WHAT'S SO SPECIAL?

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

http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_t_jones_the_dancer_the_singer_the_cellist_and_a_moment_of_creative_magic?utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_content=image__2015-05-06

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.

THE NEED FOR NEW MEMES

Big Pharma has little to do with producing an AIDS-free generation.  Big Pharma can only produce meds and market them -- maybe pull together a bit of research.  That’s not what keeps people from getting what they need to be cured of AIDS any more than it truly has eliminated smallpox (because the mega-countries have hidden some of it to use for weapons) and can’t seem to produce an STD-free generation of any kind from chlamidia to gonorrhea.  Focusing on a PILL to cure diseases that are epidemic- pandemic-syndemic lets everyone off the hook so we can all blame some mysterious white-coated figures far away, as though seen in buildings lit in the night, moving to and fro behind the glass.  Big Pharma likes that image.  If they seem mysterious and privileged, it helps keep the prices up.

Identified and devastating diseases -- polio, plague, Lyme disease, malaria -- are ecologically based.  At origin, HIV is NOT a gay disease -- not even a human disease -- not even a primate disease.  It appears that the first of its kind evolved as a lentivirus, a subcategory of retrovirus, (which are only genetic machinery codes) in simians (monkeys), possibly 12 million years ago.  

ww.thebodypro.com/content/70381/genetically-engineered-hiv-resistant-cells-the-lat.html   “In hopes of getting a more accurate estimate of how long primates and lentiviruses may have coexisted, Michael Emerman, Ph.D., a virologist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and Alex Compton, a graduate student in the Emerman Lab, examined the interaction between host and virus on a molecular level and traced back the dynamics of this relationship. They found that APOBEC3G, an immunity factor in the hosts, has evolved alongside Vif (viral infectivity factor), the viral protein that targets APOBEC3G. . . The researchers determined that this co-evolution dates back at least five to six million years -- and possibly even 12 million years.

“The oldest known primate is the Late Paleocene Plesiapius circa 55–58 million years ago.  Molecular Clock studies suggest the primate branch may be even older, originating in the mid-Cretaceous period around 85 mya.”  

It wasn’t the genes that suddenly changed, kicking off a wave of deaths, so much as it was the memes, which changed the ecology, both in the human body and in the environment of that body.  The SIV version of HIV was fiddling along in the bodies of monkeys and then chimps until hungry hunters after bush meat got deeply enough into the jungle to catch it and transmit it to other humans who carried it out to the “civilized” world.  That is, HIV like venereal diseases is dependent upon human vectors. (HIV is NOT essentially venereal -- it is a BLOOD disease which is sometimes transmitted at the same time as STD’s.)  That means avoiding contaminated blood, semen, etc., not just avoiding sex.  It’s the BLOOD, not the sex.

Since it was human memes (travel, adventure sex, habitat destruction, hunger, etc.) that got us into this mess, then that probably is the way to get out.  What memes do we need?  What cultural arrangements?

1.  The meme of families needs ecological support so that it doesn’t eject members, forcing them to do survival sexwork, or doesn’t leave them so dissatisfied that they spread their viruses around while searching for relationship.  Backup alternatives should be provided for genetically-based families that don’t work.

2.  The stigma memes have got to go.  They feed into an ecology that rewards vectors for viral contact by monetizing contagious behavior.  Stigma is a way of making something hard to access and therefore attractive and expensive.  It also justifies violence, suppression, secrecy and bullying.

3.  Some stigma markers make people attractive targets, mark them as vulnerable, set the law against them, and convince the stigmatized people themselves that they are weak and unworthy.  Other reverse-stigma markers (let’s call them authority markers) label “virtuous” religious people as universally judgmental, helpless, callous, and without resources.  These are effective in preventing people from expecting or asking for understanding or help.

4.  Persons need memes that teach them how to ask for help, where to go, how to figure out whom to trust.  We need “reach out” memes both as helpers as helpees.

5.  Social memes need to provide ways to network, join in solidarity, spread information, tolerate risk, and take action.  These were everywhere in the Sixties and Seventies and still remain in the culture, mostly latent but now waking.  However, the Status Quo people, who know that war gives them the upper hand, are fighting back -- so far with considerable effectiveness.   Until this last election. 

Genes are spread by contact.  Memes are spread in stories.  Effective stories, as powerful as “Black Beauty” or “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” -- books that changed the nation -- have been shut down by demand for proof, details, certifiable facts -- even when the stories themselves are told through publishers pursuing profit who know that sensational exaggeration will make sales go up and therefore strong-arm authors to push up the heat -- but dodge out afterwards.  Or when the demand is made to break the secrecy that made telling the story possible.  Shift the focus off the story onto the life of the author and stigmatize that person.  This is not different from focusing on Big Pharma and pills to solve a disease that thrives on poverty, ignorance, poor health, lack of housing, broken families, and in general a society that values only getting and spending -- the commodification of everything, including misery.

There have been some stellar and moving AIDS stories, both in books and on the stage or in movies.  Some of them are traveling via word-of-mouth, some of them are in our own families, and finally some of them show up in the newspaper.  We still haven’t broken the idea that HIV is only relevant to the people who catch it or that if the stats are good where you live, then the problem is solved.  

A distinguished elderly big city psychiatrist who was visiting last summer, a woman who devotes herself to helping disadvantaged women, told me that the HIV-AIDS was solved.  The meds existed, were subsidized, and amounted to a cure.  Of all people, she ought to have known better.  She seemed unaware of the many forces that keep people from maintaining pill regimes -- I can hardly remember to take my two daily blood pressure and diabetes pills, but people with HIV-AIDS take as many as twenty pills a day, spaced out at specific times.  They need to be stored and constantly available, often taken with food.  Many of them, like chemotherapy, induce nausea and fog.  

Recently pill shortages have been showing up in as many as a hundred different meds, not just HIV meds.  Unregulated companies are not working.  The pills aren’t being produced in timely quantities.  Some are not properly formulated.  There is no international access.  Prices are incredibly high and though there are supposed to be subsidies, those are also not sufficient.  The money just doesn’t arrive or -- here comes sequester -- is gone.   Dealing with needy people makes the dispensers surly -- so if you’re already confused and discouraged, you go to the clinic and the person at the desk bites your head off, and you say “forget it.”  If you blow up, you’re thrown out.  These are not magical molecular concoctions -- these are social memes.  

Not that I want to let Big Pharma off the hook.  They are outrageously gaming the system.  They say there are already “printers” that can fabricate medicines as easily as printing a paper copy or burning a DVD. They ought to be at every county health office.   Demanding action is not a gene, not even a regulation, but a crucial social reform meme and it ought not to be stigmatized.  To achieve an HIV-AIDS free generation, we’ve got to change people themselves and the way they treat each other.  Without ways to get access to meds, to have food and shelter and enough order to follow regimes, the most super pill in the world would not end HIV-AIDS.  Why wait for a pill when there’s so much to do now?