Once again, great clarity down to details! Amazing!
One wonders how extraordinary it is that indigenous understanding could have arisen and achieved continuity over the same period – the hopeful example of a different path we could/should/would take. The why probably matters if we choose that course over our dead-end course, so as not to be diverted yet again.
It is equally bold to assert that attention to child-rearing is of utmost importance. Those who have been neglected/abused in early childhood never develop that capacity to retain attention within one’s own emotional equilibrium, but is “other”-directed, susceptible to predations of growing number. Properly cultivated emotional self-mastery is the answer to distractibility, and the community capacity to make meaning follows. The susceptibility of the emotionally-disrupted is growing through the predations noted. Those properly nurtured are emotionally capable of shedding these predations, except as they take outward political and economic form – our current poly-crisis. Those of us who retain our wits need to be aggressive in countering our own preferred laissez-faire attitudes, taking the constructive path to eliminating bad actors and actions, and installing the means to support nurturing. This can no longer be seen as oxymoronic but survival oriented. Again, look to the indigenous perspective and tradition for guidance. We could adopt practices of consultation, investigation, and deference to signs in the natural environment rather than the constructed environment. This requires placing higher value on emotional maturity, which builds understanding rather than obedience. This, in turn, requires listening to children’s development rather than assuming we know best. And in the adult world, it requires shutting down the shitstorms of the Bannon ilk. Public airwaves carry the public consciousness, and we can no more entertain the degradations imposed by evil algorithms than allow shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.
With more and more right wing ideology capturing the outlets many of my pro-democracy friends are joining me in leaving the platforms. I fully support that, but I also fear it will divide us even further as people who aren't engaged or want fascism fall farther and farther down the rabbit hole. This may be the issue of our time. Who controls the narrative is now who controls the means to communicate.
One of the most frustrating facets of our current dilemma is how tantalizingly close collective human agency is to obstructing these oligarchs. Once enough people set down their smart phones (only step one, of course), the current spell can be broken. Not to mention halving the revenues of Big Tech.
I am told - by friends, family and folks in general - that this change is impossible. I understand why people feel this way. I often feel this way! But right now, our bottom-line human reality is that if we all set down our phones - even temporarily while a renegotiation of internet protocols, design, oversight and regulation is initiated - the momentum starts to swing away from the oligarchs and back toward humanity.
One plausible way for this movement to emerge is through a cultural leader / influencer. That is to say, within the current systems, using the masters' tools.
Imagine a Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Joe Rogan, Zoran Mamdani, Kurt Cobain, Kendrick Lamar-level cultural influencer, sending one simple social signal - cell phones are irredeemably uncool. Using them is lame, lazy and socially unacceptable. Let the Tik Tok "why" videos - your bosses monitor you, law enforcement tracks you, insurance companies blackmail you, scammers target you - spread. Then, once Big Tech responds by inventing rules to shut down or marginalize those messages, it will only serve to verify and validate the messengers' claims of a rigged and manipulative system in need of boycott and reform.
If you would have told someone in 1976 that in 2026 no one would smoke cigarettes in public anymore, they'd have though you a loony. Time to make the cell phone addiction industry the first vanquished pariah of the 21st Century.
But I think the post modern point of view is not a bad initial reaction to things. In politics we need to see who is funding things and what influencers can cancel you. We see this lamentable behavior on both the right and left!
Another great piece, Mike! Can I ask you to take a quick look at my 2018 book, "Cultural Evolution and its Discontents Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure," which dovetails with your Genes and Memes argument in some noteworthy ways? (Happy to send you a copy if you're interested.)
As its blurb on Routledge's site says:
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure.
The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us.
Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead?
Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.
> "And for too long, we’ve been trapped in a sterile debate between two equally unsatisfying positions. On one side, postmodernists insist that all meaning is socially constructed—that truth, morality, even reality itself are nothing more than contingent arrangements of power disguised as universal principles. On the other, naturalists argue that meaning must be discovered rather than made—that objective truths exist independently of human consciousness and our job is simply to uncover them through reason and empirical investigation."
A more or less reasonable point, though I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Though it is maybe at least in the right forest. 🙂
But in particular, those postmodernists may have something of a point themselves since ALL of our definitions are "socially constructed" -- after all is said and done, Moses didn't bring the "First Dictionary" down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. Though where they go off the rails is in not realizing that some definitions are more useful and closer to the "bedrock" than other ones -- natural kinds in particular. Apropos of which, you might like this article which asked, "Are sexes natural kinds?" by Muhammad Ali Khalidi:
On the other hand, one might also argue that your "naturalists" have likewise gone off the rails and into the weeds. In particular, when we name things -- a foundational aspect of many species, including our own, that goes back a long ways and rather deep into the bedrock -- we are, in effect, creating meaning: we are engaged in symbolic communication, the equating of a symbol with some tangible feature of our environment. A couple of elaborations on the theme or cases-in-point:
Once again, great clarity down to details! Amazing!
One wonders how extraordinary it is that indigenous understanding could have arisen and achieved continuity over the same period – the hopeful example of a different path we could/should/would take. The why probably matters if we choose that course over our dead-end course, so as not to be diverted yet again.
It is equally bold to assert that attention to child-rearing is of utmost importance. Those who have been neglected/abused in early childhood never develop that capacity to retain attention within one’s own emotional equilibrium, but is “other”-directed, susceptible to predations of growing number. Properly cultivated emotional self-mastery is the answer to distractibility, and the community capacity to make meaning follows. The susceptibility of the emotionally-disrupted is growing through the predations noted. Those properly nurtured are emotionally capable of shedding these predations, except as they take outward political and economic form – our current poly-crisis. Those of us who retain our wits need to be aggressive in countering our own preferred laissez-faire attitudes, taking the constructive path to eliminating bad actors and actions, and installing the means to support nurturing. This can no longer be seen as oxymoronic but survival oriented. Again, look to the indigenous perspective and tradition for guidance. We could adopt practices of consultation, investigation, and deference to signs in the natural environment rather than the constructed environment. This requires placing higher value on emotional maturity, which builds understanding rather than obedience. This, in turn, requires listening to children’s development rather than assuming we know best. And in the adult world, it requires shutting down the shitstorms of the Bannon ilk. Public airwaves carry the public consciousness, and we can no more entertain the degradations imposed by evil algorithms than allow shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.
I will just drop this here: Counter.Social. Panacea? Nope. Just a small community dedicated to truth
With more and more right wing ideology capturing the outlets many of my pro-democracy friends are joining me in leaving the platforms. I fully support that, but I also fear it will divide us even further as people who aren't engaged or want fascism fall farther and farther down the rabbit hole. This may be the issue of our time. Who controls the narrative is now who controls the means to communicate.
One of the most frustrating facets of our current dilemma is how tantalizingly close collective human agency is to obstructing these oligarchs. Once enough people set down their smart phones (only step one, of course), the current spell can be broken. Not to mention halving the revenues of Big Tech.
I am told - by friends, family and folks in general - that this change is impossible. I understand why people feel this way. I often feel this way! But right now, our bottom-line human reality is that if we all set down our phones - even temporarily while a renegotiation of internet protocols, design, oversight and regulation is initiated - the momentum starts to swing away from the oligarchs and back toward humanity.
One plausible way for this movement to emerge is through a cultural leader / influencer. That is to say, within the current systems, using the masters' tools.
Imagine a Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Joe Rogan, Zoran Mamdani, Kurt Cobain, Kendrick Lamar-level cultural influencer, sending one simple social signal - cell phones are irredeemably uncool. Using them is lame, lazy and socially unacceptable. Let the Tik Tok "why" videos - your bosses monitor you, law enforcement tracks you, insurance companies blackmail you, scammers target you - spread. Then, once Big Tech responds by inventing rules to shut down or marginalize those messages, it will only serve to verify and validate the messengers' claims of a rigged and manipulative system in need of boycott and reform.
If you would have told someone in 1976 that in 2026 no one would smoke cigarettes in public anymore, they'd have though you a loony. Time to make the cell phone addiction industry the first vanquished pariah of the 21st Century.
But I think the post modern point of view is not a bad initial reaction to things. In politics we need to see who is funding things and what influencers can cancel you. We see this lamentable behavior on both the right and left!
Another great piece, Mike! Can I ask you to take a quick look at my 2018 book, "Cultural Evolution and its Discontents Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure," which dovetails with your Genes and Memes argument in some noteworthy ways? (Happy to send you a copy if you're interested.)
As its blurb on Routledge's site says:
People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure.
The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us.
Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead?
Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.
Rob Watson, Dept. of English, UCLA
Hey Rob, I will take a look! Thanks!
> "And for too long, we’ve been trapped in a sterile debate between two equally unsatisfying positions. On one side, postmodernists insist that all meaning is socially constructed—that truth, morality, even reality itself are nothing more than contingent arrangements of power disguised as universal principles. On the other, naturalists argue that meaning must be discovered rather than made—that objective truths exist independently of human consciousness and our job is simply to uncover them through reason and empirical investigation."
A more or less reasonable point, though I think you're barking up the wrong tree. Though it is maybe at least in the right forest. 🙂
But in particular, those postmodernists may have something of a point themselves since ALL of our definitions are "socially constructed" -- after all is said and done, Moses didn't bring the "First Dictionary" down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. Though where they go off the rails is in not realizing that some definitions are more useful and closer to the "bedrock" than other ones -- natural kinds in particular. Apropos of which, you might like this article which asked, "Are sexes natural kinds?" by Muhammad Ali Khalidi:
https://philarchive.org/rec/KHAASN
On the other hand, one might also argue that your "naturalists" have likewise gone off the rails and into the weeds. In particular, when we name things -- a foundational aspect of many species, including our own, that goes back a long ways and rather deep into the bedrock -- we are, in effect, creating meaning: we are engaged in symbolic communication, the equating of a symbol with some tangible feature of our environment. A couple of elaborations on the theme or cases-in-point:
Is Taxonomy the Oldest Profession?
https://taxodiary.com/2013/07/is-taxonomy-the-oldest-profession/
Wasps Passed This Logic Test. Can You?
The insects frequently found in your backyard appear to be the first invertebrate known to be capable of the skill of transitive inference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/science/paper-wasps-logic-test.html?unlocked_article_code=1.n08.4rwe.Flf4WbnJUaFr&smid=url-share