12 Modern Delusions that must be challenged. #4

No.4. The world is divided into incomparable moral blocs, or civilisations.

This view has been aptly termed (by Ernest Gellner) as 'liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals' But a set of common values is indeed shared across the world from democracy and human rights to the defence of national sovereignty and belief in the benefits of economic development. The implantation of these values is disputed in all countries, but not the values themselves. Most states in the world whatever their cultural or religious character, have the signed the universal United Nations declarations on human rights, starting with the 1948 universal declaration.

My Reply:
This one goes quite deep. Because the fact is, the universal commonalities/sympathies of humankind can mainly be traced to our shared biological heritage and the formative effect that this has on our cultural and technological evolution. Every person needs to squat to shit. Unexpectedly familiar patterns often occur as artificial systems evolve (which are the only ones we can observe evolving, hence the confusion that leads many to accept the Creationist argument). So the fact that there are similarities between disparate cultural groups could have as much to do with quirks of random socio-economic & cultural evolution as with universality.

If you strip away similitude of need and the form of living, the wants and functions of living seem to diverge quite sharply. Who wants to live in peace? Not everyone. Who wants power? Not everyone. Who wants assurance of a (better) afterlife? Not everyone. Who wants everyone to subscribe to their beliefs? Not everyone.

We could start to look at this delusion in terms of teleonomies*. A genus or species operates on a genetic teleonomy, so that each individual member is driven by the actualisation of the gene. This gives us reproductive imperatives, the drive to survive, and is essentially the same for all members of a species. At the other end of the scale, there is the " teleonomy of the self" which describes the self-organising principle that we get from having a conciousness. This allows thinking beings to diverge from their genetic teleonomy by saying that "Yes I am hungry now, but I won't eat because: that magazine tells me not to/that poor person needs the food more/I can't afford food beer". Teleonomy of the self is a pretty interesting area of study cos it leads into the question of why we think, and why we think in terms of quality and aesthetics.
In the middle, there is culture. The individual is born into an environment (in terms of subjective experience) that is shaped in large part by a cultural teleonomy - how we behave toward each other in order to prolong co-existance. This teleonomy is an emergent phenomenon and most of what we know about its development is that form of educated guesswork that we call evolutionary psychology.

*All these teleonomic categories are also the categories of information transmission (some would even say storage) and learning in biological organisms.

What's the point of all this talk of teleonomies? I suppose it's just to point out how little of our inbuilt 'control software' is actually shared among people of seperate cultures and backgrounds. In his Leviathan, Hobbes posited that tyranny of the state was the only logical large-scale social contract that would be stable - if people didn't have the threat of repercussions that is inherent in law, there would be only chaos: "the war of all against all".