Within Anthropology, we have a concept of general typologies of cultures.  Personally, I always preffered the version put together by Gerhardt Lenski (a Sociologist), but which version we use is really unimportant. In my own work, I have combined Lenski’s models with those of Julian Stewart (culture types), Marshal Sahlin’s ideas on specific and general evolution, some of the ideas of evolutionary psychologists such as Cosmides and Tooby and Jerome Barkow, and Fiske’s Relational models.
I originally started doing this to try and understand what was happening in Canadian society with a shift out of an idustrial era and into an information era.   Why, for example, as we moved mode towards an information economy did we have such a framenting of religious beliefs and a rise in “fundamentalism” (broadly defined)?

I came to realize that as we shifted towards an information economy, one of the things we were doing was creating a fertile socio-ecological niche for meaning-constructing institutions, whether religious, secular or personal.  We were, in effect, going through a cultural phase change, a shift from one form of evolutionary “line” into another.  At the same time, all of the general evolutionary complexity that we had generated in the industrial age was now fragmented and, increasingly irrelevant to the new electronic era.
Much of this “general evolutionary complexity” was symbolic in nature: highly linked systems of symbols, social structures and institutions that provided what Peter Berger has called the “Sacred Canopy” of a society.

One of the ways to measure the general evolutionary complexity of a society is to see how much information can be abstracted / inferred from “reality” by the symbol systems and the concommitant manipulation of “reality” by that culture.  Symbol systems are, after all, merely ways of understanding, communicating and manipulating our interactions with each other and objective reality.  They are also, by their very nature or, to be more specific, by our very nature, limited.  This is not to say that, while limited, they cannot be very complex.  And it is this degree of complexity, when combined with utility and efficiency, that defines the degree of general evolution of a culture.

So, what sort of a phase change are we going through?

Well, one observation is that we have shifted out of nation-state models and into local, national and international networks.  We can certainly see this in business (e.g. Strategic Alliances, virtual corporations, etc.), religion (e.g. Islamist networks, Wiccan networks, etc.) and politics.  Certainly this shift has been accelerated by the deployment of the Internet and, more recently, by the development of Net 2.0 social network programs.  We are more likely to have “close friends” in cyberspace than we are to have them in our apartment buildings.

One of the implications of this is that the fragmenting effect of the cultural phase change we are going through allows for the easy establishment of communities based not on geography but on interest.  And, since the concept of a nation state is rooted in geography, i.e. control over terrain, the concept of the nation state is diminishing and being replaced by transnational globalized movements.  The simple extrapolation of this is the concept of “glocalization” proposed by Barry Wellman - think globally, act locally; something that the radical Islamist movement has certainly done.

Recently, a friend of mine in Mosul sent me a powerpoint by T.X.Hammes on network analysis in counter-insurgency.  I wish that I had heard the actual presentation since powerpoint slides, while usefull, are non-interactive and don’t convey that much actual thinking.  As I was reading through the presentation, I was struck by several things.  First, here was finally a model of insurgency / counter-insurgency that made sense in our current global culture.

Second, for a few minutes, I felt very despondent realizing, once again, that in order to make it actually work it would require a major shift in the concept of “combat”.  In effect, combat operations would have to be glocalized and contain political, economic and cultural elements in addition to the more classic kinetic combat.  My despondency didn’t come from the realization of what would be necessary, I already knew most of it.  Rather, it came from the realization that our (i.e. Western liberal democracies) institutions of the military and politics were still lodged firmly in an industrial age mindset that was hopelessly out of phase with the new electronic age.

We can see the effects of this out of phase mentality in the reactions of many Western governments to the Islamist insugency.  And, while I won’t go as far as Mark Steyn does in America Alone, he does have an interesting point: where is the alternative to the Islamist ideology?

This is what I am wrestling with right now.  The radical Islamist movement is what “Pete” Hallowell called a “revitalization movement” - something to reconstruct a lost “Golden Age”.  Where is our alternate vision?  Is it in the neo-Conservative revitalization movement?  Certainly not to my mind - that is only replacing one fundamentalism with another, and fundamentalism, at least as the foundational ideology of an electronic age culture is completely implausible.

I think our best bet is to create or, rather, reinvigorate an ideology of individual responsability operating within a general social contract.  For the past 40 years, liberal democracies have concentrated far too heavily on individual rights at the expense of individual responsabilities.  Both rights and responsabilities do not, however, appear sui generis - and that is where the social contract comes in.  Individual societies must be capable of adapting and it is deadly for any society to be caught in a mind-set that is contra-survival.  I will freely admit to my own cultural bias here - I prefer a constitutional monarchy within a parliamentary system but, at the level of general ideology, it doesn’t matter: the specifics must match the culture.