Some comments and critiques. I’m trying to understand what I wrote,
because some of it feels petty, as compared to the importance of the six
crises. But perhaps it offers some insight. Here we go.
* “There is only so much room inside your head, and ideology expands to
fill available space.”
Only when the ideology is not encoded as a social fact. For example,
there are ideologies about jurisprudence, and they occupy no space at
all in most minds, because most minds can exert zero force on the actual
expression of jurisprudence. For almost everyone, it’s just a fact of
existence that you have to accept existing jurisprudence as unalterable.
The point being: when something is a social fact, it is sufficiently
embedded in reality that it has already won the ideological battle, and
there are no more converts to be had, and thus everyone has stopped
fighting about it.
By contrast, “tort reform” in the 1980’s, under Reagan, was a political
battleground. Why? Existing tort practice was established, but
apparently there were enough people who saw it as something broken, in
need of fixing. The political battle was how to fix it, without making
things worse somewhere else. The kindest interpretation is that this
was an engineering problem calling for a better solution. The ugliest
interpretation was that this was a naked power grab by the richest
against the poorest. Once encoded as a “social fact” (as legislation, in
this example), the ideology no longer occupies room inside your head.
* “Memetic tribes”: perhaps we should call these “memetic tribes writ
large”, because there are also small ones. An example: city zoning board
battles. The memetic tribes there are the neighborhood
preservationists, who don’t want old, charming buildings demolished and
replaced by McMansions. The roadway warriors who want shorter commute
times, vs. the neighborhood traffic-calming group, who want less
cut-through traffic, so that kids and dogs playing on side-streets don’t
get run over. The powerful developers who don’t care about parking,
pedestrians, water-runoff/flooding, parks, or community spaces (very
crudely, this is the libertarian/capitalist meme pitted against the
humanistic, quality-of-life meme). The composition of city zoning boards
is sometimes determined by appointment, sometimes by election, and
sometimes by legislation (e.g. the state passing laws to force the city
to do something, often not to the city’s benefit.) The decisions made by
the zoning board have a direct economic and cultural impact for decades,
if not centuries, totalling billions of dollars over that time-period.
Which memetic tribe do you belong to, on zoning issues? How much time
do you spend battling those battles?
The point here is that there are memetic tribes at all scales of
organization, wherever decisions have to be made, and the process for
making them is not already determined by fixed social facts. (For
example, there might be “memetic skirmishes” in business decisions, as
executives duke it out. There are skirmishes in the cloistered jury
room, as jurors debate. But society as a whole cannot participate,
because the social facts are that society is not allowed to participate
in such decisions. Thus, the “memetic tribes” behind business decisions
are small, even as the actual battle is quite fully and totally intense,
just as intense as the national-scale memetic game, because there are
actual winners and losers who really do have large stakes in the game.)
* “Memetic tribes are … locked in a Darwinian zero-sum war for the
narrative of the noosphere”. Its zero-sum, if you are counting the
number of human minds available for ideological infection. In that
sense, its zero-sum. But suppose instead we look at the von Neuman
model of computing: those minds, like CPU’s, are busy converting
ideologies into social facts. The examples that are simplest to
understand are city zoning, or jurisprudence: ideological wars do get
won or lost, and have long-term social, political and economic
repercussions. Those ideologies are re-arranging the physical universe.
Some cultural wars are large, dramatic, violent, but leave behind a
muddled legacy that is hard to understand: e.g. the OJ trial in 1995 was
a national obsession, examining the interplay of race, money, lawyering.
Its occupied a huge amount of memetic/ideological effort that year, but
what do we have to show for it?
* “The reality crisis”: if one looks at memesis-writ-small, the reality
crisis becomes clear: in fisheries management, the reality of the
fisherman is very different from the reality of the conservationist, so
much so that each side is willing to state that the other side is
completely crazy, nuts, out-of-control, and should be prosecuted and
jailed. As a result, lawsuits are not infrequent. The point of
conversation is to align these realities. Similar remarks for watershed
management: the reality of the farmer, the electrical utility and the
city water board are often so different, that they live in reality bubbles
that have almost no overlap, each completely denying the fake-news and
alternative facts of the other stances. Elinor Ostrom shows how such
commons-management issues can be effectively managed.
The point here is that, by looking at memesis-writ-small, maybe we can
learn about memesis-writ-large. The reality crisis for fisheries
management is comprehensible, whereas Trumpism feels incomprehensible.
In fisheries management, we learn that both sides have a point, and both
sides are wrong in some ways. With Trumpism, its hard, almost
impossible to identify valid points on the other side; unlike fisheries
management, there seems to be no effective, operational mechanism for
dispute resolution that is currently operational — thus, outright
warfare. But is that warfare all that different from the warfare in a
jury room, a business decision, a zoning-board meeting, a watershed
management foundation?
The anvilicious point: “Thanks to the Internet, we are now fully in the
postmodern condition, or as we call it, the reality crisis.” But that’s
the same reality crisis, pre-internet, when construction workers and
hippies squared off, endlessly deconstructed by Archie Bunker and Mary
Tyler Moore. Or Culture War 0.0, when the Huguenots were tortured by the
Catholics 500 years ago?
The reality crises of 500 years ago were resolved by war. That of 50
years ago lead to Culture War 1.0. Maybe McLuhan is right; a global
village maximizes disagreement on all points. Maybe Zuckerberg is naive
about Facebook. But maybe Elinor Ostrom indicates a path that accepts
both McLuhan and Zuckerberg, and shows how to move forward?
http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons
http://evonomics.com/tragedy-of-the-commons-elinor-ostrom/
Note that Ostrom’s ideas necessarily encompass multi-polar disagreements
on basic facts…