Bill, after your talk on the culture war at the Lincoln Day Dinner in Lewiston I thought the excerpt below from a Face Book post on Culture might be of interest. The full Post is much longer and discusses how culture is the mechanism for discovering ultimate truth and morality and how truth and good are inseparable. Cheers.
I now believe culture is the mechanism that manages the risk to society as new ideas are introduced and tried. Let me provide an example. Suppose a farmer had a different way of planting crops and consistently had extremely high yields. In an effort to help his neighbors he placed his method of farming on Facebook and his post goes viral worldwide and 80% of the farmers in the world changed their practices to match this farmer. Then imagine that it turned out this farmer’s methods only worked on his local soil and crop yields worldwide drop by 70% and 100s of millions of people starve as a result. Now imagine this farmer doesn’t make his Facebook post and just tells a few neighbors about his methods. These neighbors try it and it works and they tell a few neighbors farther away who try it, but as the soil makeup changes, the crops do poorly to the point where farmers outside of the local area won’t even give it a try. In this scenario, a few farmers may have a bad year, but millions do not starve. I think this example is analogous to how culture operates. Culture is supposed to change slowly to reduce the risk as different ideas are tried and the good ideas are promoted and bad ideas are thrown out. The popularity of stories, music, selection of heroes and the retelling of legends slowly separate good ideas from bad. Those ideas which are good and help the people who implement them will be repeated and heralded, where the bad ideas fall by the wayside. I might even go so far as to say those ideas which are good are pointing society and the individuals within toward ultimate truth.
I am convinced that most things political can be analyzed through the lens of “Individualism” vs “Collectivism”, and that Individualism is akin to liberty, and Collectivism is akin to totalitarianism and is evil. This analysis of culture can also be viewed through this same lens since the totalitarianism that comes along with collectivism can compel changes to the culture extremely rapidly increasing the risk that bad ideas will be widely adopted quickly maximizing their harm to society. The history of the 20th century is filled with these examples leading to the deaths of 100s of millions. Continuing with the farming theme, collectivist farms in Russia where forced to adopt state dictated farming practices with the result of millions starving to death because of mass crop failures. At the same time, the USA under the Individual Liberty model mechanized farming and developed farming practices which increased yields while dramatically reducing the labor involved to produce and transport crops to market. No doubt there were bad ideas that were tried and failed, but the farming culture weeded out these bad ideas before they were tried on a massive scale. I would argue, based on the theme of this post, our western focus on Individual Liberty allowed and even fostered the creation of new ideas and the culture provided a mechanism that promoted the good ideas and discarded the bad ones. Also, I would argue that because this paradigm of Individual Liberty promoted what is good it pointed us toward the true way societies should operate.