The challenge is obvious.
I have been meaning to write a post for the past few weeks with that openings line. I wanted to reiterate how we are, in most aspects, narrative beings. The piece would then go on to try and explain why we seem to be in doldrums for the past few decades as a society. It is because the older frameworks or the 'founding mythology platforms' are not working and the new ones haven't taken shape/ become strong yet. One of the primary reasons the older mythologies do not seem to have the strength to hold us is because they only work if they are accepted/ 'believed in' by a critical mass (like a currency) and that has been corroded by the doctrine of individuality (which is probably the last of our most widespread myths)1.
The piece would then expand on what I have been doing over the last few years to stitch for myself a fairly cohesive platform to function more effectively. The new platform would be put together by the remnants of what I'd read, learnt, understood, imagined and it would find a way to take forward the best of my desires while also trying to explain the world (both internal and external) to myself.
The more I think about it, the more I am inclined to see mental models as a software stack. And in that sense, a founding mythology platform is the Operating System. The assembly layer below is made up of intuitions and heuristics, and the hardware layer corresponds with the wiring of my brain. Similarly, going up the stack, the applications and web pages, are more local, specific and can be picked-up or discarded more easily.
I haven't written that piece because I have not been able to find the proper mechanism for elaborating and arguing on it. The reason I'm mentioning it here is if I don't get around to blogging about it later2, I want this to be a marker of that idea and how engrossed I've been in it for the last few weeks3.
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I have been reading a bit about evolution in the last few months. I had the following eureka moment earlier while walking4:
a. It is said that the primary desire of every living being is to survive and procreate
b. The mechanism used by living beings to propagate themselves is via genes
c. Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, flips the axiom and says that it is the gene that wants to propagate and so uses us as vehicles to do that
d. Let's call the characteristic of the gene that makes it want to propagate itself (I can sense that this formulation is wrong because genes probably aren't conscious and can't really "wan't") meme-ing
e. A meme, usually, is used to refer to a unit of culture that behaves analogous to a gene
Now that I have this little conceptual framework, let me try to use this to interpret one specific aspect of my personality.
a. I don't think I really want to have children. At this point in time. And I know there are atleast a few more people like me (trust me, I keep a lookout for them)
b. But I also know I'm a biological being and it is evident that I'm driven by biological urges like hunger, sleep, physical comfort, sexual interest etc.
Then how/why is it that I don't want children. I see three possible explanations:
a. The genes that drive me are a random mutation (of the more normal human variant) that doesn't want to propagate. This is a possiblity because mutations do happen (because of faulty copying) that could lead to these kind of'negative' outcomes. If that's true, nothing to talk about there.
b. I see what is going on in the world, with the large scale suffering, political instability, climate crisis etc., and my cultural (culture here as opposed to nature) intelligence has taken over and is appealing to my 'better' instincts. This again seems like a possibility. It is this intelligence that stops us from eating too much sugar, from indulging in socially unacceptable sexual relations, from controlling our immediate impulses in favour of a longer well-being etc. But I also know that while powerful, cultural/social intelligence is not entirely sufficient so it needs to create an acceptable alternative to biological needs/desires (Like how we 'live' through movies and play out our desires as imaginations)7. But sooner or later, because of natural selection, people like this obviously die out and are replaced by those types who have more children. And assuming we are children of those children, our biological urges should overcome our cultural inclinations. And yet people like me are still being born. How come?
c. And this brings to the core of my argument. What if, in the past few centuries, the world has seen a paradigm shift where memes have become more powerful than genes.
One is the sci-fi dystopian way of looking at it: genes evolved long enough for us to become sophisticaed enough to create the internet, and now the internet is filled with memes. The memes have the machines now to take over the world, so they don't mind us dying out and the machines, with increasing intelligence, will become smart enough to keep propogating the memes.
A less dramatic way of looking at it would be: Cultural artefacts/ memes are their creators' children too but of a different type. So instead of having kids (maybe 2/3) and taking care of them, and hoping they grow healthy and smart, and live long enough to copulate and pass on their (my?) genes further, people with this mindset want to create films/songs/books/scientific theorems that will propagate and live long enough to create derivatives of their own8.
Wouldn't that assure my immortaility as well atleast to a certain extent? And while nourishing memes needs work, it's probably less energy-intensive, needs less maintenance and I can spawn (conscious use of the word) way more of them and hope atleast one of them survives than keep all my eggs (ha!) in two or three human baskets.
I know this is a ridiculously simplistic, not to mention a primal/jungle-law view of the world, and my worldview is way more romantic than this on most days, but looking from the viewpoint of a certain kind of evolutionary logic, I don't think it's entirely inelegant.
1 Like Venkatesh Rao once so beautifully put it, and I paraphrase, "There is nothing more commonplace in American society than the belief in individualism"
2 This probably can be explained by my intermittent need to be seen as a more serious writer than a mere blogger, and so my refusal to part with what I think are major ideas/insights as just blogposts. Unsurprisingly, now, I never get around to doing that so I probably should resign myself/accept/celebrate that I'm a blogger and what is form but the easiest/malleable/longstanding way for you to put the happenings inside you out to the world
3 This part is just a diggression right at the beginning. The main content of this blogpost is the consciously small, to-the-point argument of the next part
4 Disclaimer - Please note, if it isn't clear from the stuff published on this blog already, most of what I know comes from magazine articles, cursory readings of Wikipedia pages, and occassionally a non-fiction book intended for a general audience. A lot of the knowledge comes peripherally as part of living in an information network5. So when I quote theories and technical terms, they are to be understood as representations in pop culture and drawing room discussions
5 Thank god for How to talk about books you haven't read which in true Post-Modern6 fashion, I'm talking about without reading
6 I don't mean whatever it means. I mean what I think others think when I use the term
7 I think masturbation is a good example. It is a coping mechanism against the internal pressure of having to find suitable, attractive mating partner all the time
8 As I write this, I remember one of David Eagleman's stories in Sum where people die twice: once when they die physically, later when everyone on earth who knows about them, by whatever means, dies too
9 Domain as in biological taxonomy. I wanted to use a more poetic term, like realm or empire instead of domain, but in line with the functional tone of the piece, stuck to the most prosaic of terms available
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