aiming for common norms

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Aiming for common norms

Mankind consists of societies. Over the millenia, myriads of different societies gradually appeared and vanished, in a permanently changing pattern of scenarios. Recent technical developments dramatically changed the prerequisits of their formation and persistence. The most critical factor for the building of societies is the characteristic feature of humans: communication. Never in our whole history communication and translocation has been technically that easy as now.

To my impression, we have all too long carelessly neglected the potentially harmful consequences of these profound changes. As a result, the different societies of the world unintentionally came a bit too close to each other. In a way that - with some diligence - could have been foreseen, they were more and more intensly confronted with the habits and conventions of their neighbors and of their neighbor's neighbors. Not always, this confrontation was accompanied by mutual understanding and respect.

Each society needs a frame of rules and implicit standards that, during the process called 'education', becomes part of each individual's undisputable repertoire of basic comportments. Later, as adults, we mostly lose awareness of the particulars of this repertoire. The goal of this social phenomenon lies in the focusing of our cognitive abilities on creative problem solving and efficient cooperation. Various collections of 'undisputed rules' apply to various levels of cooperative behavior.

At the nucleus, each individual is spontaneously aware of his/her appropriate attitude and behavior towards his/her closest relatives. But also outside this nucleus, we without much effort know to which comportments we have to adhere in the public. Most of us easily realize different levels of public: it makes a huge difference, whether we are together with friends on a hiking tour, or whether we listen together with several hundred others (most of them unknown to us) to a public concert.

All cultures in the world foster collections of appropriate comportments to deal favorably with the challenges arising from interactions on different levels of increasing social complexity. The detailed stock of behavioral traits pooled and transmitted over the generations differs from one culture to the other, depending on each culture's individual history. Some cultures, for economic or simple geographic reasons, have been used to intense and productive contacts with many other cultures for a prolonged period of time.

On the other hand, for the same reasons, many cultures until now had no necessity to develop behavioral rules beyond a certain level of complexity. Like always in nature, organisms and their societies adapt to their necessities; this also applies to human societies. Basically, we only introduce and adhere to rules, that provide a significant advantage to all of us. If a particular rule makes no sense any more, it slowly will fall into oblivion.

Most - if not all - behavioral manners of humans are subject to cultural transmission. This allows humans faster adaptation to changed necessities than animals. Nevertheless, significant changes take their time. It is (unfortunate or not) impossible to change the rules from one moment to the other, e.g. by revising current laws. A change can only be induced slowly, by small steps into the desired direction. To my impression, recent technical advances changed our communication and translocation abilities faster than the pace of cultural transmission.

At a slower pace, societies had been approaching themselves for centuries. Over several generations, the most actively interacting cultures slowly developed some kind of super-national rules (not without blood-shed and back-lashes). But in recent decades, the pace of technical innovations overstrained the natural flexibility of societies. Nevertheless: there is light at the end of the tunnel. Since the number of different cultures on this earth is limited (and rather decreasing than increasing), the pace of increasing contacts is coming to its natural end.

It may be hoped that, on the long term, we will finally succed in convening on some kind of upper-most level of social rules all cultures of the world are able to comply with. In the 'Western World', a first approach to such a repertoire was secularism. It basically states that different cultures may coexist if they agree upon the rules of a complex society without forcing the partner cultures to adopt the traditional rules of one single 'leading culture'.

Presently, Western-type secularism is progressively under attack by outraged islamistic activists (although they attack with the same furor various other non-islamic or even 'other-islamic' cultures). Prosecuting such attacks within the frame of our secular system of laws and penalities is one way to react. Another way would be to invite the islamic culture(s) to discuss with us a new compendium of social rules that can be accepted worl-wide, including the islamic world.

It would fit with the original idea of secularism not to force any system of conventions upon any single culture. The major problem in this scenario is of course to find that magic system of conventions that all cultures of the world can agree with. Presently, the Western-type system of conventions is forced upon the whole world more or less tacitly via mass media and world wide web. The value of this unsolicited dissipation appears questionable, in the light of their rather whimsical and inconsistent ethics.

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