I’m definitely not a capitalist, and I think economic decline is inevitable, and a good thing.
I agree with a lot of that but I’ll just pick you up on this point…
Given that britain has invented 54% of everything in the world [according to the Japanese dept of trade and industry circa 2005], and 71% of everything in Japan, I’d suggest that as Japan is more advanced than the general world [because the averages with less developed nations included], then that suggests to me that innovation in the west is increasing. Not decreasing.
Does it matter?
If yes … why?
I think innovation is decreasing, I mean other than phones and computers, 1891-1917 was arguably a bigger leap technologically than 1991-2017.
It matters to people who want to understand where the world has been, and where it’s likely headed.
Also sometimes the future can be prepared for, and sometimes it can’t, it depends.
Let’s focus primarily on China for now, since it has the best chance of catching up with and even surpassing the west, of the E7.
China already has the 2nd biggest GDP in the world.
However its GDP per capita (person) is 78th in the world according to the IMF after factoring in their cost of living, so they have a lot of catching up to do.
Basically quantitatively they’re on top, but qualitatively they’re somewhere in the middle.
Let’s compare China to Japan and South Korea, since they’re its neighbors, and already match the west economically.
Japan had a decades long head start, as China’s economy was centralized, and while China’s economy is still probably more centralized than Japan’s, the government has since taken major steps to liberate it, free it up, resulting in China rapidly outpacing Japan’s sluggish growth.
It’s only a matter of time before China uses the profits it made from its menial jobs, as you put it, to invest in and develop more sophisticated ones.
It’s appetite for economic growth and material affluence is voracious.
They want the west has, they want to be number one at everything.
China was number one or two throughout much of history, even at times when Europe was in the dark ages and North America was 99%+ wilderness, it’s only in the last few centuries that they’ve happened to occupy a subordinate position.
China is roughly the same ethnicity/race as the Japanese, South Koreans, and exactly the same race/ethnicity as the people of Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and Singapore, so even from a biological/cultural standpoint, I don’t see why they can’t pull it off, barring some worldwide calamity like nuclear warfare, which’s also on the table. I suspect some of the other E7 will be able to catch up as well.
I’ll address the rest of your post another time.
Perhaps ‘civilization’ as a metric is misleading. History is clear … civilizations rise and fall … the fall being proportionate to the rise.
Masculine energy … as manifested in dominant civilizations … patriarchal societies … may be on a slow but sure decline.
If so … feminine energy is on the rise.
I’m not talking about men and women … rather the major characteristics … qualities … of men and women.
Feminine energy is predisposed to empathy, compassion, cooperation, sharing, caring … all necessary attributes for nurturing offspring.
On this basis … which civilization(s) in the world is most “feminine” … both historically and currently?
Eastern and middle eastern civilizations?
Your conception of feminine or masculine energy is just (and only) what you perceive to be the relevant traits in the culture you live in. The idea that a culture could somehow be feminine outside of it’s own conception of femininity is absurd. It would be like asking which of two dogs tastes more like chocolate. Sure, you can try to invent metrics by which to judge their taste but you will ultimately fail in making any headway due to yourself getting in the way of any meaningful analysis.
You can ask if a given culture is more comfortable for the women living there, that would make sense. But the idea of one culture being more feminine when femininity has to be defined within the concept of that same culture doesn’t make sense.
If anything, you should just be asking which cultures have demonstrated the qualities of empathy, compassion, and what not.
Another thing, China has far more resources to draw from than both Japan and South Korea combined, many times over.
It also has a much bigger population to draw from.
If the world keeps going like it is, I’m projecting and many people are projecting that China may very well surpass the US.
China is also homogeneous, racially, culturally, is that an asset?
Well with the exception of Tibetans, Turks and Mongols on its fringes, and a few others.
Difficult to say, I’m not especially conservative or liberal minded about that.
Homogeneous countries like Japan, South Korea and western Europe until recently have done very well for themselves, but on the other hand, Canada, the US and Australia have also done very well for themselves, but then until recently, most of North America and Australia’s immigration came from Europe, importing population groups from further abroad could prove problematic.
Different races and cultures have strengths and weaknesses, I think they can add and/or subtract form their host nation, some might be more conducive to their host nations development, where as others might be parasitical, or just a hindrance, incompatible.
As Mexicans become the new majority population in the US, especially in ‘Aztlan’, they might try to secede and join Mexico, or form their own country, and if Islamic terror continues to proliferate, then this could spell disaster for the US and western Europe, and no doubt China and others will be there to take advantage.
The one child policy in China that favored male children over female children has created a shortage of female singles available for marriage for generations to come. Already, 30 million bachelors, many are looking to Western women to become wives. The face of China is literally in the process of changing. A Western-looking China should be interesting.
All that being said, in my view, I don’t think China will ever be as innovative as the west is, or rather once was.
Althou there have been times when China has been more affluent or industrious than the west, it’s never been as innovative as we were during the latter half of the second millennium, nowhere near.
If China ends up equaling the west in innovation, it’ll mostly be because the west has slowed down, in terms of innovation and other things, not because China has sped up.
What the west represents in my mind is innovation, change, which is fraught with both risk, and reward.
China is learning from the west, first it adopted communism, or at least communism in theory, in practice it was really a totalitarian dictatorship, not even remotely close to communism, and now it has adopted consumer capitalism.
Ultimately thou I think the Chinese are a more conservative, traditionalist people, it’s just it’s been humiliated by western economic and technological superiority, and in the process temporarily forgotten its core Confucian and Chan values, which’re now in the process of being revived and reinvigorated.
They’ve been foolhardy as of late, instead they should be approaching the question of western dominance more cynically, pragmatically and skeptically, realizing there are things that work about our systems, and things that don’t, advantages and disadvantages, instead they’ve dived in head first with them, which’s been disastrous with ‘communism’ and I think in the long run with their modified form of capitalism too.
Eventually they’ll likely regain their sense of themselves, take some of the things about the west that make sense, for them, and discard the rest, and there’s a lot to discard, but for now, they’re bedazzled, bamboozled and bewitched, to their detriment, cause we don’t have it all figured out, not by a long shot, modernity is going to be a big, flash in the pan, in my view.
Yea I tend to think so.
I’m not sure if masculinity is declining, or if that’s a bad thing.
The masculine/feminine dichotomy hasn’t been very central to my thinking as of late, and I find it tends to be overly simplistic in practice.
Like as if every aspect of society or difference between societies could be reduced to masculinity/femininity.
I mean is there nothing it can’t encompass, are there no asexual or gender neutral characteristics?
It’s the philosophical equivalent of like French and Italians assigning sexuality and gender to inanimate objects - this table is masculine, that window is feminine… it’s kind of absurd.
Sometimes it has merit, but it’s overplayed.
It’s like people who try to make everything into a left/right thing.
Sometimes it helps to apply such terms, sometimes it’s meaningful, but often it hinders, obscuring their true identity.
Perhaps you could just as easily say that femininity is declining, women aren’t giving birth as much as they used to, and everything that went along with that, like nursing children, which is a large part of, if not the essence of what it means to be feminine, and they’re also working outside the house more than ever.
Althou they still wear makeup, they rarely wear dresses anymore, they’re tattooing themselves, working out, playing sports, and other traditionally masculine activities, in the west at least, but are men adopting traditionally feminine activities, are they wearing makeup, or dresses, ballet, knitting?
Hardly.
While you could say both sexes are becoming more androgynous lately, I think this is more true of females than males, and therefore, you could say there’s been more of a reduction of femininity than masculinity.
After all, feminism, especially first and second wave, tried to make women more like men, so they didn’t need them anymore, among many other things, but there was no equivalent movement that tried to make men more like women, MRA and MGTOW are nothing like feminism in those regards, I rarely, if ever hear them saying, men should stay home more, raise/rear children and perform domestic duties like cooking and cleaning while women work more and support them financially.
And why not, there’s a lot of benefits to such a lifestyle?
Working 9-5, 5 days a week ain’t easy.
Boys are still frowned upon for playing like girls, and while tomboys can still be given a hard time, I don’t think it’s as true to the same extent.
Patriarchy is definitely declining thou.
But what was patriarchy, was it a masculine institution, or rather, did it help define what it meant to be both masculine and feminine, assigning specific gender roles for both females and males, feminizing females and masculinity males, according to social norms, hyperfeminizing girls and hypermasculinizing boys?
When viewed that way, the dissolving of patriarchy was sort of the annihilation of both male and female gender roles, and so rather than feminizing society, you could say it’s desexualizing it.
And it makes sense to some extent that we would do that, because as man becomes more urbanized, both masculine and feminine instincts and abilities, as well their amplification and development by institutions like patriarchy, have become somewhat obsolete, and must be replaced with more artificial behaviors conducive to postindustrial, consumer capitalist society/values.
I find females have some empathy and compassion for people and things that’re perceived as weak, but those that’re perceived as strong, like some men, they don’t feel anything for, they just use them as a resource to exploit, and condemn or belittle them when they’re not willing to share their resources.
That’s a big subject, which civilizations are more masculine/feminine?
Unlike that other poster, I don’t think masculinity/femininity are entirely socially constructed, it depends.
I think it’s obvious there’s some biological basis for masculinity/femininity, but then culture comes along and attempts to amplify, redirect or repress these energies in various ways, and overlays them with things that aren’t masculine/feminine at all, but which’re believed to be, so it’s complicated, it’s objective and subjective, it’s nature and nurture, as always, but some characteristics are more rooted in the former or latter.
I don’t think there’s an easy answer to this question, like the west is masculine, in every respect, and the east feminine, that’s absurd.
There are some things about the west and east that have nothing to do with sexuality, and there are some things that do.
It’s never going to be black/white, one might be a little more feminine than the other overall, even by its own measure, like I read a book where a Chinaman compared east with west and himself concluded that the east was more feminine, more yin, and he was very, very prochinese, thou he did admit China had a lot to learn from the west, he thought that it must follow its own vision of things too.
Take a trait like innovation, first thing that came to mind, is it more masculine or feminine?
Normally we associate it with being masculine, is that culturally constructed, or biologically rooted notion?
Let’s just assume it’s objective for now.
That would make the west more masculine.
But then the west has all these things like political correctness, egalitarianism, democracy and so on we normally associate with femininity, where as places like the mid east, do not.
So I hope that you can see now it’s a huge subject.
The rightwing prides itself on being the party of tradition, conservatism, but if innovation is masculine, than wouldn’t that make tradition and conservatism feminine?
To whimsically assign an entire people a gender, a sex, without putting much needed thought into it, seems absurd to me, and this is coming from someone who, I wouldn’t say I’m very political correct, and I’m open to thinking about such things, but let’s put a little more thought to it, acknowledge the obvious limits to simplistic binaries like feminine/masculine, yin/yang, good/evil, etcetera.
Also, patriarchy declining (barely) isn’t causing less masculinity. It’s that our patriarchy defined masculinity and femininity poorly, and in a maladaptive way. The way we conceptualize gendered behavior is abhorrent. The end result makes men look like rutting murderers and women look like pregnant shriekers. The reality is that neither is even close to the truth, but patriarchy has created and sustained these perceptions.
Yet again … words are such a poor proxy for communication … seems the words masculine and feminine triggered an avalanche of words … none … or at least very few of which … are relevant to the suggestion I made.
I referred to “energy” … perhaps even “psychic energy” … not gender or human constructs around gender.
Perhaps I should have used the terms “Yin” and “Yang”.
Some time ago Trixie wrote … paraphrasing … “without the dominance of ‘yang’ energy we would still be shitting in the sand in Africa.”
I absolutely agree … it was … and largely still is … Yang energy … ergo: male aggression … that is driving humanity into the future.
Read the news … where is this dominant Yang energy taking humanity? There is only one possible outcome … self destruction.
The survival of the species requires a shift to Yin energy … looking back 100 years there is lots of empirical evidence suggesting an epoch shift is in play.
The more Yin civilizations will more easily adapt to this epoch change and as a result … if a leadership role is still required … it will likely happen by osmosis.
Name a Yin civilization and describe why it’s Yin.
Not so sure that’s a thing.
Using gender as a metaphor rarely works out. You can’t expect to use a word like femininity while avoiding the cultural context along with it.
China … the Chinese civilization remains intact after more than 5,000 years.
Yang civilizations seem fated to self destruct.