What does a better future mean? #01 - A formula for understanding civilization

A formula for understanding Civilization

Series : What does a better future mean? #01

There are people working at creating a better future for all. What does that mean? A new series tries to explore the elements that make up such a future. And although everybody has a different idea about what the expression 'a better future' entails, it deserves a closer look from a philosophical point of view, i.e. something that makes it easier to envision.

In spite of all our differences, most people would agree on the following. 

A better future means an improved civilization. It means that the people are safer, healthier of body and mind, smarter, richer, and happier.

Starting with Geert Hofstede’s findings on cultural dimensions, we define culture as mental software or the unwritten rules of the social game. According to Hofstede, culture consists of values and practices. Practices are the rituals, the role models (called “heroes’ by Hofstede), and the symbols that the particular culture observes.  

Civilization is a broader concept than culture. A civilization is characterized by culture, technology¹, and the visible way the civilization expresses itself, which we will call ‘form’. So we get the formula:

Civilization = culture(s) + technologies + forms.

The Western civilization has many cultures and uses different technologies and has a myriad of forms. 

For instance, the Norwegian culture differs greatly from the cultures in the USA, Russia or Peru. These cultures have different values even though they say they subscribe to the same values like The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This means they deal in a different way with problems like the proliferation of street drugs, the conundrum of crime & punishment, the freedom of the people to express themselves, the way they conceive of what a good government would be, and so on. Yet, the differences are not so large that they can be said to form a different civilization. Other civilizations have totally different ideas, values and concepts of humanity and the world. See the Far Eastern civilization, black African civilization and the Arabian - Middle Eastern civilization. Recently, two huge wars have been fought to keep the Western values in place: 1792-1815 and 1914 - 1945. So, we must conclude that these values are essential to the Western civilization and have huge significance.

In the modern world, with its proliferation of universal technologies of transportation and communication, one tends to overlook how different civilizations have been, and often still are, in the field of technologies. These technologies generally are adaptations to local circumstances. In wooded, fertile areas, people develop technologies that differ greatly from those in arid, infertile areas. 

Forms relate to forms of government rituals as well as the visual elements. Hofstede relates the form of government to culture but it is more explicatory to put it under form. 

However, to understand a civilization and to be able to transform it into something better or something of a higher order, one also needs to take into account the politics and contexts of a civilization. Political aims of a civilization evolve from lessons learned in the past and the coincidental circumstances the civilization finds itself in with regards to geography, availability of resources, neighboring and competing civilizations, and how it conceives its position in time. It is the context in which a nation has to survive. Taking this context into account is called “situational awareness” but we prefer the better term contextual awareness.

For short, we use the word actuality to denote the various conditions a civilization finds itself in 'in the now', i.e. in present time. So the actuality of a civilization in any given moment of time can be described by the following formula:

Actuality = civilization + politics + contextual awareness.

A nation’s governmental institutions and the quality of these institutions comprise one of the actualities. For instance, when Britannia ruled the waves and controlled 25% of all landmass of this planet, by the end of the 19^th century, the various overseas dominions were managed from a dedicated house. There was an India House, Canada House and so on. That was what one might call 'an actual form'. Today, those institutions that were so important in the 19^th century, have become irrelevant.

To improve a society one has to start with knowledge of the Actuality. When media and government pour out incessant lies and distortions of facts, and these information flows are also tampered with by one or more hacking foreign nations and other special interests, an assessment of what the Actuality really is, is becoming increasingly difficult. This means there will be only a short window to make the future go right for the population and the planet. As it is now, it looks like the future will only be pretty and nice for a very limited number of people who form special interests. The people at large do not want that but are manipulated 100% of the time by these special interests and so agree in one way or another. It is part of their civilization to do so.

17 April 2018