Cyreenik Says
It is impressive, and disturbing, how much of American prosperity is being devoted to making our rituals more elaborate. Humans have had rituals since prehistory, but how many and how much resource they consume varies with the ages and cultures. Over my lifetime it seems that more and more of American attention and resource is being spent on rituals such as Christmas, Halloween and Thanksgiving. A recent surprising example of this trend was the enthusiastic participation of Utahns in the 2013 Salt Lake Comic Con. This surprised many people by turning into the largest convention in Utah history, and "cosplay", the heart of this con, is a booming 21st century ritual.
"Black Friday", tipping, and street corner panhandling are other areas where Americans are supporting more ritual now than in decades previous. The retailers, service people and beggars could all conduct their business more routinely, but customers show their "sincere interest" in having them do things the ritual way by directly paying them to do so. (This 25 Nov 13 WSJ article, The Dirty Secret of Black Friday 'Discounts' by Suzanne Kapner, discusses specifically how retailers have adapted.)
This is disturbing because people could be thinking about more productive things, literally. But in our modern times, with increasing automation taking care of our necessities of life, thinking productively seems to be declining on the modern priority list.
This thought was inspired by a 24 Nov 13 Economist article, Modest, but still historic, which analyzes the latest Iran nuclear deal.
On the whole, this is great news. It's great because it means that Iranian views on how important nuclear development is are changing. Iran's previous president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appealed to Iran's "yahoo vote" and part of that appeal was waving around the promise of the big nuclear stick. It played well in Iran's equivalent of Peoria, but horrified the rest of the world.
We have a new president now, Hassan Rouhani, and this may lead to an era of "cooler heads" running nuclear policy in Iran. That will be good. The more Iranians consider themselves a valuable and valued part of the globalized world, the better off Iran and the globalized world will be. The current shining example of this is South Korea.
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