Yes, I appreciate your argument. It was running through my mind constantly even as I was writing about our history. Nevertheless, I would maintain my view, though I won't argue further because it really needs discussion and research that would take a lifetime to do. As I've mentioned on other occasions, I believe that there is a significant "immigrant effect" by which immigrants, and particularly the second generation of them, lose a great deal of the "memes" (and inhibitions) of their former society. Unless parents are assiduous in maintaining former customs within the family then there is scarcely any further reminder of the customs that would have saturated the children of immigrants daily in their former cultures had they stayed there. To a very considerable extent, they acquire a quite new set of memes even though it may be exiguous compared with the former one. (I don't much like Richard Dawkins' concept of memes, 'cos I think it's a get-out of some very considerable problems when considering reductionist interpretations of genes as he does [never mind labelling them as "selfish"!]. Nevertheless, it 's a useful term in some contexts.)
I cannot really comment on Canada. Despite the thousands of words exchanged on this list with, mainly Canadians, I don't know the country and still cannot get into your mind-set. But because the American literature is so much greater in volume (and I think that American literature has been vastly better than the English for the past 50 years) I think I understand Americans a little (but only a little) better. However, despite the fact that America has absorbed the cream of English and European scientists and scholars for the past 70 years, I still regard the country as a whole as rather simplistic*. Too many Republican politicians, such as Bush and Cheney, are crude and quasi-criminal in my humble opinion, and too many Democrats are naive -- reminding me of the earnest Fabian socialists of the 1920s in this country.
(*I don't think that America has yet acquired any sort of culture worth the name [apart from the original indigenous one which is fine for those who like it] that compares with, say, the English, or the French, or the German, or the Nordic, or even the Russian and certainly not the Indian, Japanese, Korean or Chinese. Furthermore [prompted by thoughts engendered last night when replying to Lawry], it is almost certain in my opinion that America will split in due course, initially from the ongoing Hispanic invasion of California and its inevitable devolution, but also from other fissures which I can glimpse only very dimly at this stage. This is not so much because of any particular fault of America but because the concept of the modern nation-state, importantly moulded by the artillery regiment and the railway networks of the 19th century, has now reached the end of its competence. We're now into an entirely different world of laterality and specialisation rather than simple territoriality and "power" politics. [When the oil gives out the present sort of politics will be dead and gone. The future will rest with competing intellectuality in exploiting solar power and production technologies based on genetics.] But this is by the way.)
Keith Hudson
At 16:45 17/09/2003 -0400, you wrote:
I'm in maroon this time.
Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Ed Weick
- Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003 12:42 PM
- Subject: This sceptred compost heap (was Re: [Futurework] Education
- Ed,
- Thanks for this. I've read three different summaries of this same OECD report this morning!
- I've just come back from a dogwalk and still dwelling on what I wrote after sending you my previous posting. What was occurring to me is that the reason for a number of the arguments we have is that our societies are much more different than we might imagine -- or at least I might imagine anyway. Time and again, I describe things going on here and I get the impression from some of your slightly nonchalant responses sometimes that you might be thinking that I am exaggerating. I also get the impression that you live in a much more laid back -- indeed much happier and less stressed -- society than here. Hitherto, I've regarded the difference as a personality one. However, during the dogwalk -- and I hope you don't think I'm being patronising here -- I think our society is more complex than yours because we have so many layers of history. Please don't think I'm trying to show off -- but consider. We were building quite complex stone buildings at the tip of Scotland and in the south of England before the pyramids were built. By 1,000BC we had probably the most complex bronze technology in the world (apart from China's), using tin from Cornwall and copper from north Wales, with, correspondingly, a very advanced mining technology (scores of tin mines stretching for miles under the sea bed in Cornwall and over 50 miles of recently discovered tunnels in north Wales from that date -- made with bone and stone tools), and with significant manufacturing areas somewhere in between (not yet discovered) to actually make the bronzes (of different blends for different purposes) and then trading the products over thousands of miles from the Baltic through to the Mediterranean. Then we've been invaded by the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Vikings and Danes, and the Normans with their advanced feudal system followed by the landowning classes. We were at the back-end of the Mediterranean Renaissance but one of the first into long-distance trading with Asia and big trading companies, the first into the Western Scientific Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, and the first into the computer revolution. We are the third/fourth largest exporting country in the world -- not of products (we're mined out of almost everything we ever had by way of resources), but of a variety of services. In short, we probably have the most mature job and social structure of anywhere in the world. We live by our wits. We may not have the sheer mass, momentum or technological products that the Americans have got but I think we lead the world in the acquisition of problems, strains and stresses from all this historical/technological development. We're a well-rotted compost heap, showing extremes of anything that can be discussed in terms of job structure and society. In addition, we're also geographically small enough to have started the most comprehensive welfare, educational, social services, health and transport services in the world and now we're the furthest advanced in showing that they're breaking down -- that the welfare society is absolutely cram full of problems and we're showing them all in abundance, so much so that even a Labour government is trying to privatise as much as it can get away with (albeit in more cunning ways that Thatcher did). The only other country which has had such a complex history as ours, running through the whole gamut of every type of economic and technological development is China. I cannot think of any other with such a varied experience and with so many historical residues which are still fermenting away.
- A couple of points, Keith. One is that, for most Canadians, your history is also our history. Whenever I've been to Europe, I've felt quite at home because my people shared in the building of your ancient civilizations and the monuments they left behind just as your people did. When we were in Ireland a couple of years ago, we visited a famine burial ground in the far west of the country. My wife's and daughter's ancestors could have been among the famine victims buried there. We visited Knouth and Newgrange which could also have been their ancestral burial grounds. Then in County Carlow, we visited the gravesite of my wife's multi-great grandmother, who was buried there in 1799. We also visited Vinegar Hill in Wexford, where a multi-great grandfather was killed. But it doesn't end there. Both the multi-great grandmother and grandfather (different families) were British landowners who had likely migrated from Somerset. I think you get my point. Your history is also our history. However, it goes well beyond that. Our institutions, our laws and indeed our democratic processes were inherited from you. They were modified to suit our purposes, but they differ only in detail and degree.
- The other point is that I cannot see our society as being less complex than yours. With perhaps the exception of some Tibetan monks living in the most isolated of monasteries, we all share the world and it is not a simple world. Like England, we too have comprehensive health, education and social services that are in various stages of growing, maintaining a stability or declining. The socialist ideals of 19th Century Europe caught on here and flourished into a society that has tried its very best to provide good services to its citizens. Margaret Thatcher's neo-conservative ideals also caught on here so that one lot of politicians is trying to take apart what another lot built up. We are in a continuous process of reappraising our health, education and social services, and coming to any real conclusion about what they should be like and who they should serve is still a distant dream and will probably remain so.
- I don't think we will ever really know whether we are a mature society or not. I would suggest that it really doesn't depend much on history, but on how we are able to handle our problems in the here and now. You are suggesting that England has a difficult time in coping with the provision of its various social services. You also seem to suggest that Canada may have less of a problem. Does that make Canada a more mature society than England? Perhaps, but I really don't think so.
- I'm very probably over-egging the pudding (once again without wishing to be patronising in any way at all) but, in comparison, Canada's (and America's) social, economic, historical, cultural problems are somewhat simpler than ours. I'm not suggesting in any way that you are personally naive, but I think that your problems can be stated (and solved) in much more simplistic terms than could be done here. However, I believe that many of the trends and problems here in England that I am writing about will come to you, too, in due course -- because we are much further on in what I believe to be the decline of the industrial revolution.
- I've dealt with this in the foregoing. I can't for one moment think that any country's problems are more simple than any other's. Each country has its unique characteristics, but to classify these as more simple or more complex is a bit of a stretch. Speaking of compost heaps, we are currently into an election here in Ontario and will probably be into a national election soon.
- Ed
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
