Dear Rog,
The question in this thread is:
What are the relevant entities to evaluate the relative
performance of alternative social patterns of value: national
societies or the global society?
Its relevance is:
To the extent that terrorism is a result of low performance of a
social pattern of value, (part of) the
solution for terrorism lies in better performance. We can't
develop or agree on a solution before we agree on the relevant
pattern that does or doesn't perform sufficiently and the scale
on which it 'performs', national or global?
We agreed on measuring performance in terms of social quality
with wealth as only one of its indicators. According to you
'social quality is primarily created rather than redistributed'
(29/10 15:16 -0500). If I understood you correctly, you hold
that some societies/social patterns are better at creating social
quality than others. Creating more social quality than elsewhere
is no factor in bringing about international terrorism. Not
relative success (of the victims) brings about terrorism, but
relative failure to adopt successful patterns of value in the
societies in which international terrorism roots.
In your 12/1 13:47 -0500 posting you miss (or implicitly offer an
alternative to) my 9/1 23:17 +0100 equation of social quality
with social status. Social quality is to me (and to Pirsig if I
quoted him rightly) ESSENTIALLY relative and internal to a
society. If some societies are better at creating social quality
than others, that implies the existence of a more global society.
I tried to describe in earlier posts social patterns of value
that operate on a global scale (with the Dutch and the Baltic in
the 16th century as example) that simultaneously bring about
social quality in one place and destroy it or hold it back in
other places. I suggested that such global patterns of value have
(historically) even been essential to the creation of social
quality in those societies that now are best at it. A conclusion
from this would be that creating more social quality than
elsewhere can very well be a factor in bringing about
international terrorism.
Social quality (of national societies) holds global society
together and makes it develop because
low-status societies strive for higher status by emulating and
copying characteristics of high-status societies and because
high-status societies strive to justify their status by promoting
not only national interests, but also global interests (as they
see them...). This is not a conflict-free pattern of values
though. There are alternative measures of status associated with
alternative (would-be or actual) global or would-be-global
societies that are threatened by it. Communism was one, a variant
of Islamism is a new one.
Mind you: a national society is not necessarily member of only
one of those global societies! For every alternative (potential)
global society you can find groups in almost any national society
that are striving to make their national society (or larger
groups of people in that society) part of that global society
(pattern of values). If national societies are dominated or
controlled by a particular group of proponents of one of those
global societies, the competition between such alternative
societies takes the form of (cold or warm) war. If not, it may
take the form of for instance civil war or international
terrorism.
I think you start erring in your 12/1 13:47 -0500 posting when
you write in the first paragraph: 'status is a dynamic driver
toward more social quality'. According to me (and Pirsig) status
(or 'fame and fortune') IS social quality. Status is a dynamic
driver towards ... Dynamic Quality which can't be measured and
can't be used to measure relative performance of national
societies.
The things you mention as 'potential benefits delivered through
social quality' may or may not be indicators of Dynamic Quality
depending on the story that is created to legitimize the creation
or preservation of a particular global society. From an
environmentalist or an islamist point of view some of the things
you mention are rather degenerate...
You write 'People and nations strive for status and power and
though any relative gain comes only at the cost of relative
losses, at an absolute level, quality marches forward.'
The only quality that can be said to march forward at an absolute
level in a MoQ-based system of ideas is Dynamic Quality. This is
not correlated with wealth.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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