Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id BAA27567 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Sat, 26 Jan 2002 01:08:51 GMT Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 17:04:30 -0800 Message-Id: <200201260104.g0Q14US23417@mail15.bigmailbox.com> Content-Type: text/plain Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary X-Mailer: MIME-tools 4.104 (Entity 4.116) X-Originating-Ip: [65.80.160.204] From: "Joe Dees" <joedees@addall.com> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Subject: RE: Civilisations as a System of Memeplexes Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk('binary' encoding is not supported, stored as-is)
>Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 08:21:39 +0000 (GMT)
> John Croft <jdcroft@yahoo.com> Civilisations as a System of Memeplexes memetics@mmu.ac.ukReply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>
>Hi folks
>
Memeplexures, or systems composed of mamy memeplexes, are found in the individual; civilizations are vast agglomerations of individual memeplexures.
>
>
>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
>
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>This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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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
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