Culture, systems of thoughts and degree of tolerance

 According to an article i was just reading, our thoughts never escapes the cage of culture we rose in and is mined by the social and psychological structure of it.

The article proposes a comparison between the ancient Greeks and Chinese civilizations and how the characteristics of each civilization in terms of moral system, values , sense of individuality, and implicitly agreed upon merits can actually follow their way up to the upper frontal part of the brain shaping thoughts, even in an era of universality and the small village world.

Greeks according to the article put a high value for power of the individual and the sense of personal agency to an extent never seen in other civilizations, something that reflects in the tradition of debate that is well known about the Greeks even for someone with shallow cultural knowledge like me. which probably fed curiosity within them and led them to advance or even discover sciences, but most importantly construct a causal models according to the way they understand the nature of things around them, not just stopping at observations and the pragmatic usefulness. While the Chinese on the contrary, have had a stronger sense of collectivity, and  social obligation in which the person is mainly guided by the values and expectations of the unit he/she belongs to, creating a hierarchy of responsibilities and obligations between each two parties residing at different levels of the hierarchy, undermining debate and questioning traditions, emphasizing collective agency rather than personal agency. 

One look at the history of the Chinese is enough to note all the progress they made in technology, irrigation systems and they are even known to be the first to invent the ink. Which might lead someone to be puzzled by how such an " un-democratic" "reactionary" society could do all this, because we have always been told that the key to technological advancements and a higher standard of life is through a culture of questioning and debating and "democracy" a dispute i'm not concerned with here. What can be said about the Chinese civilization is that it was a civilization of practicality rather than "knowing", for them thought must have entailed action. driven by that sense of empiricism, they didn't develop models for phenomena in the natural world or even concepts that refer to the natural world, as per the article, Chinese have not had the concept of nature as a distinct existence from humans and their spiritual entities. 

The social psychological aspects of both cultures can be correlated with their systems of thought and tacit epistemology. Their cognitive differences are loosely grouped by the author to be analytical vs holistic. The analytical approach of thinking mainly depends on abstraction and categorization, decontextualizing objects to belong to a category and then apply logical rules over categories, leaving no place for interferences and contradictions. The holistic thinking on the other hand, is a contextual experience-based thinking in which events are explained in terms of relationships between objects and fields, approaches are dialectical with an open door for contradictions and multiple perspectives. Which resulted in an intellectual system that view the world as an overlapping substances and objects in contrast to the Platonic philosophical view, which is adopted by the Greeks, that objects are discrete instances of a category with universal properties regardless of the context and irrelevant to the field they are acting in. 

So what is this introduction is about? it is about my thoughts on accountability and enforcement of laws and punishment. 

In an individualistic culture, the agent is the person, he represents nothing far than himself, and his actions are driven by his own mind and thoughts that are produced and acknowledged to vary from someone to another in an open space which gives you freedom of thinking, which makes it easy, to hold you accountable for it. 

keeping this in mind and looking at the collectivistic cultures, the individual represents something far than just himself. It is important for a social unit to not harm its harmony and reputation of raising individuals who are completely under control and supervision of the unit. In this case, a mistake isn't just a mistake of someone who simply did wrong and should be held accountable for his own actions, but a sign of a crack or an inability of the unit to control or even raise its individuals in the appropriate manner that maintains harmony, social order and reputation of the unit. In similar cultures, it seems explainable to me why they would not prefer to punish, enforce laws instead of an act of high tolerance and leniency in which mistakes and even crimes are preferably covered than exploited and publicly judged. 

I think tolerance of contradiction and the multiple perspectives intellectual system that stems from social structures that motivate collectivity and think of events as continuous interactions, relationships between object and fields, and see things as part of a whole rather than discrete, all this might contribute to puzzle out the way these cultures socially functions and treat individuals. for example, in our country which assimilate to a great extent the way the Chinese social structure is constructed, people show a great tolerance for corruption, for theft, for a couple of immoral behavior in a way that makes me think about how their intellectual system that might be seeing the world as  holistic and overlapping actually plays a role in this. Contradiction, intellectual liquidity when merged with a high emotional capacity are bounded in my opinion to lead to that easy going behavior, specially when you think about it in a context that presents saving the image of the social group as a divine act preceded by none. 

This intellectual system affects how people attend to things around them, we talked about how Chinese attend to the context and object-field relationship rather than a detached object, and hence, their understanding of causality can also be understood in terms of attributing it to the context and situation, unlike westerners ( sons of the Greek culture), which also seem consistent when i make a projection here on my local culture and its collective behavior in terms of, among many things, their tolerance of immoral behavior, in particular when it is associated with higher ranked members of the group, and the best way to deal with it in their point of view.

Principle of contradiction charms me in specific because i've always been puzzled by the good and the bad and the blurry, sometimes nonexistent lines between them, something similar to what i wrote in "A raven", the so called, and i knew this terminology recently, dialectical approach which i presume can describe the holistic thinking the article was trying to describe about the Chinese, this approach has contradiction as an essential part of it. I personally wouldn't call it contradiction, i think calling it this way stems from a reference to the logical system of thought as the center and the lens through which researchers and investigators classify things and call names. Seeing it as a contradiction indicate in itself a mind that is still holding the frame of so called logical system "or maybe platonic approach", and examining things inside of it and i don't point here to this as something wrong or should have gone another way, because you basically can't judge things with the same means that created them, it is not unlikely that you won't be able to do that using the same frame of reference; to state your obvious, but your chances of stating "their" obvious are probably higher. 

So a higher collective sense of change and contradiction is likely to result in a blurry judgement system that allows for grey areas and some "illogical" mixture in which people can be saints and commit murders, can be law enforcers and get involved in crimes, all inside a social "incubator" that is protecting them.

This is why i do sometimes speak pessimistically about the future of our country, state building and social structure. It seems inevitable the collapse of our social structure in our way to the state building , modify behavior, achieve social change, and enforce laws in the "logical" way "the way at least social media is bragging about", because we might need to flip the intellectual system itself to maintain the new order of things **. Nonetheless, the big question seems to me to be whether we really want it or not? do we even know what we want? how can we know unless we experience it ourselves? but if we experienced it, it might be an irreversible process and the ball will just keep rolling in a no turn back road? they actually say history repeats it self, that gives a hint of a more of a circular road than a straight line. 

thoughts about history, about the dynamics of societies, about the economical factor, about whether a mixture between both is possible, about language and religions, about universality as corner stone of psychological studies, and many more flood one's mind while pondering about all these. 

these immature thoughts and reflections are to be continued some day, hoping for a more solid informed attempts in the future.

** 

(The fall of the structure with all its good and bad seems to me a necessary step towards this. or maybe it is just my "analytical, logical" mind is speaking from a place in which it is disabled to see all the possibilities, that remains probable to some degree but what brings this probability a bit down " in a vertical scale that goes up ascendically " is that since my childhood, my mind has always been more of a holistic mind than a logical one, it resisted the logical systemization schools tried to cage it in all the way until now)