Meta-history
A verbatim extract and a summary from the 6 hidden patterns of history:
“In the most general sense, all history writing, all descriptions of the past, share one purpose: to shape the future.”
The six meta-memes offer explanatory power. They offer order. They offer a better understanding of (and thus empathy towards) other people. […] There is a unifying logic to how they function and progress, and yet each of the meta-memes is distinct and has its own logic.
- Animistic
- Faustian
- Post-faustian
- Modern
- Postmodern
- Metamodern
But…
1. We must remain agnostic and non-teleological about the evolution
2. These meta-memes co-exist and do not form a strict temporal and spatial domains… “They’re not like Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on.” They are better described as “qualitative categories”.
“The history of the physical world is cosmology. The history of the planet is geology. Geological properties can only emerge within a larger cosmological story.
The history of life, this self-organization of complex, sentient entities, is biology. Cultural history, what we usually call just “history”, is yet another level up of emergence and abstraction. It exists within a biological framework.”
“Cultural history must thereby, necessarily, be the history of how all memes emerge, how they struggle, combine, and evolve, and how they steer the world.”
No Ockham’s razor, no Enlightenment, no [utilitarian dance form of] ballet. It could not possibly exist in Animistic effective value meme context.
“Memes are more malleable than genes. We cannot all get brown eyes and black hair, but we can all learn at least some Swahili, if exposed to it. Given, of course, that we have the biological prerequisites for the meme to transfer to us”
“Nations, peoples and civilizations are themselves memes. They emerge as ideas in the heads of human beings, through their interactions, and they control the movements of human bodies. So even these are structured according to certain meta-memes.
There is, I hold, nothing Western-centric or Eurocentric in itself about the theory of metamemes. It can be misused in Western-centric or even racist ways, but let us take all necessary precautions to prevent that. By all means.”
If anything, the theory of metamemes works against Western-centric views of history and the world. Sure, Europe shaped modernity and modernity shaped the West, but modernity is not reducible to “Western”; there are other versions of it, still being explored to this day. Nor should Indian, Chinese, or any other culture, be exotified and taken to have too inherent qualities. The history of the world is just that: world history, and this includes all cultural spheres, all civilizations, all metamemes, all genders, all ecological environments.
“from different vantage points, we can make arguments for why some developmental properties can and should be preferable than others in different settings. […] we would probably be worse off with a global legal slave trade than we are without one. So let’s prefer Modern values on this one, shall we?”
“The point is that the Metamodern meta-meme makes more sense in the presently emerging world-system, because its logic corresponds to the actual society we live in. So if we don’t, in some sense, become metamodern, we’re all going to crash and burn.”
“It goes both ways, really. Later metamemes can be disruptive, meaningless, and destructive if they enter into the wrong context at the wrong time. How many indigenous cultures have not been oppressed and ripped apart by an inappropriate exposure to other, larger, cultures with later metamemes?
Still, we have good reasons to study, understand, and relate productively to, the evolution of metamemes, strategically — and sensitively — spurring their development.”
“All cultures collapse sooner or later. Once a certain Modern world has come into being and thus affects the environment on a massively larger scale, however, there are only two ways ahead: either collapse, or evolve.”
