Conversation

“Balance in the universe” concepts (karma, what goes up must come down, what goes around comes around, Golden Rule) are authoritarian high modernism in culture and myth-making. The universe does have balancey things going on but they aren’t THAT crude. Takes artifice to force it
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These ideas predate modernism so are you saying high modernism embraces them? But authoritarian high modernist states reject many of these cyclic ideas; consider the thousand year Reich, the end of term limits, etc. they sure don’t Golden Rule
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My understanding of high modernism is that it is sited specifically in history, rising in the 1950s. You seem to be saying that AHM tendencies are a consistent part of the postagricultural human psyche: pyramid builders, Chinese dynastys, Roman roads. (Sapiens would agree.)
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The initially referenced folk homilies and maxims are examples of “common understanding of social life” which predate the era Scott associates with HM. So I’m puzzled by the assertion that these particular principles can be said to serve an “eternal” AHM.
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I’m not conflating, I’m explicitly and deliberately connecting and positing an underlying human tendency that expresses itself through any kind of agency. I just think it’s a lot more well-defined than you do. It’s a narrow neurotype.
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They are not just folk homilies. Most have a history of institutional or traditional power behind them. Karma for instance is invoked in justification for specific models of monarchy and the caste system. The golden rule has the power of Christianity behind it.
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Could we call that tendency Utopianism? Does Ehrenfeld’s Arrogance of Humanism add anything to this discussion? Maybe Zen Buddhists would argue that the ability to verbalize _any_ abstract principles to govern human interaction lies at the root of the Fall from Eden.
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Utopianism is an effect not the cause. The cause I think is a personality type perhaps correlated to a neurotype. AHM is in the mind/way of seeing (like a state) that does not require an actual state to manifest. Just any sort of power over others.