Friendship and Dependency
Dependency
A few days into the move, we stopped in Chicago, and I had a long talk with Jen's friend Jon about the nature of dependency relationships in politics. I forwarded the thesis that culture is largely the accumulation of "wisdom" regarding the nature of the environment in which a group of people are living. It is "wisdom" because, of course, it is not a reasoned accumulation - it is often the mad thrashing of a group of people attempting to solve a problem. As time progresses, however, one expects useless culture to fade.
But how do I define "useless?" What are the crucial elements of a relationship between an environment and its people? What defines the "use" of a culture?
The answer must be something unchanging - something eternal. Something such that, when it changes, the cultural forms related to it no longer make any sense. The obvious answer is dependency. The nature of a society's needs will determine the forms of its culture.
A culture which must grow its crops has a dependence on the earth. Their culture will reflect this. They may have "irrational" culture such as rain-dances and ritual sacrifices, but they will also surely have some measure of knowledge reflecting the proper preparation of the earth for agriculture, perhaps burning forests to fertilize the soil for next year's crop.
Here I am using "culture" in a very general sense; this theory would be worthless if it only applied to "traditional"/old cultures - cultures of extremes. It applies to the United States equally well. The United States has an infrastructure to obtain and distribute food to its people. To ask "whose" interest this is in is wrong-headed. Instead, we should think about the historical evolution of the United State's food distribution system and the complex interplay between that system, the people of the U.S., the government, etc. This complicated mess is the whole of the pertinent "culture" in the United States. It is advanced and complicated, it has very different structural properties, but really it is the same thing as a "rain dance."
It is my belief that this sort of analysis can also explain a lot of the degradation of culture which has occured throughout the last century and which continues to occur today. Many societies lack dependency relationships which would act as the backbone for their culture. There are cities in Northern African with populations in the millions which subsist entirely on foreign aid (I can't find the link to the NYT article where I read about this). We expect such cities to lack culture reflecting the cultivation of food, maintainance of infrastructure, etc. A culture without need for X will not have infrastructure to produce X as time -> infinity.
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Friendship
An interesting question is whether these abstractions can be applied to understand relationships between individuals; friendship, animosity, etc.
Trivially, yes, since two people together is just a two-person society.
I reject the hypothesis that people have a fundamental "social need." I think that people have needs which can basically only be fulfilled by other people, but this is:
1.) Subtely different
2.) Not necessarily fundamental
What are the natures of your dependencies? To what extent do these shape your friendships? Who are you dependent on and what dynamics does this dependence create?
A few days into the move, we stopped in Chicago, and I had a long talk with Jen's friend Jon about the nature of dependency relationships in politics. I forwarded the thesis that culture is largely the accumulation of "wisdom" regarding the nature of the environment in which a group of people are living. It is "wisdom" because, of course, it is not a reasoned accumulation - it is often the mad thrashing of a group of people attempting to solve a problem. As time progresses, however, one expects useless culture to fade.
But how do I define "useless?" What are the crucial elements of a relationship between an environment and its people? What defines the "use" of a culture?
The answer must be something unchanging - something eternal. Something such that, when it changes, the cultural forms related to it no longer make any sense. The obvious answer is dependency. The nature of a society's needs will determine the forms of its culture.
A culture which must grow its crops has a dependence on the earth. Their culture will reflect this. They may have "irrational" culture such as rain-dances and ritual sacrifices, but they will also surely have some measure of knowledge reflecting the proper preparation of the earth for agriculture, perhaps burning forests to fertilize the soil for next year's crop.
Here I am using "culture" in a very general sense; this theory would be worthless if it only applied to "traditional"/old cultures - cultures of extremes. It applies to the United States equally well. The United States has an infrastructure to obtain and distribute food to its people. To ask "whose" interest this is in is wrong-headed. Instead, we should think about the historical evolution of the United State's food distribution system and the complex interplay between that system, the people of the U.S., the government, etc. This complicated mess is the whole of the pertinent "culture" in the United States. It is advanced and complicated, it has very different structural properties, but really it is the same thing as a "rain dance."
It is my belief that this sort of analysis can also explain a lot of the degradation of culture which has occured throughout the last century and which continues to occur today. Many societies lack dependency relationships which would act as the backbone for their culture. There are cities in Northern African with populations in the millions which subsist entirely on foreign aid (I can't find the link to the NYT article where I read about this). We expect such cities to lack culture reflecting the cultivation of food, maintainance of infrastructure, etc. A culture without need for X will not have infrastructure to produce X as time -> infinity.
---
Friendship
An interesting question is whether these abstractions can be applied to understand relationships between individuals; friendship, animosity, etc.
Trivially, yes, since two people together is just a two-person society.
I reject the hypothesis that people have a fundamental "social need." I think that people have needs which can basically only be fulfilled by other people, but this is:
1.) Subtely different
2.) Not necessarily fundamental
What are the natures of your dependencies? To what extent do these shape your friendships? Who are you dependent on and what dynamics does this dependence create?