Surprisingly warm in the city. Hordes of midlanders pacing the streets aimlessly, looking to participate in the much-bruited heaven hereabouts. As it turns out, it's just another city, although the confluence of millions in this context of liberal democracy does make things interesting. But it's nothing about the place itself. The charm of this Camelot is in the ways of the people, not the magic circle Merlin traced on the ground.
One meaning of "ground" closely associated with the philosophical one is the background whiting or umbering (?) of the canvas prior to painting. The shared social life operates as a ground, not merely a background presumption, but an active, epistemic basis for saying what any given thing is. If the ground were to be different, the painted sunset would have to be different.
The ground of social interaction in this country is highly mediated. The sensibility that I hear around me couldn't govern a New England town based on regular town meetings -- it's largely constructed from television, and allows people to encounter each other within an industrial mechanism in a sufficiently voluble manner. Which is no great loss, perhaps -- except for the fact that this occasionally artificial social mind is, historically speaking, what we use to identify what it is that things are in the world. This epistemic function, perhaps consequently, has been relegated to the media of the society -- we rely on the news/entertainment discourse to tell us what things are, and how these things function together -- but the common social mind, now largely an artificial creation of the media-driven society, still operates as a check on the things that we're told. Whether or not they ring true.
The nature of this three-way interaction is important, perhaps. For me to be convinced that A is X, I no longer have to have a sort of Habermasian sphere of discourse appear in which A is X -- the cultural mediation simply announces the fact. The critical bit is that the artificial social mind, which operates as the functional check on the claims of the media, doesn't have to concur with this proposition; it simply has to not reject this proposition. So it can have no commitments that are inconsistent with A being X, which is a very different thing from collectively determining that A, by rights, is X.
Perhaps.