Throttle people, make bread and love

 

Skellig Michael - Wikimedia commons

    Supposing all you say is so, so what?  We are still beset by unwholesome weather, and eat muck.  And now we have been told by our noble leader that social security leads to infanticide.  Sethren, our noble leader may have the mouth parts of a six foot tapeworm, but he also has a first class degree from Oxford.  PPE, admittedly.  I have no more idea than you what cutting-edge intellectual content resides in a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford.  Nugatory, one would imagine.  But enough to rule.  And the tyro tapeworm clearly had enough brain to master it splendidly.  A first class degree.

  Sethren, the mouthings of the great leader may evince stupidity, but they are designer mouthings, crafted by years, centuries of evolution to embody a gargantuan gormlessness.  Not his. Ours.  Our  stupidity, sethren.  The stupidity inheres not in the crafting of these obvious, children’s picture book, fatuous lies.  The gargantuan stupidity is in us, who are the butt of this ludicrous mendacity.  And yet we believe in it utterly, and remouth it and remouth it continually, as if we ourselves were not as withered grey-green carcasses on the Huddersfield ringroad, but plump pink tapeworms whose every comfort is eternally assured.

  Surely, sethren, our so thoroughgoing stupidity needs some explanation.  The last person to try to explain it was Karl Marx; false consciousness, opium of the masses; spot on, old Karl.  But a century and a half ago.  The Communist Manifesto was published nine years before The Origin of Species.  Nobody has attempted to explain our moronic collective credulity since then.

  I will.

  But first the building blocks.

  An act.  A kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of alliances of demons.

  In the human world, maybe in the Hominin world (and I read on my phone yesterday, sethren, that Sahelpithecus is likely to represent the divergence between Homo and Chimp, seven million years ago or thereabouts), in the human world, an act is seldom isolated from a thing.  “Manus amimam pinxit, my pen is in my hand” as the old fascist put it.  There is not much that we do with our bare hands.  Throttle people, make bread and love.  But by and large a human act is an obligate symbiont with at least one thing.  It is the nexus of doing and done to — obligate symbiont, Sether Albert? Have I not mentioned it before?  Oh.  No I fucking haven’t, then.  Two different kinds of organism living in a cooperative relationship upon which both are completely dependent; trees and root fungi, mammals and their gut bacteria; human beings and politicians.

  Think of sewing, sethren.  Sewing without needle, thread and two bits of material to be joined, is not sewing.  But a needle and thread and so on cannot be sewing without kinesis, fingers, musculature, neural substrate.  Most human acts can only exist in the context of things.  And most things can only evolve in the context of acts.  The old joke goes, when a simple lad had finally been taught to add two apples to two apples and get four apples, he asked, “does it work with pears too?”  Does the concept of obligate symbiosis work with acts other than sewing?  Pears, sethren, pears.

  At the level of demons, there is no distinction to be made between an act and a thing.  An act is a thing.  Sewing, like a needle, is a demon.  Sure, as with a needle, other demons consort with the demon sewing, many more than the minimal ones we associated with a needle.  We could anatomise the demon sewing into quite a lot, or if you prefer, a whole bunch of demons.  But if you are running your eye over the contents of a design technology course to see if it is suitable for one, oh ye paupers, of your profligate quantity of offspring (whom, because you may rely on social security, you are quite likely to go home and slaughter) and in the midst of a list of course components, joinery, web design, you note for the fraction of a second your eye overflies it embroidery before the epicentre of vision moves on to automobile aesthetics; then embroidery occurred as a demon; not totally unexamined, because there will be a locus in the neural substrate which awakes and leaps to life screaming me, me, and would be only too delighted to call up other demons into the workspace, needles, coloured thread, the Bayeux tapestry, whatever the fuck you like as long as you are going to take notice; but not a chance.  The automobile aesthetics demon is already having its microsecond flicker.

  So, at the demon level, things and acts are not differentiated.  But, you will say, we humans can distinguish between a thing and an act.

  Sethren, we can distinguish between a trillion things and another trillion things, had we but world enough  and time.  We have no difficulty telling the difference between angels and fairies, between cricket and baseball, between a virus and a bacterium or a gigue and a saraband.  But we do it at another level.  We shall come to concepts in time, sethren, but you will not be amazed to know that concepts, like everything in the metaverse, are also alliances of demons.

  For it is only at the demon level that evolution can take place.

But, you may say, the ancestral organism became the hippo and the whale.  Surely it is at the level of species that things change?

That is what we see, because we cannot see genes.  Darwin didn’t even know they existed.  But it was genes, sethren (and epigenetics, of course).  Evolution takes place at the level of the cell, and it is only the sum of cells that is the organism that represents the, to us, apprehensible species.

  And you will say, but culture doesn’t have to be like biological life.  Just because evolution takes place at the level of genes, not the level of the hippo and the whale, there is no reason why culture should follow suit.

  Agreed absolutely, sethren.  Give me another explanation that will lead to an account of why we believe the simple lies of our Great Leader, an explanation that does not rest on metaphor and religious platitude, and I will go along with you.  Until then, the evolution of culture takes place at the level of demons.

  The question still lies open, can there be a non-kinetic act?  Clearly.  Acts can take place in an ideoverse unexpressed by any kinesis.  You cannot look into the face of the beloved and know of whom they dream.  The raven surveyed the meat, the string, its perch for several minutes before it acted.  The high jumper clears the bar before she starts her run-up.  This, sethren, is why I call it an act, not an action.  All that we do happens in the theatre of the skull.

  Sethren, tomorrow, sabbatical.  I go to the monastery of Skellig Michael to watch and pray for a week.  You must wander the streets of Huddersfield alone.  Watch the behaviour of your fellows, and ponder my words.  Dwell on our stupidity in especial.  When I return, and if, in like case to the Earl of Groan, I am not consumed by puffins, then concepts.

Demons get kinetic

Sethren, we have serious work to do.

  We have mastered demons.  We can juggle with them now, we can spin them on our fingertips like iridescent gyroscopes no bigger than a midge.

  And we have covered things.  A thing is anything in front of your eyes now.  That ballpoint, that mug; and including animals, insects, birds.  And maybe people as well.  With people, we are in the zone of the ethical.  A dead horse is a thing.  A dead human being?
  But let us stay away from the edge.  We have anatomised a needle.  We know what a thing is, and how in the metaverse it is an assembly of demons; while in the real world, it is a bounded material existence.  Think of a needle.
  What's next?

Demon    thing    act    concept    map    praxis    Culture 

  Next up, act.  Act. 
  Here it becomes crucial to fully realise, not just "Yes yada yada yada", but actually stabilise the concept, even though we haven’t dealt with concepts yet, that body, brain and  the E=mc² universe are a continuum.
  An act is a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.

  In 2007 Heinrich and Bugnyar did an experiment with Ravens.  They put a raven on a perch in a deep narrow cage.  A bit of meat was hung from the perch on  the end of a piece of string too long for the bird to heave it up in one pull.  The raven did nothing but look at the meat for several minutes.  Then it reached as far down the string as it could with its beak, pulled up a loop, trapped the loop between its foot and the perch, reached down again with its beak, and pulled up the meat.

  This looked like a raven analysing a spatial situation, organising an act in the neural substrate, and then completing a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.  What components of logic, rationality, foresight, mechanical analytics, and general universal philosophy contributed to this act are not our concern, sethren.

  It did demonstrate something.  Ravens have an ideoverse, a four dimensional space in the neural substrate where demons exist.  Acts are not the exclusive preserve of Homo sapiens.

  Here is another thing ravens did, this time not an experiment, someone just watched them.

  A couple used to tether their large dog to a post in the yard when they went to work, with enough space that the hound had a full circle to wander about in.  They put its bowl of food on the edge of the circle and drove off, except one day they just pretended to, and stayed and watched.  A pair of ravens flew down.  One stood on the edge of the circle and cawed, danced and jeered.  The dog naturally bounded over to kill it, and was aggrieved to find that the rope pulled it up just short.  A prancing raven and a rearing, fang-gnashing slathering hound.  Meanwhile the other raven ate its fill of dog food on the other side of the circle.  Then the ravens swapped places.

  Maybe, nothing to do with acts, but maybe when we search for the origins of human cooperation, we should have more regard for the behaviour of others in the animal kingdom; African hunting dogs, wolves, orca and porpoises, social falcons.  The interactions of a pack of hunting dogs, from first waking to kill, has enough complexity to give us work for a while.

  I wander off again.  I become embroiled.  Let us rather, sethren, look at an act, borrowing a pair of the excellent “Darwin’s goggles” from Jonnie Hughes.

  It is the act performed with a needle; not the needle we anatomised all those days ago, but a needle in functional terms; a thing for puncturing a plane of material and drawing a thread through it.

Okay, we are going way back, to just the epoch before the first actual needle evolved.  Two lads are sitting against a rock in the sun.  One has a needle, a rather hefty and clunking thing, with a thin hide strip through the eye.  He doesn’t call it a needle, he calls it a dirip (this is not the same dirip as the quantum toy entangled with its twin a billion light-years away in a kids room on the planet Xerk which we discussed a few weeks ago.  The coincidence of names is just that, a coincidence.  You may think, that’s very strange, but the universe is full of coincidences).

  So he’s sitting there with this dirip, which we would recognise as a needle, forcing it through the square of hide on his lap, drawing the hide lace through after it, and then repeating the action, time after time.

  After watching for several minutes, which do not yet exist, the other says, “Bro’, I been watching you what you doing and I have to say it, Bro’ what you doing is teleologically opaque to me.”

  “I’m diripping, Bro’.”

  “But why?”

  “Because this assemblage, the pointed rigid body, the flexible strip it draws after it, is a dirip.  Thus, I am 

diripping.”

  “Yea, Bro’, but all you doing is making a series of holes in that hide.  What’s the point, Bro’?”

  “Bro’, you can’t dirip without making holes in the hide.  That’s what you doing when you diripping.”

  What we have witnessed is an act (repeated), a kinetic four dimensional amplification of a sequence of demons.  But it is an act that is very unlikely to have ever taken place, because such a thing as a dirip, and such an act as a single unit of diripping (which could in time evolve into 10^{whatever you like} acts of diripping, think all the sewing machine needles in the world, all at full chat) could not have taken place without the evolution of countless other acts preceding it, the act of joining two things together (which has eluded our diripping lad) being just one of them.  Sewing will not evolve before a whole series of things and acts and concepts have evolved.  Just as a demon is a locus for alliances of demons (a needle), a thing can be the locus for a whole agglomeration of things (a bicycle), and an act is made up of a sequence of acts, most of them involving things (a root canal filling).  Culture sometimes looks fractal.  We cannot generalise until we have the detail.

  Sethren, we must eat.  Same time tomorrow.  We have to ask ourselves whether there can be non-kinetic acts.  Among other things.  But kinetic first.  Have we signed the petition, sethren?  It is a demand that one of the plump pink London tapeworms should put his money where his bothria are and live on £53 a week; week after week.  That is one of the things we shall understand in time, sethren.  Demeaning and destructive poverty is not a condition.  It is a praxis.  We may get there in the end.

Editor's apology

  Brother Jero can be violent and intemperate, and I apologise on his behalf.  He was, apparently, unreasonably upset by the assertion that human cultures are primarily adaptive at the group level.  He misunderstood this to imply that culture evolves at the group level.  He was confused be Peter Richerson’s (whom he has admired greatly for years) phrase “If selection also acts on cultural variation, say group selection on primitive institutions…”

  If I could attempt to explain Jero's point of view, you may find it in your hearts to forgive him.  He does not lead a happy life.

  He feels that in biological evolution, selection takes place at the level of  the loci of difference between one organism and another of the same species. These loci, if selected, are transmitted down the branching line of descent, intermittently or entirely.

  In cultural evolution, selection takes place at the level of loci of difference between two things of the same sort (pointy sticks), both in the world and in the metaverse (sticks), or in the metaverse alone (the proof that the diagonal of a square with unit sides is incommensurable); though it must be born in mind that the latter, and all like all processes, are distributed about the world in material form, in the case of that particular diagonal in binary code, print, diagrams and so on.

  In biological evolution, it has not been demonstrated how selection could take place at the level of the group or species (the example of eusocial insects certainly does not make this case, and it is very simply demonstrable how this is so).  What is clear is that it is the environment which makes the selection, e.g. what selects most powerfully for the male peacock’s tail is that part of the environment which decides on the potential reproductive fitness of  that particular tail; that part of the tail's environment which is the female peacock.

  Likewise, it has not been demonstrated how a resilient and adaptable but overall stable set of loci of difference (sure he’s not handsome [organism], but he makes me/us laugh [culture]) is any different from the peacock’s tail. The loci of difference that compose an ability to make people laugh are located in a single organism.  The environment makes the selection.  It might be one person or ten million.  Each one of the ten million will or will not laugh in various degrees.  If the the ten million all laugh at the joke, then those loci of difference in the funny guy will have been selected ten million times, and one can continue with a narrative about in what further manner they might evolve.  But that is not selection by the group.  It is a selection by ten million locations in the environment. Clearly, as with a biological species, it is more durable to be selected ten million times, to be a rat, than it is to be selected just a few times, to be a white-lipped rhinoceros. But ten million rats are ten million indvidual organisms.  And ten million people laughing at a joke means the joke has been selected with replication potential ten million times.  What it does not mean is that a group has made a selection.  It is not clear where in the group such a selection might be made.

  If one person laughs at the joke, and the other 9999999  laugh because everyone else is, then the joke has not been selected and the evolutionary content is derisory. 

  This is not to assert that groups, a Roman legion versus a Gallic army, are not themselves selected by the environment.  The battle is an emergent process, a  million or a trillion loci of difference, the length of a sword, the relative placement of shields, a mosquito in the eye at the wrong moment, all lost in noise, unrecordable.  The selection only comes in retrospect, after massive selective destruction of information.  The selection will be made by a retrospective environment, upon cultural agglomerations such as victory, protocols and procedures, weaponry, timing, spatial aspects, logistics, use of terrain and so on; a bit like assessing a design of a mobile phone.  And it will be composed of anecdote, report, expert witness, progressive selective destruction of information until conclusions are drawn and put into effect, or not, in time for the next battle.  So the configuration of a group, an army, a government, “the public”, can certainly be selected.

  However, selection cannot ever take place at the level of the group, but only at the level of loci of difference. The selection cannot ever be made by a group, but only at the level of that part of the environment which is a human organism.  It can course be done more than once, by more than one person..

  Brother Jero is a simple soul, and feels these things far too strongly.  Again I apologise on his behalf.

London, that gut of tapeworms

  Sethren, today let us weep for ourselves.

  Evolution was once thought of as the survival of the fittest.  But fittest for what?  The fittest to survive.  We now know that it is the environment that selects who or what survives.  Things change, people change, animals change, viruses change like buggery.  The shivery, scratchy phlegm-hoiking cough you caught on the bus this week is changed, subtly changed, from the antigen that lured your immune system, already weakened by a diet of  MadamMiMi’sMeatyBits and their attendant medicaments, into such an exhausting war of attrition the week before last.  And all these things, people, animals, pathogens, are part of our environment.  Other people are a huge part of the environment in which each of us lives.

What has that to do with this day of weeping?

  Competition.  The struggle for survival.  We compete for resources, we human beings.  Our recent history, just the last fifty thousand years, is a tale of murder and war, fought for the earth’s ever dwindling resources.  That fits with the survival of the fittest.  But it’s not uniquely human.  Chimpanzees have wars, albeit very small ones.  What is so distinctive about our species is not war, but cooperation.  Helping each other.  Two people lifting a stone or a pole because it is too heavy for one.  A multitude of people, over days  or decades or centuries, building a stockade for animals, or a hut, or a city, or a mosque.

  How to explain this altruism in evolutionary terms, sethren?  First let us note that “cooperation” is a term of wide remit.  “Get down on the fucking floor, face down, arms wide, legs apart, while we gaffa-tape your mouth.” And then, whatever duty of the State is thereby being prosecuted by whatever contracted agency, deportation or merely the modelling of the proper order of society, “Thank you for your cooperation”; because respect for human dignity will have been written into the contract.

  Among mammals, cooperation is usually involuntary on the side of one party, and unexamined on the side of the other.  Mammals do not photosynthesise, plants do it for them, then they eat the plants.  But wolves do not eat plants.  They get the moose to do that for them, and then they eat the moose.  This is what we might call asymmetrical cooperation.

  And in these pairings there is an evolutionarily stable strategy.  Except maybe we shouldn’t call it a strategy, because it is not at all clear who or what is strategising.  Maybe it is an evolutionarily stable cycle.  In engineering it has a name, which I have forgotten.  You know the thing, sethren; you have a bi-metallic strip, it makes contact in an electrical circuit which causes it to heat up. Because it is bi-metallic, one side expands more than the other.  The strip curves.  It breaks the circuit.  The strip cools down. It straightens.  It makes the circuit.  It heats up.  Tell me when you get bored.

  There are few wolves and thousands of moose.  The wolves go forth and multiply.  There are too many moose and they eat all the, whatever it is that moose eat.  Lichen?  Birch bark?  Just at that  time the wolf population is peaking.  The wolves are eating a huge amount of moose, though the scragginess of the meal is becoming a problem.  And then there is a scarcity of even scrag of moose.  The wolf population plummets.  Meanwhile the lichen (or birch bark [or maybe those red fungi with white spots that the shamans eat {remember that fact, sethren, for I have read somewhere that — a thought has come to me here, sethren, it could be that I am confusing moose with reindeer — I have read somewhere that the reindeer herders on party nights drink reindeer piss for the hallucinogens from Aminata muscaria which the reindeer eat, to whit, muscinol, muscazon and ibotenic acid.  So if you ever find yourself at a loose end on the tundra, without the comforts of designer psychotropics bought with bitcoin, oh we should be so lucky, off the Internet, remember reindeer piss, and be happy for a while}]) — meanwhile the lichen, you may recall is doing well.  The small population of moose that have survived begin to eat plentifully, just as the wolf population, because of the scarcity and general scragginess of moose, has plummeted.  We are back where we started, and the evolutionarily stable cycle starts again.

  The great and holy Nick Cave, one of the true prophets among us, sings The Weeping Song.  And sethren, I have not yet pronounced, wherefore should we weep.

  In human beings we have cooperation, and when the time comes, I will give indications as to where we should look for its origins.  But work needs to be done, difficult work, before that will be possible.

  Here I must warn you, sethren, of heresies, atavistic, obscurantist and deeply in error.  The Strüngmann Foundation Conference gave rise to a paper by David Sloan Wilson, Human Cultures are Primarily Adaptive at the Group Level.  Sethren, when Christians tried to iron out the little problems with consistency that their Faith was undergoing in the Third Century CE, dilemmas which were up to then being resolved by extermination, genocide, torture and immolation, they called a conference at Nicaea in 325 to agree exactly what of Christianity was so, and what was not.  The Nicene Creed was the result; you know, "I believe...", and then whatever the fuck it is they believe, that was all knocked into shape at Nicaea.

  It appears that the Strüngmann Foundation Conference has done the same for the twin branches of the religion Sociologyandpsychology.  I kid you not sethren.  What they have tried to do is keep the creed, and most of the Pentateuch, of Psychologyandsociology (like the BBC I try to maintain balance) and cram Darwinism into it.  It is a sad sight, sethren.  Like most religion, it is full of circularities.  I may return to it in time.  But meanwhile I shall just forward to your mobile phones the following paragraph from the paper by David Sloan Wilson:

“Small human groups are much more cooperative than primate groups, thanks largely to the their ability to suppress bullying and other self-serving behaviours, a kind of social organization that evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls “reverse dominance” (Boehm 1993, 1999, 2011).  If members of a group can’t succeed at the expense of each other, then their main avenue of success is to succeed as a group, compared to less cooperative groups. The competition might be direct, as in warfare, or indirect, as in producing more offspring that emigrate to other groups or form new groups. In the language of multilevel selection theory, reverse dominance suppresses within-group selection and magnifies variation among groups (especially through the establishment and enforcement of norms), making between-group selection the dominant evolutionary force.”

   I will merely point out here that in this paragraph he starts with an assertion of what he sets out to prove (and indeed what, among his group, he seeks to make permanent and unquestionable as an item of a creed).  It is completely circular, as well as masterfully obscurantist, a mish-mash of nominalism and fingers-crossed teleology.

  But sethren, I wander hither and thither, and the crowds are passing us in the street, and I have not yet said why we should weep.

  In 1945 in our country, men and women returned from war.  They were determined, so it is said, to build a nation of fairness and justice.  Things that were already evolving came to fruition; the National Health, universal education, a safety net for those who for whatever reason were not coping.

  During the war there was plenty of good hunting for carnivores, who were called in those days spivs; the black market made spivs rich.  By the end of the war gangsterism was rife.  The Americans, for their own inscrutable reasons, handed the administration of Italy over to the Italian-American mafia, based in Naples.  But gangs, armed with the vast quantities of weapons left over from the war, were thriving in London and Paris as well.  Spivs, now heavily armed, competing with utopian, nation building citizens.  Moose and lichen.

  However, the spirit of the age was for cooperation.  The mafia find it hard to get power where there are strong trade unions and strong local government (reference needed, I know).  Spivs did not thrive in the presence of strong cooperation.

  Until 1980.  By then industrial capitalism was atrophying, but for a while North Sea oil masked the deficit.  Since then we have had only spiv-friendly, spiv-rewarded governments, (think Tony Blair) feasting on the nations of Britain from that off-shore gut of tapeworms, London.  Trade unions and local governement have been systematically destroyed.

  And today the spivs have decided to jettison the carcase, sucked empty.  The North and the poor and the sick can be sucked out no further.  And so the Gut, slowly writhing in plump pale pinkness, is cutting off even the sustenance for survival, the National Health, The Welfare State, universal education; the common wealth will die.  And when it has, the spivs, the tapeworms, will be transported in suppositories to their true home, the America of Ayn Rand.

  And we stand on the Huddersfield ringroad, sethren, cold, hungry, destitute, a roof over our heads always a problem.  What next?

  Understanding next.  We have accommodated demons.  Tomorrow, action.  And no more weeping.