Notes from the Underground

Home > Notes from the Underground

I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

 
I've never been particularly convinced by Jim Bennett's idea of the Anglosphere. It seemed to me that by concentrating on shared traditions it neglected other aspectcs; for example, the World Value Survey usually tends to show Britain where most of us expected it to be; poised between Europe and America rather than alongside the other Anglosphere states. In particular, Britain usually tends to be closest to Austria and about as close to the United States as we are to Uruguay. Accordingly, I was rather cynical when I read this but was interested to find some validation for my view of how Europe may develop:

"The Industrial Revolution made continent-spanning nation-states possible. The Information Revolution offers the possibility that civil societies may link themselves on a globe-spanning-although not universally inclusive-scale. Such is the network civilization... This facilitates the movement of people, goods and services across borders, forming and strengthening shared cultures (both elite and popular) and experiences-for example, common publications read by the publics of all of the nations of a particular network civilization."


I should mention that in spite of a shared view regarding the development of transnational ties my cynicism hasn't entirely abated; the idea that Britain is better placed to gain economic success from technological innovation than Europe should be easily dismissed by this which places the UK beneath every other European nation and just above Israel in a ranking of how countries have used information technology to boost economic growth. Similarly, his insistence on civil society being central to stability and prosperity belies the extent to which modern states achieved those goals by aggressive centralisation of power at the expense of civil society. Finally, I'm somewhat cynical about his view that this transformation will necessarily be channelled by shared traditions or that any notion of the social-democratic state should be discarded (the movement of valye to countries with a comparative advantage founded on cost, if taken to such an extent that Western economies are left largely based on consumption rather than production, creates exactly the conditions where social democracy is most needed).

Update: Piece dedicated to the idea of the Anglosphere. I'm sceptical. I suspect it exaggerates points of similarity, whereas British social attitudes are more closely affiliated with European attitudes on most subjects (as with the taxation example above, or this). For example, consider this piece from The Economist, and in particular this map of cultural values divided by state. The map shows that not only is the United States populace more religious than its European counterparts, but that this affects attitutudes towards a range of subjects, which Europe regards as technical issues and the United States as moral. On the map New Zealand and Britain have essentially European virtues, leaving Ireland and the United States at the other end of the spectrum.

Labels:



posted by Richard 9:09 pm