My undergraduate degree was in anthropology; what intrigued me about that
discipline was precisely the kind of questions that shiv has been asking in
this thread. (Disclaimer: It has been a long time since I was in college, so my
memory is not entirely to be trusted. Take what follows with whatever amount of
salt seems appropriate.)
The freshman year introductory course ("Anthropology 101") concerned itself
with defining what we mean by the word "culture". The professor used the
Socratic method, asking us questions, dissecting our first attempts until we
arrived at a definition that is at the heart of cultural anthropology, and that
is, (approximately): Culture is the set of shared conceptual models that allow
members of a community to communicate efficiently and work cooperatively.
Any able-bodied human is presented with more information than he or she can
possibly absorb or digest. Some norms are necessary for deciding which
information is to be "taken in" and processed, and which information is to be
ignored -- literally not even noticed. Rubrics, heuristics, evolve that
automatically prune and interpret incoming data. People who share the same
rubrics are in the same cultural group. If you were to drop me, for example,
into a Silkmeet in Bangalore, there are any number of things that most of you
would notice to which I would be absolutely oblivious. A song might come on the
radio that has all kinds of resonances for you-all, but none whatsoever for me.
So to with clothing, spoken language ( the choice of which language to speak,
the accent in which that language is spoken, etc, etc) -- all this would go
over my head. I apologize for belaboring this point, but I'm trying to
emphasize the idea of "culture" as an *information theoretic" concept.
I found this idea so intriguing that I decided declare a "major" in
Anthropology.
Many case studies in anthropology look at what happens when peoples with wildly
different cultures interact, as happened often when Europeans sailed all over
the world in the "age of discovery". What we found is that cultures are very
flexible, but they all have breaking points. For example, I seem to remember
the case when there was a society whose orderly conduct was based upon a
pattern of public rituals (i.e. a religion) related to stone axes. These very
useful tools were rare, closely guarded, objects of veneration. And then the
Europeans showed up, bearing crates of iron hatchets with which to barter. You
can guess what happened. The society completely broke down. Life literally had
no meaning anymore for the stone-axe people. They became lethargic, depressed,
unable to function. This pattern occurs again and again when cultures bump into
each other. So as a consequence, much of cultural anthropology amounts to
studying "how societies across the globe have absorbed and adopted technology
or have rejected it."
As to the question of whether novels in general or SF novels in particular have
any utility in this domain, let me hazard a few observations.
I am a novelist; the books I've written are usually considered to be of the
"SF" genre. They all deal with, in one way or another, my preoccupation with
these questions of technology & how it affects how we conceive of ourselves as
human, moral agents with free will (the question of whether free will is
actually an illusion is but one of the assumptions books like mine explore).
The one central conceit that I keep coming back to -- I seem unable to stop
myself -- is technopotheosis: the creation of new "gods" from fusion of
biological and digital technologies.
I believe that the Story is a nearly universal tool for the transmission of
culture. In modern, Western (or Wester-influenced) societies, the novel is a
particular kind of story, with certain conventions. People use novels (among
other things) as tools that change their readers' world-models
("weltanschauungs") [1] in a way to allow them to process questions of
technological change. Thus, for example, both (Moby Dick) and (War and Peace)
concern themselves at some level with how societies deal with rapid
technological change.
I've used the following quotation as epigraph for two of my novels:
Thus it is clear that the human race has at best a very limited capacity for
solving even straightforward social problems. How then is it going to solve the
far more difficult and subtle problem of reconciling freedom with technology?
Technology presents clear-cut material advantages, whereas freedom is an
abstraction that means different things to different people, and its loss is
easily obscured by propaganda and fancy talk
The author is Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
Anyway I've rambled on far too long so I'll stop here. Thanks for an
interesting discussion, as always.
jrs
On Sep 10, 2014, at 1:15 AM, SS wrote:
> Human psychology does not change rapidly - but the environment (as in
> "way of life", not as in "ecology") changes with technological change.
> The rate at which the environment (way of life) changes has had a
> bearing on human history and how societies across the globe have
> absorbed and adopted technology or have rejected it.
