What next?

  Sethren, that’s the Jeroan taxonomy dealt with.  So what? you will say.  Just stood up like that, it don’t amount to a can of beans.  Why you should say that in an American accent, sethren, I do not know, but you do, you do.  And I have no quarrel with a can of beans.

  Taxonomies are powerful things.  None more powerful than Linnaeus’s, who gave us the whole kingdom of biological life, laid out just so.  And from the other end of the telescope, Mendel, who gave us something just this side of nothing, but an infinitesimal so powerful that it can anatomise all that Linnaeus named.

Moi

  And then there is Jorge Luis Borges.  Here is his taxonomy of animals, which I’m sure you know, but has that strange quality, that every time you come across it, there seems to be something there that was not there before, while the list is no longer, and nothing is missing:

(a) belonging to the emperor,

(b) embalmed,

(c) tame,

(d) sucking pigs,

(e) sirens,

(f) fabulous,

(g) stray dogs,

(h) included in the present classification,

(i) frenzied,

(j) innumerable,

(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,

(l) et cetera,

(m) having just broken the water pitcher,

(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

  This may at first seem unscientific.  However its purport is to demonstrate that a constant of all taxonomies is fallibility.

  I have suggested

Demon    thing    act    concept    map narrative    praxis    Culture

and you, sethren, could well ask, but then, what kind of thing in your taxonomy is a scientific law, or a mathematical proof, or a rule of thumb such as that of a good man of Cork, John Punch: “entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem”.

  I could try, sethren, like the scholasticists of old, or like Procrustes, to fit these succinct, recognisable, bounded and coherent cells of the metaverse into the Jeroan taxonomy, thus:

  A scientific law is the sequential coupling and obligate linkage of  a series of concepts, any of which may and probably will themselves be composed of a series of concepts, possibly recursively until, once you get down to simple enough concepts, demons begin to appear; ergo, a concept (in the sense of the Jeroan taxonomy).

  Same goes for a mathematical proof.

  And for a rule of thumb.

  But that is all trivial circularity, sethren.  What we need to do next is to explore the ways in which the descriptees of this taxonomy, collectively evoculture, co-exist with and within the collective of human organisms.  The space that they configure is the metaverse, which is continuous, through the nexus of all functioning human neural substrates, with the rest of the universe.  Evoculture must account for not just stone knapping and sewing, but family, friendship, art and science, agriculture and warfare, love and hate.  All right, all right, sethren, do not flee.  Quite right, this is the work of ages, and I do not intend to even attempt it, especially as summer has now been deferred until at least July and we may all die of vitamin D deficiency before the sun shines again.  While our fuckhead Prime Minister talks of more wars and his soft pink lust for fracking.  Evoculture must account not only for the wonderful in humankind, but also for the criminals who have superseded bankers, and the political class.

  What I shall try to do, sethren, and that very briefly, is to delineate, not with a fine camel hair brush, but with a yard broom dipped in road grime, some ways in which evoculture might account for human nature a lot better than sociology or religion does.  And I am too pessimistic (though not about the political class), for tomorrow the sun shines.  A pic-nic, maybe, sethren.  Away with you, while I call up Fortnum & Mason upon my phone.

Running ape meets Evoculture

Knuckle, senescent white male

  Time, sethren, to consider the organism.

  The organism.  Raise your right index finger where you can see it clearly.  Keep it there, and rotate it clockwise as seen if you were looking out along your arm, which you aren’t, thus demonstrating the potential independence from the real  world of the ideoverse, where you are looking along your arm.  Dogs can’t do this, and only in part because of anatomical shortcomings.  Now rotate that finger about the metacarpophalangeal joint, the proximal knuckle, sether, bottom, bottom, no, not your arse, sether, and the wrist, and then about the elbow.  Just watch those interdependent hierarchies of concepts whizzing past in your ideoverse.  Metacarpophalangeal doesn’t often get much of an outing.  It’s hardly a familiar demon, but look how it’s hogging the limelight here.  Alas, in vain.  What chance does metacarpophalangeal (its last desperate mememe) have of ousting knuckle from any gang of demons.  Not room for both, I’m afraid, and anyway, there’s only one metacarpophalangeal joint in the human hand, there are fourteen knuckles.  Without the praxis of anatomy, I guess the metacarpophalangeal joint would be long extinct in the metaverse.

  With luck, your finger tip is now in contact with your nose, or thereabouts.  Or maybe your mouth.  Whatever, you are touching the human organism.  So are you sether Albert, but I should stop if I were you unless you want to be taken away for a good talking to by yon community police person.

  Try to imagine this organism upon which you have your finger, without Evoculture.  If you had been raised by a pack of wolves, or dogs, or even dolphins, were you sufficiently aquatic, that is exactly how you would be.  Totally devoid of Evoculture.  You would be a wolf, or a dog, or a dolphin but, in all categories, physically very ill-equipped.  If you were a wolf or a dog, you might be able to compensate for your inadequacies with the evolved hand, pulling out thorns for instance.  Your vastly superior processing power might prove useful in some situations, but that’s doubtful.  It, your brain, has access to very little of the stuff it has evolved over three million years to process, so the possibility of, say, doing a little building work round the lair may well not occur in the neural substrate, and would probably not be socially rewarded even if it it were translated into action.  To dolphins you would be even more useless, even though dolphins might have a developed but wholly proximate ideoverse, unlike dogs.  By wholly proximate, I mean the ideoverses are wholly organism-based.  Such ideoverses could for instance result in complex social interactions, games, hunting cooperation, even meeting groups of Evocultured-up human organisms for joint ventures, hopefully involving killing third parties, fish, rather than the humans killing the dolphins, as found among the Faroe- and Japanese.  But nothing uses the environment of the dolphin’s brain to evolve.  Nothing.  The downside of flippers, maybe.  On the other hand, put a human baby in a dolphin’s environment and the downside of everything else, including hands, becomes apparent.

So, the organism without Evoculture.  Homo sapiens with nothing but the brain and the real world, the world before the hominins.  Little more than a running ape with a good cooling system.  That’s what you would have your finger on, sethren, if it wasn’t for Evoculture.

  I want to call this human organism something that differentiates it from what we know the human being + Evoculture to be.  I want to call it the Ho!?, but Ho!? In our street culture, and that’s where we fucking are, sethren, has connotations.  Ma ‘ho.  Not good.  But Ha!?.  I like Ha!?.  The grunt of surprise, followed by that hardest concept, that concept at the heart of Evoculture, the question.

  The question goes back through evolutionary history.  An African Hunting Dog asks questions.  Want to hunt?  Tougher than me?  Scared?  But the repertoire is limited.  The Ha!? asks the question thus.  The two of us are looking in the same direction.  Concerning that which is before our eyes, what is the case?

  Or rather, it’s not the Ha!? that asks that question.  It’s the Ha!?-Evoculture symbiosis.    

The hummingbird and the rat

  What’s the point, you ask, sether, what’s the point of all this?  You think you might become a Mormon.  Or a Baha’í.  They’ve got some traction.  They know how the world should be.  You, Brother Jero, you just rabbit on interminably about demons.  And they’re not even proper demons, red hot with anger, butting you up the bum with their pointy horns, lacerating you with their tridents.  They’re loci of irreducible difference.

  There aren’t many laughs in that, Brother Jero.  What’s the point?

  The point is, sethren, we are possessed.  The question we have to ask is, look, we are the most intelligent beings on Earth, possibly in the universe, or at least this universe; how come we are so fucking stupid?  Look at any area of the globe, big or small, land or ocean, and you realise that something about our behaviour stands out, above all other species.  Sheer blind stupidity.  It’s not our only quality I grant you.  We are also amazingly creative and constructive, we have built cities and spaceships, art, music, and society, all miraculous achievements.  It’s not that I’m on about.  It’s the other stuff.

  Take fish.  The oceans are a gift from eternity, powered by the sun, filled with evolved life over three and half billion years, an almost inexhaustible reservoir of protein and beauty.  And we are methodically, self-consciously, turning those oceans into squalid sumps.  Collectively, not very bright.  Collectively, the seven billion of us, we have less perspicuity than a whelk.  Why?  Particularly why if, as is the case, we are so fucking brainy?

  And that is the point, sethren.  We are like that because we are possessed.  Not by evil spirits.  But what we are is not quite what we think we are.  What is in our heads, the “thoughts” and “beliefs” and “philosophies” and “principles” are not wholly us at all.  Nor are they all that interested in our welfare as a species.  If at all.  In fact they are not interested in anything, because they are insentient, mindless, subject to blind evolution, just like the humming bird and the rat.  And us.  But they are not alive, though they evolve like life.  They survive because they are at an instant better suited to a particular niche than their competitors.  Instantaneous survival, that is the sole bridge they have to cross.  Opportunism in the shortest possible term; if successful, reiterated indefinitely, from second to second for minutes, centuries, millennia.  Like a bag, or a knife.  Or what you said at 3.27pm the Tuesday before last, if you were talking at that precise time.

  And when I say they, sethren, what am I referring to?  You’ve got it.  Those demons again.

I’m not saying, sethren, that we as a species have no foresight.  Clearly inestimable foresight is what distinguishes us  from all else.  Capitalism, town planning, space travel.  But these are all evolved too, quasi-infinite alliances and alliances of alliances of demons.  And they evolved through instantaneous opportunism, instantaneous selection, instantaneous survival.  Our huge success in catching fish, from the sprat to the whale, is equally evolved.  And if you read St Richard’s Climbing Mount Improbable, a point he makes most cogently is that evolution, if it takes a wrong turn, can never turn round and go back to the branch where this track was taken in error, and take the more promising way.  No more can a stone roll up a hill.  Evolution can only go on the way it’s going, instantaneous success by instantaneous success or, if success fails for an instant, death.  Death is okay when there are thousands or millions more of the same thing, like whatever it was you said at 3.27pm the Tuesday before last, if you were talking at that precise time..  But if too many die, we’re still talking about demons here and alliances of demons, that means extinction.  And demons rely on things in the world to survive.  Fishing cannot go on without fish.  So, it seems, our fishing will go on blindly, you cannot deny that it looks blind, blind and stupid, until there are no more fish.  Then it will become, instantaneously, extinct.

  Hold on a minute, you might say.  That’s not going to happen.  Other alliances of demons are evolving, as it might be marine conservation areas.

  That is the point too, sethren.  Evolution works for good as well as ill.  But it is hugely complex, and it might help if we understood it a bit more.  What does not work, or very seldom, and often only by very lucky chance, is supposedly superordinate plans.  Look at our present government.  Okay, sether Albert, it is more gracious to refer to “the intellectual deficit issue” rather than the biggest bunch of idiot fuckwits ever gathered together in the Mother of Parliaments, but I grant you the point remains the same.  They think they have a plan.  And I am not one who has time for essences, for Platonic Forms.  But yes, their plan looks like the essence of human stupidity.  A steady progression of instantaneous selection, survival, reiteration of alliances of demons which, when we look at their shape in the world, we might think were better extinct.  But that’s not the way the evolution of culture works.  We may love the whale and Nelson Mandela, but Hitler and the herpes virus were, still are, in evolutionary terms much more successful than lovingkindness for the whole human species.

  That is why it might be a better course for governments to look at what is good in political economy, and encourage it, and look at what is bad, and try to minimise it, rather than to have plans.  But such a course is a long way from where we are at the moment.  To get there it might help us if we understood what we are are and why.  How it is that we can be so intelligent, and so stupid?

  And to understand that, sethren, we have work to do.  Tomorrow, for one day only, we’ll tie up demons.    Then onward.  But for now… Can anyone smell bacon?

Misogyny is a demon

The evolution of dirt must wait a day or two.  Let us consider, brothers ad sisters, the matter of demons.  And lo I have said, elsewhere and at another time, that all that we know is made of demons.  Fucking amazing, I hear you cry, we never did suspect, and if it is so, as you say, oh Master of the Universe, how come we’ve never seen one of these so-called demons, not a one, of which you say in your wisdom that everything we know is made up of.  Answer that.

Oh, alright.

 Take misogyny, brothers and sisters.  Or rather do not take it, but put it away from you, banish it from this world.  But just before you do, let’s take a look at it.  Okay, we know, brothers and sisters, that misogyny is a vast and shapeshifting form, like the clouds of the earth, like storm and tempest and all the fires that consume the parched wildernesses of the world, and it stretches back in time beyond memory and we can’t possibly look at the whole bloody thing, it would take forever.

  So a fleeting glimpse, then.  A collage.  (And let us remember, o sisters, that misogyny is not a sin of men alone.  Think Irish nuns, think South Asian mothers in law, think mothers themselves, complicit in genital mutilation, think women who read the British gutter press).  But okay, brothers, it is basically us, we see ourselves as the beneficiaries, just another aspect of our gargantuan and sacrosanct male stupidity.  So think, “get your tits out for the lads.  And then...  Or else...”

  In this world, brothers and sisters, you don’t have to walk far to find an example of misogyny.  Or go far in your own head, either.  That is because when we, oh human beings, want to blame somebody for a great crime, be it genocide, or be it putting something in slightly the wrong place in the fridge so you knock it over and it’s not your fault, then you do utter, under your breath or in a great roar, "If that fucking" — and then, because we want to move quickly, we choose the most inclusive attribute of the person, place or thing onto whom we wish to transfer guilt for the world’s ills in their most proximate manifestation — "[woman, man, ethnic/cultural/religious/stereotype or, if analysis won’t even run that far, something considered obscenely taboo in your own culture] had not done that particular thing, then [my particular and cherished perception of myself would not have been momentarily shattered in that unforgivably violent way]."

  So I say to you, somewhat out of the blue, brothers and sisters, misogyny is a demon.  And a demon is not a tiny homunculus, it has neither wings nor horns nor a little pointy fork to prod you with, neither does it sit in the shell of your ear describing all the unthinkable pleasures of doing evil things, and suggesting there's no time like now.  No.  A demon is an irreducible locus of meaning.

  Oh yes, brothers and sisters, I thought that would do your heads in.  I thought that would have you murmuring among yourselves, and not even to the point, not even, “what the fuck is the mad bugger on about?”

  I will leave it there for the moment.  Off you go.  A layby on the Huddersfield ring road is hardly the Mount of Olives, and it has started to snow again.  Go forth and fast, and reflect upon those words: a demon is an irreducible locus of meaning (which might sit there and suggest things, but it's much further into your head, and further outside it, than the little fleshy wingy thing).   Same time tomorrow, brothers and sisters.  Have fortitude.