Dermezel
1st March 2010, 12:05
Consider the article from Scientific American entitled measuring modernity (to find it I suggest looking at "files of public interest to share" on google. ) The result will be at the top of the search, and the relevant article will be near the second entitled Measuring Modernity. To quote a summary:
Modernization, the subject of intense scrutiny at least since the time of Marx and Nietzsche, has seldom been measured systematically. One of the most useful attempts to do so has been done by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
In their approach, being modern implies not only a lack of traditional beliefs but also a need for free expression. To measure these attributes, they use responses from the World Values Survey, an international collaborative study based on extensive questioning of people in scores of countries making up more than 80 percent of the world's population. The first of these dimensions-the traditional versus secularrational scale in the chart-derives from attitudes toward religion, respect for authority, and patriotism. The second dimension-survival versus self-expression-derives from questions about physical security, trust in other people, gender roles, and personal happiness. Self-expression, almost by definition, implies freedom from extreme need.There are other trends in sociological literature which shows how society is evolving towards a state of greater cultural modernity. Indeed, at 15,000 GDP per capita a significant shift takes place in cultural attitudes by which society places a greater emphasis on liberal/expressive needs as opposed to security needs. Call this the idealization of culture if you will.
To explain this further from a Dialectical perspective, I will quote Christopher Caudwell:
This is the theory of dialectical materialism which is itself the outcome of a dialectical movement. A philosophy is generated in society and is therefore the outcome of a social movement. The early mechanical materialism of Descartes and Hobbes, strengthened by Condillac and d’Holbach and accepted as the official methodology of physics, produced its opposite, idealism, and this reached its climax with absolute idealism. Absolute idealism is the apex of bourgeois philosophy, and all succeeding philosophies are either pedestrian recapitulations of earlier philosophies or simple eclecticism. There has been no noteworthy bourgeois philosopher since Hegel. For these two opposing bourgeois philosophies, by their very contradictions, gave rise to their synthesis, dialectical materialism. This was the outcome of classical bourgeois philosophy. It synthesised these elements not by a rigid formalism but by proceeding beyond philosophy, by becoming a sociology and exhibiting how both mechanical materialism and objective idealism were generated, as a social product, in social action upon reality through economic production.
This first dialectic movement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie gives rise to Elizabethan tragedy, to the exploration of the world, to Spanish and Tudor monarchy, to Galileo, to the splendid collation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally to Newtonism and Cartesianism. The discovery of the ‘law of gravity’, of analytical geometry, of the farthest limits of the world, marks the crescendo of the bourgeois explosion into the environment. The bourgeois has now seized the environment as tool. The mechanical materialistic philosophy of Hobbes, Condillac, D’Holbach, and the like expresses the limit of the vast social movement which has already, in reaching the limit, clearly revealed its opposite. This is the apogee (1750) of the first stage of capitalism.
For from the environment, dominated as a tool in the extraverted, exploring period of social relations, we now pass to the bourgeois himself in the introverted analytical period. All the bourgeois acts of will at first flow into the environment, and are there realised. This is not in his opinion a determining relation, for the bourgeois is, by his initial revolution, free in himself. Because therefore this is not a mutually determining relation, because he knows as it were by simple inspection, he has no two-way connexion with his environment. He has no guarantee that the environment known by him has an independent existence. If it determined his knowing, even as his knowing determined it, this would perforce constitute independent existence on its part. But the bourgeois denies this! Hence Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Comte, and neo-positivism. In this second stage of bourgeois economy we have the birth of idealism. The environment either does not exist, or is unknowable. Mind is primary.
This development is the result of industrial capitalism, of the terrific power over its environment manifested by the machine. This makes it seem as if the mind is everything, and the environment nothing. It makes mind seem the sole active force generating all quality.
Society can only seem to be the success of individual will in an economy in which men act as if their sole actions are undetermined and primary. The bourgeois producing for the market, free from all social control and restraint, believes that in doing what seems most to fulfil his will to profit, he is free. The market, the regulator of bourgeois economy, stands to him as environment, and shields him from reality.
In fact his actions are determined by the market and the market itself is determined by the completely blind actions of thousands of men like himself, but the law of its determinism is unknown to him. There is no control, no awareness of the relations between individual producers which determine slump and boom. Hence the bourgeois regards the success of society in changing the environment, not as the outcome of social laws, but as the outcome of free individual mind, as the success of personal conation. When he is sufficiently insulated from the environment by the development of his class, this becomes idealism.
Such an idealistic philosophy is necessarily the philosophy of a ruling class, with whom the environment seems to obey their free will as will. In other words, as man first begins to confront natural forces, as did the bourgeoisie when they were still social revolutionaries, a mechanistic, security minded philosophy is taken. After nature, or the social forces are mastered, this transforms into an idealism.
Now here, I will digress from Caudwell by recognizing matter of degree. The proletariat, of course, cannot become overly idealistic with respect to their general beliefs so long as they engaged at the points of productions.
However one must bare in mind, that Marx's process of capital accumulation, and the deteriorating value of labor, works on relative as opposed to absolute terms. The standard of living may increase for any given laborer overall even as the relative value of such labor diminishes.
Hence at a certain point, the proletariat themselves can become more idealistic in their attitudes and preferences. This is the process of cultural modernization that signifies the difference between corporatist states like the US, and welfare states like Northern Europe.
So the concern is, how will the process of modernization and capital accumulation interact? Can modernization reverse private capital accumulation? Or will private capital accumulation reverse modernization? Will they run parallel without any conflict (already I see this as questionable with Republican/Corporate alliances with Fundamentalists) ? Or are there other plausible consequences given these two contradictory trends?
Modernization, the subject of intense scrutiny at least since the time of Marx and Nietzsche, has seldom been measured systematically. One of the most useful attempts to do so has been done by political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
In their approach, being modern implies not only a lack of traditional beliefs but also a need for free expression. To measure these attributes, they use responses from the World Values Survey, an international collaborative study based on extensive questioning of people in scores of countries making up more than 80 percent of the world's population. The first of these dimensions-the traditional versus secularrational scale in the chart-derives from attitudes toward religion, respect for authority, and patriotism. The second dimension-survival versus self-expression-derives from questions about physical security, trust in other people, gender roles, and personal happiness. Self-expression, almost by definition, implies freedom from extreme need.There are other trends in sociological literature which shows how society is evolving towards a state of greater cultural modernity. Indeed, at 15,000 GDP per capita a significant shift takes place in cultural attitudes by which society places a greater emphasis on liberal/expressive needs as opposed to security needs. Call this the idealization of culture if you will.
To explain this further from a Dialectical perspective, I will quote Christopher Caudwell:
This is the theory of dialectical materialism which is itself the outcome of a dialectical movement. A philosophy is generated in society and is therefore the outcome of a social movement. The early mechanical materialism of Descartes and Hobbes, strengthened by Condillac and d’Holbach and accepted as the official methodology of physics, produced its opposite, idealism, and this reached its climax with absolute idealism. Absolute idealism is the apex of bourgeois philosophy, and all succeeding philosophies are either pedestrian recapitulations of earlier philosophies or simple eclecticism. There has been no noteworthy bourgeois philosopher since Hegel. For these two opposing bourgeois philosophies, by their very contradictions, gave rise to their synthesis, dialectical materialism. This was the outcome of classical bourgeois philosophy. It synthesised these elements not by a rigid formalism but by proceeding beyond philosophy, by becoming a sociology and exhibiting how both mechanical materialism and objective idealism were generated, as a social product, in social action upon reality through economic production.
This first dialectic movement of the revolutionary bourgeoisie gives rise to Elizabethan tragedy, to the exploration of the world, to Spanish and Tudor monarchy, to Galileo, to the splendid collation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally to Newtonism and Cartesianism. The discovery of the ‘law of gravity’, of analytical geometry, of the farthest limits of the world, marks the crescendo of the bourgeois explosion into the environment. The bourgeois has now seized the environment as tool. The mechanical materialistic philosophy of Hobbes, Condillac, D’Holbach, and the like expresses the limit of the vast social movement which has already, in reaching the limit, clearly revealed its opposite. This is the apogee (1750) of the first stage of capitalism.
For from the environment, dominated as a tool in the extraverted, exploring period of social relations, we now pass to the bourgeois himself in the introverted analytical period. All the bourgeois acts of will at first flow into the environment, and are there realised. This is not in his opinion a determining relation, for the bourgeois is, by his initial revolution, free in himself. Because therefore this is not a mutually determining relation, because he knows as it were by simple inspection, he has no two-way connexion with his environment. He has no guarantee that the environment known by him has an independent existence. If it determined his knowing, even as his knowing determined it, this would perforce constitute independent existence on its part. But the bourgeois denies this! Hence Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Comte, and neo-positivism. In this second stage of bourgeois economy we have the birth of idealism. The environment either does not exist, or is unknowable. Mind is primary.
This development is the result of industrial capitalism, of the terrific power over its environment manifested by the machine. This makes it seem as if the mind is everything, and the environment nothing. It makes mind seem the sole active force generating all quality.
Society can only seem to be the success of individual will in an economy in which men act as if their sole actions are undetermined and primary. The bourgeois producing for the market, free from all social control and restraint, believes that in doing what seems most to fulfil his will to profit, he is free. The market, the regulator of bourgeois economy, stands to him as environment, and shields him from reality.
In fact his actions are determined by the market and the market itself is determined by the completely blind actions of thousands of men like himself, but the law of its determinism is unknown to him. There is no control, no awareness of the relations between individual producers which determine slump and boom. Hence the bourgeois regards the success of society in changing the environment, not as the outcome of social laws, but as the outcome of free individual mind, as the success of personal conation. When he is sufficiently insulated from the environment by the development of his class, this becomes idealism.
Such an idealistic philosophy is necessarily the philosophy of a ruling class, with whom the environment seems to obey their free will as will. In other words, as man first begins to confront natural forces, as did the bourgeoisie when they were still social revolutionaries, a mechanistic, security minded philosophy is taken. After nature, or the social forces are mastered, this transforms into an idealism.
Now here, I will digress from Caudwell by recognizing matter of degree. The proletariat, of course, cannot become overly idealistic with respect to their general beliefs so long as they engaged at the points of productions.
However one must bare in mind, that Marx's process of capital accumulation, and the deteriorating value of labor, works on relative as opposed to absolute terms. The standard of living may increase for any given laborer overall even as the relative value of such labor diminishes.
Hence at a certain point, the proletariat themselves can become more idealistic in their attitudes and preferences. This is the process of cultural modernization that signifies the difference between corporatist states like the US, and welfare states like Northern Europe.
So the concern is, how will the process of modernization and capital accumulation interact? Can modernization reverse private capital accumulation? Or will private capital accumulation reverse modernization? Will they run parallel without any conflict (already I see this as questionable with Republican/Corporate alliances with Fundamentalists) ? Or are there other plausible consequences given these two contradictory trends?