We are in the habit of saying this or that "era" produced certain bodies of thoughts, arts, technologies, and ideas, and we often place values on those things in turn. We say this or that person or body of thought was "mistaken" or "on to the right things," which is more or less picking among history's detritus to assemble a new form that is appropriate to one's time.
I follow through with this habit all the time. I say, "well look here, here's where it went wrong, here is where the individual broke away, contributing to a cascade of individuals breaking away, a disintegration."
Or, "oh I see, here is where we see the beginning stirrings of Capitalism, or further back, the emergence of a relationship with increasing complexity, agrarian lifestyles, and indefinite growth."
As a human being enmeshed in a set of relations in one's time, one feels a tremendous pressure to make value judgements, to assemble an ideology whose thrust would see to it that a given state of affairs which has become unbearable would be altered.
One wishes to help, so to speak. One wishes to preserve the objects of love over time.
To do this, we choose what to focus on and what to ignore, we choose what to emphasize, or re-emphasize, and what to diminish, so as to re-establish balance. It takes raw materials, and some pre-built structures, to do this. I am referring to ideology. And in constructing ideology, we look across time. We set down ideological roots, so to speak. We look far back and say, here is where it went wrong, and here is how it happened, and here is how to fix it.
One can pick and choose values, but in the end, it all happened. History has proceeded across its fields of transition and emergence, and in turn, generated its own corollary field of arts and ideologies. One assents and dissents with each of them, but all of it together produces a totality worthy of analysis.
The study of disintegrating societies teaches us valuable lessons about how units of life organization end, or at least break-down and rearrange, and no matter how distasteful we find the ideologies and opinions emitting from such events, they teach us about the world and ourselves.
Individualism then, though stretched out to a grotesque and horrifying degree today, is interesting to study in terms of its strains of thought that curl back into history. It reveals much, unsurprisingly, about the individual, and the individual's place and behaviors in a society.
Just as religious and collectivist ideologies teach us about larger wholes. And the juxtaposition of these competing systems of thought, assumed to be at tension, teaches us much about the greater whole, about the endless historical chain that produces these tendencies and their related ideologies as they antagonize, subsume, and propel each other.
Cold environments produce their own set of phenomena, while hot environments produce theirs, and studying those, as well as the transitions in between, gives one the whole picture. Things melt. They freeze. They evaporate. They blast apart. All within certain contexts and sets of circumstances. And all of it provides a greater understanding.
