What’s so special about humans? How are we different from other animals? Do the new neurology insights make it clear that there is no such thing as a soul, as a super-natural connection to another world, as magic? Everyone seems to be abandoning “religion” so they can justify greed -- virtue as defined by income.
What about spirituality? It is irrefutable that people feel sacredness, whatever it is. The circumstances and terms, like the environment and the previous experience of the person, appear to be wildly various -- not that they can’t be made “domestic”, pulled into daily life. Even then the “wild” unpredicted experience of the sacred can burst upon us unexpectedly.
Human institutions are the way groups try to gain control and to guide arrangements and duties by defining “memes” (customs -- little sections of culture -- that people perform, mostly because of ecological factors like food, climate, transportation, the raising of children). Institutions are constantly trying to capture sacredness for their own ends, partly in order to be exempted from accountability. This may not be cynical -- may be sincere conviction and experience -- but no institution can experience the sacred because it is a human experience. An institution is not itself human, only a product of being human.
But an institution, through memes, assumptions of reality, has an eerie way of pretending it’s a person, trying to get control in order to perpetuate itself, and even building a “super-meme” of laws that will protect its wealth and power. It does not like variousness and competition, but without these, it will harden and fossilize until it is useless, or perhaps accrue so much resistance and hatred (emotional resistance) that it will be pulled to its knees with violence.
Institutions need infrastructure (buildings, transportation, storage, sources of power) but can be tempted to neglect them when they prefer memes that are empty, like luxury that is useless or toxic. (I do not mean art.) Both institutions and infrastructures must support memes that do not destroy the larger context -- the planetary environment and the beings of it.
The meaning and use of memes is to guide behavior at the level of individuals, organizations, and religions, which are organizations protecting meme-systems that work for the people and other life in a specific ecology. If that ecology (system of interacting and mutually supporting symbiotic region) changes or the system is applied to a different ecology, it will break down. This applies to communities, categories of thought, nations, businesses, corporations and religions. Their authority, usefulness and boundaries will empty. This will often cause them to resort to force and destruction.
New memes are always needed. They arise from research that offers new ideas, new words to describe them, and the jostling for new relationships. Right now, neurological and cosmological realizations are causing major reframings of understanding that were once the province of religion. Religion, in the institutional sense of theologies and practices, are now “provincial” in the sense of limited to an area, even in the pejorative definition of “concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.” It is sophisticated to presume that what one knows is smarter and more refined than what others know, even when there is no way of really knowing. Until the sacred breaks in.
We need some terms and strategies to address the disconnect between the cities and the rest of the earth’s surface, since the city dwellers have lost touch with the “boonies” even for the practice of marketing. I get questionnaires about my address that make it impossible to answer. Their own way of relating is either through “picturing” -- making distant and “artistic” the views of what is considered attractive but scary, like mountains or deserts -- or by statistics: GPS, temps, crop yields, miles between two points, house number, street name.
Memes come from material culture. The homogeneity of cities based on building materials, use of light, street grids, labor shifts, high levels of supervision and stipulation, noise, ubiquity of machinery, mean that to many people these are reality. Their sense of sacredness is likely to be pushed aside for the sake of productivity, often expressed in numbers rather than in sensory metaphor. Thus people go to the past or to the mock planet of a spaceship, sources jammed with images never really experienced (suits of armor, catapults, walled castles) or to “sets” invented by designers, closer to machines than art. Religious institutions do the same thing: cathedrals or self-containment. (I’d rather have dragons than angels.)
The hardest part of the environment to capture and systematize is other people. There are a great many of them in cities and they are much more assorted than in rural ecologies. In a small village, everyone knows everyone else and they all keep track of each other. If someone is missing in a village, people wonder. If someone is missing in a city, people shrug if they even notice.
In the city there are always a lot of excess people, maybe from some other ecology where they would have fit, or maybe because they were damaged or malformed early, or maybe got addicted -- anyway, they’re a drag on society. A meme that they ought to be just eliminated grows out of frustration and for lack of any other ideas. Resistance to the idea of just exterminating them begins to become more powerful but unexpressed and therefore unaddressed and more powerful in reprocity. Taboos always intensify what they are trying to avoid.
People are shot in the streets. Or roughed up enough and helplessly exposed to disease and violence, that they will die secretly. Or be put into situations of hopelessness so deep that inanition and marasmus will kill them, either by active suicide or gradual fading.
Sacredness can re-empower them. It is an art of hope and vision. It rests on and emerges from biology as much as the fantasy of other worlds. It’s where the memes meet genes and the spiral chromosomes in cells empower the cramped body/minds to endure, think, and eventually rise up. The genes teach the memes to do idea-judo, where the raw force of dictionaries and laws are met and deflected by reinterpretation, new stories, going for the joints and leveraging the weight of flesh. It is the power of the under-power, the shadow world growing stronger because it is unexpressed.
Bill T. Jones
It is the power of the particle, the granular accumulation of tiny bits, like one-celled animals building reefs that create and protect islands. It is possible because of the universal sea in which they dwell and which conveys the forces of pattern that can change everything. We must each do our tiny daily bit.
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