America has changed culture more than most modern civilizations. This mutability or adaptability is a threat to the older established rigid moral compass of a world that did not have so many variables and survived as a reason of taking great care with physical rules.

Rules about eating and sex characterize religions and form the basis of culture where restriction adds the value of temptation, where the forbidden gives the terribly rich and powerful access to the asinine. In a sense, the decline of civilisation, its very decadence, is not what defines it. It is not the act of the soldier priest that starts the long walk that eventually ends up with coddled children and little bits of shiny plastic. The old model was of a shepherd herding sheep, a leader with vision with followers endowed with perception or enough good sense to follow. In this contrived clash of civilisations (even it was contrived by Osama Bin Laden and his wealth, or a Bush conspiracy) we see the most decadent fighting against the most devout. Both American decadence and deep Islamic devotion are extra-ordinary behaviours based on a lifetime of thinking a certain way. Neither are wrong, indeed, if either are right it is not the reason the other is not. Social coherence is not sourced in the will. For the first part of life we seek the dictates of a leadership, we either wait for permission or we take the reigns. Early life knows no middle ground. Later on we start to realise the value of waiting dissipates and action is required and urge on our younger brothers and sisters to feel responsibility in their lives.

It is the same problem in the self aware culture of the Americas as in the forceful rigour of Afghani life. The young will not listen. But for the clash of civilisations to resolve, the young need to listen because their beliefs are formed around what they fail to understand. American culture has so many levels of pretense it appeals to many personae whereas restrictive cultures can only appeal to a limited range of minds, meaning that they only produce a limited range of mind sets.

Variety in the challenges to the mind set have produced a new approach to finding the “most successful” path. Multiple expertise assists survival in the bleakest of circumstance, but for a culture to master every terrain and climate requires more facets of specialisation. Afghanistan has become a country ruled by war and a distrust for invaders, whom, one after the other, have managed to find an army more suited to the internal conditions of a land that is not typical of every land.

The fear of invasion of America has been a driving force since World War II. The European invasion and colonisation empires collapsed as the colonies develop independent wealth. Trade ensues and is seen as the healthy signs of a cooperating world.

Into the hands of children do they place weapons. Trade supports the flow of weapons in as much as drugs and food. Trade has no conscience. What it carries from one set of hands to another is judged by neither and the mutual risk of rejection by the other is reduced by the use of currency.

On the battlefield, there is no such medium. The exchange is guaranteed to cause disease to both sides. The product of war is reduction in demand and it causes wealth by concentrating ownership. It is the exercise of power, trading the lives of those we old man can influence to fight for their sisters, their wives and children. To fight and kill the other males from over the valley and dale. To exercise their internal need to be dominated we force their energies into each other?

The need for culture to define itself in terms of relative values interferes with rightful progress. As we carry past solutions to now non-existent problems, our culture is subsumed by a need for tradition – the tired old call of parents too confused by their offspring to do much else but bark orders to limit action. We exceed our parents as we start where they left off.

There is no real notion of a skill level of the passing on of traits be they genetic or otherwise – but influence by parents may channel a level of safety and simply by being and acting do they manifest a “magnetism of motion” that defines “a field of influence” in which offspring develop. A sort of family magnetism. A web of cohesion. Social politics binds us and tears us, but family bonds remain despite efforts to annul them – they still exist.

As progress is necessary or the world would have no hope, it follows then that intergenerational change is requisite. Evolution is too slow for humanity. Immediate results are sought. Evolutionary demands have become intimate, such as the need to have children at the right time, of the right kind, with the right health and the monitoring of prenatal progress and the intrusion of medical solutions to problems that are invisible to the parents. These are all evolutionary factors.

Some science fiction proposes a take over by artificial intellect that comes to the inevitable conclusion that humanity was a danger to existence and therefore must be eliminated; to accept this as logical supposes the impregnation of life into (inanimate) matter. The fashioning of a machine that can think. The mind tries to understand itself and make replicas of its very function at some mechanistic level appears to be something that can not be so replicated.

The inverse is probably far more likely. Instead of the transfer of intellect into matter, it is much easier to install metal arms, computerised lungs or mechanical hearts. Hark back to that (purely of its moment) “6 Million Dollar Man” played by Farah Fawcett’s ex-husband Lee Majors. A cheap military weapon by today’s standards, (but it was a cheap series in many ways).

The idea of nanobot installation into human skin and the addition of computer circuitry to the being is well explored in science fiction and horror, from Star Trek’s “The Borg” assimilating anything and everything they can wrap their flesh around to “Tetsuo – The Iron Man” – an effective Japanese horror film about a man whose muscles are turning into iron. The amalgamation of flesh and silicon has been going on for years. The use of electronic devices embedded in the flesh seem commonplace in fiction and in medicine.

Is this on a level with the stem cell debate – a matter of religious sensitivity? And if so, should that hold back progress for those who believe differently? Are we allowed by the laws of nature to interfere with the balances of life, or have we already gone so far overboard in that endevour that nature can no longer defend us from her inevitable wrath?

Or has our very interference with nature demanded a certain urgency for progress so we may colonialise space? Is the need to define culture as an evolutionary trait starting to overtake the need for culture as a mode of understanding our differences?

As we chip away at our grandchildren’s future with this over consumption are we evolving better faster more reliable grandchildren? It appears that is the inevitable result of our cultural imperative.

If Argentianian ants do not get there first.