Civilization and Beyond
A Metaconscious Mosaic Outline
Once again, the devil took him to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory. 'All these', he said, 'I will give you, if you will only fall down and do me homage.'1
There you have in a nutshell the archetypical "deal" for all who participate in any way, in any stratum of Taker culture2 – i.e. human civilization. It is the essential core of Taker culture, and the lynchpin of its hierarchical structure.
This is certainly not the most "politically correct" way of expressing it, and I imagine some reading this will read no further. For "the deal" offered to participants in Taker culture has no shortage of – ah, takers – willing and eager to accept the stated terms. Yet those who do so, for some reason do not often like to have the transaction represented so baldly.
Like it or not, however, this is and always has been "the deal." It was the deal on the table, for instance, when a medieval King awarded a Title of Nobility to an individual for outstanding service. The deal wasn't necessarily stated in these terms, but the clearly understood essence of it was that "I (the King) grant you (my servant) all these lands and peoples to administer for your personal gain and profit – with the understanding, of course, that you will support my policies in all your actions; and furnish soldiers when called upon to fight my wars; and pay me regular tribute, which you will exact by taxing those within your domains; and see to it that my every command is obeyed throughout your domains; and you and all your subjects shall 'fall down and do me homage' when in my presence." Well of course. What's wrong with that? Who wouldn't jump at the opportunity?
This, by the way, is how the King got to be King in the first place: a) by making exactly the same deal (i.e. its reciprocal) with the Emperor, or with a bigger and more potent King or Warlord than himself; and b) by offering the same deal to numerous retainers ("creating" some of them "Lords" in the process). And so the King gradually gathered around himself a powerful army, and a political machine to match. The single purpose of the entire exercise, top to bottom, has always been the wielding of pre-emptive force3 as the means of achieving the King's ends – which is to say, the Warlord's ends; and the Emperor's. And the devil's. And to achieve their ends, the King's Lords wield pre-emptive force in turn – always in accord with the King's, the Warlord's, the Emperor's, and the devil's ultimate ends.
And so it goes, up and down the hierarchy, no different today than it has ever been in "civilized history." The Lords deputize Knights to carry out hierarchical policies; the Knights retain Squires, ...and so on. Bottom line, everyone lines up somewhere along this hierarchical "chain gang," which is forged, link by link, by endless repetitions of the original "pact with the devil," which achieves its ends by means of pre-emptive force. And there you have, tra-la, civilization.
The chain of pre-emptive, hierarchical tentacles stretches into every nook and cranney of civilized society, and the "golden rule" prevails: He who has the gold makes the rules. Today, giant corporate advertisers suborn the integrity of the media; corporate endowments from the same sources suborn the integrity of academic and scientific research.4 "All these I will give you, if you will only fall down and do me homage." Following are the unusually candid remarks of a 19th century American journalist, allegedly in response to a toast to "the independent press."
There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities, and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.5
There is no profession or calling in the civilized world which is not tarred with the same brush. Might makes right, and pre-emptive force is "the only game in town" – any town, anywhere in the civilized world. To be "civilized" is to be either a pimp, or a prostitute, or both. To be "civilized" is to be a slave in a "chain gang" – whether the "chain" be wrought of iron, or of gold.
At an early stage in the project which has become Civilization and Beyond, a copy of Daniel Quinn's book6 came into my hands, which had a major impact upon the direction the project has subsequently taken. Quinn's book has brilliantly clarified for me a concept – a meme – toward which I have been struggling for many years.
Meme is a word coined by Richard Dawkins,7 denoting an element of human culture equivalent in function to a gene in cellular biology. Just as genes carry the code within the nucleus of every cell, which specifies the structure and design of a biological organism, so memes carry the code within the minds of every human individual, which specifies the structure and design of an entire human culture. Following are some of the memes Quinn writes about, which define, in part, "our" culture, i.e. so-called "civilization."
- Civilization is the final and highest of all human inventions.
- Ours is the one right way for people to live and everyone should live like us.
- Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances.
Like genes in the cells of the body, memes are replicated within the "cells" (individual humans) of a culture through a multitude of channels, such as parental instruction and unconsciously conveyed attitudes; schools, churches, books, popular music, magazines, television, movies, advertising, etc., etc. They are not necessarily shared by everyone on Earth, yet they are effectively beyond doubt or question for any "civilized" human on Earth, now, and in the historical and possibly "prehistoric" past, and into the foreseeable future. They frame the visible and imaginable "field of view" within the culture of "civilization," and define the "box" which encloses all within its precincts.
It is Daniel Quinn's thesis that if humanity are to remain very much longer resident upon planet Earth, we will necessarily have abandoned certain "lethal memes," and substituted for them other memes. A "lethal meme," like a "lethal gene," is one which destroys its possessor. The meme, Civilization must continue at any cost and must not be abandoned under any circumstances, is Quinn's primary example of a lethal meme. It binds its possessors into "doing civilization," even when, as in the case of contemporary humanity, doing so is globally suicidal.
Quinn points out that the dwellers in many civilizations in the past have not possessed this particular meme, and so after some hundreds or thousands of years of "doing civilization," have ceased doing so, and have simply walked away from their civilizations, and abandoned them. He cites numerous examples, particularly in the western hemisphere, of abandoned civilizations, which have posed persistent and inexplicable puzzles to our anthropologists – who do possess the meme that Civilization must not be abandoned under any circumstances.
To the civilized mind, abandoning civilization simply isn't done, because of the corollary meme, civilization is the greatst of all possible human inventions. So if the appearance of abandoning civilization manifests in the anthropological record, in the minds of our anthropologists there must be some "rational explanation" for it, such as famine, plague, war, or natural cataclysm – anything other than the voluntary, intentional, mass abandonment of civilization.
Such explanations are never entirely satisfactory, for the reason that there is no imaginable catastrophe so final that it would, by itself, result in the destruction or abandonment by its survivors of their entire civilization. Famines, plagues, earthquakes, and wars typically run their course, and life goes on for those who survive them. The survivors do not for these reasons abandon their civilization. Yet there are many examples of civilizations which have been destroyed or abandoned by their own builders, never to rise again. This is the story, in fact, of every civilization that has ever risen, excepting only our own, and those which have been consumed or destroyed by competing civilizations such as ours.
The fact is, in Quinn's analysis (and in mine), that beyond a certain point, civilization simply does not work. Every culture which has embarked in the past upon the path of civilization has discovered this, and has eventually abandoned it, unless it was destroyed first by another civilization. Ours is the only culture in human history, Quinn writes, which has been so suicidally persistent in our dogged determination to follow the path of civilization to the bitter end, no matter what, even over the precipice of global catastrophe. If our persistence on this path continues very much longer, we shall perish. If we're still here, say, a hundred years from now, we will have long since abandoned civilization too, and moved beyond civilization.
_____________________________________
* Sources: A Pact With the Devil; Beyond Civilization or The Killer Meme.
1. Matthew 4:8-9, The New English Bible: New Testament, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, 1961.
2. Takers are the single human culture who have decided to take the Law of Life into their own hands; as opposed to Leavers, designating those peoples whose choice is to leave the Law of Life in the hands of the gods. After Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999. See also Leavers and Takers, particularly the section on It's All in the State of Mind, where the differences between Takers and Leavers, and their consequences, are developed further.
3. Pre-emptive force is how the King (or Emperor, or Warlord) came to be in "possession" of "all these lands and peoples" in the first place: i.e. by conquest. See also Beyond Civilization or The Killer Meme; and for a classic in-depth elaboration, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, 1869, by Lysander Spooner.
4. See "The Kept University" by Eyal Press and Jenniffer Washburn, The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 285 No. 3, March 2000.
5. John Swinton, preeminent New York journalist, ca. 1880, boldface emphasis added. This is why, in part, I wrote in The Metaconsciousness Myth, "Therefore, if you do nothing else, turn the &*%$ing TV OFF!" Emphasis in the original. By the way, in contrast to John Swinton and his fellow-journalists, I am not paid anything for keeping my honest opinion out of the Freedom Digital Library, or for including it: and so that is what you will find here: honest opinions. Whether you agree with them or not is your business. If you value freedom, Go thou and do likewise. That is (if this is important enough to you), find or create a venue where you too can express your honest opinions.
6. Quinn, 1999.
7. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1989, cited by Quinn, 1999.
Civilization and Beyond copyright 2004, 2005 by J. Harmon Grahn. Copying and redistribution, in whole or in part, are permitted in any medium provided this notice is included.