260715: Hills of the Homogenocene
What we cannot lose is our sense of improvability. Meliorism is adaptive, if nothing else.
What we might discard, the mountaineering parable implies, is the notion of a single vector or endzone of progress. We ought not, climbing our own hill, assume that heading towards its peak is the only means of gaining elevation. There is no reason to believe that ours has the highest peak in the range, just because we are presently highest among the climbers.
This is one of the stronger cases for diversity, and a true multiculturalism. It is made more difficult in the Homogenocene, in the age of the Columbian Exchange, when global network technologies and transportation logistics conspire to abolish distance. Something there is that loves a wall; and it is not capitalism.
The Chinese firewall, oft derided, is in fact the great insurance policy of the human race. Should they manage to rebase their culture onto a truly Eastern basis, all the better.
The indigenous tribes of today's United States are scattered and decimated. They struggle to retain their myths and language. And yet modern Americans continue to look to them for other ways of being. Their influence on both the American Revolution, and the Sixties Counterculture, is substantial. So too was the influence of Hindu and Buddhist practices on America in the 19th and 20th centuries. The happiness of impoverished, underdeveloped Africa remains an insistent rebuke to a Protestant work ethic. "Modernism"—as is apparent to any who have witnessed Picasso's collection of masks—was the invention of hunter-gatherers.
The States ought remain democracy's laboratory. And the global tendency to ape American politics and pop culture wins this country short-term influence. But it destroys us in the long run, as we lose all outer sources of vitality and vision.