From looking into a number of different tresses on the differences between culture and society it appears as if there is a common thread that both culture and society represent closed systems. Specifically culture is one based on a shared sense of language, beliefs, and traditions whereas societies are more based on geography, political systems, and the codification of perceived shared values.  This is obviously a bit of an over simplification but one that may provide some context around the current problems facing the global population today.

Whether you are talking about moderates or extremists, there appears to be a cross over between the idea of culture and that of society where culture is used to reinforce specific demands for socialization or rather that of the concept of a distinct society.

Take the conflict between Quebec and the rest of Canada as an example. No one disputes the idea that Quebec culture is distinct. They would be fools not to acknowledge the simple fact that language, beliefs, and tradition are all unique. However the idea that this uniqueness is tied to geography and political identity is something that stretches the boundaries of distinctiveness too far in my view. To follow that line of logic, every sub-division of social ideology should therefore be given an opportunity to form a distinct entity onto itself.

By the same logic Quebec itself should therefore also be divisible owing to the distinctiveness of the cultures represented by First Nations people in northern Quebec and potentially along the Canada-US border. Taken to an ultimate extreme we could probably take a 4km radius around Eglinton and Bathurst and sub-divide that into a new Jewish homeland or everything south of Spadina and Bloor as an extension of China’s territories for those that know Toronto well.

While in many areas of the world there is now the concept of the separation of Church and state, to a large degree we also need to look at the idea of the separation of culture and state.

Those people that insist that the distinctiveness of a culture can only be preserved under the auspices of a distinct society, with all the political control that such a term implies, are being both short sighted and missing the point. In Canada, we trust that those people we elect to government office will represent all constituents regardless of culture. So if I only speak Italian, I trust that the person I elect has the wherewith all to represent my interests even though they do not speak my language, read my books, or understand my idioms.

This trust relationship we have in Canada is unique in that it is a very fragile trust built upon the idea that culture and society can co-exist and be mutually re-enforcing of each other. Middle Eastern and other societies do not seem to have learned this lesson. Cultural and religious feuds spill over with blood debts  being waged over things that happened so far in the past as to be completely irrelevant to what they truly mean for the future. If the atrocity happened so long ago that, without the constant influx of hatred and persecution, the ramifications of those actions have died out on an individual basis over the course of 3-4 generations – Why perpetuate a past that is no longer when it is the future within the new social context that is important?

The challenge may simply be that there is no agreed upon mechanism for the creation or dissolution of societies that does not involve bloodshed and insurrection.

Even the United States which prides itself on being the hallmark of democracy does not allow states to succeed. And yet without some form of dissolution process, the outcome of talk of succession is one of doom, gloom, and potential treason to the state. Unless of course it is happening in someone else’s backyard at which point its perfectly fine. Or is it?

Where does the idea of culture wind up in all of this? Do cultures simply get swallowed up by the predominate culture that controls the social structure or is culture something that also deserves protection within the process of new societies being created or redefined? I would think most people would agree that culture is something that deserves protection even if it is not their own.

In the next few postings I will be going back to this idea of a truly realized democratic nation state and ways and means in which societies may be formed and dissolved without the need for bloodshed, riots, or civil unrest.

• the right to seek information and ideas;
• the right to receive information and ideas;
• the right to impart information and ideas

More fundamental however is the fact that the ability to perceive and communicate information is fundamental to what it means to be human – our competitive advantage which makes the human species capable of agriculture, manufacturing, and exploration.

The concept of freedom of the press is not a question of whether individuals have a right to seek, receive, and impart information. These are talents we are born with and cannot be taken away by any law by any government. What is at stake is power over the autonomy of others. Who has power to control and influence messages and who doesn’t.

From this junction it is important to distinguish between a ‘free press’ and ‘freedom of the press’.

Freedom of the Press is about constitutional guarantees that certain privileged groups have the right in within the social and political framework to seek or express facts, opinions, and research. It is a control mechanism which can be manipulated through constitution, stature, legal, and, in some cases, force of arms. As such, a society or political system can put limitations on what may be considered to be subversive or contrary to a well functioning social system.

By contrast, a Free Press is one in which any individual or group may seek, receive, and impart information in any form free of outside influence.

The dichotomy between a Free Press and Freedom of the Press is fundamental to the idea of social justice.  If asked about whether an individual’s right to seek information on any topic of their choosing, most individuals would likely opt for the free press model. However if the concept extends to the idea of someone wanting to create Ebola in their basement, the idea of free and open access to information starts to come with pre-conditions.

The challenge is that extreme situations are not necessary extreme within specific contexts. People working on electron colliders for example need access to highly sophisticated physics models and prototypes which are just as apt to be applicable to the creation of nuclear weapons as they are to finding how to create leptons, bosons, and quarks in the lab. So the general rule of thumb which suggests that it is only the thin grey line which is in dispute is not applicable as so much of what passes for freedom of the press is contextually based.

What makes the problem worse is that creating silos of privileged groups is only a temporary measure which is valid for a brief moment in time. This is because the social context in which these privileged groups exist are constantly changing. Dramatic leaps in innovation and social consciousness come as a result of information being shared across silos, not up and down.  As this information influences the thinking of those privileged groups, paradigms for problem definitions shift and within a relatively short span of time (approximately 8-15 years) groups who once were united have now merged or diverged depending on where these new lines of thought have taken the sub-cultures forming those groups.

Every given culture needs to find their own balance between a free press and press which is free. This is not owing to any specific political ideology but rather that systems need to find their own equilibrium which are generally made up of millions of individual preconceptions, morals, ethics, agendas, economic drivers, etc.. To do otherwise is to force upon a society the exact opposite of that which makes a democratic system work.

The Canadian Governor General’s recent trip to Rwanda is a prime example. While the message that a society which is open to journalists to ply their trade as part of a free and open press plays well to western governments, the simple fact is that these not so subtle hints are as much a means of political influence as they are opening doors to a more liberal sense of freedom in a country that has seen little of that in recent years. Essentially it is a cheap shot across the bow of a country that has enough troubles without Canada trying to influence political policy via the back-door.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way supporting anything that has happened in Rwanda over the last several decades. However, what I am saying is that if the message of a free and open press is an important message then using economic and political influence behind the scenes which encourages constructive social reform rather than undercutting an already difficult job through social discourse is a much more constructive way to deliver a message. The fact that this was a roundtable on the role of journalism notwithstanding, the message should have been either on Canada as an example or the way in which Canada has been helping Rwanda to fulfill its free press obligations through the UN and other organizations.

The problem to some extent is that Michaëlle Jean gets to drop comments like this and then leave the country while the people she is influencing have to try to come to grips with embracing new ideas under a recently reformed political system that hasn’t been given enough time to mature. A free press, similar to democracy, is not something you are just handed. It is the barometer by which the health of a democratic society can be measured.

For countries like Canada, speeches like Michaëlle Jean’s are certainly taken for granted that we can essentially yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre and then sneak out the back door without consequences. It would, however, have been nice if along with the inspirational words that Canada could have provided some political and/or economic support in conjunction with the new Rwandan Government to bolster the social conditions under which a free and open press can operate.  It certainly would have been the Canadian thing to do.

In polite company of course we don’t call this a shared paranoia but rather the development of a social construction of reality. In small groups, informal relationships of who does what can quite often be well managed through a tacit understanding of each person’s station within the social construct. For much larger groups however we have the idea of laws, charters, governments, and other more formal bureaucratic structures which serve to codify the myriad of ways in which our shared paranoia may potentially manifest itself.

For example

• Smoking marijuana is bad but cigarettes are ok
• Drinking liquor is okay but drinking too much is bad
• Open book exams are okay but bringing notes to an exam may get you expelled
• Killing an individual is a criminal act but killing thousands is good politics
• Giving $100 to Haiti relief is good but helping the out of work person on the local street corner we turn a blind eye to

There are thousands of inconsistencies in the way in which we look at the world based on our assumptions of how we perceive the division of labour. When our precepts in terms of this division is challenged there is a tendency to look upon the situation and being uncontrolled or in a state of anarchy which needs to be righted. More to the point, the anarchy that is felt is one of internal loss of control. If I am focused on Haiti relief then I am not focused on the 1001 other tasks that I need to do as part of my daily routine.  So we give our $100 or $200 or $50 to the Red Cross and sit back to say “my work here is done” so long as the implications of the event doesn’t happen in our own backyard.

The drug trade is unregulated so it scares us. Dealing with problem drinkers is something we turn over to courts and police rather than taking personal responsibility for. We penalize those who are good at finding and manipulating information rather than memorizing it even though both skill sets are equally valid in the application of knowledge. Political leaders of wars are rarely held to account unless you are on the losing side.

All social regulation, whether it be informal social morals or government bureaucracy, is about controlled anarchy rather than controlling anarchy. It is about the removal of the burden of social paranoias through an agreed upon division of labour which provides for a social construction of reality that holds for tomorrow the way it holds today.  The development of tacit social knowledge however has it boundaries which is where the explicit codification of laws, policies, and regulations come into play.

There are two inevitable extremes however that seem to create a destabilizing effect within a society. The first is when government bureaucracy goes beyond the requirements of stabilizing the security of the state and over regulates the society.  The second is when individuals develops an expectation of entitlement to excessive divestment of personal responsibility and accountability as being part of that society.

Both appear to lead to counter-productive purposes. The problem is one of resolving root believes which are fundamental to a functioning society. The Plan Canada for example provide opportunities for people to become a ‘foster parent’ of a child overseas who does not have access to the same quality of basic education, domicile, and sanitation as we have here in Canada. At the same time there are thousands of children living below the poverty line in Canada. How do we justify this? Should we not look after our own first? If we try are we really solving the problem or setting up false expectation?

See the problem? – The root beliefs we each carry establish a justification for what decisions we make on the margin of what we understood to be moral and ethical at the time the decision was made. But you can always find counter-arguments that not only invalidate the decision but will make people very uncomfortable in how they reconcile those decisions in the first place.

I raise this as an example not to point at a single inconsistency but rather as an exemplar of an entire class of moral dilemmas. Excessive government regulation and divestment of personal responsibilities are critical aspects that must be taken into account of a properly functioning society because of the escalating creation of challenges to a society’s justified true beliefs. In other words, once we have crossed a line of over regulation each new piece of legislation, regulation, or policy simply increases the number of core beliefs which are subject to be challenged.

As with any form of communications network, the growth of these points are exponential, not linear, as you add new points to the network. To further complicate things, since personal divestment and bureaucratic regulation are mutually reinforcing, the tendency for a society to reach a breaking point is almost a certainty. The questions therefore become, at what point does the re-organization of the political institutions governing such regulation become inevitable, how do we recognize the signs of the societal collapse before it happens, and is there any way to bring a society back from the brink even if we do recognize the signs?

I would suggest that we may be seeing the initial stages of this happening in various countries around the world. Of course that just may be a sign of my own paranoia of what the near-term future may hold within western culture. The thing about trying to predict the future is that the one person who is right will never be known until after the final cards are dealt. In the case of over regulation of personal liberties and a discussion of where personal accountability lies in the grander scheme of a well functioning society, these are issues which quite often go understated when new restrictions on social development are being considered. So right or wrong, I feel without this discussion occurring we are not doing justice to any new codification of how to control basic anarchistic tendencies within a society.

Case in point. Residents of a virtual world environment called Second Life enjoy a certain amount of anonymity when it comes to revealing who they are. You sign-up for a free profile, select a name, and away you go. This is nothing new or subversive in any way. People have been using alternative identities to tell their stories for hundreds of years. Consider the game dungeons and dragons (the old school one – not the electron versions). People are often known by the characters they choose to represent and assign names of historical or personal importance as part of the role playing experience.

Gamers do this all the time. From XBOX to Playstation to World of Warcraft to Second Life. It is a means of developing confidence in oneself by insulating yourself from looking foolish during the learning and development process. This is a very common psychological phenomena that people are often more at ease with risk taking when they don’t have to put all of themselves on the line.

Then there is the aspect of personal privacy and security. Some people just want to be able to interact with others without having to worry that some nutcase is going to wind up on their front door step. Only once they are comfortable with someone are they willing to go that next step to provide more information. Sound familiar? It should because its something that everyone who has gone to a bar or college has done or experienced at some point in their lives.

The idea of a virtual personae will often times extend beyond the limited circumstances of the role play scenario and cross over into everyday life. Those people who go to work dressed up as Captain Kirk for example. For the most part its harmless. More importantly however it allows us to tell our stories, those narratives that are important to us as individuals, in a ways that are imaginative, unique, and memorable. Everyone has a fish story, but we remember the ones by “Old Man McKinley down the road yonder” because the personae is larger than the individual and in so doing provides a contextual means of connecting with others that just doesn’t happen under ordinary circumstances.

So – back to my case in point. There has been a series of recent terms of service violation reports by some anonymous person (who I’m not about to justify by stating his/her name or website – check Google if you are really that interested) who is searching almost every Facebook profile seeking out Second Life residents for the expressed purpose of having those accounts banned. To be fair the Facebook TOS does have a provision that says people are expected to use their real names in establishing a profile. However this is not the way the service is being used and I would hazard a guess that at least 50% of the profiles on Facebook are bogus if you were to compare birth records.

You don’t need to look at Second Life residents to see this principle in action on Facebook. Look at any number of the applications and groups related to things such as World of Warcraft, Triumph, Plane Crazy, etc. A good percentage of the profiles used are clearly alternates to a main profile or just simply in no way representative of who the person is in real life. This is probably one of the most broken TOS aspects of Facebook imaginable. Nor does Facebook have a mechanism by which people can verify their identity. To say that Second Life residents with profiles on Facebook are corrupting the moral fabric of the online community is akin to suggesting that children watch Saturday morning cartoons are going to grow up to be violent offenders. Is there an influence, sure. Is it corrupting the moral fabric of society, absolutely not because at the end of the day most rational people understand the difference between constructive social interaction regardless of whether you are dealing with Kevin Feenan or Phelan Corrimal.

I would in fact take this one step further. Linden Lab, the developers of Second Life, actually have very strong identity proving processes included as part of their environment. Something Facebook doesn’t have. The likelihood that a hard core Second Life resident has been both age verified and confirmed their identity through an independent 3rd agency is greater than 1 in 3. Beyond this, all educators have to provide proof of having gone through a police background check if they have any intention of working with those under 18 years of age on the teen grid. If there was a true argument to be made that any particular group needed to be the front edge of the wedge for deconstructing the “avatarism of the nation”, Second Life is not it.

So what is driving this move? Fear maybe. Paranoia of what a world might look like where you could be defined not only by your legal name but by the personae you choose to wear in telling your story the way you want to. In point of fact however we are already there. Virtual world environments are simply providing a much more visible look into what lies beneath social norms and values in our society at large whether you are talking about bars, gaming, virtual worlds, social networking platforms, or personal ads. There has always been this undercurrent of people wanting to risk while at the same time not wanting to be hurt in the process.

I would think that anyone who fears what the future holds should really take a very strong look in their own backyard first before using a measuring stick that changes scale based on context. If you are fighting for a fundamental concept of human-social interaction then you can’t eradicate a single symptom and assume you’ve found a cure. You need to understand what it is you are fighting for and then need to realize that fundamental paradigm shifts in social paradigms are not fought on a single battlefield.

Clearly this person doesn’t understand what it is they are fighting for and that is unfortunate because even if they are somehow right, they have already lost the war despite the havoc they are wreaking on the battlefield. They have also lost any potential to open up true dialogue on what their issue is really about. And that I feel diminishes us all regardless of which side of the argument you are on.

Canada’s reaction is a case in point. In Canada it was announced that we would be introducing 40+ full body scanners that can see through clothing. Of course all the kafuffle is about who gets to see those pictures and what happens to them after the fact. As with any new system however the problem is not the new introduction of a technology but rather the longer term implications of what those technological changes may mean. While there are those that believe in the capability of governments and regulation to put in effective controls to manage the long term implication of these technologies there are two very simple facts that regulators tend to ignore when making these types of knee-jerk judgments.

1) Nothing lasts forever, not even taxes. The fact that these types of machines are being introduced at all opens the door to their use in a myriad of applications – everything from boat cruises to high schools. While boarder security may have a better chance of not having the technology abused, eventually somebody’s body parts are going to end up youTube.

2) Sometimes the slippery slope argument is the correct one. Power corrupts. This is a lesson passed down and reinforced throughout history. What makes slippery slope arguments valid is when the introduction of a particular point of view unfairly unbalances the power relationship between those subject to changes in policy verses those for whom the new policy benefits.

For every extreme measure taken by governments and forced on its citizens, the balance of power is shifted away from society and placed in favour of those whom would use that power against us. This is in part due to the fact that a smaller amount of effort is required for each subsequent act of terrorism in order to gain larger influence and restriction of the populations by which they seek to subjugate.

From that standpoint, it doesn’t matter whether a terrorist group is successful or fails in its attempts. So long as they have control over the manipulation of behaviours of government in responding to these types of incidents then they have achieved their aims while the rest of us have to bear the brunt of the fallout of those actions.

The only way to take power back is to move the problem back onto the shoulders of the people that should be accountable for ensuring these types of things don’t happen in the first place – that being the people themselves. The way you fight terrorism is though culture – not force of arms.

Unfortunately that doesn’t get you re-elected because it is a very hard road to take and requires a very broad reach when dealing with issues on a global scale. It also requires a population that is prepared to stand up and take accountability for the culture in which we live by teaching right from wrong, ethics, morals, and not by constantly  trying to abdicate our personal responsibility in this regards to schools and governments.

It is the only way in which to win this battle.

As social creatures cultures and communities have a natural tendency to define themselves in terms of “us” vs “them”. We are good, They are bad. We are the same, They are different. We have ownership over our community, they have no stake in the welfare of our society. It is an inherent quality of survival that we naturally form these bonds and justify our exclusiveness so as to ensure the health of both our genes and social way of life.

“All men are created equal”. You go anywhere in the world and those words are synonymous with freedom from bigotry, racism, and religious persecution. However those words don’t recognize that all societies are not created equal. Access to freedoms, resources, capital, labour, educational opportunities and the promotion of entrepreneurial spirit are not in equal measure in all societies or communities.

When we talk about identity politics in that each person should be fairly represented it is almost impossible to ensure that is the case without the social and community structures which form the basis of their individual experiences also being equal. What Thernstrom is failing to recognize is that Sotomayor, in her comments, is accounting for the role of community as part of the lived experience – something which you cannot discount. My perception of Sotomayor’s comments is not that she is referring to all Latina women would make better choices but that what represents the best decision is very often the product of both social and contextual circumstances.

Let’s put this in perspective: while men can empathize with the pain of childbirth – let’s face it – we don’t have that individual life experience of what it actually means to give birth that is uniquely and wholly owned by women.

The issue is not really one of race or colour or creed or gender but rather one of getting over our natural impulses to separate social communities into us verses them.

Case in point: how many times have you heard the expression “I’m not a racist but …” or “present company excluded” when in the same room as a woman, or person of colour, or disabled, or …

Once we accept someone into our social culture the concept of race, creed, colour, and gender tend to diminish and/or disappear altogether. It is not a question of forcing individuals to fight against their natural instincts to be exclusive of other communities but rather establishing a societal bill of rights that provide equal opportunities at a community level and then to promote a social understanding that as the size of our communities grow, so to does our understanding of the breadth of what we need to perceive as being ‘our community’. In so doing, breaking down the walls of that group perception of who represents us and who represents them.

This is not to say that any such program of social evolutionary thinking is necessarily going to work. There may be an upper limit to which the human mind can necessarily understand the concept of “community”. But at least in attempting to make all social communities equal, the opportunities for the individuals within those communities should naturally develop as a consequence of leveling the playing field rather than in spite of it.