There are all sorts of cultures. People enjoy the culture that can be reduced to fancy dress, ballet folklorico, and cuisine. And language, of course, at least since the 19th century when it was used to (re)construct nations as states in Europe and then elsewhere (except perhaps Africa where African nations were treated more like those of the Americas. The propaganda organs built into social collectives, including its intellectuals, artists and informal performative organs now resident to a substantial extent in and as social media reinforce this approach to the essentialization, and objectivization of reductionist culture in forms that then can be aligned with the creation of all sorts of other nations. If the 19th century had its ethno-identitarian moment, the 21st century has seen the triumph of identity nations--some old (religious communities) and some newly emergent. Nation, culture, identity tend to swirl around each other, amplify each other, and contribute to the architecture of self and collective nationality that seems now so common as to be taken for granted. Civilization is sometimes understood as the productive force of civilization; or that civilization is the tangible product of culture(s); in the later sense civilization is to culture as discrete territory is to empire (interesting discussion here). And then, in a form prepared for mass consumption both for the intellectuals and the masses is the notion of clashes of civilization; not just of civilization as meta-culture or the product of aligned cultural production, one encounters the marketplace of civilization, one in which civilization collide, compete, and ultimately seek forms of mutual destruction or alignment. Globalization could be understood as a means of civilization amalgamation through the quite clever device of consensual (more or less) consensus. Territorial conquest and suppression was the traditional go-to; so was extermination or forced population movements.
All of this is quite interesting; and it helps entertain the masses and the mass of PhD students and their supervisors in the market place of knowledge. But it is hardly relevant to what one confronts today. The globalization experiment of the later part of the late century and the first decades of this one remind one that convergence merely shifts the arena in which cultural forms--types--manifest, compete, and strive to dominate the culture/civilization. This is the age of transnational cultures--not just of civilization and culture in the traditional thick sense. It is the age of virtual cultures and of cultural types tied to all of the difference ways in which, beneath the veneer of unity, diversity emerges. The transnational capitalist class, the transnational identity based culture/nation, etc. points to "nationality" well beyond those of ethnicity or religio-ethnicity that people have grown fond of in developing the cognitive cages of modern political groupings. One ordering looks back for inspiration to older notions of caste--not as forms of hereditary position in society (a crude manifestation of the form with its own significant problems) but of caste as cultural types (and perhaps drawing from the Confucian Legalist tradition, the 士农工商 (Shì nóng gōng shāng) the four categories--warror nobles/schlars, peasants, artisans, and merchants) reconsidered through the sociological lens of the post-modern and its consideration of the habitus.
It is as difficult to be a free marketeer in a local social work department as it is to be a socialist in an investment bank. It follows that if we are to get on with colleagues, win promotions, or achieve status, we have to accept the fundamental values of the workplace--its customs and forms of behaviors. . . This has been the case in many societies throughout history, and it is something the ancients understood. They saw society not as an aggregation of atomized individuals, nor as Marx's economic classes . . . [nor it seems as the product of collective identity], nor as ideological parties, but as occupational groups, each of which, they believed, had its own ethos. (David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A History of the World in Three Castes (NY Penguin Press, 2013), Introduction)
It follows that like the rich have far more in common with the rich of other places, caste archetypes align more outside of their political culture (in terms of habitus) than they do with the members of other castes within their own political environment. Necessary to the insight is the further one that social collectives are a cocktail of crossing cultures and that while generally one cannot be expected to adopt the ethos of multiple castes simultaneously, one can juggle multi-cultural affiliation--citizenship, ethnos, religion, sexual identity, age, etc. At the same time, that amalgamation of cultural attributes tends to define the person and their collective (though in different ways). Where things get interesting is in the matter of hierarchy within these cultural amalgams, or rather in the way that they are blended; different blending produce different cocktails of human "nature." Normally this is resolved in context. Work, family, and political environments tend to suggest the ordering of importance of cultural attributes--but it does not change them.
The same, one can assume, applies in political spaces as well. But in those spaces there may be more "play in the joints." A civilization-culture can, from time to time, manifest a preference one or more aspects of culture to predominate in its forms of organization and governance. These usually are translated into ideological terms--liberal democracy, Marxist-Leninism, absolute monarchy (or whatever type), and aristocratic oligarchy (again of whatever type). But each masks a caste preference attitude, and with it the ruling ethos of a government and social organization. The West has tended to the ethos of the merchant or farmer in times of stability, and of the warrior otherwise; elsewhere the ethos of the bureaucrat, the official, as representative of a hierarch at the apex of a stable apparatus of centralized and coordinated management has tended to prevail in times of stability, in other times chaos or fracture in which the model splits up into smaller subparts until cobbled back together (Warring States periods, warlord periods, etc.). What becomes more interesting is when leadership in either system is held by a person who does not conform to type--a merchant at the head of a bureaucratic administrative order, or a bureaucrat at the head of a warrior order. ore interesting still is to understand the importance of these ethos when leaders from rival empires interact. That interaction becomes more complicated in the face of ethos clashes.
That might bring one, at last, to the present. It may be worth pondering the extent to which one sees in the current conflicts and transformations a more fundamental clash--not between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninist ideologies (though that is always a crowd-pleaser), nor between progressive and conservative elements (however those terms are infused with contextually relevant meaning)--between a merchant (U.S.) and a bureaucratic (China) ethos. Acknowledging the critical importance of nuance within each system (for example if President Trump is an exemplar of the merchant mentality he not represent the central core of that ethos in the U.S. now; or between the noblesse de robe and d'epée in 17th century France), it might be useful to begin to think about those characteristics that shape and differentiates the merchant from the bureaucrat. It is also important to remember crossovers (eg warrior merchants). That, in turn, may help better understand the conceptual difficulties of explaining action (rather than describing them) except by reference to the cognitive cages from which they manifest themselves (eg, John Hall, "Rule by Status in Tokugawa Japan," J. Japanese Stud. 1(1):39-49 (1974); consider also the "Shi, nō, kō, shō" (士農工商, shinōkōshō)) and of communication and negotiation between the two quite distinct caste empires. The latter perhaps may help provide some clarity to at least a portion of the challenges of reordering global collectives between a merchant and a bureaucratic empire.
Let's consider this from the position of a reductionist essentialization, at least as a grounding point from which more complicated elaborations, pathways, and ecologies may be developed:
The merchant (商): transactional, risk taking, inductive, reasoning from transactional analogy, non-linear pathways, iterative behaviors, instrumentalization of rules as factors in production, production oriented, objectives based, welfare maximizing for the represented collective, instrumentalization also of theory and ideology as factors in production, autonomous subject to expectations of collective participants, focus on post facto remedy, the costs of prevention and mitigation are always balanced against the costs of remedy, assessment is measured against an objective, the hierarchy of productivity and wealth, equality among equals and peers, otherwise power relations determines the context of transnational negotiation. They are fundamentally driven by trade irrespective of its direction, with the system emerging from the expectations of trading, transactional stability is necessary but otherwise a risk factor. The merchant views the bureaucrat as a necessity at best and as a source of oppression and mass poverty at their self-serving worst. But bureaucrats are not to be trusted.
The bureaucrat (士): systemic operative, managerial, risk averse, chaos is the enemy, order is the objective and ideology is the guide and the goal, linear decision pathways, deductive, reasoning from principle, system and structural preservation paramount, institutional preservation and solidarity with bureaucratic caste is paramount, transactions are the means of organizing production, people, production, and collective behaviors are both factors of production and a manifestation of ideology, assessment and compliance based governance grounded in assessment against an ideal, and the ideal is a visualization of an ideological pathway. They are fundamentally driven by the needs of managing a system toward proper operation to meet goals and enhance stability. The bureaucrat views the merchant as a necessity but a threat to social stability that needs careful control. But merchants are not to be trusted.
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It also, and perhaps most importantly, situates the merchant and the bureaucrat within their own oppositional environments.
The merchant (商) is fundamentally opposed by the bureaucratic elements within the structures in which they operate. Large enterprises approach the bureaucratic ideal, and, when large enough, become almost indistinguishable from a bureaucratic state and its ethos. Both pose the greatest challenge to the merchant type, especially when they have stables of retainers--public intellectuals, media, and others who can amplify and legitimate their own ethos.
The bureaucrat (士) is fundamentally opposed by merchant elements within the structures that have been created and made possible only by the harnessing of well managed merchant power. But it can be a challenge to well manage merchants. They can undo the carefully structured comprehensive systems of coordination and control at the heart of the bureaucratic project. They are a constant threat to the hegemony of the public objective.
When they interact, the possibilities of win-win is plausible, especially since the merchant and the bureaucrat measure winning by quite distinct standards. But the again, a lose-lose is also possible, precisely because each is incapable of understanding the other, and certainly unwilling to consider that in their own internal calculus. This is a manifestation of the semiotics of cognition as it plays out in the field of politics. It manifests like a folie a deaux, and from a semiotics perspective necessarily so, not as a condition of psychosis, but actually of its opposite, the playing out of collective dialectics on a grand scale. What emerges, of course, is also the way, now quite popular if unconscious, of philosophizing with a hammer.
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"At other times another means of recovery which is even more to my taste, is to cross-examine idols. There are more idols than realities in the world:[Pg xviii] this constitutes my “evil eye” for this world: it is also my “evil ear.” To put questions in this quarter with a hammer, and to hear perchance that well-known hollow sound which tells of blown-out frogs,—what a joy this is for one who has ears even behind his ears, for an old psychologist and Pied Piper like myself in whose presence precisely that which would fain be silent, must betray itself." (Frederich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols [Götzen-Dämmerung] (Anthny Ludovivi trans (1911; 1888), Preface
And so it has.
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