563. Culture of violence.
Cantor, N.F. 1993, Civilization of the Middle Ages, London: Harper Collins.
563. Culture of violence.
Cantor, N.F. 1993, Civilization of the Middle Ages, London: Harper Collins.
562 high and low context
In studies of communication, Eduard Hall (1967) made a distinction between ‘low context’ communication with precise, explicit, logical, coherent use of words, and ‘high context’ communication, which is ambiguous, context-dependent, using body language, expression, relying on trust, and aimed at maintaining the relation concerned (Ramos, 2014). What is the relation with other insights from theories of communication and language?
Buber’s ‘Ich-Du’ relations and Rosa’s
‘resonance’, discussed in earlier items in this blog, require ‘high context’
communication. There also appears that there is a connection with Ferdinand de
Saussure’s (1979) distinction between ‘langue’, and ‘parole’, also discussed
previously. In Langue, language is public, shared by all in a culture, logical
and precise. Parole is based in part on personal experience and contact, is more
vague, emotion-laden, including non-verbal elements. Langue covers universals,
parole is individual.
This, in turn, rhymes with the ‘hermeneutic
circle’, an exchange between a ‘paradigmatic axis’ of established, common, shared,
reasonably stable, universal concepts,
and a ‘syntagmatic axis’ of sentences, in action contexts, where the
abstraction of general concepts become concrete, in interaction with other
concepts in the sentence and context at hand. A ‘chair’ in langue and the paradigmatic axis covers many different
chairs, but in parole it becomes the specific armchair that is now being ripped
apart by my cat. This experience may become part of the general notion of ‘cat’,
now including their ripping of furniture. The interaction between the two axes yields
a dynamic of shifting meanings. That is how language and meaning develop.
European and American culture are largely low-context,
and Latin and Eastern cultures are more ‘high-context’, giving rise to
misunderstanding when Westerners visit. In the East explicitness is rude,
uncouth. However, the difference is mostly not so strict: in most cultures
there is a mix, depending on the context and on the relation.
Hall,
E.T. 1967, Beyond culture. Anchor.
Ramos, S. 2014, Profile of Man and culture,
Google
Saussure, F de 1979, Cours de
Linguistique Générale, Paris: Payotèque, Payot
561.
Our culture makes young people mad
My daughter Anouk, a high school teacher , commented on this piece
There are reports that a growing number of people, especially young people, are suffering from psychological problems, with an increasing number of suicides. There are indications that this is associated with the obsessive use of social media, in a form of addiction, where children spend absurd amounts of time, going to great lengths to compete on building profiles that are more glamourous than those of others, to the point of yielding nude photos to lecherous men who then use them to blackmail the children. They let themselves be guided by ‘influencers’, who set examples of how to dress and compete in looks and draw attention Why do young people do that?
My daughter, who is a primary school teacher, gave the answer. First of all, in puberty, children need social interaction to develop their identity, getting away from family strictures, and now they use social media for it, partly enhanced by the closing of schools and lockdowns that closed off those contacts, due to Covid-19. There is also much pressure for performance by parents and at school, which has become a testing factory bent on grades rather than development.
One can ask: Why can’t the youngsters go out to celebrate their interaction in playing soccer on the streets or have rave parties? Many do that, but being tied to a smart phone or laptop for social media is more alluring, and generates a more direct and enticing kick. The behaviour they exhibit is like that of drug addicts, such as isolation, and a decreased ability to make decisions. It produces fear, anxiety, and feelings of uncertainty.
I
can only hope for the resilience of young people to change the culture, in
varieties of contact and sociality that curtail the obsession surrender and
bondage to social media and phones, in real, physical interaction in joint
projects, of sports, parties, cohabitation, maintaining gardens, growing foods
together, engaging in adventures, other types of development and education than
the traditional constriction to a class and fixed protocols of learning that
may be best developed by themselves, guided by teachers who have got it. We see
some of this happening.
560. Realist and idealist
Lakoff
, G. and M. Johnson. 1980, Metaphors we
live by, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
559. From gold to copper
H.
Yong 2005. ‘Between generalisation and particularism, the Chang brothers’, in: S.C.
Angle and M. Slote, Virtue ethics and Confucianism: pp. 162-70, New
York: Routledge.
558. Betrayal in academia.
At
a given university, I was asked to set up a research institute cum Phd school,
in collaboration between the faculties of Business and Economics. I was so
naïve as to accept the assignment, seeing bridgeheads between the two
disciplines. There was much at stake, because if it did not succeed, we would
lose substantial funds for research.
2. Economics
is focussed on calculating optimal outcomes, but business has to deal with
processes of organisation that may never achieve an optimum.
3. Economics
reduces uncertainty to risk, where one knows what can happen, to assign probabilities
to possible outcomes and calculate the optimum, while in business one has to
face the condition that one does not know all that can happen. and yet has to craft
a path.
557. Three gems from medieval history
Here I share with you three gems that I delved from ‘The civilisation of the Middle Ages’ by Norman F. Cantor (1993 edition).
The first gem is an explanation of why the ancient Romans produced so little technical progress. The explanation offered by Cantor is this. The Romans had an abundant supply of slaves that could do all menial jobs and handicraft needed, which made labour so cheap, that there was no incentive to produce labour-saving innovation. Interesting view: slavery slows innovation.
The second gem is an explanation of why the Arabs, who were far in advance of Europe in geometry and astronomy, which was stopped and reversed in the middle ages, around the thirteenth century, by the emergence of Aristotelian philosophy, in Europe in translation from Arabic into Latin. Previously, the dominant philosophy was that of Plato, with his notion of universal meanings and truths, applying everywhere and eternally, and the dualism of body and mind. Those fitted well in the Christian theology of the separation of an eternal soul from the vicissitudes and jumbled notions and experiences of life and reality, and of a providential God transcendent from the world, with the attendant use of prayer, and of the creation of the world out of nothing. Aristotle, on the other hand, did not believe in the existence of universals beyond experience. For him, universals were made up from experience, and the only reality lies in particulars in worldly experience, God was the ‘fist mover’ of the world and not providential and concerned about individual beings, so that prayer is useless.
This was threatening to theistic religion, and had to be suppressed to save religion, in the Muslim world. Christianism, in Europe, was under similar threat, but intellectual thought was mostly localised in monasteries, as places of learning and teaching, which tried to reconcile Christian religion with Aristotelian rationality, culminating in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. This reconciliation ultimately failed, but the attempt still made Aristotelianism respectable, which was a requisite for scientific thought.
Later, Aristotelian thought, with its notion of a final cause, was seen to be at odds with natural science. Nature does not have a goal to which it strives. The decline of Aristotelianism was excessive, because in a causality of action of people, the final cause, as a goal of action, does apply, as I have argued earlier in this blog.
A third gem, in my view, is the narrative of how in the slow emergence of legal ordering, since the 12th century, needed because of the emergence of cities and the growth of trade, there arose doctrinal law on the basis of Roman law, originally dictated by the emperor, and next to that Germanic community law that later became ‘Common Law’, based on the idea that the law is ‘Folk Law’, belongs to the people and originates from the people. The Roman tradition became dominant in continental Europe, but not in England, where the tradition of common law was brought to England from Normandy, where it had settled, by William the Conqueror, in the eleventh century.