The Root Of All Evil

by poputonian

There were many interesting comments in tristero’s last post, but two separate ones in particular caught my eye:

“This world is ruled by the purse, and violence, diplomacy, war, deception, and the long knives all serve the purse.”

And then this one, which argued against economic causes:

“It is irrational tribalism, nationalism, religion (and also the pride, fears, and stupidities of leaders) that are the root cause of most conflicts.”

I agree with both of these points but think the first one, material standing, causes a distortion of the ‘rightness’ of the second, the cultural ways that make up the tribe. In other words, those with the material means control the politics, and with control of the politics comes the opportunity to push your tribe’s belief system onto society. My favorite history professor writes:

[Culture] is communicated from one generation to the next by many interlocking mechanisms — child-rearing processes, institutional structures, cultural ethics, and codes of law — which in advanced societies as well as primitive cultures create ethical imperatives of great power. Indeed, the more advanced a society becomes in material terms, the stronger is the determinant power of its folkways, for modern technologies act as amplifiers, and modern institutions as stabilizers, and modern elites as organizers of these complex cultural processes.

I would posit that America’s path to war was caused by the political power of the Republican culture along with its southern and religious cultural roots. Modern institutions, such as the free press, failed to act as a stabilizer against what that culture saw as its ethical imperatives. The Republican connection to the business class amplified the power behind those perceived imperatives.

In a footnote, Fischer tempers the notion that materialism is the lone determinant in what shapes a culture’s norms and expectations:

Scholars regularly rediscover the persistent power of ethnicity and regional culture in modern societies without being able to explain it except in material terms. See, for example, Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (London 1975), which argues that survival of “ethnic solidarity” in Britain was caused by a division of labor in which some ethnic groups were kept in inferior positions by a process “internal colonialism.” The argument of the present work is different — that cultural systems have their own imperatives, and are not mere reflexes of material relationships. This is not to argue against the power of material forces, but for a more balanced conception of the problem in which material structures are seen as part of a cultural whole.

Maybe this is a chicken and the egg sort of thing: is it the pursuit of material things that causes war, or is it the perceived cultural imperatives — or both? There is strong evidence that the Bush-Cheney plutocrats were already planning regime change for Iraq, but 9/11 surely was a trigger event (bad pun intended) for all the moralistic and ideological responses that made war essential to their tribal cause.