Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id PAA00276 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 17 May 2000 15:07:01 +0100 Message-ID: <392251AF.9143913D@mediaone.net> Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 09:00:47 +0100 From: Chuck Palson <cpalson@mediaone.net> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: Just surviving in S. California? References: <NBBBIIDKHCMGAIPMFFPJGEAOENAA.richard@brodietech.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Richard Brodie tells me in a recent posting that people don't worry about
survival anymore in S. Cal because it's so easy. That's important because, if
true, the idea of a meme useful for survival would be ridiculous.
In fact, the economy Southern California along with several pockets of
prosperity in the world today and in the past raises some interesting questions
about useful memes. Other places would include places like Kuwait (pre Gulf
war), parts of post 1870s during the prosperity years, and Holland in the 1500s
during the tulip mania. In other words, bubble economies.
But before I answer why these examples offer possible exceptions that prove the
rule, let's look at the survival word. It conjures up images of barely surviving
- just the basics like food, water, and protection from the elements. It may
even conjure up images of coping with large predator animals -- hunting and
eating them. But survival is not necessarily just these things - although they
may include them. The necessities of survival depend on the type of society as
the context. Defined, it's "getting the goods and services needed to participate
in the basics of that society." In turn, those basics are really quite necessary
for the continued reproduction of that society. An early American farmer didn't
need to send his kids to college, and the society as a whole didn't need that
kind of specialized knowledge to survive, so there were few colleges. That
changed gradually; today we have to send our kids to college. Further, we have
to be able to afford a house in a neighborhood where there is a good high school
or we have to send them off to private high school. If you follow the chain of
goods and services you need to survive in this society, you find that the vast
majority of people are still using the problem solving skills our
hunter/gatherer needed to earn a living; it's just another set of situations
they apply themselves to. Modern society does have some such skills that are a
stretch; computer programing and other highly logical tasks (like the sciences)
run on a set of logical constructs that are not tied to any content in
particular. That's a big difference, of course, because it means we are
producing products that we often can't touch or see for a long time, if ever.
That kind of thing challenges our brains quite a bit; it's like making virtual
products. Just how important differences like these make is still an open
question, but it does make a difference.
But in any event, the vast majority of the world's population - even in the
United States, spend a huge part of their waking ours working to survive.
That said, bubble economies function under slightly different conditions **for
as long as they last**; they are the equivalent in some ways to an infernal
machine that has defied gravity. Our brains have not evolved to be completely
outside of any conditions of necessity, so when we are in such conditions, some
strange things happen. We can reproduce a bit of this kind of condition in
animals by simply giving them an overabundance of what they need. Their
sexuality is the first thing to go wacky because sexuality is the center of the
social lives of those animals that are social. And once the sexuality is wacked
out, the rest of social behavior also becomes disoriented. The sexuality of an
animal evolved within a particular type of environment which means that the
sexual habits need a particular set of material circumstances to maintain those
habits. I like to say that the sexuality of a species is "calibrated" to a
particular kind of environment.
What does this mean in particular? If the females are engineered to choose a
mate on the basis of their ability to provide during the reproductive phase, and
that requirement is obviated by a sudden abundance that results in all males
being equally able to provide, the mating habits go out the window. That is why
sexuality goes wacky if there is a sudden lasting abundance.
In human societies we can get the same thing. Status, for example, needs a
certain amount of scarcity to exist. Those who can procure the scarce goods and
services achieve status. We, like all social animals, are a status seeking
animal that, American democratic ideals aside, still thoroughly penetrate our
social life. (The word status is sometimes confusing for people; you can use
position or relative position as a substitute and get the idea). Status is
directly linked to sexuality.
Now, let's see what happens to status in times and places where economic bubbles
appear. There is first an attempt to modify what constitutes status. Should it
be diamonds? Travel? Number of houses? Cars? That's not easy to figure out, and,
in fact, it gets pretty artificial because no matter what you do, you are
literally thowing money at the problem - which a lot of other people can do
also. Back in the last century Thorstein Veblin called this "conspicuous
consumption" and disdained all the neuveau riche doing it because the spending
was so frenetic and apparently stupid or - to use a the key word here,
*useless*. Veblin's term applies nicely today in Southern California or at any
other time and place where there are or have been bubbles.
There is another kind of situation that resembles in many ways the condition of
super prosperity: academia. Its causes are in some ways the same: a society that
can afford to pay people to just think about subjects in the humanities. Status
under such conditions is very poorly defined, and academics are far less aware
of the material necesssities of life than the ordinary citizen. The actual
material world that others must survive in has receded quite a bit in the
academic world. And so it should be no surprise that they look on the outside
world with puzzlement, wondering of what use the goods and services that are
circulating around. In one such example on an English campus, a famous memeic
researcher seriously proposed that people did not need of faxes and the
operating systems of computers. The principle is nothing new. Back in the 19th
century it was common for academics to propose that ideas alone moved the world.
So, in answer to Richard Brode, it may very well be the case that S. Cal is in
the throes of a bubble economy that produces memes that are rather thin on use
value. But S. Cal isn't the world, it's an exception that proves the rule that
memes must, under normal conditions of human existence, have substantial use
value to be adopted.
In all probability, then, these bubble situations will pass and people will look
back on them and wonder why they could have acted the way they did. Baby boomers
look back on the late sixties, another bubble period, and realize they did some
pretty stupid things. Traditional courting practices went down the tubes, and so
did sexuality. Suddenly it was taken literally that having sex in public was an
effective way to oppose the war. We don't hear baby boomers saying these days
how stupid that was, but you can bet that in the privacy of their own minds they
feel a bit stupid about it. If you are a student of human behavior, the
important thing to remember in the middle of a bubble period is that the
behavior is not representative of the vast majority of our species.
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