Society: Form, Change and Essence. Of Genes and Memes. (complement).

Memes, an introduction

Memes, memetics, are recurring terms for some time. Little by little, timidly, in very closed circles the concept of memes begins to appear and finally reaches the massive world. So much so, that in recent years people have adopted the word meme to refer to a quick joke with iconic-archetypal images of a particular situation. What really is quite close to what we ultimately try, except for the playful part.

And capable that even in the game reside, as in all learning, the art of feeling and thinking.

NOTE: Homo Sapiens, our first modern selfie, was preceded by the almost contemporary Homo Politicus of Aristotle and the less famous Homo Faber of the Latin writer Appius Claudius Caecus (even when Marx rescues Faber in Capital and paradoxically quoting Benjamin Franklin).

More recently, the nineteenth and neoclassical Homo Economicus pales against the very current Homo Ludens (1954) of the Dutch Johan Huizinga. Here its devastating beginning: “The game is older than culture; because, however much we narrow the concept of it, it always presupposes a human society, and the animals have not waited for man to teach them to play. ”

Anyway, I think they will have heard me, read and raved about memes on more than one occasion.

The term was born in 1976. Richard Dawkins in his "The Selfish Gene" proposes the idea to refer to the mechanics in which cultural ideas and constructs are housed in people's minds; which, when interacting, propagate or contain them, making them thrive, replicate and massify or isolate, retract and disappear. Dawkins makes a pun on the concepts of memory and genetics, seeking to assimilate the genetic mechanisms to the propagation of ideas.

We must thus understand memes as units of cultural information that organized in complex chains shape ideas and structure cultural tools such as languages, architecture and morals with which people and nations express themselves (analogously to an organism in a phenotype) of "femotypes" in cultural niches where some of these ideas are symbolized or deprecated in trophic chains, making them express themselves in a dominant or recessive manner and thus shaping the infinite cultural diversity of man.

Memes like Paradigms

These memes simply and elegantly are the basic structures with which the mind organizes and explains its reality. They are the paradigms of each time.

Ideas, like genes, respond to the pressures of the environment, but this time doubly. On the one hand they respond to the physical pressures of the environment (climate, geology, biodiversity), and on the other hand they respond at the same time to their own cultural pressures (politics, social strata and cultural diversity).

Here we can intuit how the climate layer can be associated with the political layer, the geology with the hierarchical-social structures and biodiversity with its own diversity. All these factors come together and influence themselves or the rest. The climate can shape the valleys and rocks, making the flora and fauna populations flourish or retract and therefore defining the levels of biodiversity in ecological niches.

Similarly, the politics of homo politicus, trigger or not the flowering of basal layers that support new soils, expressed in hierarchies and social forms, such as those of homo faber or homo economicus, which at their time they allow or not the appearance of meme-diversity in ecological-cultural niches, such as homo ludens.

In that way, our genes have shaped our memes and they in turn have shaped our culture. Our culture, as part of a process of increasing sophistication in complex adaptive systems, will give rise to the emergence of new consciences, machine and biological. See, emerge from a new consciousness in Gaia

Ideas, memes, such as money and private property, public goods and others will be strongly questioned in the coming days, as well as the interpretation of concepts such as collapse, decline, regressive or isolated locality and its negative meaning because we already know it is urgent to adjust our existence to levels of harmonic ecological footprint with Gaia.

If you want to know a little more about the concept of Ecological Footprint, please here is a starting point: https://hermandadblanca.org/presente-desarrollo-canon-vigente/

Unfortunately, our memes do not yet realize the entropy in their variations and mutations to the future, and we only see their rapid interaction in a medium that still does not resent delivering energy to its inhabitants in an unequal distribution thus perpetuating a petty and unsupportive culture ( tragedy of the commons).

Hominization and Memes

Before continuing, it is worth remembering Edgar Morin and his look at the Hominization process.

Morin first reminds us that since Ecology, which studies the distribution and abundance of living organisms and the interactions of these organisms with their environment, we arrive at the concept of Society, defined as a “complex organization of diverse individuals with territorial base, hierarchy and cooperation group solidarity ”.

But it is his devastating reminder that forces us to keep looking for how to get out of this supposed deterministic barrier. In fact, Morin reminds us that every society even when “it is one of the most widely spread fundamental forms of self-organization among living beings” is also “unequally and diversely developed”, which ultimately brings inequality of satisfaction and happiness (in human environments even though it has been seriously studied that also in animal, primal and ketatic environments in the main).

The above table schematically shows the layers of increasing complexity and sophistication of the Hominization process as Morin understands.

In the advanced anthropoid society, hierarchically controlled, and demographically self-regulated almost identically to the primary society (that is, on the basis of exclusion or dispersion of new colonies), the family is poorly developed and the social triad structure appears almost clearly, as embryonic bioclasses, of (1) adult females- (2) females and young males - (3) adult males.

It is the young people of both sexes who, when sharing during the process of adaptation to adult life, generate bonds of trust and friendship that they then project in their own once-adult groups, females with females and males with males, but especially between females and males.

While it is true in the upper classes there is total freedom of movement, and social power oscillates between aggressiveness and exhibitionism, the social mobility of young-adults-elders is the only mechanism that tempers social inequality.

The advanced anthropoid society and the human society itself do not differ too much from the primitive society, but the family is already seen in the first as a clan agglutinator and in the second as the basis of all humanity. It should be noted that in the society of advanced anthropoids regulation is demographic, and although in both the control is hierarchical, human self-regulation is in a political phase (Homo politicus and Homo Economicus)

In both cases, males advance to hominization by developing tolerance between males and accepting mutual collaboration; the females, on the other hand, develop the capacity for affection and friendship between infants of both sexes and the females themselves and the youngsters are benefited from it, promoting innovation in language, social praxis, technology and tools.

It is young people who play a key role as tempering of social inequality because it is in the youth that they share in a mixed way, generating better understanding of each counterpart, learning social forms and giving rise to innovation.

In the society of advanced anthropoids individuality is only expressed in elites with some level of moderation in the public. In our human society, even though in the upper class you have all the advantages, all the freedoms and especially personal fullness, the individuality begins to be timidly explored by all mankind.

I close the previous table with a layer designated for post-human society, following Morin I dare to say that his self-regulation will be ecological and under decentralized control finally allowing individuality to be expressed openly by all humanity.

Case Study, Spiral Dynamics

All the advance from primitive, anthropoid, human and post-human societies is mounted not only in genes, but especially in memes.

Human beings live an evolutionary dynamic of endless search. 5000 years ago it was written in stone by Hermes with his famous “everything vibrates”. Since then, culture and subcultures are in different stages of psychosocial development, expressing different and unique values.

Today we are not only in the 4th Industrial Revolution, but also she will in turn feed back the field of social sciences and their responses and proposals from society.

Already said, Richard Dawkins in his "Selfish Gene", 1976, uses for the first time the term, mixture of memory and gene. From Dawkins to today, a lot of water has run under the bridge.

Dr. Clare W. Graves is one of the first developmental psychologists to scientifically articulate levels of human cultural evolution and concrete measures to promote positive and evolutionary change. His work allows us to understand how complex systems become adaptive.

On the other hand, Dr. Don E. Beck, successor and friend of Dr. Graves, creator of the methodology of Spiral Dynamics, has spent his life developing the work of Graves for companies and Governments overcome complexity problems.

Here it is worth stopping and recognizing that the old institutionality no longer responds to the problems of cultural and social constructions. The Graves-Beck model (see table above) identifies eight levels and argues that more than half of the planet lives between the third and fourth levels. This section heads a summary of Grave-Beck levels. Below is an infographic, even if not exhaustive or definitive, and certainly somewhat playful, it gives an account of the probable distribution of macro-memes on a global scale.

Much of the integration progress in the new South Africa was worked with Spiral Dynamics and today in Chile the constituent process. In The new elite, the evolutionary transition of Chilean society, 2014, Fern ndez and Reyes adapt Beck-Graves to the challenges we face today in Chile.

For those who wish to know the practical applications of this work, refer to Emerge! The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of Middle East by Elza S. Maalouf or The Crucible: Forging South Africas future in search of template for the world, by Dr. Don Beck.

Thus, following Dawkins, Morin and Beck-Graves, the memetic-cultural development of the peoples of the Earth expresses various forms, all obviously reflecting their essences and intimate truths, which throughout history and the process of retro-mirroring so much make those best aspects that surprise us shine and we try to sustain and to perpetuate low ways that in transitory states of unconsciousness cannot be seen until they are no longer sustained when people wake up.

Bibliography

Edgar Morin, The Lost Paradigm: The Forgotten Paradise (bioanthropology essay) / Ed. Kairós 1973

Daniel Fernandez-Pablo Reyes, The New Elite; The evolutionary transition of Chilean society / Ed. Catalonia 2014