[TML] Solomani Cultural identity

[Richard Aiken]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 2:09 AM, Jerry W Barrington
<jerry.barrington at gmail.com> wrote:
> Their kids even more than the elders.  Ask the American Indians how many of
> their kids are more interested in "tradition" instead of wider, modern
> society.

It seems to be a modern habit.  The kids - of whatever culture - look
for something else to be.  But when they realize they aren't kids
anymore, they look around for an identity which feels stronger to them
than whatever they've made up on their own.  Most often (at least in
my experience), they seem to end up returning to their original
culture.  Except that, in the meantime, said "original" culture will
have likely changed, by incorporating elements from other cultures (to
a greater or lesser extent).  The ultimate probable outcome of this
trend - once everyone everywhere goes through enough iterations of it
- is that we'll end up with one worldwide monoculture.

Of course, if we split ourselves up among thousands of worlds with
extremely slow communications between them (that is, the Traveller
universe), the situation changes.  If there is a monoculture in
existence before the splitting-off begins, each world will develop
it's own version of the overall "monoculture" that will look similar
to that of nearby worlds (assuming that each particular world doesn't
find a cultural reason to deliberately differentiate itself from
it/them).  But the further the distance between each given pair of
worlds, the less alike they'll become.  If there isn't a monoculture
yet developed at the split-off point (and I think that's the case in
the OTU), then we'll get a whole bunch of different "monocultural"
models (one per world - assuming real world communications tech on
each world) and it's extremely unlikely that these will ever settle
down into one universal monoculture.

Just my opinion, of course.  :-)

-- 
Richard Aiken

"Never insult anyone by accident." Robert A. Heinlein