10 GA. Build on the good in society, while completely rejecting its destructive elements?

It is not the same people that are both destructive and constructive, these two opposite poles in every society. When the destructive part begins to dominate, then great changes are about to occur.

1.   Culture is a system of symbols; more specifically, it is a historically transmitted pattern of meaning embodied in these symbols. It is the summation of diverse inherited concepts expressed in symbolic form, which we communicate with.  We perpetuate and develop our presumed knowledge-about, and our attitudes-towards life.  Is there a way to break an old pattern, and interject another idea?  You would have to do it with a system of rewards and chastisement. Many wouldn’t like it.

2.   Ritual is also a key facet of cultural projection. Rituals are forms of enacted meaning which enable social actors to frame, negotiate, and articulate existence, as social, cultural and moral beings.  Rituals are how we run our government institutions, who and what we honor on specific occasions, and what are our holidays and celebrations.  Rituals are components of ideology, helping to shape perceptions of daily life and how to live it.

3.    Existing rituals must be reinforcing existing patterns of class and ethnic dominance. Or what else keeps them going?  We should always ask the tough questions: what is the hidden history of otherness contained within our narratives of liberation?  Whom do we exclude, marginalize, and repress? 

The struggle for democracy is sometimes painted as the destructive clamoring of special interest groups; but this is the description of the dominant-special-interest-group.  There’s a social and economic context which reproduces the problems we confront. Are we just reproducing the current social order characterized by dominance, subordination, and inequity?  How can we regather what has been lost, and fill the empty space of despair with revolutionary hope? 

4.   Hope stipulates the “Other” which stands before us.  You must unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be. The primary characteristic of a Critical Theory in any area, philosophy, politics, economics, literature, art, or education should play a significant role in changing the world, not just in describing it.  These are attempts to understand our personal contradictions within the context of the contradictions in society, and those dominant contradictions within our ideology and economics.

5.   Man’s ontological vocation is to be the subject who acts upon, and transforms his world, and in so doing moves toward ever new possibilities for a fuller and richer life, both individually and collectively. Everybody can do it to some extent, if they break out of the “culture of silence”, and build their verbal understanding.

6.   Social learning means we gain understanding to exercise rights and responsibilities.  We should be free, but realize that expanding compassion, empathy and solidarity builds upon our societal cohesion.  While excessive individualism, competitiveness and intellectual consumerism would foster more divisiveness.  Just how resilient is our society?  We must balance between these two factors.

 7.   We need a language of possibility, one that allows us to think in terms of the not-yet, to imagine social relations outside of the existing configurations.  Power works productively through the poetics of imagination.  Present reality is a fact, but what form of existence can be a possibility?  Without hope there is only the politics of cynicism.  There is an importance in developing multiple literacies, functional, cultural and critical.  If literacy is a condition for human agency, then education cannot be limited to young people.

True democratic community can only be imagined up to a certain size.  In the study of primitive tribes there was hypothesized what was called the Dunbar-number, about 150.  That was the maximum number of people that could successfully communicate together, and the limit of the tribe.  Afterwards, the tribe split.  Same with “cooperative” corporate structures, or perhaps our democracy can be made up of local “pods” with these limited numbers.  In any case, democracy can begin through local action.

8.   Love of country can happen, even with serious flaws.  America deserves criticism, which is healthy, but not derision and condemnation which are destructive.  Although, some things do deserve condemnation.  I see this as the major challenge, to separate what is good about America and American people, from the obvious flaws from the past, and now in the present.

9.   Somehow this separation must be done without contaminating the good with the destructive.  So far, I think this contamination is predominant.  If we just acknowledge flaws with a wink, that is not enough.  I cannot know how to do it myself.

Some positive traditions are needed to build on.  We can’t renew society from a blank slate, just by rejecting everything.

What’s the point I was trying to develop by writing each of these (numbered) paragraphs?

1.  That culture is a verbal system that dictates our actions.
2.  One of those actions is ritual, which exemplifies and sustains the culture.
3.  Rituals might be unconsciously slanted toward power groups.
4. The word hope in itself, reveals that there exists the other, and without hope it becomes dangerous.
5.  Our social vocation is to change society for the better, not to force the status quo.
6.  Social learning means to understand rights and responsibilities.
7.  We need imagination to create outside the box.
8.  Love of country is difficult because it seems that the nation has been captured by money-power, and not people power.
9.  How can you care for the positive constructive without mixing it, and continuing with the factors of separation and privilege?

Let these be our discussion points.