizes, condition, etc.
But then I started to wonder about "mind" as the emergent result of 10^11 neurons and 10^15 synaptic connections. Is the mind also a "forest" or a "civilization" [aka civilisation]? Will we discover more about the mind from examining the collective subsets of neurons? Their interconnectedness. What sensory inputs they have received when, how, from whom? What chemistry aids or hinders its optimal performance? Or is the mind an entity that really is greater than the sum of its parts, aka an emergent entity?
Ah, but a mind does direct an agent.
Very informative.
From 1990 to 94, I did an undergraduate degree in economics from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Goiás, a very provincial and not exactly first-rate institution in central Brasil. Though communism was collapsing everywhere else, Marxist was still the LATEST THING there, and all the serious students (mostly female) made sure to copy it all down neatly in their notebooks. Did any those bright girls grow up to become hardcore commies? No. They mostly passed civil service exams and became career bureaucrats, or just got married.
This is great stuff. Keep it coming!
I only read the first part(?), which seems accurate. Gerhard Lenski is the solution (or one of many) to these categorization schemes.
Developmental theorists such as Robert Kegan (and evolutionary psychologists like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke or sociobiologist E.O. Wilson) are others. Their developmental levels/stages do get close to being "orienting generalizations" (Ken Wilber) that are almost like the legacy categorization schemes, but are anchored in the specifics of evolution.
Here is some legacy Wilber, explaining that Marx was right about one important thing, but that "absolutism" of material causes and rational systems ("exteriors" in Wilber's jargon), to the exclusion of the "interiors" of meaning, is the big imperfection of Marx.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060503044013/http://wilber.shambhala.com:80/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part3-1.cfm
"Excerpt A: An Integral Age at the Leading Edge
Part III. The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation (page 1)"
I will read those links with interest. I am reading the paper linked here which gives a very different origin story for East Asian patterns. https://davidsun.substack.com/p/the-origins-of-arcticism-theory