...if the twentieth
century proved anything, it was that the
certainty of utilitarian reason could as
easily be the ally of evil as
of good. In fact, it raised the question
of what linear progress actually meant.
The reasonable
position after our experience would be
that the human
race does not progress. We may
slowly evolve in scientific terms. But
in terms of our own qualities we don't
change.
We all know that we
know more. And our technical progress
has been revolutionary. But what we do
with this knowledge and machinery
remains as open a question as it always
has been. "Ignorance made you
happy," the Chorus said to Oedipus.
"The truth has made you
blind."
You
could argue that this inability to
progress is the human disease. We
may design the most noble of laws yet
twenty or fifty years later discover
that they are being used accomplish the
opposite. Social theories which rid us
of state violence --
the death penalty, for example --
reverse themselves effortlessly and
bring it back. (Saul 2001, p. 253)
Over the past few
decades there has been a shift in thought
concerning the evolution of human culture.
Just as Dawkins in the Selfish Gene
suggested that the evolution of living
entities was really the result of the
evolution of genes, so too there has been
a ground swell of people focusing on the
evolution of ideas (memes) separate from
humans. “Memes are ideas,
tunes, inventions, retorts, ways of doing
business, ways of asking for help, and
ways of saying hello (Palumbi 2001, p.
243).”
Dawkins
suggested that memes, composed of
memory and imagination, were the basic
replicating units through which human
culture evolved. However, there is
basic flaw to this approach. Memes simply
do not fit the model of classic Darwinian
evolution. For starters, an idea, if
not passed on, may die with the person who
had the idea. A prime example was
Fermat’s last theorem. In 1637 Fermat
pencilled a note in the margin of a page
saying he had solved a particular
mathematical theorem, however, he did not
give the complete solution because, as he
said, “there is not enough space in the
margin to write it.” It was not until
1993 that Andrew Wiles solved the
mathematical problem and announced the
answer. Ideas clearly are not passed on
from one generation to another in a linear
fashion as are genes.
With ideas,
replication and transference are identical
processes. That is, ideas can be cloned
(no change in an idea passed from person
to person) or modified (another person may
add their own slant to an idea or may
simply not understand it properly and pass
on some distortion of the original). The
life and evolution of an idea then, has
nothing to do with the survival of the
fittest.
Values,
too, have a
profound impact on the transference of
ideas. When people are acting unconsciously,
their values will filter what they give
attention to --
they will not even notice someone else’s
idea that has no relation to what they
value --
let alone pass it on. On the other hand,
if people are operating consciously, they
will make a conscious choice, based on
their values, as to whether or not and how
to pass on a
particular idea (whether to pass it on at
all, whether to pass it on in its raw
form, or whether to embellish it in some
way).
Lastly, the most
significant difference between the classic
Darwinian evolution of genes and the
conscious evolution of ideas is that with
the former, it is merely about the
survival of what works in order to keep
the species alive, whereas with the
latter, there is a values judgement made
in respect of the idea as to whether or
not it should survive.
The impact of
conscious selection at the stage of idea
mutation and transmission blurs the
distinction among the three elements of
Darwin's engine and suggests a very
different way of looking at ideas than
Dawkins's notion of evolving memes.
Picked over as carefully as meatballs at
a cheap buffet, ideas are sorted by the
finicky process of conscious selection.
They are created, used, and discarded by
active minds seeking their own
advancement or their own comfort. What
other element of our lives do we
consciously improve for better function
and pick carefully among to fill our
cultural shopping carts? We can also
consider ideas as tools.
As tools, ideas may be
practical or not. They may have general
or specific uses. Others may scorn them
or adopt them with gusto. Sometimes they
seem to have a life and independence of
their own, like the wooden handle of an
axe that becomes polished through use to
fit the hands that wield it. But in the
final analysis they remain tools, ways
of manipulating the world or
understanding it. They do not evolve
like genes because like tools, they
cannot really replicate themselves--
they can be made
only on demand by brains, and only by
this agency can they spread through to
other brains. This does not say they
always benefit us--
akin to the way
many of us have tool boxes stuffed full
of things not currently doing us any
good--
and it does not
claim that they can never do damage--
like an
unchaperoned gun. But the function and
rapid change of ideas does not require
their independent evolution... (Palumbi 2001, p. 252)
It is worth repeating
the point I made last eZine: that there is no automatic link between
evolution and progress. Classic
Darwinian evolution does
not inevitably lead to progress since the
only value judgment involved is about survival. On
the other hand, conscious evolution
can lead to progress when, and only when,
value judgments are made in relation what
should or should not survive in terms of
creating a desirable society for us all.
At the start of this article I quoted
Saul who believes that, to date, society itself
has not progressed. In fact, given some of the
events of the past few weeks related to
the war in Iraq, one would wonder if perhaps society is regressing! The other
point Saul made was, "We
may design the most noble of laws yet
twenty or fifty years later discover
that they are being used accomplish the
opposite. Social theories which rid us
of state violence--
the death penalty, for example--
reverse themselves effortlessly and
bring it back."
The former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim
Soorley, expresses a similar view:
Former Prime Minister
[of Australia] Paul Keating has his fans
and those who hate him. But even those
who hate him have to admit he had a way
with words and concepts.
Nothing has
changed. This week, at the celebration
of the 100th anniversary of the first
national Labor government in the world,
Keating talked about the huge effect war
has on politics. When a nation is
involved in war, he said, it's easy for
government to roll back progressive
policies, and resort to wrapping the
country in the flag of others.
In
World War I we wrapped ourselves in the
British flag --
this time it's the
Stars and Stripes.
He's
right. The war in Iraq is terrible and
ongoing, and there is a sense that our
whole development as a nation, our
international role and identity, and our
domestic progress have been put on hold
while we line up with George Bush.
I don't know about
you, but I'm tired of facing backwards.
(Soorley 2004, The Sunday
Mail, p.21)
If we choose to face
forward and look towards a more advanced
society than we have today, what would we
see?
The main characteristic
of this society would be that it creates a
context in which the quality of human
experience of all of its members is
continually improved. Currently, our
society uses the promise that, if you do
its bidding, then the quality of
experience will be improved. However, this
is only a myth and, in reality, is a means
of social control with the result being,
"We are always getting to live, but
never living" (Ralph Waldo Emerson,
cited Csikszentmihalyi 1992, p. 16). When
people begin to realise that they have
been duped and that progress is not
inevitable, then most often, they quickly
lose courage and determination at the
first signs of adversity:
When they realise that what they had
believed in is not entirely true, they
abandon faith in everything else they
have learned. Deprived of the customary
supports that cultural values had given
them, they flounder in a morass of
anxiety and apathy.
Such symptoms of
disillusionment are not hard to observe
around us now. The most obvious ones
relate to the pervasive listlessness
that affects so many lives. Genuinely
happy individuals are few and far
between...
The roots of this
discontent are internal, and each person
must untangle them personally, with his
or her own power. The [cultural] shields
that have worked in the past --
the order that religion,
patriotism, ethnic traditions, and
habits instilled by social classes used
to provide --
are no longer effective for
increasing numbers of people who feel
exposed to the harsh winds of chaos.
The lack of inner
order manifests itself in the subjective
condition that some call ontological
anxiety, or existential dread. Basically
it is a fear of being, a feeling that
there is no meaning to life and that
existence is not worth going on with.
Nothing seems to make sense. ...There no
longer seems any point to the historical
strivings of humankind. We are just
forgotten specks drifting in the void.
With each passing year, the chaos of the
physical universe becomes magnified in
the minds of the multitude.
(Csikszentmihalyi 1992, pp. 11-12)
The key principle that
gives us a way out of this malaise has
been known for as long as human records
exist, that is, control
of consciousness determines quality of
life. Whether one studies the
teachings of Aristotle, the advice of the
oracle in ancient Delphi, follows the
principles developed by the Stoic
philosophers in classical antiquity, or
follows the disciplines of Yoga, Zen or
Buddhism, the intended result is identical
(Csikszentmihalyi
1992, p. 20):
...to free life from the threat of
chaos, on the one hand, and from the
rigid conditioning of biological urges
on the other, and hence to become
independent of the social controls that
exploit both.
If this principle for
living has been known for so long, why
hasn't society progressed? Csikszentmihalyi
(1992, p. 21-22) has identified two plausible
explanations for this failure:
- The type of knowledge
or wisdom that is required to control
the focus of attention of our
conscious mind is not cumulative. That
is to say:
...it cannot be
condensed into a formula; it cannot be
memorised and then routinely applied.
Like other complex forms of expertise,
such as mature political judgment or
refined aesthetic sense, it must be
earned through trial-and-error
experience by each individual,
generation after generation. control
over consciousness is not simply a
cognitive skill. At least as much as
intelligence, it requires commitment
of emotions and will. It is not enough
to know how to do it; one must do it,
consistently, in the same way as
athletes or musicians who must keep
practising what they know in theory.
And this is never easy. Progress is
relatively fast in fields that apply
knowledge to the material world, such
as physics or genetics. But it is
painfully slow when knowledge is to be
applied to modify our own habits and
desires.
- The knowledge about
how to control consciousness must be
reformulated for each culture and
between generations, in fact, each
time the cultural context changes:
The wisdom of the mystics, of the
Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the
Zen masters might have been excellent
in their own time --
and might still be the best, if
we lived in those and in those
cultures. But when transplanted to
contemporary [Western cultures] those
systems lose quite a bit of their
original power. They contain elements
that were specific to their original
contexts, and when these accidental
components are not distinguished from
what is essential, the path to freedom
gets overgrown by brambles of
meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form
wins over substance, and the seeker is
back where he started.
Control over
consciousness cannot be
institutionalised. As soon as it
becomes part of a set of social rules
and norms, it ceases to be effective
in the way it was originally intended
to be. Routinization, unfortunately,
tends to take place very rapidly.
Freud was still alive when his quest
for liberating the ego from its
oppressors was turned into a solid
ideology and a rigidly regulated
profession. Marx was even less
fortunate: his attempts to free
consciousness from the tyranny of
economic exploitation were soon turned
into a system of repression that would
have boggled the poor founder's mind.
And as Dostoevsky among many others
observed, if Christ had returned to
preach his message of liberation in
the Middle Ages, he would have been
crucified again and again by the
leaders of every church whose worldly
power was built on his name.
I believe there is
a third impediment to society's progress.
It is in society's interest to control its
members. This control is accomplished
through a process known as socialisation.
What society is going to include, within
its educational programmes, courses which
teach us to control our consciousness,
when the known outcome is the development
of individuals who have the strength to
resist society's socialisation strategies?
The Bottom Line
It's
up to each of us to develop skills, in
controlling our own consciousness, which
lead to quality of life experience --
no one else can do
it for us. Additionally, we have a
responsibility to pass this message on to
others.
Memes
(if they exist at all) can play no part in
society's progress because, the more each
of us is in control of or consciousness,
the more we will be immune to memes. Memes
(if they existed) would be the tool used
by society to control its unconscious
members.
No
great improvements in the lot of mankind
are possible, until a great change takes
place in the fundamental constitution of
their modes of thought (J. S. Mill).
References
Csikszentmihalyi,
M. 1992, Flow: The Psychology of
happiness, Random House.
Palumbi, S. 2001,
The Evolution Explosion: How humans cause rapid evolutionary
change, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.
Saul,
J. 2002, On Equilibrium, Penguin
Books, Australia.
|