(no subject)
Once upon a time, for about a million years or so, we were Tribal. (Now we're NOT. Wait.) Tribal meant (and in some places still means) being born into a monoculture; there is one cuisine, there is one kind of music, there is one set of dance moves, there is one set of beliefs, one memeset. And, in most cases, one would live out an entire lifetime within this monoculture. If you were to ask, "Who am I?" the answer would be, "You are One of Us." You eat like us, you sing our songs, you dance like we dance, you believe what we believe and pray as we pray and laugh at what we laugh at. And if you were to ask, "Who are we?" the answer would be, "We are the people who do things this way."
Which is not quite a semantically null answer, really. We are the hosts of these memes, and in particular our Tribe is the set of people who are hosts of this particular memeset. Within the Tribalism of Gatherers & Hunters one very seldom needed to make a major decision because there weren't many options and the memeset/monoculture had already evolved answers to all those questions. There could be no identity crisis because the Tribe wouldn't allow it, and to go against the Tribe would be both madness and suicide - an individual pretechnological primate without a Tribe is a meal waiting for the right predator.
Like us, our Tribal ancestors were running a certain set of software which was programmed into them from birth and which had been evolving for a very long time (like Linux at a glacial pace). Like us, they were largely unconscious about it. The Tribe needed a shaman to provide software tech support for the operating system; the shaman had the tools and skills to listen directly to the voices of the spirits and ancestors that most of us only hear passively and unconsciously. The shaman was the meme doctor, the only person within the Tribe qualified to get under the hood of the culture/memeset, check it out, perhaps make some tweaks.
This was Eden. And it was not static; a Tribe's monoculture/memeset could surely change, but only at the snail's pace of evolution, not at the lightning pace of innovation, because Tribalism tends to equate innovation with heresy (and by extension madness and suicide). Within an individual's lifetime, the odds of anything noticeably changing within the culture would be slim. What kept this from being stultifyingly dull was that (a) the tribes were generally nomadic and (b) just staying alive was relatively complicated.
I blame and credit intelligence for slowly driving us from Eden. I imagine a snowball of change very very very slowly building momentum until two things happened: (1) just staying alive got less and less complicated due to advancing technology and (2) the frame in which perceptible change took place got to be smaller than a lifetime. (This snowball is still accelerating, as you may have noticed.) The gift of innovation/deviation was not so much intelligence itself as the meme of free will. "Eat this," said the snake/snowball, "and ye shall become as gods." Eat this and you shall be forever changed, for instead of simply doing what your ancient Tribal memeset dictates, you will consider yourself an individual, capable of making your own decisions.
Most of those decisions won't be very smart, because the Tribe's memeset, being a product of evolution, really did provide a well-optimized way to stay alive in situations that didn't change very rapidly. Any individual decisions that might actually be positive innovations would still be pretty radical and disturbing to the Tribe, and might well result in exile (into madness, heresy and suicide). In short, the immediate symptoms of the Free Will meme were usually self-injurious or socially unacceptable - in other words, Evil. It meant living beyond what the memeset/ancestors/gods/spirits had dictated. It was not kosher. It was haram. It was often stupid, and scary...and yet even the culture/ancestors/gods/spirits could not exterminate the Free Will meme.
What, you might ask, is the difference between having Free Will and being infected with the Free Will meme? Subjectively, none. If you believe you have Free Will, you are undeniably, by definition, infected with the Free Will meme. Others who are likewise infected will agree with you, while those not infected will say, "You're not free, you're just a host for a certain set of software/memes like everyone else, only one of those memes happens to tell you you have Free Will." But even if it's just another memetic voice in your head, to have the Free Will meme definitely means a higher tolerance for memetic mutation. Where a noninfected brain might be very reluctant to entertain thoughts of deviating somewhat from the Tribe's monoculture, a Free Will-infected brain gets a dopamine release and says, "Look how clever and special I am! I have hosted a mutation and shall write my own name on it instead of the names of the ancestors!"
So in a world with increasing numbers of post-Apple, post-Edenic, Free-Will-infected brains running around, the upside is an explosion of innovation that continues to this day. The downside is, suddenly our brains are full of much more chatter, since instead of just running the Tribe's software, we're running that plus all the renegade operating systems and programs generated by individuals instead of evolution. The Biblical narrative records this as the Tower of Babel - on the one hand mankind had gotten incredibly capable of doing things previously only doable by superhuman forces, while on the other hand this epidemic of deviation both meant less and less common ground for understanding and more contact (and conflict) with other cultures/memesets.
In time several really major memesets evolved, providing completely different operating systems than the original, million-year-old Tribalism framework. These included Hierarchy (which is all about vertical levels of organized power and rules), Markets (which are all about horizontal networks of flowing resources based on supply and demand), and, most recently, Networks (like, say, Facebook and the internet itself). More on these elsewhere.
One of the most-viewed TED Talks is Elizabeth Gilbert's discussion of genius and how we ruin it. Gilbert argues that the ancient concept of "genius" as a spirit that temporarily acts through an innovator is in some ways healthier than more modern model of innovation as the product of an individual's creativity and insight. In essence I would translate this as recognizing that humans as memetic hosts have always been hosts of memetic mutation, with or without ego and Free Will getting involved; in fact, if ego isn't involved, ego won't be wounded if memetic mutation doesn't take place.
Like other living things, no new idea comes forth into the world without parents, without a whole family tree of ancestors - the ideas that seem the most disconnected from their memetic heritage are the ones that seem like pure madness. Within each brain countless memes are constantly fighting for mental bandwidth and processor time, just as the DNA strands of our cells and those of bacteria and viruses we're hosting compete within our bodies. And mutation and evolution are part of that. Usually if a brain hosts and successfully expresses an advantageous mutation, the meme finds a way to reward its host - this could take the form of the "I'm so clever and special and original!" dopamine release/ego flare, or it could take the form of a successful literary or artistic career, or anything in between.
If your brain hosts a disadvantageous mutation, there's a pretty good filtering system in place. Our brains seem to be running constant simulation software, sort of like wind tunnels for testing memes internally. We imagine how the mutant meme might fit into the world, and if we're pretty well-convinced they wouldn't work out all that well, we do our best to forget about them. The ones we can't forget can be really troublesome...these exceptionally robust memes rage inside our brains, perhaps as delusions, or superstitions, or phobias, or perhaps just as dreams deferred. Langston Hughes asked if they shrivel up and die like a raisin in the sun, or do they...EXPLODE?
William Blake wrote: "Better to slay an infant in its crib than nurse unacted desire." The infant is the internal meme; the crib is the brain. Also: "A dog barking at the gate/Foretells the downfall of the state." The wild memes we trap within us are like any stifled rebels, more likely to cause damage than to just quietly fade away.
The Gospel of St. Thomas: "Bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what you don't bring forth shall surely destroy you."
John Lee Hooker: "You got to let that chile boogie/It's in him, and it gots to come out."
This is gnosis: to be your own shaman, to know and name and interact with the memes within you, the software your brain is running. Mental health professionals do similar work, helping people debug their memes, and artists do so on a macro level, tweaking the memes of an entire culture. This is why ego has always been a mixed blessing to insight and innovation: when you label every meme within your brain "me," it's hard to let healthy dialogue (and/or duels to the death or anything in between) take place among them. But if you can say, in more shamanic language, "I heard the voice of my grandfather telling me to do this," you can be a better vessel of genius, as Gilbert would say, instead of insisting on being the genius yourself.
We cannot uneat the Apple of metacognition, individualism and free will. We cannot go back to the original Tribalism, because part of what made it work was the fact that Tribal culture allows no competition (and very little individualism). We live with the constant cacophonous babble/Babel of voices in our heads - Tribalism tells us to fear and loathe those who don't live like we do and to protect our own kind, while Hierarchy tells us to fear power and obey laws and let kings, princes and presidents take care of the poor and needy, while Marketism tells us to let supply & demand take care of everything, and we're only beginning to understand what Networks are telling us, and meanwhile there's the voice of your grandfather and the voice of Buddha and the voice of Fonzie and the voice of Elizabeth Gilbert all raging in your brain.
If you know them, if you perform gnosis, if you maintain enough reflective metacognition to recognize them, you can be a mindful host to these and all the mutants they'll spawn, and control the gate through which select few might enter and enrich the outside world. If not...they can really fuck you up.
Maybe someday we'll look back at this phase of our information technology and shake our heads with wonder at our own ignorance. "The purpose of computers," we might say, "is not to run programs and avoid malware - the purpose of computers is to give programs and malware a place to compete and evolve."
No wonder we need to reboot from time to time. We crash from running so many programs at once. And there's no way to purge all of them and return to pure Edenic Tribalism - as Faulkner says, "Purity is a negative state, and therefore contrary to nature."
Or Whitman: "Do I contradict myself?/I am large; I contain multitudes."
Or John 14:2: "In my father's house there are many mansions." The ones you do not unlock and visit may be sheltering demons...or treasures. It is our work in this life not to live free of our ghosts, our memes, our mental mutants, but to mindfully and responsibly be their keepers, and to bring forth the best of them and their products.
Which is not quite a semantically null answer, really. We are the hosts of these memes, and in particular our Tribe is the set of people who are hosts of this particular memeset. Within the Tribalism of Gatherers & Hunters one very seldom needed to make a major decision because there weren't many options and the memeset/monoculture had already evolved answers to all those questions. There could be no identity crisis because the Tribe wouldn't allow it, and to go against the Tribe would be both madness and suicide - an individual pretechnological primate without a Tribe is a meal waiting for the right predator.
Like us, our Tribal ancestors were running a certain set of software which was programmed into them from birth and which had been evolving for a very long time (like Linux at a glacial pace). Like us, they were largely unconscious about it. The Tribe needed a shaman to provide software tech support for the operating system; the shaman had the tools and skills to listen directly to the voices of the spirits and ancestors that most of us only hear passively and unconsciously. The shaman was the meme doctor, the only person within the Tribe qualified to get under the hood of the culture/memeset, check it out, perhaps make some tweaks.
This was Eden. And it was not static; a Tribe's monoculture/memeset could surely change, but only at the snail's pace of evolution, not at the lightning pace of innovation, because Tribalism tends to equate innovation with heresy (and by extension madness and suicide). Within an individual's lifetime, the odds of anything noticeably changing within the culture would be slim. What kept this from being stultifyingly dull was that (a) the tribes were generally nomadic and (b) just staying alive was relatively complicated.
I blame and credit intelligence for slowly driving us from Eden. I imagine a snowball of change very very very slowly building momentum until two things happened: (1) just staying alive got less and less complicated due to advancing technology and (2) the frame in which perceptible change took place got to be smaller than a lifetime. (This snowball is still accelerating, as you may have noticed.) The gift of innovation/deviation was not so much intelligence itself as the meme of free will. "Eat this," said the snake/snowball, "and ye shall become as gods." Eat this and you shall be forever changed, for instead of simply doing what your ancient Tribal memeset dictates, you will consider yourself an individual, capable of making your own decisions.
Most of those decisions won't be very smart, because the Tribe's memeset, being a product of evolution, really did provide a well-optimized way to stay alive in situations that didn't change very rapidly. Any individual decisions that might actually be positive innovations would still be pretty radical and disturbing to the Tribe, and might well result in exile (into madness, heresy and suicide). In short, the immediate symptoms of the Free Will meme were usually self-injurious or socially unacceptable - in other words, Evil. It meant living beyond what the memeset/ancestors/gods/spirits had dictated. It was not kosher. It was haram. It was often stupid, and scary...and yet even the culture/ancestors/gods/spirits could not exterminate the Free Will meme.
What, you might ask, is the difference between having Free Will and being infected with the Free Will meme? Subjectively, none. If you believe you have Free Will, you are undeniably, by definition, infected with the Free Will meme. Others who are likewise infected will agree with you, while those not infected will say, "You're not free, you're just a host for a certain set of software/memes like everyone else, only one of those memes happens to tell you you have Free Will." But even if it's just another memetic voice in your head, to have the Free Will meme definitely means a higher tolerance for memetic mutation. Where a noninfected brain might be very reluctant to entertain thoughts of deviating somewhat from the Tribe's monoculture, a Free Will-infected brain gets a dopamine release and says, "Look how clever and special I am! I have hosted a mutation and shall write my own name on it instead of the names of the ancestors!"
So in a world with increasing numbers of post-Apple, post-Edenic, Free-Will-infected brains running around, the upside is an explosion of innovation that continues to this day. The downside is, suddenly our brains are full of much more chatter, since instead of just running the Tribe's software, we're running that plus all the renegade operating systems and programs generated by individuals instead of evolution. The Biblical narrative records this as the Tower of Babel - on the one hand mankind had gotten incredibly capable of doing things previously only doable by superhuman forces, while on the other hand this epidemic of deviation both meant less and less common ground for understanding and more contact (and conflict) with other cultures/memesets.
In time several really major memesets evolved, providing completely different operating systems than the original, million-year-old Tribalism framework. These included Hierarchy (which is all about vertical levels of organized power and rules), Markets (which are all about horizontal networks of flowing resources based on supply and demand), and, most recently, Networks (like, say, Facebook and the internet itself). More on these elsewhere.
One of the most-viewed TED Talks is Elizabeth Gilbert's discussion of genius and how we ruin it. Gilbert argues that the ancient concept of "genius" as a spirit that temporarily acts through an innovator is in some ways healthier than more modern model of innovation as the product of an individual's creativity and insight. In essence I would translate this as recognizing that humans as memetic hosts have always been hosts of memetic mutation, with or without ego and Free Will getting involved; in fact, if ego isn't involved, ego won't be wounded if memetic mutation doesn't take place.
Like other living things, no new idea comes forth into the world without parents, without a whole family tree of ancestors - the ideas that seem the most disconnected from their memetic heritage are the ones that seem like pure madness. Within each brain countless memes are constantly fighting for mental bandwidth and processor time, just as the DNA strands of our cells and those of bacteria and viruses we're hosting compete within our bodies. And mutation and evolution are part of that. Usually if a brain hosts and successfully expresses an advantageous mutation, the meme finds a way to reward its host - this could take the form of the "I'm so clever and special and original!" dopamine release/ego flare, or it could take the form of a successful literary or artistic career, or anything in between.
If your brain hosts a disadvantageous mutation, there's a pretty good filtering system in place. Our brains seem to be running constant simulation software, sort of like wind tunnels for testing memes internally. We imagine how the mutant meme might fit into the world, and if we're pretty well-convinced they wouldn't work out all that well, we do our best to forget about them. The ones we can't forget can be really troublesome...these exceptionally robust memes rage inside our brains, perhaps as delusions, or superstitions, or phobias, or perhaps just as dreams deferred. Langston Hughes asked if they shrivel up and die like a raisin in the sun, or do they...EXPLODE?
William Blake wrote: "Better to slay an infant in its crib than nurse unacted desire." The infant is the internal meme; the crib is the brain. Also: "A dog barking at the gate/Foretells the downfall of the state." The wild memes we trap within us are like any stifled rebels, more likely to cause damage than to just quietly fade away.
The Gospel of St. Thomas: "Bring forth what is within you, and what you bring forth will save you. If you don't bring forth what is within you, what you don't bring forth shall surely destroy you."
John Lee Hooker: "You got to let that chile boogie/It's in him, and it gots to come out."
This is gnosis: to be your own shaman, to know and name and interact with the memes within you, the software your brain is running. Mental health professionals do similar work, helping people debug their memes, and artists do so on a macro level, tweaking the memes of an entire culture. This is why ego has always been a mixed blessing to insight and innovation: when you label every meme within your brain "me," it's hard to let healthy dialogue (and/or duels to the death or anything in between) take place among them. But if you can say, in more shamanic language, "I heard the voice of my grandfather telling me to do this," you can be a better vessel of genius, as Gilbert would say, instead of insisting on being the genius yourself.
We cannot uneat the Apple of metacognition, individualism and free will. We cannot go back to the original Tribalism, because part of what made it work was the fact that Tribal culture allows no competition (and very little individualism). We live with the constant cacophonous babble/Babel of voices in our heads - Tribalism tells us to fear and loathe those who don't live like we do and to protect our own kind, while Hierarchy tells us to fear power and obey laws and let kings, princes and presidents take care of the poor and needy, while Marketism tells us to let supply & demand take care of everything, and we're only beginning to understand what Networks are telling us, and meanwhile there's the voice of your grandfather and the voice of Buddha and the voice of Fonzie and the voice of Elizabeth Gilbert all raging in your brain.
If you know them, if you perform gnosis, if you maintain enough reflective metacognition to recognize them, you can be a mindful host to these and all the mutants they'll spawn, and control the gate through which select few might enter and enrich the outside world. If not...they can really fuck you up.
Maybe someday we'll look back at this phase of our information technology and shake our heads with wonder at our own ignorance. "The purpose of computers," we might say, "is not to run programs and avoid malware - the purpose of computers is to give programs and malware a place to compete and evolve."
No wonder we need to reboot from time to time. We crash from running so many programs at once. And there's no way to purge all of them and return to pure Edenic Tribalism - as Faulkner says, "Purity is a negative state, and therefore contrary to nature."
Or Whitman: "Do I contradict myself?/I am large; I contain multitudes."
Or John 14:2: "In my father's house there are many mansions." The ones you do not unlock and visit may be sheltering demons...or treasures. It is our work in this life not to live free of our ghosts, our memes, our mental mutants, but to mindfully and responsibly be their keepers, and to bring forth the best of them and their products.