How can we know what the world is really like?
We often hear fairly frank opinions about how things ‘really’ are. We probably make these kinds of claims ourselves from time to time: ‘the fact is…’, ‘that’s just the way it is…’; ‘you know what it’s like…’
But how do we know what we think we know? And what makes us so sure that our assumptions are right?
There’s an interesting working paper on the culture of political blogs over at Crooked Timber.
Some highlights and discussion: Continue reading Political blogs – the curious case of the missing centre
Most of the dominant analyses of society allow for a straight choice between one of only two conditions. A clear example is political preference, the dichotomy between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ or between left and right. But the Four cultures approach explored on this website proposes that there are four, not two basic ways of organising society (but there aren’t any more than that). It claims that when we think in terms of only two ways of organising society, we are missing out on the other two, and then our understanding as well as our freedom of action suffers for it.
Since this post is being composed on Dr Seuss’s birthday, I’ll use an appropriate example: Green Eggs and Ham. Continue reading The Four Cultures – No Way! Oh go on then…
As I write this on the train home, my neighbour is watching Star Wars: A New Hope on his portable DVD player. The bleeps and moans of R2D2 and Chewbacca come through clearly on his earphones. Thirty two years after its release, the movie and its myth-making are evidently still going strong. But what is it that gives this particular story its staying power?
I think it works partly because it recognises the existence of the Four Cultures and the endless conflicts and settlements between them.
Here’s how it works:
Marketing, whether of a product or an idea, can be overt or it can be covert.
In the former everyone can see what’s happening and can willingly consent to it. The latter, though can become out and out manipulation. Mostly, there’s a big grey area in between. Continue reading The Four Cultures of Marketing Ethics
As a genre, sci-fi is par excellence concerned with culture. What would it be like to visit an alien world? How would its inhabitants operate, and how would they differ from us?
In a way it’s a kind of theoretical anthropology. Think of Ursula Le Guin’s inquiry into a culture of hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness, or of Iain M. Banks’s series of novels in which he explores the political permutations of a culture that has abolished scarcity – a culture provocatively named ‘the Culture’. Continue reading The Four Cultures of Science Fiction
Imagine a village nestled in a valley below a large dam.
One morning the villagers look up from their houses to see very clearly that the dam has suddenly burst and a huge quantity of flood water is incontrovertibly rushing down the valley towards the defenceless settlement.
It has all happened so fast there is no way of stopping it. And no-one is doubting the reality of the predicament: the village is about to be entirely consumed by the raging flood.
So far, so certain. The facts are there to be seen by all. So, given this, why doesn’t everyone do the same thing? Surely the best course of action is obvious.
The theory of Four Cultures suggests that even when the facts are clearly known, there are four main ways people interpret their environment. Continue reading The Dam Bursts
Nick Naylor: Right there, looking into Joey’s eyes, it all came back in a rush. Why I do what I do. Defending the defenseless, protecting the disenfranchised corporations that have been abandoned by their very own consumers: the logger, the sweatshop foreman, the oil driller, the land mine developer, the baby seal poacher…
Polly Bailey: Baby seal poacher?
Bobby Jay Bliss: Even *I* think that’s kind of cruel.— Thank You For Smoking (2005)
Grid-group cultural theory proposes that there’s a constant and endless argument going on about ‘the facts of the matter’. We look at the evidence that suits our cultural biases – moreover we create the evidence to fit our take on the world. Continue reading The Dark Side of Cultural Theory
Four Cultures 