"Meaning" and "feeling themselves" are not the same thing. I feel more "myself" when engaging in my hobbies. That doesn't mean that my hobbies provide the primary source of meaning in my life. But even that is irrelevant. The data on the relation between unemployment and depression, all-cause mortality, etc. overwhelmingly indicates that a workless existence is poor one, and it's not that people - in the west - anyway, are experiencing such poor outcomes due to a lack of basic necessities. Feeling useless is common factor in depression even when one is gainfully employed, so much more so for those who are not. Of course, you will find people happy to just by the proverbial river, and others who will be workaholics, working themselves into an early grave. We aren't talking about those outliers.
As a social creature, we evolved a need to contribute to the group in some fashion. Consuming without contributing is a recipe for poor mental health, to put it mildly.
This is interesting to me, because it sounds like a discrepancy between meaning and identity--two things that usually find association in these kinds of discussions.
In other words, meaning as you're discussing it sounds like something effectively distinct from identity; meaning derives from the value one achieves in a social network, i.e. one's value as perceived by others. By contrast, identity would derive from one's individual interests and feeling oneself as oneself, so to speak. Yet the author of that article/post was interested in how individuals affirm their own identities, something that is inextricable from how they construct meaning.
I'd question your dissociation of meaning and identity if only because it's possible to contribute value to a society without taking any pleasure in doing so. We might point to extreme, totalitarian or utopian examples, but also to more plausible ones--i.e. someone who works a desk job in an office supplies store and does not enjoy themselves Monday through Friday, but feels alive on weekends going on bike rides or writing poetry, for example.
Now, as per my theoretical dispositions, I acknowledge that meaning exceeds an individual's perception of it (we've had this discussion before). But I also acknowledge that meaning arises from individuals' participation in the meaning-making process; there has to be some perceptive spark that resonates with an individual's subjective sense of selfhood.
So while I agree that "meaning" and "feeling oneself" aren't the same thing, I think the author of the piece you linked is interested in how they overlap.
I think one can treat the imperialistic aims of European governments somewhat separately from the aims of the missionary monks. After all, they eventually withdrew and the clergy remained.
Aims, yes--but now we're back to individual perceptions versus that unwieldy thing called "meaning." To say that England colonized Africa because they saw souls in need of saving is a vastly reductive and incomplete explanation. Comparing European perspectives on Africa to Asian perspectives and chalking it up to religious background ignores the (I think) far more important economic relationships between Asia and Europe at that time. Jesuit and Anglican missionaries were often lumped in with political and military campaigns to earn the support of the Churches.
Technology is not a simple determinant for culture is the point I think. The developed world and even many quasi-developed countries all have access to pretty much the same basic daily living technologies. Different countries still retain very distinct cultures. Just because McDonalds and Iphones are in China doesn't mean you are going to mistake Shanghai for Boston. However, the "Culture" as capitalized is working to iron out those differences, along with all the others which provide sources of meaning.
I haven't read Banks, so I can't speak to the series itself. In fact, it sounds like a structural functionalist (i.e. early systems theory) conception of advanced civilization.
A very preliminary explanation would be that the Culture, although it supplants/displaces distinctions that inform cultural meaning for us (e.g. gender, race, class, access to medicine, tech, etc.), also gives rise to new distinctions. The point of systems theory is that autopoietic evolution (i.e. the incessant rehabilitation/persistence of systems for their own sake, of expanding and maintaining their function) inevitably introduces new differences, many of which will be experienced by individuals at a visceral level. The neotraditional response is to reject change entirely for fear of giving up human identity--to concretize human identity as an experience closer to neolithic life than modern cybernetic life. Such resistance is incompatible with complex culture as it has developed to its current phase, which Banks extrapolates into a far-future scenario.
The apparent homogeneity of life under the Culture is misleading (as the author presents it), since the series is also constantly exploring how the Culture itself adapts when confronted with new life forms, star systems, energy and physical anomalies, etc (based on what I've read about it). Its point may be to reproduce itself, but this doesn't mean the Culture doesn't evolve.
Again, that's my impression based on the references to Talcott Parsons and the author's systems-theoretical perspective. I could be wrong about Banks's representation in the books.
In short, the fear of technological expansion and ubiquity seems to be that it would introduce the homogeneity of human life and experience, but there's no reason to assume this would be the case, especially in an adaptive and expanding civilization like the Culture.
I've been that broke and homeless and trust me, you miss work because you feel so utterly useless and worthless. Spending money on something fun can often feel very bad when you can't afford to even do it. One of the worst feelings I've ever experienced.
Point taken. Well put.
True, I wonder if there are any studies asking a question like that. Seems like a hard one to accurately word to me.
It also seems like a conceptually difficult thing to pinpoint in a study. Would be interesting to see, though.
