A population is always engaged in an ongoing discourse about what it is, what it values and what it should be. This can be seen in its rawest form on the editorial pages of tabloid newspapers, but it is implicit in the media, in the activities and rhetoric of politicians, artists and public commentators, in the aggregate spending habits of the population, in the places they go on holiday and the subjects they study at university.
The most important channel for this discourse is the news and opinion media, which choose and frame the issues of the day and develop and promote a population
2 thoughts on “G8: Populations and Discourse”
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I’ve been inspired reading your posts Morgue and the comments thereon around varieties of social discourse, their nature and ability to effect change. It’s difficult to know where to start. Perhaps by defining two terms that have emerged and appear to me as significantly influential. I would use structure as the “arrangement of and relations between the parts of something complex”; and culture as the “value and understanding of human activity”. From this perspective I would question how useful it is to conceive of them as mutually exclusive. Artists for example certainly employ organising, structuring principles in their work – whether conscious or unconscious – just as surely as political legislation is influenced by cultural values: abortion law or civil unions for same sex relationships for example. Certainly a society, culture included, is a complex multi-form entity dependent upon the “arrangement of and relations” among its constituent elements. This is not to say that culture is purely structural. The given environment is balanced by the free-form potential for change.
The same kind of faculty that may reveal culture as, at once, both actual and ideal may uplift social action by likewise revealing it not as activity of little consequence or even as ultimately evasive of the causes we try in this way to support, but as action that contains within it our idea for the future.
Particularly at this time, in this place – much of the Western world – the organisation of cultural life is productive of a profound alienation: from the natural world (which is to say the inner from the outer world), from the effects of our actions, and crucially from one another. This is a powerful formative influence upon our cultural place of being. I would suggest this amounts to an effective matrix for the birth of the individual but equally tends to the disintegration of community. In this context what makes social action of various forms a service to our collective life is the possibility that it offers for an actual experience of what we would give to those in need. To gather together out of compassion for others is to acknowledge our identity with them. In the developed world we have backed ourselves into a corner: via the use of all our various life enhancing modern technologies it has become increasingly difficult to ignore our shared humanity with those less materially fortunate than ourselves. When we congregate in this spirit we foster a reality that may overcome our abstract conceptions of ‘doing what is best for others’. How otherwise can individuals in our culture be expected to care for Africans and Indians in any meaningful way when our experience of community here at home is itself so tenuous?
In this each individual is crucial I think, because if the ideal of democracy is to become manifest and freedom a reality, choice must be based not upon moral imperative – something from ‘outside’ oneself – derived as it might be from religion, law, custom, or any form of peer pressure but on an individual experience of the worth of that choice. This act of knowing might then be recognised as a free act. This is a freedom worth sharing, a freedom that does not depend on any error of logic that would see liberty emerge from compulsion of any kind.
More than just the self-indulgence of those who have the material means to give time, energy, and money, this is the nurturing of a life, or a spirit if you like, that we take with us, collectively yes, but most importantly each one individually, as a living experience wherever we go – whether it be to Edinburgh, New York, Kabul, or Baghdad.
The Word can become manifest but this takes time to grow. Look it up in the dictionary, the word culture is derived from the Latin word colere: to inhabit or dwell, to revere, to honour, to take care of, to cultivate. Yes, we have ideals and a vision of what might be – and we also have time and place and an inevitable responsibility to what is – to be here, to honour what is, and to care for it. As individuals we are rooted in society but our idea of what that means, or should mean, makes it possible to outgrow that society and take part in its transformation. Both the ideal and the actual may yet unite in us, perhaps it is the quintessential human act to draw cosmos from the flux – body and spirit – but as we grow together I am encouraged to have patience. Otherwise who knows what may be overlooked in the rush to be somewhere else. When you march than, “tread softly because you tread on our dreams.”
jew b over edubcated
[editor morgue sez – I almost deleted this comment. but then i didn’t. so far.]