Cultural changes drive human evolution

Am busy ahead of deadlines today, but I did want to share this story: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=culture-speeds-up-human-evolution

 There are other articles on the internets about this covering various angles (including reactions to potentials for racism from this study), though I chose one that I thought treated it comprehensively and fairly. I am unsure what to offer in the way of comment at this time, lacking proper understanding of genetics, but from the fact that people tens of thousands of years ago were moving into new climates with new circumstances the species hadn’t yet faced, and yet managed to both survive and thrive in greater numbers, it would seem to follow that there was considerable evolving and passing along of acquired traits. Making the connection from the movement from tribe to city-state (and from Africa to Europe and Asia) to biological evolution seems like a leap though, but that could be those post-Industrial Age sensibilities kicking in. 

But I still have to wonder, if evolution sped up in the periods of migration and settlement in new places where the species wasn’t acclimated, have we slowed down our own development down by occupying every spot on the Earth’s surface, and if so what’s it going to take to speed it up again? Underwater settlements? Colonizing the Moon? That’s interesting to consider.

Why does one write?

I haven’t fared quite so well as I had hoped. The difficulty of writing for a living on someone else’s schedule (i.e. commercially) is always in finding time and energy to write on one’s own schedule afterward. Likewise transitioning from reporting the news to critiquing art and literature is a challenge of shifting mindsets, though it oughtn’t be so difficult for one who at least claims to love the subject matter and enjoys writing about it.

Which got me to thinking on the existential question, why do I write? The initial (written) answer is, because I have something to say that I can express better this way than through speech. (The initial thought was “for myself” but I know that’s much too simplistic.) Better because it’s more permanent, more conducive to thoughtfulness than reactive or emotional responses are, and because of how my mind has been trained to communicate (though I do think some of our epistemology is natural/intrinsic). All of that is true, and yet all of it misses the mark, because by a wide margin at least currently, I write because it pays the bills.

To be able to earn a living simply by communicating is a nice advantage of our leisure-based economy, that much I recognize. We have grown successful enough as a species in large part through the division of labor, which has allowed us to create a specialised class of workers whose jobs solely are to record and transmit information from its sources to its consumers. Much easier that way than relying on Joe Everyman to find things out for himself, let alone tell others what he’s discovered–aside from ability and credibility concerns, how many would even consistently undertake those efforts? From the standpoint of History, looking back to the days before the printing press when information was passed from town to town by traveling merchants or vagabonds, very few would bother. Most of us only care about our own small circle of influence.

Which brings me to my point: I write for the local paper of a small, insular community to which I have no ties, which means I write about them for them, within their circle. It’s information that they know, far better than I do, but these are stories that are important to them and that they need to tell, or rather to have told. As a card-carrying member of this particular class of workers, I knew that I would be a vessel for information, that’s the life I chose long ago and I do enjoy writing about other people, past and present, real and imagined. What I wonder though is, when do I get to write the story I want to tell?

To answer my own question, that’s what I need to use this site for, and use it for as long as it takes until I can write what I want, for myself, and pay the bills by doing so.

The Romantic Ideal

To my view, there have been at least three major epochs of Western Civilisation that have celebrated the ideal of heroism for its own sake: the Ancients of the Near East and Mediterranean, popularised by the Homeric Epic; the Early Middle Ages of Northern Europe, with its own form of epic or Saga; and the Age of Romanticism, though for that much of it was too entangled with corresponding political idealism coming out of the Revolutions to remain untainted when those ideals went unrealised. (As an aside, it’s also interesting they never produced a successful epic of their own.)

 While visions of perfect liberty and brotherhood were quickly shattered (as they, being immature beliefs, always are) by the ambitious Few and the iconoclast Many, even in their ruin remained a sense of the unconquered Self. I do not suggest that the Self had been unrealised to that point, though it certainly had been sublimated to the Mass from the rise of medieval Christendom through to the end of absolute monarchy. Oddly, Imperial Rome likewise sublimated self-will, and yet the idealised beauty of the individual will has rarely been so championed as in Romanticism.

There was a time–oddly enough in my youth–when Romanticism held little appeal to me, and still I regard it with misgivings because of its unfettered political idealism, but in terms of art as expression of self-will, I look on it now with a certain respect. There is a reason I chose “Wanderer Above the Mists” by Caspar David Friedrich to visually represent my site:

There are several worthwhile interpretations of this painting. Contextually, it is a self-portrait of the artist, but radically so: with back turned to the viewer, he is not the subject of the painting, he is in the painting. Even without knowing it’s a self-portrait, we can still see that the painted figure’s own experience trumps that of the viewers, since he’s hiked out to the promontory and been rewarded with the awe-inspiring view that we on only minimally appreciate here on the other side.

Adding to that interpretation but going beyond it, what I see is the lone individual standing out above the Formless Void, the Nothing itself. While the motion of the scene draws the viewers into the center of the storm of Chaos, the individual, the very principia individuationis, superimposes himself above it; perhaps defiantly, perhaps even triumphantly, but he is there nonetheless, and while we are not we want to be. That, I think, is a model of heroism.

There are other, greater, models of the heroic ideal than the self-assertion of Art contra Nature of the Romantic Age, which I hope to explore as time allows, but it is a good enough place to begin since they were often the ones who brought those models back into the Modern era, even if not always for the right ends.

Into the breach

A beginning is a difficult thing. Sallying forth into the Outer Chaos of the Internet with naught but a computer and my own will to guide me, I stand little chance of success in the oath I have sworn–to fight the good, yet hopeless fight against the dark forces of deconstruction. But I shall meet them in battle nonetheless, and though the war is lost perhaps I will win a few small victories until, by whatever cause or blame, I am forced to leave the field.

If all of that reads like hogwash from a pompous student who’s read too many medieval tales, played too many wargames and deluded himself into thinking he’s a would-be hero of the culture war, it is exactly that. And yet, what I’m really on about with this is that I do believe there has been a significant downturn in the Culture since the advent of the Twentieth Century (and perhaps since the failure of Romanticism). Its perpetrators range from Anglo-American Democracy to Germanic Nationalism, from fundamentalist world religions to relativist secular humanism, from materialist socio-economic systems (capitalist and collectivist alike) that reduce humanity to the lowest common denominator in the name of equality, to the inexorable march of Technology and with it the rise of all-devouring Apathy and Laziness, but in truth we are all to blame, every one of us who hasn’t stood up in the face of that Everything-and-Nothing, that great cacophonous Mass, and said “Enough.”

We need heroes. No, not the sword-and-shield fighting men of yore, we need heroes armed for discourse, but there is much we can learn of the cultures that produced them, in particular those out of Northern European myth-history. I have my own reasons for asserting those traditions, which I intend to make clear in time (my username is a small hint), but even from an objective viewpoint they are valid. I think  J.R.R. Tolkien said it best in his seminal work, Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics:

“In Norse, at any rate, the gods are within Time, doomed with their allies to death. Their battle is with the monsters and the outer darkness. They gather heroes for the last defence… It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent but terrible solution in naked will and courage. ‘As a working theory absolutely impregnable.’ So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded forever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times. It can work, even as it did with the gođlauss viking, without gods: martial heroism as its own end.”

Aristotle had much the same idea centuries before, reflecting back upon the Homeric Age when he defined the virtue of Courage as “doing of great deeds” while “enduring pain”, including the pain of death. Admittedly we are fortunate to be shielded from the fear of elemental danger and violent death, but nevertheless we have our own monsters to contend with today, even if they are predominantly rhetorical, and though their triumph is virtually assured we who have not yet been crushed by that Mass ought to stand in the breach for as long as we may endure.

 How I shall proceed to do that exactly, I’m honestly not quite sure, but since I have many different kinds of arrows in my quiver, which is to say many different interests–in art, architecture, cinema, history, languages, literature, music, mythology, photography, to name several, not to mention the stuff of life in general–there are at least a few things I can write about until the end comes.