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Max Weber's idea of [dis]enchantment

Heuristic and Zorn are in similar dialogues with me elsewhere, so I'mma figure out where to reply to avoid cross-posting.

MrM said:
Rational objectivism is a useful way to build tools and pretty much all the other physical apparatus that go with an advanced civilisation. If you consider 2 basic civilisations that meet up, one that reveres trees as sacred and another that chops them down to build houses and spears, which do you think will win out over the other?

Weber certainly agrees, and Weber at no point advocated a return to 'traditional practices' (in his terms, patrimonial legitimation/domination). On the other hand, he spent a lot of effort fretting over a then nascent society which could execute massive tasks efficiently but which lacked a solid way to figure out which tasks are 'worthy'.

I'm going to blaim christianity on this one. Once you've got the idea in your head that all the earth and animals and stuff there were made for you personally by god to use as you see fit, you are going to use them anyway you feel best and not worry about hurting their feelings so much or large scale deforestation (as Pocahontas would) until science comes along and mentions global warming and stuff.

I'm going to disagree, and so does Weber, actually. It's only with the emergence of science as we know it (circa Bacon), after the Protestant reformation, that we see rampant 'instrumentalism' to the near exclusion of all else. Hell, Weber argues that Protestantism played only an indirect role, people's social reactions to some specific doctrines providing a cultural seed that could later mutate into the modern ethic of purposive reason.
...
Clarifications:
1. Weber was speaking to science in social institutions. The preoccupation with meanings can get quite silly for those working in 'hard' sciences as ends in themselves.
2. People appear to be using different definitions for "reductionism", talking past one another.

zorn said:
And it's definitely not true that their answers would divide up nicely according to their "culture." Maybe there's some statistical differences. I don't know. But the question strikes me kind of the same way as "What are different races good at?"... seductive because it reifies simple categories & distinctions, but probably not conducive to useful understanding. Weber was a product of a quite racist era, late imperialist Europe, right?

1. Weber's anthropology often ended up being damned poor, relying to a great extent on document analysis and presupposition.
2. Weber deals with this issue explicity "The Nature of Social Action". A hypothetical individual acting and perceiving as a member of his 'culture' is an "ideal type". An ideal type functions as an analytical tool. It's what we'd expect someone to do given that they hold identified cultural schemata, approaching according ends purposively rationally except when culture dictates irrationality. People behave in any number of ways for various reasons, and the statistical average of what they do won't be exactly the same as the ideal type...although it should veer in that direction.

So Weber takes things a step further.

3. Weber was a stark racist (at least an ethnic chauvinist). His main political project was to create a strong Germany in opposition to "lazy" Slavic people. To his credit, though, Weber thought that genetic racial differences play only a minor role, cultural divisions looming largest...this was back when phrenology was still popular.

H said:
All science is concerned about is the explanation itself, not any value judgments one may wish to make about the value of the phenomenon.

This is in line w/ Weber's philosophy of science. Hence, he was quite concerned with the modern decoupling of the two, institutional proliferation of the former, along side a vacuum in the latter. He never wanted them to truly reunite, let alone in such a way to return to the past.

I wonder how much of Weber's argument was caused by the advent of the German model of the research university, which stood in stark contrast to the Anglo-American model of a liberal arts education. The former places an emphasis on the gradual accumulation of knowledge, each individual adding accretions.

He very much was, detailing things explicitly in "Science as a Vocation".

ebola
 
Weber certainly agrees, and Weber at no point advocated a return to 'traditional practices' (in his terms, patrimonial legitimation/domination). On the other hand, he spent a lot of effort fretting over a then nascent society which could execute massive tasks efficiently but which lacked a solid way to figure out which tasks are 'worthy'.

I'm not sure what time scales we are talking about here but i'm guessing (based on topic) we talking the very beginnings of civilisation i.e. just as hunter gatherers were comming together to form larger tribes and eventually smaller nations.

If Weber is suggesting that these early societies could occasionally commit to massive acts of effort but only rarely come together to perform them due to lack of direction, that might help explain things like stonehenge and other ancient remnants where you get apparent massive amounts of effort and then nothing else similar for miles (and centuries) around.

Obviously you'd get lots of stuff like mud huts that would just wash away but it's the massive scale (relative to all other remnants) and rarety of things like stonehenge that made me think of Weber in this context.

I'm going to disagree, and so does Weber, actually. It's only with the emergence of science as we know it (circa Bacon), after the Protestant reformation, that we see rampant 'instrumentalism' to the near exclusion of all else.

It wasn't until the emergence of science (and specifically the technology that took advantage of it) that the west had the ability to go about deconstructing the natural environment for it's own ends but i suspect that had a more 'enchanted' civilisation somehow arrived at the scientific and technological point of the industrial revolution before the west things would have worked out very differently.
 
MrM said:
I'm not sure what time scales we are talking about here but i'm guessing (based on topic) we talking the very beginnings of civilisation i.e. just as hunter gatherers were comming together to form larger tribes and eventually smaller nations.

Actually, no. We're talking about modernity and post-modernity versus the time before. "the time before" runs, roughly, right to the disillusion of feudalism.

As for this time scale in the non-West, Weber is colored by the modernization theory myth, that there is a single developmentary track, and various places are either near the forefront or 'behind'. The alternative is a single world-system moving through time, paths of change in different places branching in different directions.

If Weber is suggesting that these early societies could occasionally commit to massive acts of effort but only rarely come together to perform them due to lack of direction, that might help explain things like stonehenge and other ancient remnants where you get apparent massive amounts of effort and then nothing else similar for miles (and centuries) around.

Not really...for W, the source of social creativity is charismatic leadership/legitimation/domination. In the pre-modern world, fervor following the charismatic figure turns to the routine of tradition. In the (post)modern world, charisma gives way to bureaucratic administration.

Your examples are interesting. For Weber, ancient Egypt is one of the first societies showing significant bureaucratization.

It is really the efficiency of bureaucracy that accounts for modernity's quantity of massive undertakings.

It wasn't until the emergence of science (and specifically the technology that took advantage of it) that the west had the ability to go about deconstructing the natural environment for it's own ends

No, earlier, I think. "Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492".

i suspect that had a more 'enchanted' civilisation somehow arrived at the scientific and technological point of the industrial revolution before the west things would have worked out very differently.

Why? Weber thinks:
1. Xianity was thoroughly pre-modern at modernity's inception, unexpectedly giving rise to the disenchanted ethic in unpredictable ways, through various convolutions over time.
2. 'The East' was not a 'disenchanted culture' per se during modernity's inception. In China and India, we see highly rationalized philosophy and spirituality at that point, but directed inwardly rather than toward social organization. However, in China, we also see the most highly developed form of bureaucratic politics in the world.


Now, I'm convinced by Diamond: accidents of geography and natural resources were likely the over-riding causal factors explaining who would modernize enough to wage modern imperialism.

ebola
 
Actually, no. We're talking about modernity and post-modernity versus the time before. "the time before" runs, roughly, right to the disillusion of feudalism.

If you (weber?) are suggesting that bureaucratic administration is the seperating feature for the modern world and pre modern 'enchanted' time before, then i would suggest that the catholic church is the best and earliest example in the west that i can think of. They certainly excelled in turning a very spiritual religion into a doctrine by killing off all the smaller rival christian churches they could get away with right up to the point they met up with the church of england which was big enough to stick up for itself.

The church of england is an even more obvious administrative bureaucratic insitution in that it was clearly invented by Henry 8th so as to distance himself from the politics and bureaucracy of rome.

If you are telling me that ancient Egypt (as one of the earliest civilisations) is one of the first societies that showed significant bureaucratization i can well believe you, and i'm guessing it would have been tied into the religion in the same way as roman catholicism.

I think there would have been plenty of bureaucracy around by the time of columbus. Bureaucracy would surely be vital for the kind of international trade that was booming at the time and allowing for long distance shipping.

Now, I'm convinced by Diamond: accidents of geography and natural resources were likely the over-riding causal factors explaining who would modernize enough to wage modern imperialism.ebola

I tend to agree with this view. I think climate is also important. If you live somewhere where the conditions are terribly harsh (innuit people) you will spend all your energy surviving. If you live somewhere paradisical you aren't going to feel motivated to start building a civilisation. You need to be located somewhere where the conditions are hard enough to encourage you to improve your situation but the situation isn't so bad as to prevent this occuring and the resources exist to make it possible.

My suggestion that if a more 'enchanted' civilisation had reached the industrial revolution first things would have worked out differently is a bit meaningless in this light as they would never have got to that point first in the first place (short of aliens or time travellers from the future going back in time and giving the native americans a bunch of AK-47s or something just prior to 1492).

The point at which society went from pre-modern to modern is different if you use technology and science as the devider than if you use significant bureaucratization. I think significant bureaucratization predates science (in some places anyway) by a good thousand years.
 
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I don't know, this seems like a wrong dichotomy (valuing connectedness over truth) -- like asking if you value liberty over brevity. Or originality over compassion. They're not really commensurable things. Truth is valuable when you're trying to decide, well, what you think is true. Compassion is important when you're trying to decide how to treat people. They're just different things, entirely -- I can't see what good confusing them would do.

So I don't think that viewing things rationally, or "reductionist takedowns," as you say, is a problem at all. A tree is in fact, among other things, a self-replicating carbon producer... but I don't know anyone who would say, "therefore we must destroy the tree!" What you do then depends on what your values are regarding life, the environment, the people it would affect, and so on -- as it should be.

I'm talking when push comes to shove. I can think of some situations where one might be forced to choose between originality and compassion, and can't really express both. For example, when a close friend of yours is grieving the death of someone in their family, do you say the wholly unoriginal 'I'm sorry for your loss', or do you spontaneously craft a more personal and unique response, and risk confusing or upsetting your friend more, given the state he's in?

Likewise, I've definitely encountered situations where framing something rationally and framing it in a way that makes it meaningful and connected to us are not both possible at once. This is not to say there are many situations where they ARE both possible at once. But hardly always. I have to agree with Papa on this one.

But if instead you think the tree is some spirit or god, you can't come to the right conclusion based on your values about life -- instead you will come to a conclusion based on whatever your crazy belief system tells you about spirits. It's possible you might revere & preserve it anyways (tho for the wrong reason) to honor/placate the spirit. But real "enchanted" cultures are not Disney fairy-tales: Maybe you chop the tree down because you believe the spirit has turned against your village. Maybe you sacrifice animals to keep the spirit happy. Maybe you sacrifice people. Maybe you ostracize the diseased or crippled or because their injuries show the spirits have condemned them. Who knows? Whatever happens, it's determined by the made-up belief system, not your actual values about trees.

What do you mean by 'real values' or 'actual values'? I'm going to take a stab and guess you mean rational cost-benefit analysis, but you tell me. :|

I think you misunderstand how pre-modern cultures develop the values, beliefs, and practices they do. They're not crazy or ad hoc at all -- they were developed over centuries of trial and error in a people's interaction with their natural environment, and over time became tailored to that particular community and that particular environment, such that they allowed for excellent management of resources on the local level. If not, both the ecosystem and the human community suffered, and without a change of human ways, both perished.

So I don't really see the value here. If a particular "enchanted" belief system were correct, then certainly, it would be valuable! That would be an important thing to understand to deal with the world. "Disenchanted" people in such a world would be like people with autism -- completely missing out on a whole important part of reality around them. But we don't live in such a world.

But as I just explained, many of them are correct, in that many of them have arrived at a set of rules for dealing with the natural world that do indeed get favorable results for both the natural ecosystem and the humans involved.

For example... I just can't see how confusing psychoactive chemicals with entities -- which you meet, have a relationship with, whatever -- is helpful. Sure, people respond differently to different substances, at different times, in different states, and so on. And you can invent anthropic language to describe that reponse as if it were a relationship. Sometimes that might be convenient shorthand. But what in the world does taking it seriously this add? The "alternate worldview" of relationships only works as long as you're making up the story to match what happened. If you start to actually use the worldview -- to take the story seriously, and not just match it up to reality -- it's going to lead you astray, because the chemical really doesn't follow the rules of human behavior.

But the things a drug does to me ARE similar to things other people have done to me. Framing something weird and unfamiliar in the terms of something familiar (myself and other humans), is just how we make sense of the world and our place in it.

Taking it seriously, in this example, can allow someone to assess the place and value of a drug in their lives using the same mental machinations with which they assess the value of another person in their lives, without having to master the finer points of a whole new paradigm. This is very helpful, for example, to someone who has a keen eye for reading people, but knows nothing about chemistry or neuroscience.
 
I'm talking when push comes to shove. I can think of some situations where one might be forced to choose between originality and compassion, and can't really express both. For example, when a close friend of yours is grieving the death of someone in their family, do you say the wholly unoriginal 'I'm sorry for your loss', or do you spontaneously craft a more personal and unique response, and risk confusing or upsetting your friend more, given the state he's in?

Likewise, I've definitely encountered situations where framing something rationally and framing it in a way that makes it meaningful and connected to us are not both possible at once. This is not to say there are many situations where they ARE both possible at once. But hardly always. I have to agree with Papa on this one.

I'm not sure i follow the example you give and i can't think of any other examples or situations where framing something rationally and framing it in a way that is meaningful and connected is not possible at the same time (with the exception given below).

In the example you give you say you have to choose between originality and compassion when a friend is grieving the death of a loved one. I would think this a bit of a false choice - depending on your friend the best response might well be an unoriginal minimal 'sorry for your loss' so that they are not forced to focus on the issue, it might be to ignore it completely, or to ignore it completely after the one time they break down and cry on your shoulder, or to have an in depth conversation about all their feelings (or recomend a psychologist) or any one of a million things.

People don't necessarily want a self made edible musical 'sorry for your lose' greetings card or an ancient death ritual or whatever original and meaningful response you've thought up. Although some might.

It seems to me the rationally compassionate thing to do is to think about how your friend is likely to react and take the best approach for their psychological wellbeing. If they are a fundamentalist christian going to the christian funeral might be the thing to do even if you are not christian yourself.

If i had to help out one of my friends in a situation like this i wouldn't be thinking 'shall i be original or shall i be compassionate?' i would be thinking 'what's the best way to help?' where best may mean rationally choosing to do something unrationable like attend a christian funeral where some guy in robes goes on about ashes and dust.

So if you are trying to comunicate or help someone else and their world view is non rational and enchanted in some way then it is perfectly rational to engage with them on a non rational level. It stands to reason that if you are conversing with some 'primitive' tribes person in the amazon rain forrest you'll have difficulty explaining the awe inspiring sight of saturns rings (for example) and how they can be seen as analogous to electrons shells around atoms although this is not something i have much experience of living in the UK.

But as I just explained, many of them are correct, in that many of them have arrived at a set of rules for dealing with the natural world that do indeed get favorable results for both the natural ecosystem and the humans involved.

Non rational methods of thought definitely have value or they wouldn't have survived. I would suggest the main value of rational thought over non rational thought is that rational thought works outside of it's 'natural' environment and can be applied (either correctly or not) to pretty much anything. Stick your average fairly rational londoner (ideally one with a bit of an education who's at least seen a tree before) in the middle of a rainforest and they'd be a bit stuck and quite frightened but they wouldn't have quite the same experience of sheer terror that a non rational rainforest dweller would experience if they were placed in the middle of modern london.
 
Hmmmm... [edit - I should have read MrM's post above first, which contains, more eloquently, some of my same points; sorry for the repetition]

But when "push comes to shove" isn't it better to have a more accurate idea of what we're talking about?

That is, if I have to decide between cutting down a tree to plant my crops, isn't it better that I know the tree is NOT a spirit and is in fact a carbon-based plant? I may find the tree beautiful, and weight that value appropriately, but is it helpful to have a pre-modern belief that the tree is a spirit?

Also... remember that pre-modern beliefs about how trees and other objects connect to the wider eco-system were rarely correct. Often they did not involve catastrophe simply because they were practiced on a small scale (think slash and burn farming). And when they were expanded out on a large scale (think Angor) catastrophe did sometimes follow.

Finally... a further word about rampant purposive rationality or instrumentality... I don't think we see anything like that. Cost-benefit analyses generally involve asking the question "WHAT do you value, and HOW MUCH do you value it." In other words, it requires an examination of the ends, as well as the means.

And we see debates about how much we think x is worth, and whether we want to sacrifice y amount for it, all the time. We see it in discussions about military action, about health care, about free speech, about education, about affirmative action, and so forth.

I'm not saying Weber was wrong about Prussia in the mid 19th/late 19th century. But I'm less sure that his observations translate so neatly into the democratic society of the United States, or other Westernized democracies, in the 21st century.
 
A few responses:

There seems to be some areas where we're just misinterpreting or talking past each other, and some where we actually disagree.

1) Chief among the first is a confusion between 'unenchanted' worldviews and what I'll call "secular materialism" -- the idea that only material objects exist, obeying strict physical laws, and all phenomena in the universe can be mechanistically explained in terms of them. I agree that many/most people tend to find secular materialism cold, lacking meaning, and isolated. But that's a rather different thing that the 'unenchanted' wordlviews we're talking about -- after all, the European Protestant society of the 1800's that Weber was talking about was not a hotbed of Dawkins-esque materialism. They didn't need to invoke spirits to make sense of day-to-day life, but they did have supernatural beliefs.


2) A disagreement: People don't have a "natural" tendency to dislike mechanical explanations and only accept anthropomorphic ones, I don't think. What they do have is a natural ability to understand anthropomorphic ("enchanted") explanations. Here's what I think happens: We know human brains, like the brains of our primate relatives, are wired for understanding quite complicated social structures. (Nearly everyone can easily & immediately grasp the complex web of drama in, say, a soap opera; understanding how a motor or gravity works is quite a bit harder.) And one thing that we can all agree people don't like is not having an explanation for something. It's extremely difficult to be able to maintain a position of uncertainty in the face of an asserted explanation; we tend to accept the first plausible-seeming explanation we're given. So it's natural to expect that primitive human cultures, faced with a vast unknown world around them, would deal with it by inventing explanations of the only kind they knew -- anthropomorphic ones.

But this doesn't mean the mechanistic explanations are unsatisfying. Indeed, if that were really the case, we would expect the "unenchanted" worldview to be a freak aberration, limited to a tiny fraction of mankind. Yet that's not the case at all -- instead we see it spreading across the world. "Unenchanted" religions, like Weber's Protestanism and its offshoots, are making rapid inroads all across the world. No doubt at the edges some of this is these religions adapting by becoming a little more 'enchanted', but I don't think anyone would argue with the basic trend of things -- that a lot more people across the world hold "unenchanted" views now than they did in the 1800's.

A few more specific responses:

What do you mean by 'real values' or 'actual values'? I'm going to take a stab and guess you mean rational cost-benefit analysis, but you tell me. :|
Not at all; I just mean being able to make judgments according to how you value the real world. Let's say you're debating whether to cut down some trees to build your family a bigger/different home. There's various values that come into play here -- how much your family values what the home can give them, how much you value the comfort of your family, how much you value preserving the natural environment, how much you value having this type of tree nearby, etc. Even if they all know the basic facts of the situation, different people will come to different decisions here, because of differing values. Those would be different choices according to their actual values & judgment. But there's another way people could come to different decisions -- they could e.g. believe that the trees are the home to demons, who sneak out and night and cause disease and deformity. (Or the home to spirits, who would wreak vengeance on the destroyer of their homes.)

I think you misunderstand how pre-modern cultures develop the values, beliefs, and practices they do. They're not crazy or ad hoc at all -- they were developed over centuries of trial and error in a people's interaction with their natural environment, and over time became tailored to that particular community and that particular environment, such that they allowed for excellent management of resources on the local level. If not, both the ecosystem and the human community suffered, and without a change of human ways, both perished.
This is sheer Panglossian fantasy. Neither we nor primitive pre-modern cultures live in the best in of all possible worlds, where all beliefs & practices are for the best. And not yet having wiped yourselves out in no way guarantees your beliefs & practices are humane, sensible, or nondestructive, let alone correct or excellent! It just guarantees they're not going to lead to your immediate extinction -- that leaves room to be pretty horrendous...

We have, for example: hereditary slavery, or slavery based on some visible characteristic. People being considered 'untouchable'/'unclean', with all the brutality and discrimination that implies. Ritual murder of babies: twins, or deformed babies, or the fruits of forbidden mating, for example. Forced mutilation of certain groups, such as foot-binding or female genital mutilation. The pointless slaughter of animals, or people, due to ritual uncleanliness (either because they were themselves considered unclean or to expiate some other uncleanliness) -- this is incredibly common. Murder of people who behave unusually, or have a different religion, or suffer from certian disorders, for "withcraft" or "sorcery." The sacrifice of captives from other tribes (often in grisly ways). The list of horrendous things people do because their "enchanted" worldview tells them the spirits or gods demand it goes on and on. People can come up with quite enough real reasons for commiting murder and atrocities; they don't need fantastical ones added on top of it.

And let's also note that environmental destruction isn't something foreign to "enchanted" cultures either: Easter Island is empty. Most of the worlds' megafauna went extinct just shortly after humans expanded into its habitat. The classical Maya more or less wiped out their civilization thanks to environmental destruction & warfare. Pre-modern cultures mostly lacked the power to alter their environment much, but you can find examples where they did. Obviously once you wipe out part of your environment once you can't really wipe it out again; but I'm not sure how that's useful.

I expect this kind of "it's necessarily perfect!" thinking applied to, say, laissez-faire economics by free-market fanatics, but not applied to pre-modern cultures in general. The free-market nuts at least have a mechanism which they claim makes everything turn out for the best in their system. You don't even have that. People form beliefs and traditions for a wide variety of reasons; it's just absurd to think that they will magically turn out to be ideal or even good. Sure, you can assume most cultures you see still alive have beliefs that won't immediately lead to their extinction -- but not ideal, good, decent, sane, excellent, or moral.
But as I just explained, many of them are correct, in that many of them have arrived at a set of rules for dealing with the natural world that do indeed get favorable results for both the natural ecosystem and the humans involved.
One other thing -- even if we lived in an alternate reality where this were true, that still wouldn't make those beliefs correct, i.e. true. This seems like a pretty basic point so I don't want to belabor it -- maybe you're using some weird definition of 'correct'? If I don't cut down the forest by my village because I believe it would cause the Forest Spirit to kill me, when in fact I wouldn't die but if everyone cut down the forest it would lead to eventual desertification and cause the village to be abandoned -- then my belief is not a true or correct one. It might be an adaptive belief, it might lead me to do the right thing from the POV of the village, but it's not a true one.

Taking it seriously, in this example, can allow someone to assess the place and value of a drug in their lives using the same mental machinations with which they assess the value of another person in their lives, without having to master the finer points of a whole new paradigm. This is very helpful, for example, to someone who has a keen eye for reading people, but knows nothing about chemistry or neuroscience.
How do people normally assess the value of anything in their life -- job, position, drug, relationship? Seems to me they go over how it's changed their life, how it makes them feel, what it does for them, what consequences it might present down the road for them, and so on. (What knowing chemistry & neuroscience could possibly have to do with this, I don't know.) That's what you're going to do regardless of whether you've got "enchanted" views, without thinking that drugs "are" in some sense conscious entities.

Now, what good does it do you to take this drug=person view seriously? You can't actually use skills to "read the other person," since of course there is no other person there to read. You could go by how the drug makes you feel, and use your knowledge of people. Maybe it make you feel really good; you think, "wow, he/she really completes me, when we're together I feel like a million bucks... and then when we part I really miss him/her, I just keep thinking about the next time we'll be together." In the case of a person, this'd be a good sign, a sign you should try and catch the person and make something lasting of it. Needless to say, with a drug, things are rather different; it's a sign you need to stop using and get help.

The fact is that drugs (obviously!) aren't people. Making the mistake that they are is unlikely to help you, and likely to lead you down the wrong path. Now of course there's no problem with using metaphors from other areas to talk about them, but this is totally different from thinking they're something they're not.
But the things a drug does to me ARE similar to things other people have done to me. Framing something weird and unfamiliar in the terms of something familiar (myself and other humans), is just how we make sense of the world and our place in it.
I don't have any objection at all to framing unfamiliar things in terms of familiar things. That's perfectly normal and reasonable, and as long as we keep the limitations of the metaphor in mind, no problem at all. The problem comes when you go another step and take the metaphor too seriously (as more than a metaphor).

An example may help: sometimes we say crime is like a cancer in our cities. That's a fine metaphor, it illustrates some of the aspects of crime. But like any metaphor, it's just a metaphor: it normally only works for the aspects you picked it to work for. If you take it too seriously, and use it to get new information about crime -- to tell you about aspects of crime you didn't already know (and choose the metaphor to fit) -- it's very likely to lead you astray. If I say, well, the important thing in fighting a cancer is to cut it all out before it kills us, and I apply that to crime, then my anti-crime strategy will be something like "ID and kill all the criminals before they kill us." Obviously this is a bad idea. And it's such a bad idea b/c crime is not in fact a cancer in your body: it's not just self-perpetuating but has outside causes, it doesn't spread until it kills everyone in society, etc. You can't use metaphors as a substitute for understanding & thinking.

ebola said:
A hypothetical individual acting and perceiving as a member of his 'culture' is an "ideal type". An ideal type functions as an analytical tool. It's what we'd expect someone to do given that they hold identified cultural schemata, approaching according ends purposively rationally except when culture dictates irrationality.
You're going to have to de-jargonify this if you want me to understand what you're trying to say. But it sounds like Weber is basically doing what I suspected -- he realized it was BS, but he really liked talking about cultural stereotypes, so he invented an imaginary 'ideal type' in order to fantasize about them in a fact-free zone.
 
i dont see how your brains chew through this type of topic in the middle of summer/...but I can respond based on a few things I read here!

I agree with the bloke who said it's more of a Northern European thing than a generally Western thing - the separate of observer and observed- but that way of thinking has seeped into all Western cultures to a massive extent. It has reached as far as Africa, and I dare say, it leads to a general degradation and ill state of the human spirit (in the short term - its ultimate goal, like all things, is to cleanse). i dont see a dichotomy between compassion and intelect (although they often struggle within me!), but trying to conquer and control the natural universe vs. living in harmony, relaxed peace with it, is a huge dichotomy we are all facing, in all cultures. Control vs. going with the flow. Seems like its tilted dangerously in favour of control rather than coexistence. Also, although I agree with Zorn that magical traditions are often romanticized, we are still missing the magic component of human existence/culture we having killed off/let die, both the good and the bad. Maybe science and religion will finally come around and meet face to face, so these dichotomies can be resolved, and we can live spiritually SHARP and behave mechanically but with PURPOSE and values, not a blind chewing-up of all matter and information just for the sake of it, while thinking because we are the prime 're-imaginers' of our universe that the means by which we manipulate has no meaning. indeed...in an universe made of information...meaning is all there is. including its ultimate subjectivity
 
Bumping to avoid prune.

(Fantastic thread IMO! I hope it can continue...)
 
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