I did not say enough in an earlier blog about the nature of modernity.
Modernity is the introduction of commerce in a society that has already seen a breakdown in its tribal structure. Putting commerce on top of the tribal structure means that the tribal family systems will slowly disappear. That disappearance of family structure had already appeared in places like Australia and the United States.
What Australia, Israel, Holland, much of Scandinavia and the United States have in common is what I call modernity 1.0. Most other countries have a more traditional tribal -family structure as well as class barriers. There are many countries that are tribal with an overlay of modernity 1.0
We 1.0 countries are slowly seen the emergence of modernity 2.0.
Commerce is becoming more important more comforting and more pervasive in our societies. More and more people are part of the commercial world and spend more time there. In the commercial world meritocracy is of paramount importance and that requires a high level of honesty, constant reliable evaluations of productivity and complete rejection of familial loyalty (called nepotism.)
The commercial world is more and more reflected in our daily lives where we have fewer and fewer families and fewer members of our families. We also have fewer friends who are based on our personal experience and history. Increasingly, because of meritocracy, we're making friends and partners based on merit… on their ability to help us or to make use of us in helping them. I call these pseudo friendships: ‘instrumental relationships’.
Because we must live in a diverse environment in order to support genuine meritocracy, we are surrounded by people whose values, religions, opinions and private behavior are unacceptable to us. As a consequence we now censor all of our conversation and communication in such a way as to make it inoffensive to others. We work with Sunnis, Taiwanese and Mormons. We learned not to discuss any issues, political or moral, that will in any way offend our coworkers. We call this politically correct but in fact it is simply modernity 2.0.
All of these changes in our lives are the consequence of expanding our commercial world and making it more productive.
We don't yet have a political worldview that I would call pro-commerce. Neither political party is close to being for or against commerce. The Republican party doesn’t come close to having 50% of a pro-commerce platform or 5% anti-commerce and the Democratic Party does not even come close to a 65% true anti-commerce platform.
More than anything, we have no foreign-policy that understands that the commercial world is at war with the tribal values that are dominant on the planet.
We have yet to develop domestic policies and values that could be called pro-commerce.
We have not even begun thinking about how the commercial world can operate in a largely tribal global environment.
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The three comments below by D. Boxenhorn, Peter Everett and Scott are relevant and important.