David -
I think that is a good example... at least for me.
I have struggled with this duality all of my life... having a
natural curiosity about other places/things/people and that innate
"fear of difference or unknown", I have had an almost morbid
fascination with playing up against "the Other". And I admit to
avoiding clicques (mostly in High School) and groups (professional
and recreational organizations) because while I might distrust or
even fear some of the things the groups do, I always felt the
"magnification" of those feelings that they offered.
Similar to Marx's (Groucho) idea that "I would belong any club
that would admit the likes of me", I felt that I didn't NEED or
want to have those feelings reinforced by being amongst others who
felt too much like me and I *really* didn't trust the
near-codification of some of those feelings that seemed to come
with "groupness".
I'm looking forward to Glen's elaboration but I think you hit at least one aspect of it on the head here!
- Steve
all humans, probably all animals, are innately xenophobic, we are all afraid of the "other." This is nature. But, fear of the black man, or the woman, or whatever, comes about only when our context, the collective / the culture gives definition to the xenophobic "other."
absent the collective, no individual would be racist or misogynist, but they would be afraid.
davew
On Mon, Nov 14, 2016, at 01:20 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Glen -
Not to be argumentative, but:
Yes, the racist attributes of the system map to the individual's myopia, their inability to extrapolate to the consequences of their own actions. But at the system layer, the attribute is racism. At the individual layer, the attributes are not racism. Myopia (and other types of ignorance) at the individual layer can generate all sorts of systemic effects. If such gen-phen mappings were always bijections, then there would be no "complex systems".It sounds as if you are entirely dissociating individual racist (or misogynist or... ) bigotry from the collective?
I know you to have some fairly eclectic ideas about individual and collective human behaviour/motivation/self-awareness, so I'm trying to wrap my head around what you are trying to say here rather than deny or discount or disagree with it.
Perhaps one could postulate that many if not all human "sins" are emergent properties of collectives and that individuals, raised out of the context of an already corrupted group would not have those properties. Adam and Eve before expulsion from the garden of Eden? It is as if you are suggesting that many (or all?) individuals remain in some kind of state of Grace, marred only by their myopic (and other types of) ignorance, magnified quantitatively or transformed qualitatively into the kind "sinful" behaviour we see in group activities? I can buy SOME of that, but have a hard time not believing that there *are* truly bad actors, individuals who have, through whatever process of arriving (nature or nurture, genetic/disease/trauma-induced insanity), exhibit truly, deeply madly abhorrent if not actually evil (how do you measure that?) behaviour?
Again, not to belabor it, I know you to have some very *useful* (to me) alternative perspectives on things, I'm hoping my questions here provoke you to illuminate me more.
- Steve
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
| Free forum by Nabble | Edit this page |