As the globe is heating, the environment unravels and “natural” disasters have become the new normal, millions of refugees are seeking new homes, the Russia – Ukraine war is dragging on, and Israel is about to revenge atrocities committed by Hamas by “eradicating” many thousands of people, the US is preparing for war with China as well as Russia, ethnic and regional conflicts fester around the world, while many millions suffer from poverty, inequality, homelessness, and preventable diseases, it should be apparent that humanity is not making much progress in coming to terms with its enduring challenges. If anything, people are becoming more divided, politics is becoming increasingly polarised, and governments are drifting rather than steering, as they have no clue how to stem the flood of converging crises hitting societies and the world, let alone what to do to address their sources.
One of the main characteristics of collapsing societies, like people at the end of their tether, is that they continue to do the same thing(s) in the hope that it will solve their problems by some kind of miracle. Governments and businesses continue to promote economic growth as the miracle cure for their and the world’s problems. They keep on exploiting and ruining the environment in the belief that this will generate enough money and motivation to solve environmental problems. They keep on producing new chemical compounds, approving untested technologies, and selling products that are supposed to improve people’s health and well-being, but that cause ill health and addiction. They keep on exploiting people with the promise that this will lift them out of poverty and make them rich. They keep on suppressing freedom, discontent and critique by labelling people criminals or terrorists, locking them up or killing them. And last but not least, they keep entertaining the people to distract them from their misery.
Keep spinning in a rut, but it won’t get you out. These mantras and repetitive behaviours may fool people into believing that governments know what they are doing, but they do not even recognise, let alone address, the enduring problems facing societies and the world. Instead, they dig humanity into deeper and deeper ruts. The problems, discontent, tensions, and conflicts are getting bigger. One of the sad things about humanity is that it seems incapable of learning from its mistakes.
One of the biggest mistakes made by human groups and societies is engaging in culture wars. Culture wars are not just about “wokeness” or transgenderism, although these do add to the divisiveness in many societies. Culture should be seen as a much broader thing. It comprises almost everything people believe, do, and continue to do as group members. Culture gives a group and its members a sense of identity, meaning, and purpose. People acquire culture from the societies in which they grow up, but throughout their lives, they may also be or become members of a variety of sub-cultures, such as a youth culture, a business culture, a professional culture, a gang culture, a regional culture, or an ethnic culture, among many others.
Culture is a thorny matter. Almost by definition, cultures rule people in or out. Originally based on the imperatives of survival in a local or regional biophysical environment, kinship groups developed cultures that served the basic material needs of the group members. They adopted strict rules and norms, allocating distinct roles legitimised on the grounds of necessity, nature, and the spirits or gods thought to rule their world. Those who did not adhere to their culture were regarded as aliens or sub-humans that could be killed or enslaved at will. By contrast, they thought of themselves as the only “real” humans at the centre of the world.
While, over time, the groups and societies in which people lived and on which they depended for their survival increased in size, their propensity to rule people in or out remained. Ethnic divisions, based on culture and perpetuated by histories of conflict, atrocities, exploitation, and discrimination, continue to plague many countries in all parts of the world. While national cultures and nationalism can be regarded as steps towards integrating diverse cultures into newly shared (or forged) cultures, these, too, have been highly divisive and lethal in their applications, both domestically and internationally. If anything, globalisation has provoked a backlash against the idea that national, indigenous, regional and local cultures are no longer important.
However, rather than reviving nationalism, tribalism, and ethnocentrism, humanity must overcome these divisions to address its enormous political, economic, social, and environmental challenges. What is needed, instead, is forging an eco-cosmopolitan culture that emphasises the common values and interests of all humans on this planet. This does not imply the abolition of existing cultures and cultural diversity. Given the basic human need for identity and belonging, the human propensity to categorise people in or out (which may be hard-wired), and the existing socio-cultural reality, cultural divisions are likely to persist. The best we can hope for is that a growing number of people start realising and accepting that humanity urgently needs to forge a common eco-cosmopolitan culture. This may sound idealistic and unrealistic. But reality demands that humanity stop its culture wars. If we acknowledge that cultures are not God-given but have been forged by powerful people, and increasingly so by manipulating them by highly insidious means, we can get a sharper idea of how this can be done.