The New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article recently that adds some credence to what I was writing about in the previous blog entry. At least, I think that it adds some such credence. The article is somewhat difficult to read because, try as I might, I’m finding it hard to gauge the specific level of sarchasm that is intoned therein. Either Brooks really does like to not think about anything, or he is mocking technology in general. Perhaps contracts with the Times allow for a kind of… what’s the term… bad writing for which one gets paid exhorbidant amounts of money.

Whatever the case, Mr. Brooks talks of the “externalization” of various mental functions via technology. The basic innovation of note here is the GPS device in his vehicle which allows him to essentially have no idea where he is going, not think at all with regard to his environment, while still arriving (with a pleasant “You have arrived” Adrogynine voice) at the destination. There is spurious talk of the overmind (oversoul if you ween that from my last post) at the terminus of which is a quote by Steinbeck concerning some similar idea. The crime of quoting good authors in bad writing goes beyond even original sin, and may way heavy on the scales if certain unamed deities were to judge such interlocutors in the afterlife. I’m an atheist, so I can’t even pray for Brooks’ soul.

My point here is that, while written terribly, the article achieves a singular merit in as much as Brooks proves my point that real space behavior is being changed by non-space innovation. There isn’t much eles to parse for you, reader, it just is as it is.

Of note, however, is a thought I had after reading the aforementioned article and thinking back over the glorified explosion which was yesterday’s blog. In particular I was thinking about how cultures evolve via this more or less constant battle between established mores and random mutation (innovation). What I’m thinking about here is how, while the internet may have changed the way in which some people are dating/courting, it hasn’t changed the ways in which they expect such activity to play itself out. The act itself (dating) can have a completely different medium that in did even 10 years ago but still has an established end-point that is not being altered by the same force that is altering the dating game itself. It’s as if the force of change must first breach a lower level of something analagous to Mazlow’s Hierarchy and work itself up the ladder for truly sweeping change to occur.

What does it mean? Does it mean that the ritual danse macabre that is dating has some intrinsic characteristic that allows it to be more easily manipulated than, say, the idea of monogamy? Does it mean that there is a hidden time stamp on cultural behavior that allows for newer and less established practices while older more established practices evince some immunity to same (monogamy predates “dating” by a long stretch)?

Actually, what is probably happening is that the idea of monogamy is not terribly incompatible with the technology that is changing the dating ritual. Anthropologists talk about the “cultural environment” as being analogous to ecosystems. It’s sort of the social Darwinism of the 21st century (less the eugenic flavor of the past century). I’ve long thought that as evolution plays itself out in meat space, so to do the same rules apply to cultural space. Humans are, after all, just animals. Our genes play by certain rules of evolution, so why can’t we extract it all fractally (going from say a biological focus to a cultural focus) and say that our cultural patterns will obey similar, if not identical rules? This is, I suppose, why someone invented the concept of a “meme” (a cultural gene) and why Brooks name-drops that term in his article.

What is curiousor and curiousor, though, is that even intellectuals find anethema the idea that humans are actually supposed to be playing by the natural rules. Or, rather, that humans are playing by natural rules by, for instance, driving ourselves headlong into extinction. On one hand, people are willing to think about more abstract human processes such as “cultural environment” as having rules that are “natural.” On the other hand, just about everyone ignores the point that we are (in all of our glorious teleological evolutionary status) basically doing the same thing to ourselves on a global scale that certain lower rodents do in their own environments on a small scale. Namely consuming available resources at staggering and unsustainable rates and breeding ourselves out of a possible future. The more I think about it, the more the metaphor “fractal” comes to mind.

To return to the point of dating, I think what we’re actually witnessing is how technology represents an aspect of the cultural environment. As that aspect changes, certain memes will find themselves pre-adapted to the new environment (e.g. monogamy) and thus survive, while others are maladapted to the new environment (e.g. the older dating ritual) and will thus will reach a meme frequency of approximately zero. It seems rather obvious that the rules of biological evolution are playing themselves out on the cultural stage to a fault. I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to make other observations of genetic phenomena in cultural space: fashion comes to mind as an example of something that breeds itself out of existence very quickly.

I now have written enough on this subject for now. I thank my muse for this particular spate of vociferousness. You know who you are.

-vec