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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Exactly how does one go about measuring cultural or governmental acheivements?
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By making a historical overview of which ideals persist and which perish. By blade or by quill, just as in biological evolution there is a chain of thought going all the way back to pre-civilization. Some ideals spread and conquer the world while others never reach beyond their makers. This is the way I measure cultural acheivments. All your "what if"s are interesting thoughts, but they never happened, and behind them are reasons why. Utilitarian ethics is a way of explaining these "why"s.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
Homogenous Europe was still generations away in 1492
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You keep talking about that year... I hope you're not reading "pre-columbian" literally.
I think we're talking around each other. As I wrote in the OP, I'm not arguing that this is all written in stone, that the Europeans were destined to colonize the world or anything like that. However, certain cultural traits made the European want to explore the world in a way barely ever seen before. This combined with other factors led to the eventual rise of European colonialism/imperialism.
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Originally Posted by The_Jazz
the premises you're using ignores basic historic facts.
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The premise is that the Europeans traveled across the sea and colonized america. It seems you are trying to make these "what if"s into reality. It's precisely
because the Chinese dynasties tried to outpreform each other (by erasing history), unlike the Europeans who tried to do the same by simply being better. These are the cultural traits that utilitarian realism tries to pinpoint and draw conclusions from.
Hope I cleared this out a bit.
On to roachboy.
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Originally Posted by roachboy
o.p. repeats itself in a tautological and circular way as well because of the way in which the premises are the same as the conclusions and they are said twice
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Care to show me?
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Originally Posted by roachboy
is presu,ably a restatement of whatever "utilitarian realism" is this week.
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I would argue that, from a historical perspective, apathy/laziness/deference are not traits that lifts society, in any direction. Do you have a few examples maybe?
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Originally Posted by roachboy
differentiate their version of the same thing from previous versions of the same thing to throw around the word "realism"
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It's only to distinguish it from other forms of utilitarianism, as this is in the context of applied ethics, not in economics or philosophy or anything else. I guess since utilitarian means practical it's kinda superfluous to add realism on top. Utilitarian determinism sounds any better?
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Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru
I think much of this likely stems from postmodernism's (arguable) collapse, and the hangover we're experiencing from nearly 100 years of modernism and its dependent successors.
What we have is the apparent fall of irony and a craving to return/rebuild what the (post-)modernists spent decades destroying or otherwise mucking around with. So I think this is what leads us to—somewhat naturally perhaps—utilitarianism. This is what leads us to find use value in everything. This is what marginalizes anything that cannot be commodified or otherwise tied into our material reality.
What frustrates many is that a post-colonial, post-imperial world is essentially post-capitalist. We aren't quite there yet, but we see the capitalist system (which really was a driving force even in its proto-capitalist/post-mercantile forms since the Age of Enlightenment and subsequent industrialization) lurching and spiralling through crisis.
The world is finite and capitalism is running its course. This is not to say that capitalism as a mode of economics isn't going to be around; however, capitalism as a primary mode of governance, as a primary mode for building and managing societies, is, perhaps, in crisis. Growth for the sake of growth is a fool's game. Prosperity and growth aren't the same thing.
I suppose one measure of a culture is whether it's still around.
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Couldn't agree more. However, capitalism in it's current form has not been around any longer than previous socio-economic doctrines. If we are indeed at roads end of liberal, global, free-trade capitalism, then both mercantilism and manorialism outlasted it by at least a century.