Dyschronicity

Issue:

Dyschronicity

Dyschronicity is a measurement of how much two places are out of sync in time.

To draw a map of dyschronicity, one must pick:

· the yardstick country

· the topic of comparison

In this case, the yardstick is Sweden, and the topic of comparison is broad: societal values and lifeways.

The topic is based on the fact that there has been a path of development that most of the wealthy countries have passed through, characterized by these interrelated phenomena:

· increasing freedom

· rising personal autonomy, if not individualism

· respect for human rights

· diminishing rigidity in approach to traditions

Potential problems with the idea must be acknowledged:

· This is an essentially Western model that may break down as modernization takes more forms.

· Countries are quite diverse, and a single country is likely to be in multiple stages at once.

· All relevant issues do not move in lockstep: post-modern Americans are still rather more religious than post-modern Europeans, for instance.

This map format requires other oversimplifications. Chief among them is that countries are assigned in a uniform color. Swedish-American dyschronicity actually varies from about 10 years to about 100, depending on the locale. The Swedish-Turkish gap might run from 50 years if comparing Sweden to some Istanbul neighborhoods to 500 if the comparison is certain mountain villages.

This measure also in effect presupposes directionality: if one believes that Alabama or Saudi Arabia are more likely evolutionary endpoints than Stockholm, a different map would result.

The same concept can apply to other topics: a map of technology dyschronicity would be informative, for instance.