Below is an excerpt from a book. It's just an idea, but I think it's a really important idea in terms of where we are as a society. Or maybe how we should see ourselves, because you can't get to where you want to be (open/accurate elections & social/enviro reform), unless you first know where you're at.
From Chapter One:
The method we are using is valuable because it allows us to understand Hamlet from more than one early modern perspective, but since this diversity can be confusing, it’s helpful, in understanding the rich and complex territory we are mapping, to turn to distinctions offered by Raymond Williams, a modern British literary historian. Since these distinctions will be used throughout the rest of the book, it’s important to explain them in some detail. Their chief value is that they will prevent us from thinking that early modern English culture was a unitary (whole, undivided), and this will hopefully make it impossible to think that putting Hamlet in a historical context means putting Hamlet in just one context, since in early modern England, as in every culture before and since, there are always at least four significantly different contexts to contend with:
- Residual: What is left over from the past.
- Dominant: What is presently in control.
- Transgressive: What lies beyond the boundaries of the acceptable.
- Emergent: What arises as new.
RESIDUAL, with respect to Elizabethan England, in part meant the Catholic religious establishment, which, though declared illegal in 1532, nevertheless hung on in memories, values, published texts, subversive practices, ruined or remodeled monastic buildings, as well as in a Europe where Catholicism was still primarily dominant. For Elizabethans residual also meant those early subversive reactions to the Catholic order mobilized by Wyclif, Hus, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Luther, among others, linked in the public mind with Wittenberg and the 1521 Diet of Worms, and associated with the Hamlet in the play. Residual also designated a wide spectrum of conservative and social feelings based in agrarian resistance to economic and social change. In part residual also marked that long traditional, blood-based hereditary aristocratic order which successive Tudor monarchical bureaucracies labored to disempower.
DOMINANT signifies the Protestant, monarchical, bureaucratic cultural formation that emerged with Henry VIII (1491-1547), and came into full power during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Dominant also meant that the authority formally vested in the Pope, Catholic tradition, and/or an oligarchic English aristocratic nobility, came to reside instead in a sovereign monarch, English common law, and parliament.
TRANSGRESSIVE means everything defined as illegal and/or sinful according to the laws of the dominant culture and/or the more general codes of the culture. In religious terms, transgression of activities included atheism, witchcraft, sodomy, prostitution, incest, and adultery; in political terms, treason, rebellion, sedition, and the like; in social terms, violations of, for example, sumptuary laws (laws that made it illegal for people to wear clothes that would elevate their social status or alter their gender). Though the transgression is distinguished from the Dominant and Residual, it is a phenomenon that also occurs within each of these domains.
EMERGENT, to quote Raymond Williams, means the "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and new kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created." These include the sorts of new knowledge a dominant order readily appropriates (i.e. takes over) as a way of strengthening itself, and the sorts of new knowledge that such an order regards as sufficiently threatening to contain or suppress.
From a dominant perspective, virtually all residual, transgression, and emergent activities are viewed as subversive, though subversion is also, of course, present in the dominant itself. And, just as society as a whole is divided into at least these four domains, every cultural entity in such a society is also similarly divided.