Monday, June 19, 2023
Reading The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington at the same time as doing other things – including plotting “The Stone and the Stream” – is a unique experience, necessarily, because everything we ingest mingles with what else we have ingested in the past and at the same moment. So how could any two people read it or anything in the same way, obtain the same end result?
I have been talking about the approaching new civilization. Huntington makes a very good case that there won’t be any one civilization, but a continuation of these existing, contending, ones. But maybe the passage of another century or two will indeed pull them together or anyway give them a common tinge they don’t have at present. But my written thoughts never express the subtlety of my unspoken ones.
So, guys, at 5:25 a.m., anything to say on the subject?
Anyone’s input is one drop in the bucket; nevertheless the bucket gets filled by just such drops, no other way. There is no “collective” input, there is no “individual” input. There is only the individual as part of the whole, or the whole as represented by the individual. The logical splitting of this unit is the cause of many difficulties in understanding. It is as if you were to be required to take sides with only your left arm and not the right. You will obtain in that way a one-sided view, not a view in true stereo.
What you do as an individual is in fact done also as a community. What a community does is done only by many individuals acting together. This is almost too basic to bother to say, except it is so often forgotten. So, the emerging world culture will indeed be funneled through subsidiary civilizations. How else could it be? But it is precisely the altering ratios of interpenetration that is at issue.
I think you mean to say, the new emerging civilization that will filter down through regional civilizations will be more open to mixed influences, less hermetically sealed, than, say, the West’s attempt to be a universal solvent.
Hegemony is not charisma.
Fairly cryptic. More?
Why should Western dress be required of Eastern businessmen? Why should Western sports or values or religions be required of Eastern societies, or Northern of Southern? However, there is nothing to prevent Southern or Eastern societies from being attracted to Northern or Western values and institutions. Only, it will be their choice; it will not come as a bundled package.
Certainly.
You say certainly, but consider how a bundled package is to be deconstructed and selectively absorbed or adapted or adopted or rejected. Won’t there be uncounted ways that this is done? Won’t it be done individually more than as groups, more by perceived special need than by someone’s persuasion?
Blue jeans, jazz, rock music, Western film. None of these except the latter perhaps were pushed on anybody. Rather, they were powerful attractors. Could you or anyone predetermine what will attract whom, why, when, in combination with what else? Can you or anyone restrict people’s being attracted to a thing for reasons they themselves probably don’t know?
So, Elvis, the Beatles, any phenomenally popular icon, exerting charisma in some undefined and indefinable way, will unpredictably change what the cultural landscape looks like.
It is hard to state obvious connections without seeming to say nothing. Nobody planned pop culture, no matter how many influences sought to do so. Nobody predicted Dylan, nor manufactured his image, nor fashioned the emotional ties that bound him to his time and place, and yet transcended them. Who could have predicted “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite”? It would have required predicting the Beatles, predicting Bob Dylan, predicting the interaction between them, predicting all the jazz and rock and roll and country and protest songs that went into their individual mixes. Who could have done that? Who could predict the effect of the Beatles, or of Dylan, or of the Beatles and Dylan, or of the Beatles and Dylan and their rivals and admirers and imitators?
They were not produced ex nihilo, nor by formula, nor by any form of inevitability. Could the Zeitgeist predict “Blowin’ in the Wind”? Or Sgt. Pepper? If so, could it predict “Idiot Wind” or “Let It Be”? Yet, again, they were not created by parthenogenesis, nor by an explosion in a chemistry lab. They were “expressing themselves.” They were robins singing their morning song in the trees. Yes, they worked at fashioning what came to them, but “what came to them” is precisely and only what they could fashion. Bob Dylan could not draw on experiences as a Buddhist monk. John Lennon could not create from experience as a college professor or farm worker or seamstress. They were Western, not Eastern, Northern not Southern, urban not rural, secular not religious, etc., etc., but piling up what they were or were not tells you nothing about why these individual-communities produced expressions that moved millions of people. It wasn’t merely that they were talented robins. It is that they were able to sing the robins’ song. Something that they were shaped and enabled what they did, and what they did interacted in millions of ways then and now and in the future with people who will never be enumerated or recognized, but count.
Ravi Shankar, the same way. Mahavishnu John McLaughlin, same way. The list goes on forever and in all directions. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Salinger, all robins singing their songs, flavoring the morning. Can you call this individual? Can you call it collective? Yes, you can call it anything you like, but perhaps it is more important to see beyond labels than it is to enlist in the ranks of one or another label, just to feel one belongs.
So, civilizations –
As in all things, the more ways you see it, the more facets appear.
Thanks as always.