The following blog is a new first-draft extract from my
book-in-progress, The Complexity Revolution: uncovering the universal laws of
life. This is a narrative of History extrapolated not from history books, but
through complexity theory, and the way in which the self, culture, identity,
and society emerge and interact. Again, the theoretical basis (chapters 2/3) is
missing here, this just being a first draft extract. Please excuse any typos,
mistakes, etc – this was written in two sittings, stream-of-consciousness, and
I haven’t proofread, fact-checked, or referenced it yet. If you find any errors, it’d save
me a small-job in the long run so feel free to point them out. What this
extract represents is a fundamental narrative, as readers of History are
accustomed to, but based upon a complexity-derived model that is previously
presented in the book. If you would like to see these diagrams and models
outlining the self-similar and universal dynamics underlying this narrative,
please feel free to send me a tweet: @grimeandreason, or email me, same name, @
gmail.com
A Brief History of Cultural Evolution
Back at the dawn of cultural evolution, the bond we
felt to the known, and the fear inherent in the unknown, naturally created
power structures through the search for, and the proclamation of, ‘divine’
knowledge (and the fear and respect that such a claim would provide). The world
needed explaining to minds that had evolved to rationalise their own
environment: Why did these crops fail? Why did my mate just keel over dead?
What the hell does it mean when the Sun disappears temporarily? Explaining all
of this, or at least giving the appearance of doing so to our pattern-finding
minds, derives the authority that we evolved to defer to, a natural extension
of biologically emerging hierarchy. Imagine the questions and answers that
would arise to explain natural phenomenon such as eclipses or extreme weather
events! Such speculations brought forth power structures capable of
administering huge networks of large-scale settlements, such as those evident
in the Jungles of South America, complete with sophisticated calendar systems
that mapped the stars and convinced those early minds that a) the heavens and
the earth were somehow connected and b) that those in power weren’t entirely
full of shit. They may have had primitive data sets upon which to draw, but
these times would have had geniuses to work with it still.
The emergence of Religion as
a fundamental identity
Thus started what we would view today as religious
identity, where preachers and spiritual-leaders would monopolise ‘divine’
knowledge through exclusive use of literacy and cultural production and
transmit a cultural identity that, with high fecundity, would infect the everyone
within the system. This would create an immensely strong, and entirely
homogeneous shared cultural identity, one capable of extreme acts such as child
sacrifice, yet also the source of an immense bond, with every mind having
identical cultural influence, corresponding to extremely similar
subjectivities, hence the slow pace of cultural evolution. Yet this tight bond
also came with a great evolutionary advantage; it could maintain hegemony over
cultural identity beyond that which naturally occurred prior to cultural
evolutions emergence. Then, tribes most often fit what is called the ????,
which placed the natural (pre-culture) cap on our optimal scale of
self-organisation at around 140 (???), still found today in army units and ????. The ability
to control potentially millions of people through what amounts to
indoctrination is what brought about recorded History in the first place. If
society hadn’t been a mere extension of our natural hierarchical organisation,
belief and ideology would have remained too disparate, too small-scale, to
begin to effect History in the global sense. The Greek historian Herodotus,
‘the first historian’ - apparently - wouldn’t have written all that he did if
wars consisted of two family groups having a mega-tiff.
The Bronze age is a perfect example of how even
large-scale cultural systems can take a relative (to our own time most
obviously) age to slowly, ever so slowly, attain the complexity that
forces a transition of self-organisation (let alone a transition to a new
fundamental identity). To give you an example of how a highly homogenous and
superstitious (that is, ignorant of science and objective knowledge or
thinking) cultural system can pretty much come to represent stagnation, the
Egyptians only way of calculating one-third of a figure, was to work out
two-thirds first, and then half it. This method was used for around 1400
years, and it wasn’t until the cultural evolution bomb that was the Greeks
that someone turned around and asked, “why”? It worked, nobody knew the
fundamentals as to why, and there simply wasn’t the cultural variation or
freedom of subjectivity to nurture, synthesise, and build-upon the necessary
concepts. Seen in relative terms, this would mean that whichever
freak-of-nature first worked out how to calculate two-thirds, and then half it
(if indeed it was the same person!), achieved one of the greatest, relative,
intellectual feats in all of humanity.
It would be thousands of years before growing
complexity forced the emergence of the next fundamental identity, that of the
State, yet this is still a slight grey area for me. Levy is happy to see the
emergence of Greek city-states, and the Roman Empire, as examples of a new form
of fundamental identity, territory, and I can understand why. They did indeed
create new forms of identity to the prior Bronze Age - that is of no doubt. Citizenship
is a fundamental characteristic of the State cultural identity, and it cannot
be argued that Roman didn’t incorporate people of multiple religious identities
under this term, and for a very long period of time. But there are three things
that bother me.
Firstly, what is eminently debatable is just
how much cultural production Rome was responsible for, particularly the further
away you got. It is hard to imagine that the territorial, or state identity, in
any way supplanted, or even mass subverted, the existing religious cultural
identities of its occupied territory. Note the word occupied: without actually
saturating conquered areas with your culture by way of synthesis (the most
evolutionarily successful strategy), as the Moors did in Spain, all you are
doing is finding ways to extract wealth through taxes, fear, and force, not
create a new fundamental identity.
Secondly, and this merely provides the
complexity-based proof of the first point, communication structures did not
extend across the entire system, down to the local level, to the degree
necessary to saturate culture in the first place. Communication across the
system was limited to a tiny minority of traders (but more on this soon), and
to the structures of power itself. For one, Latin was a language used only
by the elite. For two, how this communication was then delivered to the various
local contexts was most often at the end of a very sharp, very pointy sword
(especially in rural areas more likely to be sustaining established religious
cultural identity), which isn’t the best evolutionary tactic by which to
convert new generations to your cultural identity (a lesson power has yet to
learn to this day, - see: Mr I have a Drone).
Thirdly, and again, this merely proves my second
point, History shows that these Roman experiments with proto-state cultural
identity that have so fascinated historians ever since, still heavily reliant
on and subject to the influences of Christianity from within, and multiple,
strong religious cultural systems from without, simply wasn’t sustainable at the
scale Rome had reached. Technological, tactical, and social advances were
happening in a period that wasn’t ready, wasn’t creative or subjective enough
at the societal level, to make much more use of these new tools than creating
awe-inspiring urban centres, and a war machine that could conquer most of the
known world. This had allowed Rome to overreach itself, and without the
accompanying advances in communication technology (and greater democratisation
of cultural production) needed to unite these peoples under a new fundamental
cultural identity, it simply collapsed from all sides as other people’s, united
by genuine shared cultural identity and desire to succeed, were able to
react and adapt to Rome’s power and exact their long-built up need for revenge.
I know that, again, this is rather tautologous, but the very fact that Greek
thought and Roman technological advance were largely lost to humanity, almost forgetting
entirely these experiments with statehood, and devolving once more to the
religious fundamental cultural identity of divine rulers and large-scale,
catastrophic culture clashes.
Although I have primarily used Rome in this narrative,
the same principles apply to Greece. Here though, it was of a different nature,
with different drivers and influences. The compartmentalisation of governance
across multiple city states; the first experiments with mass-participatory
democracy; Greece’s place on the Mediterranean ensuring a constant supply of
outside cultural influences through traders and travelling philosophers and
early scientists; the establishment of universities and halls of learning; and
by no means least, the mountainous terrain, which made Greece an extremely
difficult place to conquer; all of these combined to create an explosive
enabling environment for cultural evolution, which, like Rome before it,
managed to produce governing structures that bare many of the hallmarks of
statehood. Yet, once again, it wasn’t enough. Religious identity still provided
the foundation of everyone’s identity, with even the state-like characteristics
- the attempts at direct-democracy - infused with religious symbolism,
interpretation, and even inclusion in decision-making (even so, they still
managed to be a damned sight more enlightened regarding the design of the
systematic structure of politics than we have today even). Greece, like Rome,
was not a closed system. Other, less developed cultural identities were quite
capable of marshalling tens, or even hundreds of thousands of men on missions
of conquest, and so Greece, like Rome, existed in a state of perpetual war, or
threat of war. Communication networks were non-existent across societal scales,
and these civilisations would have seen Greeks as no different than animals,
such would the extent of homogenous indoctrination and dehumanisation. Genocide
ruled this age, and it didn’t discriminate when it came to cultural advance.
Strict authoritarian rule defined the history-deriving
scale of religious fundamental identity in the millennia that followed, for
Europe and most of Asia at least, as did (by definition) stagnation of
knowledge, since homogenous cultural identity minimised subjectivities, and
therefore innovation, to the extreme. Meanwhile, in the Middle-east, Greek
knowledge was being gathered together, synthesised, maintained, and
disseminated across it’s growing empire, which correlates (guess what? By
definition) with the less homogenised, less authoritarian ruled that emerged in
feedback with the widening and diverging subjectivities held within, and
brought forth from, Greek cultural identity.
If you haven’t seen it already, I cannot recommend the
episode of Neil de Grasse Tyson’s Cosmos with the profile of Ibn Al Haytham.
When I first discovered this guy, it took me about two minutes of
research to conclude that here, indisputably, lies the greatest scientific mind
between Aristotle and Newton. It then took me a further 2.3 seconds to fall
into desperate despair. Why had it taken 27 years of reading, of growing, keen
interest in science, and having nearly completed my History degree at
University, for me to have ever come across the name? Incidentally, it was
through my own reading, not the university, that I first heard about
him. Nowhere in my studies had this period ever popped up - not in political
philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, or even the history of
science. I quickly looked to see what book I might be able to buy about
this incredible person, yet the only book I could find in English was a
profile in a series of science books for small children. My mind was
blown. Here I was, a highly educated, relatively independent mind in the UK, a
country with Islamophobia running rife through the (vertical) cultural
corridors of power, and I had to admit that my, and everyone else’s, entire
historical and cultural knowledge was a biased, imperialistic mess, and I
had no way to know to what extent anything was true. Selection bias was
clearly enough to make even the most intellectual mind unknowingly shape
cultural identity into the image power decides. This more than anything made me
integrate self-reflection and self-falsification subconsciously, into my very
worldview.
Anyway, I digress. Ibn Al-Haytham is an absolute,
grade-A, historical badass. Let me just run down a few of the many things he
accomplished having developed in the still here, despite the West’s best
efforts, Iraqi city of Basra: the correct model of how light travels, and how
the eye interacts with the light to allow us to see; a complete formulation of
reflection, and a detailed investigation and (correct) description of
refraction, including angles of incidence and deviation; other optical work
concerning the light reflecting from the moon, halos and rainbows, and
development of the ‘camera obscura’; alternative constructions and direct
proofs of some of Euclid’s theorems; and the most complete understanding of the
importance of the scientific methods, and human flaws of reasoning and
perception to date. Here was a person who, with the right genes, and the right
upbringing, with the right exposure to the right dissonance in the right order,
could break free of the conceptual bonds of his entire cultural environment.
Here is a quote from his biography page on Harvard University’s website (see,
they do know about these guys, it’s just, well, Newton’s more European-y):
In a short
autobiography, Ibn al-Haytham tells us that in his youth he scrutinized the
claims of the many religious sects teeming around him. In the end it was the
empirical strain and rational thinking he recognized in Aristotelian natural
philosophy, and the rigor of mathematics, that finally won his heart.
It’s important to remember at this point however, that
science, as a non-fundamental identity (more on that, and those, later) was
never able to fully integrate itself into, or as, a fundamental cultural
identity. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; however cultural and socially
advanced this period, and this location, was, it was still utterly incapable of
providing an enabling environment for it’s saturation of the entire cultural
system. Again, language and literacy barriers are rife, and while scholars of
multiple faiths were often invited to debate and contribute new books and new
knowledge, this cultural evolution was inherently limited to a tiny elite, with
the vast majority of people still living largely unchanged to how they had been
for thousands of years (excepting urban areas, which like Rome, saw significant
advances in aesthetics and functionality). Everything may have been theocratically under Islam's control, this region wasn’t
homogenous in the way closed, European cultural systems were; they were the
mid-point between East and West, an obvious location for such cultural
evolution to emerge.
Unfortunately, that same fact also meant that they
were perfectly placed to be utterly annihilated by more homogenous, less
enlightened cultural systems that had the Middle East utterly surrounded. The
constant waging of religious-based conflict, the constant genocide,
whether from the West at the hands of the Crusaders, or the East at the hands of
one of the most alien-seeming, blood-thirsty, and devastating warrior cultures
ever known, the Mongols. Entire cities would be burned to the ground, their entire populace executed, down to the last child, methodically, each man being
given his quota to maximise efficiency. They did both because it made tactical
sense - striking terror into the hearts of your enemy at the mere mention of
you heading their way will always give an advantage - and because they
could. The Mongols, like the European crusaders, shared no culture with
these people - they had no evident empathy for them whatsoever. Who knows
whether individual moments managed to sneak glimpses of dissonance, hints of a
more universal reality, into the minds of these men as they slayed babies that,
lets face it, would have at least looked similar, who knows. What we do know is
that the societal scale identity, these cultures fundamental, top-down identities,
facilitated mass-genocide regularly. And it is a feature common to both
religious and state cultural identities, as the 20th century showed.
Hopefully, corporatism won’t follow suit, though has you will see later in this
book, many would argue it already is.
At this moment such opportunities for a free mind was
still a fragile basis of identity and was almost wiped out, were it not for the
knowledge it produced being kept alive by the Muslim world. The Dark Ages
represented a throw-back to that pre-Greek time of theocratic rule (divine
kings), until that Greek seed was re-planted in Europe once more through the
Moorish in Spain, and on through the Renaissance in Italy. It was following
this time, when sufficient knowledge had been disseminated, replicated, and
disbursed in Latin, the growing lingua-franca (SP?) of an emerging, international
elite of thinkers, that science emerged as an unstoppable, but still, as ever,
far from fundamental, cultural identity. Early Modern Europe saw the first
major split in the dominant religious cultural identity, as new concepts and
thoughts brought dissonance to a point whereby an enabling environment formed
that allowed one man, nailing one piece of paper to a Church door, could be
discerned as the cascade-triggering event (how accurately, who knows) that
ripped that tension from its chains. Although Catholicism had been the major
source of funding for science, and cultural production in genera, in the period
of the Renaissance, it’s inevitable creation of dissonance meant that Protestantism’s
embrace of early science’s ability to empower the individual, over the
institution, was the next major catalyst for cultural evolution. This
evolution advanced in feedback with advancing communication technology, such as
the printing press, and the subsequent market forces driving the establishment
of common vernaculars across large, geographical regions, each feeding the
other to begin the process of accumulating truly objective knowledge.
This generated an unstoppable new catalyst to cultural
evolution; the establishment of science as an indispensible cultural identity
due to it’s wide spread, and ultimately, because of it’s tremendous use for
power to achieve it’s own ends. Complexity and cognitive dissonance grew,
both from the religious cultural identity (continued fragmentation and growing
synthesis - a precedent had been set)) and the resulting emergence and growth
of non-fundamental identities such as science, art, and philosophy. This meant
that the enabling environment for a transition to a new and genuinely
fundamental cultural identity was arriving exponentially, in feedback
with the exponentially increasing domestic and international
institutional and communication network that formed the foundation of science
in this time. Most importantly however was the emergence of common vernaculars
across entire cultural systems, for it represented the medium through which
disparate identities would be shaped into a new fundamental Identity, that of
the State.
The emergence of the State
fundamental cultural identity
The English Civil War, according to my premise,
represents the moment when cultural complexity hit the maximum threshold that
religious cultural identity could maintain. The dissonance had hit its peak.
Such was the power of this uprising, against the very notion of King Charles
being God’s personally chosen representative to rule over them, that families,
communities, and the entire country were torn apart, Royalists, desperate to
maintain the very fabric of their identity, indeed, their concept of reality,
versus those who had seen enough to convince them that divinity could be found
elsewhere. It is mightily interesting that it was during this time that, to my
knowledge at least, the first hint of understanding of emergence first gained
mass attention. Thomas Hobbes, on the front cover of his mammothly influential
book, ‘Leviathan’, depicted the image of a giant King, looking out over his
lands. Yet despite the head being that of a single, noble individual, the body
that holds that held is comprised of a multitude of individuals, representing
the subjects that make up his kingdom. The book itself didn’t directly
challenge the sovereignty of the King - if it had, it wouldn’t have been
so influential - but it did open the way to discussing the nature of that
sovereignty in a different way. By including the subjects within the image of
the King, Hobbes was making an implicit reference to the fact that the King was
nothing without the people, whatever his original intent.
Predictably, the transition didn’t go smoothly. For a
section of the populace to have executed the King, God’s own representative on
this earth, chosen by him to govern you… it is impossible for us to
overstate just how incredibly crippling and paralysing that would have been, to
people across the entire nation. The closest we in the West have to imagining
such an event of collective shock would be to think of the U.S. post September
11th. But magnified thousands of times. The natural order, the
order that no one could possibly have envisioned beyond, had been irrevocably
shattered. INSERT IMAGE HERE. Not only that, but it had been shattered by
their own kin. Nothing we could imagine could compare to what that must
have been like. Every royalist would have been talking about the
end-times approaching, and sincerely believing it. The fall-out lasted
through two periods of intense, bloody conflict, as the newly conceived
parliament struggled to impose its legitimacy. In the end, as always, the
eventual equilibrium saw the first-ever separation of powers to have stuck
through until modern day. King Charles II took the throne, his powers
significantly reduced, and parliament was able then to establish itself to the
point where opposing political parties created the dichotomy that drove
cultural production, not the clash between religious power and civic,
non-fundamental identities (within a cultural system), or large-scale religious
cultural identities (inter-cultural systems). But most importantly, and what made
this transition to statehood ‘stick’, was that the state eventually came to
tame the democratising force of the printing press, impose it’s authority over
cultural production, and begin the process of saturating culture with its own
image, diluting the cultural capital of religious cultural identity in the
process.
This ‘balancing-out’ of the religious and state
fundamental cultural identities is the main, single, underlying cause of the
enlightenment. While the state may have had a good deal of control over
system-wide dissemination of cultural identity, religion still held the trump
card of having millions congregate at the localised scale every week. The power
of the sermon was still immense, and while the state may have lasted, and
evolved, to this day, this first few hundred years of history was still
dominated by religious conflict. Europe was ablaze, somewhere, for pretty much
all of this period, as Catholicism and Protestantism fought back and forth, as
though echoing the explosion Martin Luther had lit the fuse to, an echo that
lingers still today. Religion still had the most cultural capital, stored and
accumulated over thousands of years, and this will take an age to change; while
the state may have been catching up in the UK - the Houses of Parliament, the
tower(s) holding Big Ben (and Tom), etc - it could not be expected to compete
with the thousands of churches, castles, and palaces accrued from time long
past, and the identity held, and continuously transmitted from, within them.
Even the rapidly evolving scientific cultural identity took hundreds of years
to gradually rid itself, at both the individual and societal level, of
religions influence, only to have to do the same for that of the state.
Although the network of early scientists that helped
progress this new fundamental identity was extremely small, I bet that if you
were to quantify it’s growth, the amount of letters sent in this time would
have grown exponentially, just as the growth in peer-reviewed publishing has
been shown to be. Yet we are still talking numbers in the low hundreds, as well
as a pretty homogenous demographic of white men of wealth. Yet between the
emerging universities, scientific institutions, and men of patronage free to
further their studies whilst tutoring the young aristocrats (an important
group, since institutionalisation would be less of an issue), enough people
gained enough knowledge, through enough revolutionary books translated into
enough vernacular languages, to bring the capacity of innovation to more and
more people, only now to the benefit of the state, and the continued
detriment of religion. Advances in communication technology such as the
telegraph, photography, the establishment of newspaper and the fourth estate
relaying ideology authoritatively and en-masse, combined with the gradual
integration by the state of religious cultural identity (entirely naturally)
meant that religions monopoly on system-wide cultural production, their ability
to define themselves, waned dramatically, never to return in the West in a
governing form. Gradually, mass-culture became state-culture, homogenising the
nature of cultural production in a fashion that excluded religion entirely. The
state began to define itself, and the populace was powerless to resist its message.
It is here that the story takes a tragic turn for the
worse that is familiar to all of us, not just in the West, but also around the
world. It was the first, globally reaching travesty of human universality to
imprint itself, forever, on the cultural identity of hundreds of millions of
people. No, I’m not talking about the two World Wars. I am talking about
colonialism.
Colonialism was what happened when competing
nationalist cultural identities realised they had the technology to basically
conquer the world, in the good old fashioned way that all but the very most
enlightened intellectual found entirely natural. And why wouldn’t they? Conquest
of the ‘other’ has been a staple of civilisation since civilisation first
began. While the state cultural identity may have contributed to one hell of a
lot of cultural advancement, morality was still bounded by shared culture; some
may have objected to killing other Latin speaking peoples, or destroying Greek
architecture, no one gave a damn about people who were so different as to be a
different colour! It wasn’t even an established consensus, until Darwin’s work
had had sufficient influence (in the 19th century!), that they were even the
same species as the clearly more civilised white folk. The state cultural identity,
with renewed legitimacy derived from “science” that just happened to justify
the abhorrent practices that were so enriching those in power. Yet it wasn’t
just about wealth. The state cultural identity had co-opted religious identity,
infusing its mission with religious righteousness and misplaced ‘good’-intent,
combining it’s ‘civilising’ mission with good old fashioned It should come as
no surprise then that so many should have travelled, sorry, been renditioned to
the States, as part of a systematic and global crime against humanity that
lasted for many generations. The justification through reason that the state,
and its beneficiaries, employed was so sophisticated that it was even able, for
a short while longer at least, to find residence in the minds of those few,
wealthy men who designed what became the pinnacle, for many, of the emergent
forms of ‘self’-governance. Personally, I see it as an idealistic high-water
mark that has receded ever since. Fortunately, it was so ahead of its time that
that didn’t, and doesn’t, matter.
The founding fathers of the United States,
blessed with an abundance of resources, officially separated church and state
(I say officially: thousands of years of cultural capital preserved through the
minds of those first immigrants hardly vanishes overnight - churches were very
soon aplenty), and laid the conceptual foundations for that which would come to
supplant the very state as the new fundamental cultural identity. First though,
back to Europe, where nationalism still had something nasty up its sleeve as
its global power began to wane (strangely, all that communication and transport
infrastructure Europeans built everywhere fed-back into a growing sense of
indigenous collective identity built around oppression), and resource hungry
state cultural systems, reaching their peak capacity of complexity given the
increasing influences of other cultures on previously more closed cultural
systems. With a leadership in every nation state, every anachronistic
empire soon to fall of the cliff-face of History, had a leadership whose
cultural identity was at it’s most purely nationalistic, it’s most exclusive in
terms of morality. Every such cultural system reflected this homogeneity of
power, every young, male mind infected with glorious tales of noble and
virtuous war, every young female mind disempowered into subservience, and with
the ingrained sense of duty forcibly imparted on all, by families, by
communities, by the state, an unquestionable cultural norm.
An unfortunate trend that has remained steady
throughout History is the ever-increasing capacity for humanity to kill each
other. Not in the sense of actually being able to carry out the deed, that has remained a constant, and we
would be foolish to think it cannot reappear. People at the turn of the 20th
century also regarded their own time as too advanced, culturally, to stoop the
levels of depravity the continent soon witnessed. They were wrong. Again,
communication networks, and the relatively closed and tightly controlled nature
of each competing nationalist cultural system, pre-determined what was about to
happen. Complexity had once again reached it’s zenith with the state cultural
identity, but whereas in the U.S where the transition happened gradually (after
a false start) - mainly due to nothing more than geography, that is, its
distance away from the major powers, combined with its sheer land-mass and
self-sufficiency in vital resources - in Europe it was sudden, explosive, and
brutally unprecedented.
The First World War, seen through this complexity
framework, has to be one of the most tragic sets of circumstances in the
history of humanity. It came at a terrible time: power was still highly
exclusive and almost at it’s peak of homogeneity; the mythology and cultural
identity, embodied most fundamentally by those in power, built around the
glory, nobility, and even the necessity of war; the largely untested technology
that appeared at that time, so dangerous that the Hague convention of 1898
(????) saw the introduction of international law prohibiting certain
technologies, such as gas, and aerial warfare; the sheer pig-headed,
testosterone fuelled stubbornness created by the purity of the elites cultural
identity, their unquestioning loyalty to 19th century thinking (at best); and
finally, but most depressingly, the still huge gap between the cultural
identities between the fundamentalist leadership, and the
indoctrinated-to-all-degrees-and-none multitude that was the drafted,
and until recently civilians and students, armies. Together with
whichever black regiments we could muster from the colonies, obviously.
The utter heart-break that is the first world war is,
for me personally using this framework, summed up best (or worst, I
guess) in the Christmas Day armistice of 1914. As an aside here, I cannot
implore you enough to listen to Dan Carlin’s latest series of Hardcore History
podcasts, covering the First World War. Describing the following scene, Dan had
me wailing with grief for a solid five minutes. Here’s why.
By the time that first Christmas of the First World
War came around, it had already become clear that this was a war like no other.
The most intense and complex opening round of hostilities in human history,
featuring armies from a whole host of regions and states just piling into each
other, saw tens of thousands from all sides dead within weeks. Soon, the whole
thing devolved into what the Great War has primarily become known for, the
trenches, stretching from the border of Switzerland right up to the Belgium
coast. The wet, muddy, rat-infested trenches, where bodies would lie sometimes
for months, unable to be removed, were these men's homes, their every-day lives for four long years, should they be so
'lucky’. Raise so much as a finger, and bullets would ring out. The brutal,
constant pounding of the shells forcing men to dig themselves deeper and
deeper, often finding themselves digging into the bodies of former comrades,
adding to the images of gore and horror that would continue to torment those
who witnessed them for the rest of their lives. Barely ten yards separated the
two sides at various points in the front, two walls of flying steel forcing men
to behave like animals, desperately burrowing deeper for any safety at all.
The ‘shell shock’ that would later be diagnosed as PTSD was enough to
send even the bravest soldier insane, and yet within this hell on Earth,
something incredible happened: a deeper sense of shared humanity than that held
by the officers and politicians shone through, before being extinguished in the
name of more killing.
Across the entire Western Front, with a few
exceptions, guns from both sides were unusually quiet on that first Christmas
Eve in hell, even non-existent in places for the first time in months. At
first, some of the English soldier thought that the strange coloured lights
appearing along the German trenches might be some kind of signal, perhaps
indicating a fresh attack. Some even thought they might be some new weapon, or
a ploy to make the allies curious enough to show their heads. Then they heard
singing, and not just any singing: they heard the sound of Christmas Carols
which, despite being in German, were utterly recognisable to all the allied
soldiers that heard them. Many soldiers recorded the strange, surreal events in
their diaries, talking of hearing nothing but the beautiful sound of carol
singing, drifting eerily through the forest night, or out over the desolate and
pitted no-mans land. Allied soldiers began to sing back, slowly inching
themselves up, out of the trench, to get a better view of the Christmas
decorations appearing along the Germans lines. Gradually, soldiers from
both sides worked their way out of the trenches and across no mans land, where
they met, exchanged gifts, and laughed together, language barriers overcome
through sign language, a shared tragedy, and a joint sense of bewilderment,
disbelief, and dissonance. So, so much dissonance.
What had happened here? Subject to the fundamentalist
nationalist ideologies of their leaders, drafted soldiers from both sides,
civilians really, suddenly found that the enemy, forever demonised and recently
dehumanised within their respective, nationalistic, top-down cultural
environment, shared with them cultural identity. It was a cultural identity
that stretched back much farther than even the foundation of the nation state.
Christianities spread across the whole of Europe had left a legacy of shared
music, lyrics, and traditions, never mind the language used, which came to the
fore with the coming of a shared celebration, Christmas. Hearing those songs
cut through the nationalist ideology like a knife, presenting a window for
empathy that was grasped by minds desperate for relief, desperate to not be
shot at, desperate not to have to shoot anymore. Hundreds of thousands of men
succumbed to the desire to ignore the moral exclusivity, the hate, and the
venom of their respective rulers cultural identity, even then more alike to
each other than they were to the average populace. Conversely, common soldiers
on both sides were slowly realising, as they chatted with the ‘enemy’ and
swapped cheese for cigarettes, that they weren’t so different either. Singing
carols together will do that to people, given the long, mutual, and
pre-nationalist history that they represent. More than that, it would have hit
them hard, right in their religious cultural identity, which for many soldiers
would have been stronger then than the nationalism that had compelled them to
fight in the first place.
I can only imagine the dissonance, the heartbreak,
the sheer existential fear involved in joining fellow men in celebrating your
saviours’ birth one day, and then forced to resume killing each other the next.
It wasn’t even just the deep-rooted Christian identity that united them; the
mere appearance of a football would send soldiers on both sides into a frenzy
of laughter and joyful competition. Yet the officers on both sides, their
humanity unable to break through the pure, nationalistic state cultural
identity that so consumed them, the environment they grew up in, and the
group-dynamics they were trapped in, decreed that such deviations should
never happen again, ordering regular artillery bombings on Christmas days
thereafter. How dare they grasp for shared humanity?! It makes me openly sob to
tell the tale.
Yet nationalism still hadn’t run its course,
power still hadn’t finished with the development of ever greater horrors that
it could turn science toward. More importantly however, power wasn’t ready to
give up what was seen as a traditional, and given the lives lost, duty-bound
obligation to make the losers, sorry, instigators (actually, in this case it was
both, though all parties must share some responsibility), pay a heavy
price. It’s not hard to see why. Nobody came out of this war victorious.
Everyone, even those leaders who had supposedly won the war, must have had a
severely dented pride and troubled conscience, even if they consciously denied
it (I’m looking at you Churchill, though a lot of people took to justifying
their actions following the debacle). Someone had to pay. Someone had to
shoulder the blame. Yet all it did was create the perfect enabling environment
for a backlash. The Second World War was essentially made inevitable; not only
were communication structures still where they were at pre-WW1, worse in many
places that were still being rebuilt; you had an entire generation suffering a
bout of collective PTSD; you had economic hardship exacerbated by unfeasible
reparation payments, but worse of all you had an isolated Germany. It’s the
societal equivalent of taking someone’s freedom and locking them in jail, where
they cannot make new connections and develop greater, more inclusive empathy,
instead forced to introspect alone, with no outside help, with the inevitable
outcome that they blamed someone else and reoffended. Big time.
Here it is we see the culmination of what homogenous,
top-down cultural systems can become. The Nazi party are the single most
extreme case of cultural identity engineering I know of, in terms of time
taken to get to mass genocide. As you will see later, there is a
contemporary example that in many ways goes beyond what the Nazi’s did.
What the Nazis managed to do was take the science of propaganda and implement
it, on a massive scale: by targeting schools, they ensured that they would
complete their task as soon as possible; by using the Hitler youth to terrorise
the populace, they protected themselves from a potential source of revolt,
while also using them, a group inherently culturally different, and therefore
more easily manipulated into moral divergence, to subjugate older people, those
who potentially had actual power at the community level; by burning books,
utterly disenfranchising the Jews, closing institutions, and vetting all
cultural production, they rapidly reduced the amount of contrary cultural
capital available to those developing, and those who would find solstice in
them; by appointing Nazi supporters in prominent positions throughout
culture, they ensured no independent, smaller-scale cultural identities
could evolve without their influence.
MAKE THIS GOEBBELS/GORING PIECE INTO A BOX.
The Nazi’s knew what they were doing here, none
more so than Joseph Goebbels, in my view far more dangerous and evil a villain
than even Hitler. Without Goebbels, Hitler may have come to no more than
another hated dictator. Yet without Hitler, Goebbels would have made possible
the machinations of whichever messed-up mind from the First World War
had become obsessed with conspiracy theory and revenge.
Check out some of these quotes from this master of
manipulation:
“It would not
be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological
understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They
are mere words, and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”
“Think of the
press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
“Every age
that has historical status is governed by aristocracies. Aristocracy with the
meaning - the best are ruling. Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy
was concocted by liberalism. Behind its "people's sovereignty" the slyest
cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized.”
“What does
Christianity mean today? National Socialism is a religion. All we lack is a
religious genius capable of uprooting outmoded religious practices and putting
new ones in their place. We lack traditions and ritual. One day soon National
Socialism will be the religion of all Germans. My Party is my church, and I
believe I serve the Lord best if I do his will, and liberate my oppressed
people from the fetters of slavery. That is my gospel.”
Here is someone who knows all too
well the fickle nature of free will, of the power that such knowledge grants
you, particularly over those who are under your trust, or your under you will.
The awareness of the German states’ supplanting of religion, in a very literal
sense, allowed them to use religious identity for their own ends, again
neutralising and utilising a potential source for revolt for its own ends.
Finally, in an exchange from the Nuremberg trials between a lawyer and Hermann
Goring, commander of the Luftwaffe, Goring makes clear just how universal they
had perceived this power of propaganda to be:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would
some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he
can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the
common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is
the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple
matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist
dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have
some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United
States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the
people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same
way in any country.
Now, I don’t
want to sound glib, but does this tactic not sound incredibly familiar, to the
entire West, nay, the globe? In a way it isn’t their fault, those in power that
is; society produces emergent properties that can carry events way beyond the
design or planning of any one person, or group of people. That’s the social
forces version of History, and has culture and cultural identity become more
complex, this force is growing stronger. It should come as no surprise in such
an enabling environment that fear becomes ever-more resorted to, what with it
being the easiest, and most effective, way of covering your own incompetence,
and/or getting what you want (which in an increasingly divergent cultural
context between rulers and subjects, will only get harder to achieve). But hate
as I do to say it, Goring is right, and Gilberts riposte merely evidence of the
superiority complex that comes with being able to maintain a narrative of
owning the moral high ground. It is a legacy that lives on to this day.
END BOX
In summary, they had utterly saturated the entire
cultural environment with their influence, indoctrinating some to subjugate the
others, and held it for long enough to facilitate the industrial-scale, and
-form, killing of millions of Jews, gays, gypsies, disabled, and other cultural
identities deemed a threat, or simply undesirable. The most depressing thing?
It took less than a decade to create the enabling environment, a Stanford
prison experiment writ large, with terrible consequences. After this, there
could be no return to the old ways. People had finally learned the lesson, one
they would misinterpret and soon forget anyway, but not before they could
establish strong, if still intensely western-centric (obviously), European-wide,
and then global, institutions. Yet, despite the EU, UN, and other supranational
bodies undoubtedly helped by employing sound separation-of-powers principles at
a scale above that of the state, I don’t think they can necessarily take the
credit they may imagine they deserve (and certainly not a Nobel Peace prize,
though neither could the main cause either. For that title, we need to go once
more across the pond, back in the nursery of a corporate cultural identity,
back in time just a wee bit to see what was happening while Europe was in
flames, twice.
The emergence of Corporate
fundamental cultural identity.
In the States, the state cultural identity was having
a tough time of it themselves, though hardly to the same degree. Having come a
fairly long way from the noble, non-interventionist (if you except the forced
migration of millions of humans) ideal, and incorporating most of the
Caribbean, and a good chunk of Mexico, into its domain, one has to wonder what
on Earth went wrong. What went wrong was the emergence of a new cultural
identity, not yet fundamental, but that nevertheless found itself with unimaginable
wealth, and therefore power. Powers over politics, over the very state cultural
identity, but not yet with a monopolistic hold on cultural production.
This created a stunning divergence in the cultural and moral systems
of those in power and those under it, in feedback with the huge growth in
inequality (see: wealth inequality as a measure of homogeneity of a cultural
system), but not the required foundation to sustain it.
This is evident in the mass-mobilisation of religious
communities during the Great Depression; cultural identity not yet cowed into
submission and seeing morality practiced that was contrary to what they
themselves believed. The combined efforts of religious and other,
non-fundamental identities, was enough to create an enabling environment for
the state to come down hard on those corporations, and their ideologue owners,
who were seen, as now, as responsible for the market crash, and redistribute
wealth to a degree that released the tension once more. But, after a period of
brief societal equilibrium, fundamental and non-fundamental alike, the slowly,
exponentially growing corporate identity did not just disappear. Rather, it
gained control, control over the banking system with the introduction of
the Federal Reserve, control over the newly emerging technologies of radio,
telephony, and television. Then it bided its time, and became a fundamental
cultural identity the way cultural evolution demands - slowly, and through
gaining uninterrupted control over cultural production for a couple of
generation. It became the background noise, the new shadows on the wall, and it
did it first in the States.
This shift toward monopolistic corporate control of an
unprecedented, one-way, system-wide communication network had the same
consequences as would happen were religion, or the state, were (and are) in
control of such a system: mass indoctrination. Again, it isn’t some evil plot.
In fact, complexity theory practically rules out the possibility of a small
group of people even being able to control such a complex system as society.
The only reason people see the connection is because they are indoctrinated
into viewing control by the metrics power itself does: money. Yet this isn’t
control of the system, that’s control over wealth extraction, and to conflate
the two is to submit to the definitions power has provided for itself.
Eventually, the system will bite those people hard on the ass, but until then,
the U.S. is largely, and sustainably (in the near term), trapped in Plato’s goddamn cave again.
The reasons for this are numerous, obviously, it’s
massively complex, but can essentially be summarised as: it had the most
complex and facilitative enabling environment. The freedoms enshrined, for what
they are truly worth, in the U.S. constitution and its amendments granted unprecedented
freedom for cultural evolution to occur; it was the only superpower left to
fully exploit the now blindingly fast (supposedly, back then anyway) advances
of technology; it suffered barely any significant damage back in the homeland,
leaving a celebratory populace who had mostly been spared the lifelong,
crippling, psychological legacy the two World Wars left. Times were bloody
awesome, people had “never had it so good” - at least if you were white, male,
and reasonably wealthy and/or lucky, but then, since they were the only ones on
these new radios, and television sets, that counts as everyone, to a relative
mind. The American Dream was here, first in black-and-white, then in full Technicolor!
It was in Broadway, it was in every living room (that mattered), and it held,
and grew, and got more and more clever, and manipulative, all with one aim; to
make you part with the money you have earned. What is this ‘it’ I speak
of? Corporate cultural identity, everywhere, day and night. It isn’t capitalism
creating this cultural identity, creating these new desires and insecurities
and “personality disorders”, any more than it was nationalism creating
state cultural identity, or spiritualism creating religious cultural identity.
It was, and is, corporations and their CEOs. State governments and their
politicians, and organised religion, with its priests. Capitalism doesn’t exist;
it is an abstract ideal that complexity shows is as impossible to realise. All
ideology has, at its heart, the belief that if things are done in just this way
or that, optimal order will somehow emerge. That isn’t how it works. That isn’t
emergence.
Having had two generations in which to spread a TV or
Radio into just about every house, and having welcomed advertising and
corporate involvement in communications infrastructure in a way Europe didn’t,
the States saw the corporate cultural identity gain it’s monopolistic market
share of system-wide cultural production. Nobody knew it, but here was the
subversion of power that would inevitably lead to corporate cultural
identity subverting both religion and the state. So all consuming was
its reach, that even those who would consider themselves fully religious, or
nationalistic at heart, are subconsciously forced to wade through a sea of adverts,
each attempting to drill it’s way in new and innovative ways into your
subconscious, explicitly, by design. There is a reason Bill Hicks hated
marketing so much, and this is why. Marketing, PR, spin; all they represent are
more subtle and nuanced forms of propaganda, pure and simple. No cultural
system could withstand such an onslaught, and the exclusivity inherent in the
moral fabric of such a homogenous cultural identity has reeked unimaginable
devastation in its role of creating, sustaining and exaggerating the phantom of
the ‘other’, Communism, that twin enemy of both state and corporate identity
alike. You want to talk feedback? Look no further than the ridiculous arms
race, with its self-imposed, twisted logic of mutually assured destruction evidence
of ideologies inherent stupidity when it comes to thinking in terms of the
greater (than themselves) good.
Reagan and Thatcher were on the same mission, but they
were starting from different locations, and with a disparate amount of
institutionalised power behind them in their ideological goals. In the states,
corporate identity had already laid the foundation for the acceptance of
neoliberalism, for the acceptance of the ideologues personal definition, under
the idealistic myth that is capitalism, The American Dream, the End of History.
Thatcher meanwhile, in a cultural system whose state cultural identity had
retained its sovereignty over these new technologies (the BBC), and whose
cultural identity stretched way farther back than the relative blank slate that
was the U.S. Thatcher couldn’t take the neoliberal reforms as far as Reagan,
and it took until New Labour betraying their working class base and embrace
corporatism for the transformation, the subjugation, of the state identity to
be complete (at least, in its top-down form). But how could New Labour
have “betrayed their working class base”, while winning in a landslide? The
answer is they didn’t - they changed in feedback with their changing base, a
base that had by now had the same 20 or so years of dominant corporate culture
that the states had had from the fifties onwards. There was no working class
anymore, just a few diehard communities, suffering dissonance and exclusion in
a sea of consumerism. Not only that, but as the U.S’s closest cultural system,
the UK naturally and inevitably became the first and most receptive to the
growing corporate influence across the pond. With no language barrier and an
aura of glamour, U.S. culture found a home in the UK that only added to the
acceleration of the corporate cultural monopoly.
Gradually, U.S. corporate culture reached every corner
of the globe, and where corporate interests went, the state duly followed. The
media gradually became more subservient the more their corporate masters
diverged in culture, the more inequality grew. Religion embraced corporatism’s
message, the appearance of vast, multi-million dollar turnover mega-churches,
taking the traditional, religious way of extracting wealth (though still using
fear, and other devices such as music and repetition that Goebbels was fond of)
and applying economies-of-scale. Any counter-cultural possibility had been
extinguished with the coming of Reagan and the freedoms he granted, in the name
of an economic ideology, to corporations. The West was lost to fundamentalism,
driven there by external fears and internal monopolistic control over cultural
production.
If you think fundamentalism is too harsh a word, then you either
haven’t been paying attention, or else disagree with my theoretical premise,
that culture reflects identity, that culture is identity. U.S.
system-wide cultural production is entirely corporate, either directly,
or through power of mediation, with just the one public TV and radio channel in PBS and NPR (and even that is under constant threat of having it’s funding pulled). It has been
this way for decades; every single large scale producer of cultural production,
all functioning not for the public good, but for their
bottom-line. For a reflection of how far we have come, consider this. We
have just had a financial crisis like the West has not known since the 30’s.
Yet unlike that time, there was no mass-mobilisation, no rallying cries of any
influence from the pulpits, just a bunch of disparate, desperate, isolated
voices crying out into the ether. Unlike that time, the state is no longer
independent enough, cultural identity no longer diverse enough, to create the
enabling environment to legislate against those that all but the most
hardened ideologues know are to blame for this mess. A homogenous corporate
identity, free to define itself in culture and law, had instead created
the conditions required for them to survive such an enormous, and
usually reform-generating, systemic shock. Yet nothing has changed.
Inequality is still getting higher. The balance of fundamental and
non-fundamental identities, united by the horrors of war and a vision of a
brighter future, had once conspired to correct the greed of exclusive cultural
identity, and bring about two decades of rising equality. Not this time. This time
corporations have the power they then lacked, the power of mass-indoctrination.
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