This post makes me miss my days in marching band, or in the Boy Scouts. Honestly it doesn’t sound all that authoritarian.
I agree with the sentiment. It seems that most things in modern culture like marching band or Boy Scouts which demand commitment and/or group cohesion are at least a few decades old. I suspect this is because we have developed cultural antibodies towards the creation of new things like this (as evidenced by some of the comments in this thread).
When Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, it was the Americans’ propensity for civic association that most impressed him as the key to their unprecedented ability to make democracy work. “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition,” he observed, “are forever forming associations. There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute… Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”
If we’ve lost cultural memories about how to create new associations, early attempts to get “association culture” going again may fail. But they seem like very worthwhile experiments. (I suppose if people dislike learning things the hard way, they might be able to read about the early history of successful associations and glean some best practices?)
Exploring this intuition more deeply: Successful communities are known to do community stuff like sing together and have secret handshakes. If a person in a fledgling community proposes doing something this for the first time, people in our culture are apt to shut them down by saying it’s weird or (if done for the explicit purpose of community-building) inauthentic. The skeptics miss the fact that the weirdness is a feature, not a bug. Doing weird stuff with other people builds deep friendships, in the same way sharing private thoughts and fears builds deep friendships. Then somewhere along the line the weird stuff starts to become a tradition, and the fact that it’s a tradition builds group cohesion in a different way.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Given that the standard response to “weird” groups that demand cohesion/commitment seems to be “that sounds like a cult”, it feels like these antibodies could have developed after the cult scares, which Wikipedia tells me showed up seriously in the 1970s.
Wasn’t “Generation X” supposed to have been really cynical compared to the generations that preceded it? When I search for “cynical generation” on Google I get a bunch of results about how Millennials are really cynical too. So maybe it was a permanent shift.
I agree with the sentiment. It seems that most things in modern culture like marching band or Boy Scouts which demand commitment and/or group cohesion are at least a few decades old. I suspect this is because we have developed cultural antibodies towards the creation of new things like this (as evidenced by some of the comments in this thread).
Source: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/assoc/bowling.html (This quote is part of a longer essay about declining social capital in the US)
If we’ve lost cultural memories about how to create new associations, early attempts to get “association culture” going again may fail. But they seem like very worthwhile experiments. (I suppose if people dislike learning things the hard way, they might be able to read about the early history of successful associations and glean some best practices?)
Exploring this intuition more deeply: Successful communities are known to do community stuff like sing together and have secret handshakes. If a person in a fledgling community proposes doing something this for the first time, people in our culture are apt to shut them down by saying it’s weird or (if done for the explicit purpose of community-building) inauthentic. The skeptics miss the fact that the weirdness is a feature, not a bug. Doing weird stuff with other people builds deep friendships, in the same way sharing private thoughts and fears builds deep friendships. Then somewhere along the line the weird stuff starts to become a tradition, and the fact that it’s a tradition builds group cohesion in a different way.
Hypothesis for why the antibodies exist: People noticed that there were standard methods for creating in-group identification, and these methods were exploited by con artists, advertisers, managers trying to get their employees to work harder, teachers trying to get their students to behave, etc. Antibodies formed in response.
Given that the standard response to “weird” groups that demand cohesion/commitment seems to be “that sounds like a cult”, it feels like these antibodies could have developed after the cult scares, which Wikipedia tells me showed up seriously in the 1970s.
Yeah, this is my hypothesis. Vietnam and Watergate probably seriously contributed to a general erosion of trust in authorities as well.
Wasn’t “Generation X” supposed to have been really cynical compared to the generations that preceded it? When I search for “cynical generation” on Google I get a bunch of results about how Millennials are really cynical too. So maybe it was a permanent shift.
I like both of these posts a lot. Thanks for adding them—they helped me make explicit something implicit that I felt very strongly.