I get that, but also think it makes a lot of thematic and historical sense. The Avatars generally represent society, and industrialisation represents a radical break with the past. Korra is the first real industrial Avatar, so it makes since to me that as the world breaks its ties with its past, so does Korra. The only thing I'd do differently is have Korra keep her connection with Aang, because he's the bridge between the traditional world and the industrialised one.
I'm honestly scared of how terrible a new Avatar's politics would be
I agree with you, and I think it makes sense, but I also disagree because I’m personally tired of the narrative that industrialisation fundamentally changed humanity.
Really, as different as things are, they are still the same. Power is power. Humans are humans. It wasn’t some psycho-spiritual evolutionary threshold, it was a relatively minor social reorganization and some technological adaptations. To me, that whole narrative feels a lot like the liberal’s version of it, ‘the end of history’.
Like, we’re talking about spirit, and about humanity’s fundamental connection with the natural world (bending), and our connection to our ancestors (perhaps understood modernly as ‘evolved characteristics’ or somesuch). Those things don’t just change in 10 generations because of some technological threshold, imo, as much as different cultures like to imagine they do.
Oh wow we burn coal now instead of wood! I guess we’re suddenly a different species, time to just ignore the entirety of history up to this point hahaha
(yes fine I have some extremely personal and extremely pent-up gripes with that particular metanarrative, I really hope you don’t take this personally, you’re just the comrade who made me think of it just now hahahaha)
I won't talk about Avatar specifically, except to mention that even bending changes under industrial capitalism, losing its spiritual element and becoming profane (pro bending), used as vehicles for advertising and large corporations rather than spiritual fulfilment.
But in our world industrialisation, along with capitalism, has radically shifted everything, at least where I live. Extended family doesn't exist, the nuclear family as a structure reshapes the fabric of our society, the way we think of ourselves as individuals is radically different from how people in the 1600s thought of themselves, most people don't live on farms, etc. It was not a minor social change; for most of history, humans existed as hunter-gatherers mostly. Agriculture was a radical change, but industrialisation makes it look small. I'm not saying humans had some massive evolutionary change; biologically, we're mostly the same as we were 50,000 years ago. But the scale of our society, it's organisation, the way we think of ourselves, etc, have all been massively shifted by industrialisation.
This is interesting! I might make a counter-point: modern post-industrialists are more similar to even the earlier agriculturalists than those agriculturalists were to hunter-gatherers. If only from an individual-scale psychological perspective.
Hunter-gatherer societies, if anthropologists can be trusted, have extremely communialist identities. And they saw themselves as ‘embedded in’ the world, rather than ‘standing on’ it. While you might argue that farmstead culture has an element of collectivism, it’s pretty clear they have that idea that ‘the world exists to serve humanity’, that is the very essence of industrialism.
And besides, my reading of agrarian society is that it is a very individualistic thing. Farms are groups, ya, but they belong exclusively, almost without exception, to the patriarch. Everyone follows the patriarchs rules, until they either marry a different patriarch or go off to found a new patriarchy of their own; hence the imperalistic tendencies of agrarian societies.
What I’m getting at is that industrialisation isn’t so much a radical shift away from what came immediately before it, but rather is a very natural expansion of those core ideas.
Much as agriculture took families out of the community, modernity takes individuals out of the family. It’s all one story, to me.
I’d be a fool to deny that industrialization didn’t change a hella lot hella fast tho, of course. If you look at all the graphs, particularly of materialist trends (consupmtion, climate change, etc), they all hockey-stick starting in the ~1950’s. And mass society, communication, all that amplifies core cultural impetuses.
I guess all I mean to say is that I tend to object to ‘industrial exceptionalism’; the idea that things were fundamentally all new again, starting right there. It was a threshold, but not necessarily the biggest or most important!
I heard a sociologist say that teens in the 1960s were more similar to people today than they were their own parents. But, also, they weren’t that different. Just like I don’t think ‘modernity’ is fundamentally different than the largely christian roots it arose from, even if it was tossed through the ringer of industrialization and rationalist secularism.
Gosh I get away from myself sometimes. But, I think, if you compare, say, you and I to a medieval christian, and then compare all three of us to someone in a traditional non-agrarian society, all three of us would have a lot more in common than the ‘hunter-gatherer’. Just... an intuition, though haha; also skewed because we’re two leftists here, of course! :)
You might say that new modes of production completely destroy the superstructure built above the old and only on the ashes of the old can a new society be built.
I get that, but also think it makes a lot of thematic and historical sense. The Avatars generally represent society, and industrialisation represents a radical break with the past. Korra is the first real industrial Avatar, so it makes since to me that as the world breaks its ties with its past, so does Korra. The only thing I'd do differently is have Korra keep her connection with Aang, because he's the bridge between the traditional world and the industrialised one.
I'm honestly scared of how terrible a new Avatar's politics would be
I agree with you, and I think it makes sense, but I also disagree because I’m personally tired of the narrative that industrialisation fundamentally changed humanity.
Really, as different as things are, they are still the same. Power is power. Humans are humans. It wasn’t some psycho-spiritual evolutionary threshold, it was a relatively minor social reorganization and some technological adaptations. To me, that whole narrative feels a lot like the liberal’s version of it, ‘the end of history’.
Like, we’re talking about spirit, and about humanity’s fundamental connection with the natural world (bending), and our connection to our ancestors (perhaps understood modernly as ‘evolved characteristics’ or somesuch). Those things don’t just change in 10 generations because of some technological threshold, imo, as much as different cultures like to imagine they do.
Oh wow we burn coal now instead of wood! I guess we’re suddenly a different species, time to just ignore the entirety of history up to this point hahaha
(yes fine I have some extremely personal and extremely pent-up gripes with that particular metanarrative, I really hope you don’t take this personally, you’re just the comrade who made me think of it just now hahahaha)
I won't talk about Avatar specifically, except to mention that even bending changes under industrial capitalism, losing its spiritual element and becoming profane (pro bending), used as vehicles for advertising and large corporations rather than spiritual fulfilment.
But in our world industrialisation, along with capitalism, has radically shifted everything, at least where I live. Extended family doesn't exist, the nuclear family as a structure reshapes the fabric of our society, the way we think of ourselves as individuals is radically different from how people in the 1600s thought of themselves, most people don't live on farms, etc. It was not a minor social change; for most of history, humans existed as hunter-gatherers mostly. Agriculture was a radical change, but industrialisation makes it look small. I'm not saying humans had some massive evolutionary change; biologically, we're mostly the same as we were 50,000 years ago. But the scale of our society, it's organisation, the way we think of ourselves, etc, have all been massively shifted by industrialisation.
I don't take it personally, I like discussion
This is interesting! I might make a counter-point: modern post-industrialists are more similar to even the earlier agriculturalists than those agriculturalists were to hunter-gatherers. If only from an individual-scale psychological perspective.
Hunter-gatherer societies, if anthropologists can be trusted, have extremely communialist identities. And they saw themselves as ‘embedded in’ the world, rather than ‘standing on’ it. While you might argue that farmstead culture has an element of collectivism, it’s pretty clear they have that idea that ‘the world exists to serve humanity’, that is the very essence of industrialism.
And besides, my reading of agrarian society is that it is a very individualistic thing. Farms are groups, ya, but they belong exclusively, almost without exception, to the patriarch. Everyone follows the patriarchs rules, until they either marry a different patriarch or go off to found a new patriarchy of their own; hence the imperalistic tendencies of agrarian societies.
What I’m getting at is that industrialisation isn’t so much a radical shift away from what came immediately before it, but rather is a very natural expansion of those core ideas.
Much as agriculture took families out of the community, modernity takes individuals out of the family. It’s all one story, to me.
I’d be a fool to deny that industrialization didn’t change a hella lot hella fast tho, of course. If you look at all the graphs, particularly of materialist trends (consupmtion, climate change, etc), they all hockey-stick starting in the ~1950’s. And mass society, communication, all that amplifies core cultural impetuses.
I guess all I mean to say is that I tend to object to ‘industrial exceptionalism’; the idea that things were fundamentally all new again, starting right there. It was a threshold, but not necessarily the biggest or most important!
I heard a sociologist say that teens in the 1960s were more similar to people today than they were their own parents. But, also, they weren’t that different. Just like I don’t think ‘modernity’ is fundamentally different than the largely christian roots it arose from, even if it was tossed through the ringer of industrialization and rationalist secularism.
Gosh I get away from myself sometimes. But, I think, if you compare, say, you and I to a medieval christian, and then compare all three of us to someone in a traditional non-agrarian society, all three of us would have a lot more in common than the ‘hunter-gatherer’. Just... an intuition, though haha; also skewed because we’re two leftists here, of course! :)
Removed by mod
Gorn. You should read The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State and "Caliban and the Whitch".
You might say that new modes of production completely destroy the superstructure built above the old and only on the ashes of the old can a new society be built.