Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id IAA24718 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 25 Jan 2002 08:25:33 GMT Message-ID: <20020125082139.40718.qmail@web12307.mail.yahoo.com> Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 08:21:39 +0000 (GMT) From: John Croft <jdcroft@yahoo.com> Subject: Civilisations as a System of Memeplexes To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Hi folks
Just joined the list but I have some thoughts I'd like
to share.
Firstly about the nature of civilisation. What is a
civilisation? Civilisation is a word used we tend to
use very loosely. Here, I define "civilisation" to be
a special kind of human culture in which a minority of
people are not engaged in food production, industry or
trade, but are supported in various ways for other
purposes, by that society. Generally these purposes
are involved in the preservation, duplication and
dissemination of the memes that give that culture
coherence and allow it to "hang together". In a
civilisation, those people not engaged in productive
activity or trade, amongst other purposes, are thus
usually expected to create a vision, a set of
coordinating ideas or "memes". It is the duplication
and dissemination of these meme complexes, or
"memeplexes" that justifies and petpetuates the form
of social organisation that allows that civilisation
to survive.Generally, the people engaged in such
activities are gathered together in centres, often
described as cities. It is from the Latin word for
city - "civilis" - that civilisation takes its name.
Every great urban civilisation that has ever existed
on Earth, therefore, has had at least one psychic or
spiritual centre upon which the "memeplexes" specific
to that culture focus. The psychic centre for the
Tibetans for centuries, has been the great Potala
Palace in Llasa, For Muslims it is the black rock of
the Kaba in Mecca, for Jews the Wailing Wall of
Herod's Temple in Jerusalem. For China, it has been
the heart of the Forbidden City in Peking. It is these
centres that provide in "space" the symbolic core of
meaning for that culture. Today, in the globalised
corporate capitalist world culture its psychic
"centre" in a very real sense is that area in New
York, close by the New York Stock Exchange, that was,
until 11th September 2001, occupied by the World Trade
Centre. This was the primary optimistic focus from
which the "memeplexes" that sustained and gave meaning
to the corporate industrial civilisation have fanned
out via institutions effecting global finance and
production systems across the planet. The terrorist
attack on this centre has left our culture in a state
of shock, shaken in a way not experienced by the West,
since perhaps the the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Such an event was also found with the fall of Rome,
the Eternal City, to Alaric the Visigoth, an earlier
Osama bin Laden, in 410 CE. The shock of this event
was described by Augustine Bishop of the City of Hippo
in modern Algeria (354-430 CE) in his great spiritual
memeplex of a work, "The City of God". Rome was the
center of the world, its literature and culture
presented a society in which a visible civil
institution, the Roman empire, embodied all the hopes
and expectations of reasonable men. The sacking of
this city provided Saint Augustine the chance to
suggest that the world of the Empire was a fantastic
dream, an illusory fantasy world built upon a
collective delusion. Out of this great work, came the
chance to build a set of memeplexes, embodying a new
civilisation, that of Western Christendom, out of
which a new Rome was to develop. For Roman Catholics
the centre of this new civilisation is the crypt of
the tomb of the disciple Peter, the rock (petros) on
which Christ would build his church, at the heart of
Saint Peter's Basilica, in the Vatican in Rome.
Our circumstances today afford us the opportunity to
re-examine the framework of our lives and the
dream-factories from which the memeplexes that
undergird the global industrial civilisation emanate.
The need to engage in this self-analysis is urgent.
All civilisations that have ever existed, have
depended on the extraction of a surplus, beyond the
requirements of biological survival. It is this
surplus which has allowed the survival of the
non-productive groups that maintain its organisation
and structure. This surplus has been extracted from
the ecology and biology of the region in which the
civilisation has dominated. To a large extent, the
size of this surplus has determined how many people
can be involved in establishing and maintaining its
core memplexes, how large a civilisation can be, and
for how long it can survive. This extent in space and
time varies from place to place and has changed and
altered throughout history. In every case, however,
cilvilisations come under threat when, for internal or
external reasons, it exceeds the carrying capacity of
its environment.
Of the 40-50 civilisations that can be historically
recognised, the vast majority collapsed when, through
their memeplexes structure and organisation, they
undermined the ecological system upon which their
culture depended. When this has happened, there have
been five possible responses.
Firstly, when people of an area of a civilisation, or
part of a civilisation, cannot any longer secure a
livelihood which allows them to fulfil the potential
offered by the cultural vision of the memeplex, they
will be forced either to lower their expectations, or
seek emigration to somewhere else which allows them to
survive. We cannot begin to guess the millions who
are forced to revise their expectations downwards. On
those who seek to escape through emigration, the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees today
estimates some 22 million people, in more than 120
countries, world wide are affected by this problem.
Generally, those refugees fleeing economic or
environmental collapse is growing, and there are also
increasing numbers of "internal refugees" within
countries too.
Secondly, through deliberate action, for example, by
birth control, abortion, infanticide or voluntary
euthanasia, or through the forces of nature; through
plague, pestilence or famine, populations may be
reduced to levels that the environment can sustain.
History contains many hundreds of examples of such
events. Such limitations in population run counter to
the expectations of biological survival, but if they
assist the survival of the cultural memeplexes they
can proliferate. Earlier cultures, lacking the modern
forms of transport, were greatly affected by the
vagaries of weather patterns, in which an El Nino or
La Nina event, a regional collapse of the harvest
could occur. Recently, as this book will show, such
climatic reversals, some lasting just for a few years,
others lasting for centuries, could cause the collapse
and depopulation of a whole civilisation. Any
structure which minimises the negative impact of such
events will tend to spread.
Thirdly, often as a result of these first two factors,
levels of coercion and expropriation of the resources
of a population by its elite, or of a civilisation or
part of a civilisation over its neighbours, can also
increase. Militaristic expansion, through capturing
the resources of others, may temporarily prevent a
collapse, giving a brief chance for a civilisation to
reorganise and restructure itself to secure its
survival. But this usually does not happen. The
resources often continue to be wasted on vainglorious
examples of conspicuous consumption, and the respite
is only temporary. Eventually the situation becomes
too complex to manage effectively, the numbers of
disenfranchised grow to such an extent, that the tools
and weapons of the dominant culture get turned inwards
upon itself, and violence becomes endemic.
In some cases a civilisation can reorganise itself,
and its central memeplexes, to use its available
resources more intensively. This can be achieved in a
number of fashions, either through technological
change, or by forcing dependent groups in society to
work longer and harder for less return. Examples of
the former tend to predominate during the early
gestation and germination of a new civilisation.
Examples of the latter happen when people feel that
there is "no alternative", and creativity begins to
diminish. These two alternatives, however, are, like
the others often compatible with each other, or indeed
with any one or more of the other five factors.
Finally, in some cases, option four may result in a
fifth situation, where a civilisation may specialise
in producing goods, labour or services of a kind not
available to neighbouring cultures. Intra-and
inter-civilisation trade can result in a regional or
global economic system, what Emmanuel Wallerstein and
World Systems Theory describes as a "World System"
which can, if conditions are right, allow a higher
population with a more complex culture, to be
supported.
These five alternative options may interact and
reinforce each other in different ways. For example,
our dependence upon the non-renewable resource of
fossil fuels, or a culture's non-sustainable use of a
renewable resource (for example - Rome's use of the
soils of Southern Italy and North Africa), can
temporarily produce highly complex cultures, but
ultimately one of the five strategies will be
required. Recent history, the Gulf War, and many other
struggles offer examples of these events. The War
against Iraq can be interpreted as an attempt to
prevent a vital resource, oil, being expropriated by a
state, Iraq, in danger of collapse. To ensure its
uninterrupted flow to the benefit of corporate
industrial culture, over half a million Iraqis have
perished. The growth of an economically and
environmentally destitute population is seeing the
attempts of large numbers of people to emigrate to
more favourable locations. The increase in Iraqi
refugees is the direct result.
Today, the situation across Africa, the Middle East
and the former Soviet Union, where unstable coercive
regimes attempt to survive in conditions of worsening
economic and ecological conditions, with burgeoning
populations and increasing dependence upon
non-renewable, non-sustainable resources is perilous.
It offers us in miniature, for the majority or Third
World, of the possible conditions to be found in a
civilisation like our own, whose core memeplexes have
vastly exceeded the carrying capacity of their
biological environment. Unfortunately, history does
not give us a single example of any culture or
civilisation, which has continued to exceed this
limit, that has long continued to survive.
Today, outside the "core" areas of the Corporate
Industrial civilisation to which we belong, life in
the future is beginning to look very grim. Popular
culture of the Hollywood Dream Machine, in its
portrayals of this future, tend to reflect such an
apocalyptic view. Given current trends, it would seem
impossible to avoid the conclusion that our culture
has got itself into a literal "dead-end". Unless
things change quite radically soon, it is quite likely
that we will see our civilisation increasingly enter
its death throes - as levels of consumption world-wide
begin to plummet to what a depleted ecosystem can
sustain.
Interested in other's thoughts on these matters.
Regards
John
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 25 2002 - 08:40:45 GMT