Cultural Evolution and its Discontents

Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure

Robert Watson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429670879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Colecciones literarias

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.

1 Culture vs. Anarchy

Meaningful resistance to dominator culture demands of all of us a willingness to accurately identify the various systems that work together to promote injustice, exploitation, and oppression. To name interlocking systems of domination is one way to disrupt our wrong-minded reliance on dualistic thinking. Highlighted, these interlocking systems tend to indict us all in some way, making it impossible for any of us to claim that we are absolutely and always victims, calling attention to the reality of our accountability, however relative. … asserting agency, even in small ways, is always the first step in self-determination. It is the place of hope.

—bell hooks, Writing Beyond Race¹

The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano²

People worry that computers and robots, or interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, crafty, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what is uniquely valuable about the human race. This book 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 have blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival, and we need to be alert, creative, and determined in our resistance. If you have ever wondered how our species can be so smart and so foolish at the same time, this book offers an explanation: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by cultural constructs, but the cultural constructs that thrive are the ones that divert us from any interests that don’t correspond to their own.

Cultures – roughly, the beliefs, values, entertainments, and manners of our communities – are presumed innocent. Wonderfully diverse though they are, they generally reflect what their members have assumed or decided is good and true. What people have failed to notice is that the assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones skilled at protecting and replicating themselves – not necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. That has been a costly blind spot. Fortunately, it is also a curable blind spot.

So, this is a book about cultural evolution and its discontents. It offers what I hope is an interesting and plausible explanation of why human beings suffer from cognitive overload, why that overload necessitates culture, how culture evolves to control us, why that control turns societies against creative minds, and what all that means for politics, education, scholarship, and the arts in the 21st century. Beyond the better-known advantages human beings derive from humanistic learning and artistic creativity, these endeavors allow us to evaluate, regulate, and sometimes replace the evolving systems that we empower, at some cost and risk, to protect us from the unique openness of human consciousness. Intellectuals can be both valuable and vulnerable because they tend to resist the resulting conformist pressures of tribalism that collude with forces such as capitalism, fascism, neoliberalism, communism, and institutional religions that have evolved ingenious mechanisms to protect themselves from competing ideas while protecting their true believers from discomforting complexity and ambiguity. Whether democracy itself can survive in this sociopolitical ecosystem, and coexist with ideals of kindness and justice – ideals so fundamentally human that they are already visible in infants – has become an open and urgent question worldwide, as new reactionary alliances rise to power and could take any of several radically different directions. This book will offer readers a fresh perspective on their own tribal certainties – a perspective that may allow them to recognize common enemies instead of demonizing rival tribes.

The bubble that each wing of American politics believes the other is trapped in – campus snowflakes and their radical professors on one side, Fox News dittoheads on the other – can be more productively understood as idea clusters that are dangerously good at gathering and retaining their carriers. Democrats may – without surrendering their understandable loathing of Donald Trump – begin to sympathize with the aspects of Trumpism that protest the way a rampant neoliberal economic system benefits only the elites, as career politicians of both mainstream parties (despite their moral posturing) serve the self-replicating desires of the money system that feeds them rather than serving the best interests of their human constituencies. Leftists may also notice where their investment in some causes becomes partly a doctrinaire self-congratulatory reflex, and where some well-intentioned big-government programs perpetuate themselves rather than producing a net gain for a society. Christian fundamentalist Republicans may recognize the progressive campaigns against poverty and consumerism as reflecting some of their religion’s first and deepest values, such as succoring the poor and warning more privileged souls against the seductions of materialism. Conservatives may see that entrenched economic interests have superficially mimicked and thereby co-opted their value system to enlist them in shortsightedly protecting profits instead of stabilizing our wondrous and indispensable biosphere. They may also notice that racism and sexism can function through them even though they feel no racial animosity or gender prejudice, while, on the opposite wing, identity politics activists may, by the same insights, realize that labeling as “hate” every view that doesn’t conform to their latest program is neither intellectually valid nor tactically wise. And all citizens can realize that they aren’t obliged to make the moral compromises that a system – a nation, a religion, an economic structure – supposedly embodying their ideals has made for its own survival.

Some major social problems will remain unsolvable, and some serious self-betrayals inevitable, unless we recognize them as the natural product of systems with a talent for making us serve them rather than serving what is best about ourselves and best for each other. With obviously dysfunctional social structures flourishing all around the world, such that suffering communities cannot seem to escape them, we need to understand why. It suits some people to blame the victims as simply lacking sufficient moral character, intelligence, and determination to escape. Personal responsibility is certainly important, but this book is emphasizing a different answer: when a system, or one strain of a system, comes along, that happens to have a talent for perpetuating itself through generations of human carriers even when it creates a disease in those carriers, that is the system likely to persist, by a fundamental Darwinian logic. Such systems can be ingenious seducers and puppeteers without having any conscious intent, just as many tiny biological parasites are.

The systems may also be deployed with malicious intent. Governments and other sociopolitical actors (notably the Kremlin) have started to realize they can inject dangerous parasites into the cultural systems of their enemies. So the danger of memetic forces is no longer only through side effects of their own Darwinian self-protectiveness. They can be engineered into a kind of virus warfare sprayed into enemy territory to sicken its citizenry, turning them into a population of civil-warring bots, or turning them into consumers rather than citizens.

Recent evolutionary anthropology and archeology have shown convincingly that a massive increase in the brainpower of our ancestors made cultural learning feasible. What this book seeks to add is that cultural learning then had to make massive brainpower manageable, or at least tolerable. Those same fields have shown compellingly how indispensable cultural transmission is to the success of our species.³ What this book seeks to add is that our dependency on culture sometimes causes our costliest failures. It is risky to hire institutions with a stake in their own persistence to manage the balance between control and freedom – a task that is central to the thriving of our species and our individual selves.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Before those main features, let me provide a movie trailer that offers a fabulous insight into the terrors of knowledge when it is unbounded by the limits human culture provides. It is literally fabulous: a fable, a story from which a deep warning eventually emerges:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – the latest installment of Steven Spielberg’s hit movie franchise, with a screenplay by David Koepp – shows the heroic archeologist Dr. Jones on the trail of a transparent cranium that may have the power to grant world dominion, and hence is fiercely pursued by the brilliant but ruthless Dr. Irina Spalko on behalf of the Soviet empire. A longtime colleague of Indy’s named Oxley has already been driven insane by exposure to the skull, but – using enigmatic quotations from T. S. Eliot and John Milton, which Dr. Spalko (as a no-nonsense Russian scientist) cannot understand – Oxley does manage to tell Indy to return the skull to the underground temple from which it had been stolen. That temple’s antechamber is crammed with cobwebbed artifacts from many ancient civilizations, which the crystal-skulled beings – now themselves ancient artifacts pursued by archeologists – had collected to study the range of human cultures. We are thus confronted with multiculturalism squared, a panorama of diversity in factorial: “There are artifacts from every era of early history,” observes an amazed Indiana Jones; “Macedonian. Sumerian … Etruscan. Babylonian … Early Egyptian …. Collectors. They were archeologists.”

With the skull finally mounted back on its skeleton among a dozen others – maybe a weird version of Christ and his Apostles at a Last Supper, maybe just an evocation of the superstitious fear of the number 13 – the eggheads resume a timeless conversation and promise to reveal a “big gift.” “Tell me everything you know,” is Dr. Spalko’s rash demand: the intellectual analogue to the Soviet will to world empire, tying the movie’s theme nicely to its plot. Indy rolls out his signature gut-instinct warning: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” The temple spins itself into a vortex that Oxley identifies as “A pathway to another dimension,” and again Jones senses the danger: “I don’t think we want to go that way,” he says, leading his group out a side passage.

But the entranced Spalko, epitomizing human curiosity, stands in the center and persists: “I want to know. I want to know. Tell me. I’m ready. I want to know.” The movie then cuts to Mac, a treacherous archeologist, greedily snatching up a variety of the artifacts in the antechamber, fatally encumbering his escape. It is a different mistake from the one Spalko is making, but finally not so different: they are both gathering too many different forms and frames of knowledge for a human being to bear.

We return to Spalko, as strange wisps from all 13 skulls invade her eyes. “I can see,” she exults; “I can see!” But, as the saying goes, she ain’t seen nothing yet. The crystal creatures rotate and combine into what now looks like a conscious single being who concentrates its knowing gaze on her, like a genie granting a foolish wish in a fairy tale. “No more,” she begs; “Cover it. Cover it!” But the discovery is relentless, and omniscience is a major headache. Flames shoot out of her eye sockets, and with a scream of anguish she explodes into tiny particles that the vortex consumes.

The collective wisdom of the temple, at once a summation of the human past and a terrifying futuristic alien vehicle, is then smashed to bits and dissolved in a flood that leaves a tranquil lake, covering over the alien traces, the dangerous knowledge, and the alternative dimensionality – “like a broom to their footprints,” says Oxley. The scene becomes a retraction of the whole archeological enterprise, a renunciation of Jones’s professorial determination to unearth secret knowledge no matter what the risks. “Knowledge was their treasure,” Indy concludes, but there can evidently be too much of a good thing, and the heroes are all relieved to see that treasure reburied. This seems remarkably similar to the conclusion of the blockbuster first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the power-hungry villains are Nazis rather than Soviets, but their rash peek into forbidden superhuman knowledge also sent flames through their eye sockets, evaporating all the evildoers before sealing itself back up.

So – as this, conceived as the last Indiana Jones movie, slips back from an unsettling adventure to a formulaic comic ending – nothing is left for Indy but assimilation back into the most normative modes of domesticity. He heads back to 1950s small-town America, marries his long-lost sweetheart under the guidance of a Protestant minister and the beatific gaze of their all-Caucasian friends, embraces the role of fatherhood he had neglected in his daring and arcane research, and returns to his college as an associate dean. His nickname, which hinted at heroic independence, yields to the formal form that absorbs him in a conservative Midwestern state. The world is safe from the transparent skull.

* * * * * * * * * * *

What was so dangerous about it anyway? I want to suggest it might be the same thing that makes intellectuals and great artworks and universities so beautifully dangerous, so resented for their assaults on common values and common sense, but also so persistent through modern human history. In human evolution, as in the movie, the amazing oversized cranium is both a treasure and a threat – and one that can either resist or abet tyranny.

The climax of the film offers an allegory of the problem of the human mind – and most other artworks respond to that same problem. We are designed (as Steven Pinker’s research has shown⁴) to see through two eyeholes, not omnidirectionally through a crystal skull. Just as our physical view is limited in order to permit adequate attention to what is in front of us and coming near enough to matter, so our mental system is limited also, lest we become inundated with experience. There is a thrill, but also a lurking threat, in the question William Blake asks in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” Vision that expands to the visionary can be glorious but also overwhelming in its scope. We take in certain frequencies through those sensory channels, and our intellectual range is similarly constrained – usually to our benefit, as evolutionary models would predict, but (this book will argue) also to our peril because enemies can lurk in our blind spots.

Cognitive overload is a human-nature problem now widely mistaken for an Information Age problem. Prophets of the digital era warn that “We are producing data at a rate that already outstrips our ability to store them and outpaces our ability to catalog, analyze, and archive these data in meaningful ways.”⁵ But all that is really new is that we are recording more of that information electronically and disseminating it more quickly and widely: none of us have ever been able to catalog, analyze, and archive all the waves of information that flood in through our senses and slosh around our minds. The noumenal world – the world in itself, beyond our perceptual filters – is infinitely complex, and already was so before we packed our view of it with subatomic particles and their indeterminacies. Toward the end of her masterpiece, Middlemarch, George Eliot observed that

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.⁶

So there is a cognitive trade-off. According to some (admittedly controversial) theories, genetically based illnesses such as sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease became entrenched in a lineage by protecting against malaria and tuberculosis, respectively.⁷ A genetic variant that encourages osteoarthritis may have survived by helping some people survive in colder climates.⁸ Our dangerously expandable consciousness may be similarly a side effect of an evolutionary advantage sufficient to make it worth enduring under some circumstances, because it has protected our adaptability to rapidly changing social and physical worlds. But the expandability of human consciousness can provoke a backlash against openness of mind, whether the expansion arrives in the form of heightened sensory receptivity, multiculturalism, or academic freedom.

The original equipment firmware of Homo sapiens is advantageously adaptable but also dangerously so. It allows too many complicated, fuzzy-logical, and potentially conflicting programs to run simultaneously in our brains, and it is vulnerable to hijacking by alien programs for their own benefit. A chief task of culture, broadly conceived – along with the transfer of knowledge useful for survival – is to set firewalls around a world-view or belief-system, and to give shape to the deluge of data offered by the internal and external worlds.⁹

Cultures – “systems of concepts or ideas which guide thought and conduct”¹⁰ – soothe the thorny tangle of cognition and smooth the rough edges of our social imbrications. The creative arts – a part of culture sometimes dismissed as functionless – help us evolve mentally within those constraints to fit the changing circumstances of our species while also brokering the tension between a cacophonous world and our limited ability to make sense of it. Scholarship in the humanities – another part of culture sometimes deemed essentially useless – highlights the changes and contradictions in human consciousness, enabling us to make informed choices about which mutations to nurture and which to cease feeding. Primarily, however, culture is a force that stabilizes a community by encouraging a consensus on how the field of possible ideas and behavior should be limited.

While the immense capacity of the human brain and the malleable structure of its thinking have given our species unique opportunities, there is a catch in the bargain – a bug in the system. As Hamlet puts it, “there’s the rub … what dreams may come?” Our talent for imagination and fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Culture vs. Anarchy
• 2 Agency in the Human Hive
• 3 The Evolution of Memeplexes
• 4 The Blue Guitar and the Uses of Art
• 5 The Red Scare and the Idea of the University
• 6 Past and Present Humanism
• 7 The Technological Singularity and Artificial Unintelligence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index