요약
Iain M. Banks 의 SF 소설 The Culture 시리즈를 주제로 논리 진행
- SF 소설들은 기술적으로 발전한 동시에 전통적인 사회 구조를 가지도록 그려지는 경우가 많다
- 하지만 기술과 사회 구조의 관계는 예전 방식으로 결합된 수 없다
- 기술발전은 기능적 제약을 줄이면서 사회 구조에 영향을 주고 그에 맞는 문화를 가지게 한다
- 여기서 문화들이 meme처럼 모방되고 경쟁하고 재생산된다
- 경쟁과정에서 재생산성이 낮은 문화들보다 재생산성이 높은 문화들이 생존한다
- 최종적으로 모든 기능제약이 사라진 문화 The Culture는 문화 재생산 즉 참여를 위해 뭐든 만족시킬 수 있는 형태가 된다
- 모든 선택이 가능해진 상황에서, 인간의 자유가 정체성을 증명해주지 못하기에 자유가 의미없어진 역설적 상황을 보여준다
이런 접근을 통한 해석을 다양하게 보여주는데, 그중 기독과와 유교를 비교하는 예시가 재밌습니다. 중국 유교 문화가 가지는 자기복제성이 기독교의 선교문화보다 약했기에 유교 문화는 다른 대륙에까지 미치지 못했다는 겁니다. 그 증거로 비서구권인 한국에서 기독교의 성공도 들고 있습니다. 또한 문화의 수렴과 적응이 서구화로 오해된다는 설명 등 흥미로운 접근이 많습니다. 짧게 요약했지만 긴 논리를 설득력있게 전개해서 좋은 글이라 느꼈습니다. 요약에서는 중간중간 논리가 빠진 부분들이 있어서 원문 전체를 한번 읽어보는 것도 추천드립니다.
The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness.
원문에서 발췌한 중요 부분
Imagine a future transformed by the evolution of culture first and foremost, and by technology only secondarily. Modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future. There are functional relations between technology and social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old way.
Most importantly, there has been practically universal acceptance of the need for a market economy and a bureaucratic state as the only desirable social structure at the national level. One can think of this as the basic blueprint of a “successful” society. This has led to an incredible narrowing of cultural possibilities, as cultures that are functionally incompatible with capitalism or bureaucracy are slowly extinguished or transformed. This winnowing down of cultural possibilities is what constitutes the trend that is often falsely described as “Westernization.”
One interesting consequence of this process is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.
A particularly compelling example that Dawkins gives is that of the chain letter, or its modern email or twitter equivalent. Even if the contents are not particularly compelling, the letter typically provides some half-way plausible story about why you should send a copy to everyone you know. The story need not be entirely persuasive, of course, it only needs to be plausible enough to persuade a fraction of the population to pass it on to a sufficiently large number of people. “the Culture” will simply be that which is best at reproducing itself, by appealing to the sensibilities and tastes of humanoid life-forms.
Now consider the choices that people have in the Culture. You can be male or female, or anything in between (indeed, many Culture citizens alternate, and it’s considered slightly outré to be strongly gender-identified). You can live as long as you like. You can acquire any appearance, or any set of skills. You can alter your physiology or brain chemistry at will, learn anything you like.
Given all these options, how do you choose? More fundamentally, who are you? What is it that creates your identity, or that makes you distinctive? If we reflect upon our own lives, the significant choices we have made were all in important ways informed by the constraints we are subject to, the hand that we were dealt: our natural talents, our gender, the country that we were born in. Once the constraints are gone, what basis is there for choosing one path over another? The paradox of freedom is that it deprives choice of all meaningfulness.