Apologies to loyal followers of this blog space. I have not posted in a while. I have been taking a 500 level course at UBC Okanagan and I have a paper due on Saturday. It was worrying me, but anyway ...it is now finished.
I am also working for a landscaping company. Pulling up concrete patio blocks, mowing, raking, weeding, wheelbarrowing gravel. I'm very tired some nights.
Ah, enough excuses.
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
I want to discuss today the differences between the meme/belief systems of two cultures whose clash is still going on: the Europeans and the native people of the Americas.
When Europeans first came to the New World, every tribe had its own distinct memes/beliefs and there were hundreds of tribes. But the biggest shock that Europeans brought to the native way of life was grounded in the worldview expressed by English philosopher John Locke.
Locke argued that any item, area, etc. became the property of the person who added value to it. If you cut down a tree, then your labor had made that tree available for human use so you should be entitled to sell it for a profit to yourself. If you cleared and farmed a plot of land, that labor made it yours. Whatever you were able to do with it - feed a family, raise a cash crop - was then yours. He was careful to say that when you consume any natural resource you must leave enough for others. There should be no total draining of any resource so that no one gets any from that time on. But to Europeans in those times, North America's lands and forests seemed near infinite. The Europeans meme/belief system was telling them to grab the wealth.
Work, work, work. Get what you came for; the enjoyment can wait. It might run out someday, but that would be so far in the future that there was no point in even thinking about it now.
This is a large generalization, I know, but ...generally the native people could not accept this European worldview. How can a person own the land? That is as foolish as talking about owning the air. And why would that person seek to hunt all the game, cut all the trees, plow all the acres, and so on? This would be a desecration, a heresy beyond conceiving by any normal, sane human being. The land was not ownable. It was held in trust for the Great Spirit. It was to be treated with utmost respect. Who could conceive of violating that trust?
So John Locke on one side and the spiritual beliefs of the native peoples on the other confronted one another not as much in hostility as in disbelief.
This is how utterly memes limit our thinking at the same time as they enable that thinking. We can only conclude what our range of concepts enables us to conclude.
The systems of memes foster and produce their respective ways of life. And when the ways of life clash, the stronger wins. That is how cultural evolution works.
But it is important to note that the stronger isn't always the more pleasant as far as the levels of ambience and joy produced in the populations who are programmed with these different ways of thinking and living. The native peoples of North America probably enjoyed their lives more than their European counterparts did when they first met. But happiness is not the goal of any meme system. Vigor. Population. Technology. Industry. Military might. These are the things that win when the struggle ripens into open warfare. Survival trumps all else.
The European way of life made population and added effective weapons and military might. It has run roughshod over much of the world for, arguably, the last two centuries at least.
But if we look at the largest view of this planet and the history of our species on it, we are driven to conclude that the Euro way of thinking, working, living, and fighting is closing in on its logical limits. The resources of this planet aren't infinite. The caveat in Locke's theory of work and value is coming round to bite us. We should leave plenty for the next generation. But that is becoming hard to do under the present market-driven, industrial system and the pressures of so many humans on this planet.
We are going to need some memes that tell us its time to pull our industrial production and human reproduction back on this planet. The native peoples' belief system and wisdom offers a whole set of such memes to discuss and teach to the children. All of the children.
We may take our production and reproduction into space. Space stations. Lunar colonies that grow around mines that get minerals from lunar dust. Space stations that hold hundreds of thousands, even millions of human beings, growing their own food, being born, living, and dying generation after generation in space. We may begin the great adventure of spreading our species off of this small world. All of these make for interesting speculation in science fiction novels.
But on this planet, we are going to have to change our memes and our ways, and the native peoples' memes may very well be the ground on which we build a new social order.
Here. On Earth. In time.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a great day.
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
I am also working for a landscaping company. Pulling up concrete patio blocks, mowing, raking, weeding, wheelbarrowing gravel. I'm very tired some nights.
Ah, enough excuses.
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
I want to discuss today the differences between the meme/belief systems of two cultures whose clash is still going on: the Europeans and the native people of the Americas.
When Europeans first came to the New World, every tribe had its own distinct memes/beliefs and there were hundreds of tribes. But the biggest shock that Europeans brought to the native way of life was grounded in the worldview expressed by English philosopher John Locke.
Locke argued that any item, area, etc. became the property of the person who added value to it. If you cut down a tree, then your labor had made that tree available for human use so you should be entitled to sell it for a profit to yourself. If you cleared and farmed a plot of land, that labor made it yours. Whatever you were able to do with it - feed a family, raise a cash crop - was then yours. He was careful to say that when you consume any natural resource you must leave enough for others. There should be no total draining of any resource so that no one gets any from that time on. But to Europeans in those times, North America's lands and forests seemed near infinite. The Europeans meme/belief system was telling them to grab the wealth.
Work, work, work. Get what you came for; the enjoyment can wait. It might run out someday, but that would be so far in the future that there was no point in even thinking about it now.
This is a large generalization, I know, but ...generally the native people could not accept this European worldview. How can a person own the land? That is as foolish as talking about owning the air. And why would that person seek to hunt all the game, cut all the trees, plow all the acres, and so on? This would be a desecration, a heresy beyond conceiving by any normal, sane human being. The land was not ownable. It was held in trust for the Great Spirit. It was to be treated with utmost respect. Who could conceive of violating that trust?
So John Locke on one side and the spiritual beliefs of the native peoples on the other confronted one another not as much in hostility as in disbelief.
This is how utterly memes limit our thinking at the same time as they enable that thinking. We can only conclude what our range of concepts enables us to conclude.
The systems of memes foster and produce their respective ways of life. And when the ways of life clash, the stronger wins. That is how cultural evolution works.
But it is important to note that the stronger isn't always the more pleasant as far as the levels of ambience and joy produced in the populations who are programmed with these different ways of thinking and living. The native peoples of North America probably enjoyed their lives more than their European counterparts did when they first met. But happiness is not the goal of any meme system. Vigor. Population. Technology. Industry. Military might. These are the things that win when the struggle ripens into open warfare. Survival trumps all else.
The European way of life made population and added effective weapons and military might. It has run roughshod over much of the world for, arguably, the last two centuries at least.
But if we look at the largest view of this planet and the history of our species on it, we are driven to conclude that the Euro way of thinking, working, living, and fighting is closing in on its logical limits. The resources of this planet aren't infinite. The caveat in Locke's theory of work and value is coming round to bite us. We should leave plenty for the next generation. But that is becoming hard to do under the present market-driven, industrial system and the pressures of so many humans on this planet.
We are going to need some memes that tell us its time to pull our industrial production and human reproduction back on this planet. The native peoples' belief system and wisdom offers a whole set of such memes to discuss and teach to the children. All of the children.
We may take our production and reproduction into space. Space stations. Lunar colonies that grow around mines that get minerals from lunar dust. Space stations that hold hundreds of thousands, even millions of human beings, growing their own food, being born, living, and dying generation after generation in space. We may begin the great adventure of spreading our species off of this small world. All of these make for interesting speculation in science fiction novels.
But on this planet, we are going to have to change our memes and our ways, and the native peoples' memes may very well be the ground on which we build a new social order.
Here. On Earth. In time.
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a great day.
(credit: Wikimedia Commons)
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