Memetic Evolution: Driving Mechanisms
09/30/2001
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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
by
In an earlier post on the bombing of the World Trade Center, I applied a fairly new perspective in social psychology cum evolutionary psychology cum memetic evolution to try to help graduate students in sociology and social psychology to gain a grasp of both.
First, I have received some helpful criticism of that post which I will share. One critic wrote to say that it sounded as though I approved the bombing since I tried to give it a theoretical gloss. I don't approve of it any more than I approve of carpet bombing in Vietnam, defoliation of the Ho Chi Minh trail by agent orange, use of nuclear weapons on Japan or the assassination attempts on Castro by the CIA. I have been involved in two underground anti-government episodes...once in Uganda when several faculty at U Makerere collected evidence on mass murder by Idi Amin's government and smuggled the information to the US press and Congress. Then too, I agreed, with Black Leaders in Denver, to buy guns and ammunition in Wyoming and use my home in Ft. Collins as depot in the 60's if there was an uprising in Denver similar to those in Watts/L.A. and other cities around the country...to my great relief, it didn't happen. There are very, very few times when I would ever approve of violence let alone be part of it.
One should not confuse efforts to understand a thing with approval for it. Nor should one confuse hatred and vengeance with objective analysis....should one?
Secondly, one critic made the point that evolutionary psychology is reductionist and hostile to macro-analytic perspectives such as Marxian theory, Symbolic Interaction, Coalition theory, Feminist and other theory. All this starts with Dawkins; The Selfish Gene, 1989, Oxford U. Press. The operative point in the criticism is
It's amazing that we still want (as capitalist ideology) to see the reproduction of culture as occuring "outside" ourselves, when in fact it is we humans who are from moment to moment reproducing it, and could reproduce it differently, if we so chose.
I agree that we could, in principle, change capitalist culture but it takes a social base of some magnitude to do that. Whatever the case, I think that all social scientists, especially sociologists who work in the sociology of science, in the philosophy of knowledge and in phenomenology and postmodern critique, should know and understand how a theory is used in the larger political economy.
But, more than that, we should keep in mind that there are some home truths from psychology and physiology not covered by social psychology nor by sociology itself. This is a hard point to make to some structural marxists as well as other enthusiasts for the sociology of it all. On my part, I think that, sometimes, the sociology of it all can set aside psychological drives and/or built in psychological tendencies...the only problem is that we don't know when or which...so we shouldn't get too proud in the 'struggle for survival.'
A third criticism was that memetic 'struggle for survival' sounded like 'cultural wars' in disguise. A good point...the operative question is, again, are there some insights one gets from one form of analysis not available in other forms. The answer is, Yes....see below.
A fourth point is that Dawkins treats all sets of religious memes as 'parasitical memes.' A point to which my critic objects...as do I. As I have said at length in other places, all social relations are based upon faith, trust, hope, belief and even, sometimes, compassion...these are the deep structures of religion whether we like the visible form of religion or not.
My good friend, Alan Spector, makes the trenchant point that neither genes (nor memes) can drive human evolution...all organic evolution is driven by adaptation to the environment in which a group of plants and animals live. I agree. The question is whether there is some sort of social evolution being driven by the social selection of memes..I'll make that case below. And that argument will be congenial to Spector's point that genes (or memes) are pretty passive, Dawkins not withstanding.
A variant of the Spector criticism is foundational it seems to me that memes cannot be of great importance in understanding the evolutions of human culture these past 100 years...any more than one can set the automobile as an key carrier of transport evolution....one can claim that carriages capture people and make them the agent of evolution on behalf of cars; that motors, super-highways and oil policy in a global economy traces back to the car as key carrier...but that ignores the larger political economy in which both memes, automobiles, oil policy, food policy, capital investment and terrorism dwell...I'll try to restore that political economy to memes, et al, in the mini-lecture below.
Political-Economic Mechanisms for Memetic Evolution.
Sue Blackmore (sp?) makes the point that electronic communications has provided a new and powerful means by which given sets of memes can reproduce and colonize ever more of an emerging global culture. I take the point. Printing, telephony, computers and satelite technology has, indeed, made it possible to transmit memes by orders of magnitude over yodelling, whistling, smoke signals and shouting.
But there is a political economy which drives the evolution of communication devices; financial institutions, military institutions and entertainment institutions have their own built-in motives for pushing a given set of memes on a culture; on a population; on a global economy.
Financial institutions; mainly stock exchanges, have driven the development of information exchange systems. Stock brokers and money brokers in Paris, Brussels and Berlin used carrier pidgeons to bring news which would affect stock prices or interest rates. The teletype was developed to serve the New York and other exchanges. Satellites make money available around the world to banks and to customers of banks...all for a fee.
Military institutions used semaphores, messenger dogs, runners, and mirrors to signal battle instructions and battalion movements. The computer was sponsored by the US military. Today the US military has a monopoly on the most advanced computer technology in the world...along with the National Security Administration. Both use the technology to encrypt and decrypt memetic sets to and from all over the world.
Public Relations, Advertizing Firms and Freudian Revisionism.
In the last 70 years or so, ever more musicians, writers, actors and graphic artists have been hired to celebrate and sanctify symbol sets on behalf of commercial customers. These are the front-line soldiers of memetic revolution. They attempt to use the best of psychology and sociology on behalf of local and global firms to 'colonize consciousnesss' as Marcuse put it, of mass audiences for sports, politics, drama, comedy and religion. In doing so, the reverse the hopes of Freud and most of his students to use psychology toward better emotional health of people whose psyche has been battered by abuse and neglect of parents and other specialists in fear, hate and alienated sexuality. As for sociology, there has been little systematic hope for social justice or for personal well-being in its theory and research since Marx, Mills and Marcuse have been marginalized; while impersonal, mercenary research in factories, towns, politics and marketplaces has been canonized.
One should not underestimate the role of these hundreds of thousands of well-paid psychological engineers who push American products and American culture on the rest of the world. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent to reproduce words, feelings and behavior congenial to corporate sponsors of this growing industry. PR hirelings and commercial advertizers are the prostitutes and pimps of the postmodern world replacing the poets and critics of an earlier, value-full memetic process. Governments, Universities, Churches and profit-making firms alike use these revisionists to push false consciousness, false needs and false impressions upon billions of voters, communicants, customers, students and spectators seated around a global theatre of the absurd.
The Larger Political Economy of Cultural Wars.
The concept of Cultural wars are, as one critic noted, a better way to view the clash between sets of memes as registered in the destruction of the WTC and attach on the Pentagon...themselves powerful memetic representations of US economic imperialism in the 21st century.
But it is within the larger struggle between pre-modern, modern and postmodern cultures that the faceless, depersonalized 'memetic evolution' translates into cultural wars. And it is Osama Bin Laden and millions of devout Muslims, Conservative Christians, Orthodox Jews and gentle Buddhists alike rise up to reject the soulless materialism of Western Capitalism in favor of a world-view which sets the drama of the holy as central to human existence.
Now, before you too rise up in anger at this depiction of the culture of pre-modern religious sensibility; before you assume I approve, endorse and take the side of conservative Christians, devout Muslims and Orthodox Jews in their fight against a globalizing ideological hegemony of the West, you might want to visit my personal views on religious sensibility at
http//www.tryoung.com/dramaholy/dramaholyindex.html
A short, poetic version of this book is at
http//www.tryoung.com/dramaholy/quartet.html
Please do not send angry posts to me until you've read one or the other.
In a word, pre-modern cultures with their tribal=like religions, arise out of small hunting and gathering economies...and solve some problems of solidarity and eschatology in a dangerous social life world.
The 'universalization of tribal religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam arise in agricultural political economies with enough food surplus to support hierarchy and expansionist tribal authority...all validated by religious teachings.
Modernist culture arises out of the transition from agriculture to industrial political economy; god becomes a remote architect...almost pure intelligence and religion becomes marginalized to small gauge dramas of the holy. See the mini-lecture on Stephen Hawking as exemplar of this transition
http//www.tryoung.com/lectures/041Hawking.htm
Post-modernist cultural arises out of the clash between modernist and pre-modernist culture...as does this critique out of the clash between Islamic 'memes' and globalized capitalist 'memes'. Postmodernism shows the human hand in all claims of final truth, absolute authority and/or claims of a natural evolution toward some final, best political economy...i.e., capitalism.
More on the social sources of postmodernism at
http//www.tryoung.com/lectures/017SocBasePomoSens.htm
My own view is that pre-modern, modern and postmodern knowledge processes can be most helpful to the human project of praxis and planning but that each provides but part of the totality of human interest. Pre-modern knowledge processes gave us the social-psychological capacities to hope, to trust, to believe, to have faith and to sanctify nature and society. Modern science has gone from success in predicting the behavior of simple non-linear systems and grounds much of what is helpful in transport, communication, medicine, construction and agriculture.
Postmodern knowledge processes are far more problematic, filled as they are with passion, jealousy, ambition, anger and greed...filled in fact with all the seven deadly sins mentioned in pre-modern wisdom. Yet good theory and good politics are possible. Feminism has helped change the face of research in both theory and methods...all by herself, Carol Gilligan changed our understandings of moral development. Third World artists, writers, dramatists and dancers are changing Euro-centric norms of aesthetics and ethics...and thus greatly increase the human heritage. Postmodern scientists, beginning with Poincare' and centering on the work of Lorenz, Mandelbrot and Feigenbaum are transforming our philosophy of science to include elegant transformations from order to disorder...rather than looking for and praising only that which is sure and certain.
The End of This Chapter.
There are several endings possible in this chapter of cultural clash/religious warfare as dramatized in the WTC collapse.
The first ending was embodied in the first week of the Bush administration response; full of anger, calls for bloody revenge and accusations of guilt accompanied by self-serving claims of innocence, purity and divine endorsement.
A second ending is emerging as more thoughtful voices have been heard in Washington and, indeed, in American media. Efforts to understand some of the anger driving fundamentalist Islamic outrage at the onslaught of rapacious policies which impoverish whole peoples and move ever more wealth to Europe and North America; policies which take foods from the poorest, hungriest countries in South America, Asia and Africa and ship them to Europe and North America. Policies which establish governments 'friendly' to global capitalism apart from claims of democratic, equality and freedom.
The use of the CIA on behalf of imperialist hegemony of the West; use of the World Bank on behalf of finance capital centered in Europe, America and Japan; use of the US military on behalf of a dozen global oil companies; use of UN sanctions to support or subvert governments hostile to free trade...and the emergence of the Big Eight as the effective government of the world...all these are hostile to a religious tradition that calls for both social justice, patriarchy, government by holy men and divine vengeance upon those who don't accept the true god.
These efforts to understand together with efforts to build a world coalition against terrorism mark a second ending possible...one which is a credit to the USA and to the Bush Administration. Much less angry and militaristic, it focuses upon a much smaller, much more appropriate target for whatever justice is found in removing the Taliban and, of course, the Bin Laden organization.
A third ending could emerge if ever a legitimate world government/UN policy could emerge to remove the sources of terrorism which emerge from the growing stratification of power, status and wealth in the world...and a better mechanism to resolve the angry ethnic clashes in East Europe, the Mid-East and, of course Palestine.
The next 25 years will be interesting as the political and economic effects of 11 September spin out and spread out. I am hopeful of endings of the third, fourth and fifth variety can emerge in my lifetime....and in yours.
Peace, TR Young