No one's in control

Culture as a River

The moment you talk about “co-option”, and culture as a kind of “show”, the assumption is going to be that someone is in charge – controlling, and directing and financing and so on. You only “co-opt” people when there is a program for them to join, and whose program is that?

In fact, no one is in control Forget the Jews, the Illuminati, the Christians, Global Elites, the Masons, White People, Silicon Valley, or your Mom. Not universities. Not the “Deep State”. Not Corporations. Not the Media.

When you were a kid, there was always someone in charge. Mom, Dad, the Babysitter, people at the kindergarten, teachers. It’s a long list. It got longer with time. You learned quickly to “get with the program”, and you got in line..

That’s what you see with people like Scheer, Mearsheimer, Sachs, and all the rest – why they desperately to play both sides. The river that is culture has a middle, a left and a right – but the flow is one direction. There are other rivers, but few take the trouble to find them or navigate them. And do you really need a river to take you to the sea, to which all rivers flow.

Basic thing: no one controls the river. You can try and watch your house being washed away during the floods .

Still, childhood training means we look to the there is a hierarchy of power in our societies as though a King or Queen or Emperor or Empress or President somehow defined our society and its direction, rather than just had the biggest boat, driven by the current. Here is an AI definition.

That’s one way of looking at it. Keeping in mind that Americans worship “flow’

But there are others. Another comes from an AI….

Culture as Organism

A culture, viewed as a self-perpetuating organic system, is a dynamic, interconnected web of shared beliefs, values, practices, and symbols that evolves and sustains itself over time. This system relies on continuous interaction and transmission of cultural elements across generations, adapting to changing circumstances while maintaining its core identity. (AI)

What does that mean? It means that cultures are organisms, a concept first explored by the French philosopher Merleau Ponty., as a much-disregarded philosophical issue—which it is, although it has more relevance to me as an anthropological concept.

Think of it this way,…. “You are “you”, right? For most people – although not for me—because I am weird — this is a truism.

You have a name, memories, consciousness, the faculty of reason. But all that depends on your physical being – your heart, your lungs, your digestive organs, nervous system. Your brain itself, depends on neurochemical / electrical balance. That “you” is just a point of reference. It is not in control. It is not the person. Rather, the organism is. When you are tired or sick everything falls apart.

There’s more. In social terms, the faculties of empathy and altruism transcend simplistic ego functions, so you are part of a larger organism made up of people with whom you have bonds, so there is an individual “self” and a “social self”.

Is the whole greater than the sum of the parts?

Yes – obviously.

But unless the parts are in balance , that “whole” lacks sustainability. If one part of your body, say heart of lungs or liver is “off”, the rest of the body is, too. You need that large brain to coordinate things – but it depends on the whole physical ecosystem, including those little buggers known as DNA and RNA.

Yet, in modern societies we reduce everything to a singular “self”, an “identity” .

Blame Descartes – who said in a self-congratulatory manner: “I think therefore I am”. The problem lies in the “I” part.

As Merleau Ponty points out, most people don’t really think, not in the Socratic sense, questioning, not only ourselves but others. The isolated “self”, means you are “not”. And that we are dead before we die.

Life and death

We live as though there was no end.

Life goes on after death – for others who share our genetic, social and cultural inheritance.

This is the basis for theories of culture and a self-perpetuating organism with its own evolutionary processes.

…continuous interaction and transmission of cultural elements across generations, adapting to changing circumstances

Cultural elements are transmitted memetically just like DNA.

Richard Dawkins, who was a zoologist studying beavers before he turned to people, was one of the forerunners of this model.

Of course, his ideas were misunderstood by the media.

It was partly Dawkins’ fault. He didn’t develop the theory very well. Perhaps because he didn’t’ understand genetics not anyone in those days did as we do today. As for evolution he relied on George C. Williams's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966);

We have come a long way since the Selfish Gene in our understanding of human evolution to the point where we must ask if the book would have been better called, “The Selfish Meme”. Organicist paradigms of cultural evolution have been developing led by Boyd and Richardson’s work in “Dual Inheritance Theory” (DIT).

What’s the difference?

One difference is that memetics' focus is on the selection potential of discrete replicators (memes), where DIT allows for transmission of both non-replicators and non-discrete cultural variants. DIT does not assume that replicators are necessary for cumulative adaptive evolution. DIT also more strongly emphasizes the role of genetic inheritance in shaping the capacity for cultural evolution.

DIT is a more expansive and inclusive theory, taking into account paleontology, climatology, anthropology, genetics, history and other fields which in view of climate change and ecological collapse is suddenly very important..

Boyd and Richardson?

If you have read my previous special articles or my book Ageing Young, you will see that I also link human evolution— both genetic and cultural —to climate change and resource availability, with some important differences .

Boyd and Richardson think climate change drove cultural adaptation which drove genetic adaptation. I disagree.

I think genetic adaptation – as a result of mutations in NCmicroRNA created genetic types that could adapt more effectively to the challenges of climate change.

Nor was it just the size of our brain that mattered.. H. Neanderthalensis had bigger brains and similar skill sets.

What they lacked were the slightly over a hundred genetic factors that predisposed those who carried the genes to creativity, enhance sociality as a result of greater capacity of empathy and altruism.

There are two forms of “modern” H. Sapiens.The oldest form has been around for perhaps 200,000 years co-existing with other Homo species. “Behaviorally modern” H. Sapiens has only been around 50,000 years, despite being physically very similar to its forebears – Yet, in that short time, it supplanted all other homo species.

Our advantage was “culture” which depended on those 100 odd genetic factors. I think “odd” is the right word.

When the Pleistocene shifted to the Holocene, culture evolved further to meet the challenges of the shift from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. This is when “non-replicators” and “discrete cultural units” were innovated and passed on from generation to generation to drive cultural adaptability.

We moved forward. Always forward.

Cultures, like species, adapt or die. If the go backwards, the end up like the Dodo, which died out not because its environment changed.

MAGA? That America that Trump and his ilk talk about is a rotting corpse.

All civilizations – and therefore – all cultures deline and fail . But they pass on memes and the like to future generations.

Not necessarily, functional memes, of course.Some cultures are inbred.

Rome’s bastard children

So it was that Rome had a lot of bastard children. England was one of those bastards. And it begat the US of A. What comes after it?

As I said, no one is in control. The culture perpetuates itself though narratives support cultural agendas and behaviors that are adaptive to external events causing us to constantly revise history. The culture is like an AI —artificially intelligent and defaulting to the common denominator. IQ=0.

That is why you cannot believe anything the West says about its competitors – Russia and China. They are to us as Behaviorally Modern H. Sapiens was to the inbred Neanderthals.

Let us remember that H. Sapiens did not go to war with the Neanderthals – they just had sex.

So, if you are wondering why Americans are irrational and the country is in decline, why we have Bushes and Obamas and Bidens and Trumps at the helm of a ship with no rudder, it’s just evolution.

No hope

That’s pretty depressing right?

And opponents of cultural evolution theories like mine or Boyd and Richardson’s complain about the lack of human agency or in the simplest terms, hope.

As I have suggested, all evolution is affected by climate change and the larger ecosystem in which we exist. When those things change — challenge results in some organisms unable to adapt. They become extinct, supplanted by new species of organisms created though genetic mutations that can adapt.

As we saw with Behaviorally Modern H. Sapiens you need only a few such mutations , mostly epigenetic factors.

Are you a mutant?

This is true of cultures, too. Human agency matters. But it must come in unexpected forms.

When the USSR collapsed, that could have been the end of Russia. But in cultural terms you had the equivalent of genetic mutation in the form of institutional anomalies that allowed Vladimir Putin to come to power in a situation which required his rather special abilities. Under ordinary circumstances that would have been impossible,.

China seemed to be collapsing during the Cultural Revolution, but it survived thanks to the same kind of cultural mutations — under Deng and Xi and others.

Why isn’t it happening in the Western cultures ?

Because we haven’t broken yet.

At a time when the world is entering a new phase, with a radically different natural and technological ecosystem, the West looks backwards , imaging a world that never existed and glory that never was. It must collapse and then start again as Russia and China did.

Russia and China are children of the future. The West is the idiot child of the Past.

This post?

This is an excerpt from one of my “special article” drafts. It’s a little academic but

germane, I think.

As you can see the current special article covers a lot of territory but its arguments are backed up by solid research.

Yes, Prof. Chappy supervises. Chappy, by the way, is a mutant! (Really!)

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