For a while the Internet focus has been on the social site posts, the small talk about daily life that create the illusion of a huge circle of friends among people who are basically in very small affinity circles. It seems to me this goes back to People magazine which abandoned the idea of a magazine being about big subjects like War or the Economy or Science, even if they were made accessible to ordinary folks by saturating the mag with photos -- think Life or Look, which were really a 20th century people's art form, printed on slick paper for the sake of the photos, and more often in black-and-white than color. So memorable. Iconic. Unifying.
Other people made pulp tabloids that didn’t care about photo quality so long as the subject was sensational. But then they got “nice” by using slick paper, color paparazzi snaps of celebrities off their diets or with their clothes off, a faux village subject to curiosity and gossip in a way that is embedded in all primates, even pre-human. Not so noble. This is now on the Internet (YouTube), but also it persists in “real” life. There are women in this town who sit together doing what they call “chit-chat,” metaphorically searching for fleas and bonding with each other, forming hierarchies, alliances and outcasts. They are the emotional terrain of the town. They prevent chickens, demand an end to dust, and work the system to protect their children. They do not think about the meaning of democracy or how to prevent cancer. They do local awareness and maintenance.
This recurring pattern of ordinary people who are not powerful, not running businesses, but forming friendship networks -- quilting parties -- persists all these millennia so it must have some kind of evolutionary effectiveness. The trouble with evolution is that you cannot tell who will survive by looking at the future -- the path to survival is clear only in retrospect.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/126/the_big_picture.html Here’s a useful talk about how social patterns, business networks, governments and -- eventually -- survival strategies evolve. I don’t know where I got this quote: “Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.” The strategy evolved on the prairie and the African veldt, and worked very well, esp. for the animals in the middle of the herd, until someone figured out how to chase the whole bunch over a cliff, a piskun. Same with schools of fish: works great until someone has a big enough net to drag out the whole number together.
Gladtfelder studies flocks and schools. His premise is that their ability to stick together, turn quickly, and sacrifice the outliers for the sake of the middle, is not the result of a plot or some God-given rule. Rather it is EMERGENT from small-rule behavior in the brains of the individual creatures. If-then rules. Likewise, chit-chatting women are using small-rule behavior to create the town. Each is responding to the others. And they ARE willing to sacrifice -- or at least exclude -- outliers. Standards for keeping up the yard are in reality markers for the prosperity of the household in question, which is key to the prosperity of the whole town. In recent years three of the worst eyesores have disappeared because their crazed and helpless owners died. They would have rejected help on the grounds of personal dignity and self-determination.
Humans are not fish or birds. Much of OUR evolution doesn’t come from survival of the individual body but rather from the survival evolution of our culture. Cultural evolution is challenged in a Ted Talk by Eric X. Li. http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_x_li_a_tale_of_two_political_systems.html Li is trying to convince us that political systems only work for the cultural systems out of which they emerge. The Euro-Marxist world view was a disaster for China in many ways. He describes the system he feels is right for China and begs the West to give up the Christian notion of proselytizing, converting everyone to our system. A system that is not EMERGENT will not persist. A system based on Confucian rules will survive in China -- NOT in America with its Calvinist rules. I was fascinated that Li says China has a “committee on committees”, called the Party Organization Department, and it is the heart of power.
The heart of this EMERGENCE is the trade-off between the survival of the individual versus the survival of the group. So the next TED talk in this little mini-sequence is about the Egyptian Spring, the revolution that speaks eloquently of individual dignity and self-determination, because the persons who have authority over the whole group have used it to torture and repress, not as Li recommends, a meritocracy-based authority that responds to the needs of the people.
Recent photo of Egyptian demonstrators
http://www.ted.com/talks/wael_ghonim_inside_the_egyptian_revolution.html Today Egyptians (who are living in the seed-bed of Christianity) are ready to start on the pendulum's path to glorifying the individual which at its extreme is currently (and arguably) paralyzing the United States. But the survival of both individual and group -- in terms of nature -- is to overproduce, then reduce by attrition. It’s just tough when the eliminated parties are people you care about. If the natural attrition is designed, whether it is genocide or welfare, the results will be people who depend upon the context that was assumed when the plan was designed. And that can change. That context can be destroyed. As the Nazis discovered.
Little chit-chat groups are the equivalent of the beat cop who addresses broken windows, thereby keeping order in bigger ways. But it also maintains the local status quo and can quickly turn into code enforcers who think they know everything, though they may only have experience in schools -- not life -- and quite different ideas about survival. The context they assume is THEIRS, to protect THEM, and this plagues us all through government, advertising, the arts, even the assumptions of computer programs. They are constantly building blind corrals. We’re lucky if there’s no cliff at the end.
I would propose that the many small individual experiences of people resisting the Roman Empire are what gradually caused Christianity to emerge, but that when the Roman Empire swallowed up the religious principles, converting them to laws and literally killing non-compliants (hundreds were crucified -- not just Jesus), it was already on the way to self-destruction just as Christian churches so strong on expelling outliers are now. The wild card is corruption, debilitating culture parasites rather than outliers. Pope Francis I seems to know that. I hope.
In general, human culture evolves by developing a consensus, a flock, a herd, a school -- and then individuals may become outliers who leave either voluntarily or under pressure or by mortality. (Like Saint Francis and the Franciscans.) If they persist and if they are in sympathy with others, soon there is an alternative culture. It may turn out to be the one that survives when the larger context (climate change, pandemic) shifts sharply. Or it may be that the larger culture takes an outlier group back into the original group as a reformation or energizing progress. (The re-inclusion of gays in mainstream society.) Chit-chatting women may turn out to be an excellent way of keeping corruption to a minimum. House-keeping. Realizing their grandchildren are gay. As they chit-chat, they show each other photos and brag. If they are lucky, their grandchildren will be able to praise them.
No comments:
Post a Comment