This book also discusses the history of tarot cards and other occult and esoteric tools and symbols that hid ancient and secret knowledge from the powers that be of the day within their mysterious imagery, as well as the use of such symbolism by secret societies and religious orders that often operated under the authoritarian radar. Even some of the great art of the past contains hidden scientific and historic information, waiting to be deciphered and discovered by those with discerning eyes.
We also look at ancient archeological and astronomical edifices, monuments, drawings, and images that attempt to express scientific knowledge through iconography and sacred geometry. As above, so below. From Stonehenge to Chartres Cathedral, from the similarities of pyramid structures all over the world, to images of aliens and entities that are prevalent in even the most diverse of cultures, there is hidden truth to be found in the words and pictures and architecture of the distant past.
Viral Mythology is about the way we communicate the truth, and sometimes even the way that we spread rumors and theories that become the stuff of conspiracy and myth and legend, often by hiding it in the creativity, art, architecture, and the imagination of the times, out of direct sight of those who might not want that truth revealed. This book is also about how the stories we tell create and shape the future, based upon our understanding of the past and present. The tales we tell today become the reality of the next generations. The information that shapes our lives today is the new mythology, one day to be unearthed and rediscovered by a civilization far in the future that will wonder how we, too, went viral with the crude technology of our time. The scientific knowledge and historical events of today will one day serve as the study lessons to those in the future who thirst for an understanding of their own past. They, like us, will look back and wonder if what we are describing in the information we convey is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or a fictionalized version that contains within it our level of understanding of the world around us.
Like us, they will wonder how information was embedded in our stories, movies, TV shows, novels, books, and so on; and they, like us, will attempt to construct an image of what life was like for us primitive folks in their distant past.
We are their past, and the way we communicate information is their study guide, a guide that is no doubt filled with words and images and objects that speak and sing of “the way we were.”
In the beginning... Once upon a time... Long ago and far away....
Chapter 1
Information, Please: How We Spread It, How We Get It
Question: What did they use as means of transmitting information in the ancient days?
Answer: Men on feet.
—Answers.com
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of gifts.
—Malcolm Gladwell
This is a book about information: what it is, how it is spread, and why. Without information, we wouldn’t know anything, or be able to express what we know. Without information, we are left in the dark, stumbling for understanding and a footing to stand on. Information is the “stuff” of our reality, from the ideas that fill our heads to the statistics we see on the news to the facts we learn in school to the theories that scientists posit to describe the world we live in and how it works.
All these “its and bits” of information fill our brains with things to perceive and process, and to make sense of the reality we call home, and to imagine the possibilities of other realities as well. Information is education, creativity, intuition, knowledge, wisdom, and fact and all that emerges from the realms of the mind into the physical. Information is everything. The word information comes from the Latin informare, which means “to inform” or “to give form to the mind.” It also means to teach or instruct, and when information is passed on, it is often for the means of instructing or teaching something to the receiver.
But information can also be described as any sensory input to an organism, like a human being. This input is designed to help the organism identify and process the system in which it exists by identifying and using data such as environmental factors and influences, threats to safety, food and water location, changes in social systems, and even the possibility of mating. Some information is meaningless to one organism, but crucial to another. Some information is bypassed or filtered out by the brain as not necessary for survival. Other information causes extreme reactions of fight or flight, or sexual arousal, both of which are necessary for survival (especially the latter!). Even our bodies are made up of information in the form of DNA and genetic coding that influences our physical development.
Though we could go on and on about the various aspects of information in relation to physics and entropy, systems theory, technologically mediated information, semiotics, and abstraction, our focus in this book is information in the form of knowledge, wisdom, and truth, and how it gets from there to here.
Scientific knowledge and understanding, spiritual and religious wisdom, life truths and creative ideas and concepts always existed, albeit not in the complex forms they do in today’s web-linked, viral world. Back in ancient times, what people knew and experienced had outlets that we might think of today as crude and ineffective—and yet, we got the messages, and are in the process of trying to interpret them. Ancient art, myth, stories, lore and legend, buildings and architecture, symbols and archetypes, all served as fodder for the transmission methods of the times, and they did work, because today we revel in the discovery of what those myths and legends and symbols and fodder meant, and how they fit into the structure of modern knowledge.
So here’s the thing. Back in the day, without aid of high-speed gadgets and viral videos, how did information get from one place to another? We might start by looking at how things go viral in a natural sense, minus the gadgetry.
Let’s start with the obvious.
Viva voce is Latin for “by word of mouth.” Passing on information by word of mouth, from person to person, is at heart our most basic form of communication as human beings. Along with writing, which came later, we talk. We tell. We describe and convey using words. Cultural and religious tradition is passed down orally. History is passed down orally, in speech and story-telling. Oral tradition is our way of recording and communicating the history of our species for all of posterity. In Oral Tradition as History, author Jan Vansina describes it as “verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation.” These messages can be spoken, sung, or played along with musical instruments, and must have been passed down at least one generation.
Oral history may involve the passing of personal information, or even societal information from one generation to the next. This form of historical documentation, though effective, often leaves much to be desired because of the possibility of misinformation, disinformation, and even rumor, gaining a foothold in the passing of truth and fact—not to mention the fact that so much of our oral tradition involves actual story-telling and embellishment in which we must weed out the fact from the fiction. Sometimes we even speak in symbols and images that must be interpreted, which leaves the truth open to all kinds of error, not to mention the personal spin those carrying on the oral tradition often put on what they were conveying and transmitting.
But long before we figured out how to scratch out symbols and images on rocks, pick up a pen and put it to paper, and fire up a tablet and get on the Web, we talked it out.
But the way information has been presented and preserved from ancient times is a lot more involved, a lot more complex. It is, at heart, linked intrinsically with our own evolution as a species.
Cultural Evolution
In the fields of anthropology and archeology, cultural evolution presents a theory by which cultures change and replicate in a similar vein to that of genetic evolution. Cultural evolution is an offshoot of the Darwinian evolutionary theory, and examines how cultures are not just influen
ced by their environment and biology, but by social factors as well.
The theory was developed in the 19th century to describe cultural inheritance of habits and knowledge and behavior, and their relationship to social learning structures within a given species. Different species will have different means by which they learn various habits and knowledge, and how they are passed on to offspring. Charles Darwin posited this to natural adaptation and selection that occurred along either vertical lines—from parent to offspring, or oblique transmission—from peers and authority figures. But cultural evolution goes beyond mere natural selection to explain more complex questions as to how learning and information spread and transmit through various cultures, including something called “prestige bias,” which states that individuals in a culture will copy ideas and knowledge from those they consider higher up the prestige chain than themselves.
On the other hand, “conformist bias” posits that we learn from imitation with common types, sort of a “birds of a feather stick together” idea, and this can include imitating any given member of a society or group that appears to be engaging in appropriate behavior. This was especially important for social groups entering an entirely new environment, in the same way today that city folk learn from country folk when they move from Manhattan to the Ozarks. We learn by conforming to those we seek out as being common to us, or with whom we hope to blend in with.
For a culture to evolve, or for any social change to occur, which often requires the spread of information to allow for new knowledge and behaviors, there must be an interaction between the individual and the social environment in which he or she is embedded. We might ask which came first—the individual who makes society, or the society that makes the individual—and find evidence for both. Cultural inheritance, Darwin believed, was learned from one generation to the next via an organic transmission using “gemmules,” particles found in the body that ended up in the gonads, then transmitted to offspring via conception. The new generation would be carrying cellular “knowledge” of the prior generation via these gemmules, and thus continue the traits and characteristics of the parental line.
Another key figure in the development of cultural evolutionary theory, Herbert Spencer, wrote about his view of how evolutionary thinking helped drive human culture via deductive or a priori knowledge. Spencer was a British philosopher and psychologist who actually coined the term survival of the fittest. (The actual quote is “The survival of the fittest, which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called ‘natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life.’”) The experiences, he posited, of past generations were somehow imprinted on human minds as deductive reasoning and knowledge independent of experience, which was then passed on to future generations. This knowledge we possess was that of our ancestors and their experiences, imprinted upon the common mind of all. Spencer also advocated the idea of “use-inheritance,” by which individuals and cultures adopted habits and behaviors that were originally utilized by their ancestors. Can learned habits be passed down from one generation to the next? Spencer is quoted in Darwin’s classic Descent of Man that he believed
the experiences of utility, organized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been producing corresponding modifications, which, by continued transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition, certain emotions corresponding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the individual experience of utility.
The arguments over which theory best explains cultural evolution and the societal transmission of information continues in the halls of academia, among philosophers and anthropologists, archeologists and psychologists alike. But most can agree that there are certain mechanisms at work by which information is passed around, whether from culture to culture, or generation to generation. Or even person to person to person.
Memes and Memetics
In today’s fast-paced world of instant communication, the meme rules. Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, our access and availability to information has changed. A meme is an idea or behavior that spreads within a culture from person to person. It can be done very quickly, as in today’s linked-up world, or slowly, as in oral tradition and story passed from one generation to another. Or it can be a secret whispered in the ear of the person standing next to you, who then whispers to another, and another, until everyone had heard the secret (although by the time it gets to the last person, it’s a completely different secret!).
Chances are good that if you are on the Internet, especially on the many social networking sites, you know what a meme is. To put it simply, a meme is a concept, idea, action, behavior, or even style that spreads within a particular culture via person-to-person interaction. Memes can spread via writing, art, rituals, and anything that can be repeated or imitated by someone else. The word meme comes from the Ancient Greek mimeisthai, “to imitate,” and was actually coined by Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist and ethologist in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, although references to the idea of the “mneme” as a unit of cultural transmission of experiences was discussed in an earlier 1904 book, Die Mneme, by German biologist Richard Semon.
Dawkins, a noted atheist and author of The God Delusion, popularized the idea of the gene as the principal unit of selection in evolution. In The Selfish Gene, he wrote that a meme was a “cultural replicator” that could be viewed as a unit with the ability to copy or duplicate itself, and that all life evolved from the “differential survival of replicating entities.” Ideas, beliefs, catch phrases, and even gestures could be copied via linguistic communication and inference from a person to a person. Ideas, then, which are information, could be thought of as actual entities that hop from one mind to another and make copies as they go, spreading like a mental virus. These would, of course, do so at different rates and speeds, depending on the cultural environment, and eventually might spread beyond one culture to another nearby.
In the same way genes replicate, ideas might do so. Memes therefore can be thought of as the behavioral genes. Dawkins had a lot of skeptics and even scholars who felt he was ignoring the fact that genes are part of their environment, working together. One gene alone does not survival make. But Dawkins strongly supported the idea that for each individual gene, all other genes are a part of its adapted environment. In the same fashion, one meme alone does not a culture make, but memes serve as one driver of ideas within a system.
Memetics is the theory of memes as a driver of evolutionary biology, although it is only one theory. There are issues with memetics being a sole cause of how a culture embraces and transmits ideas and information, and detractors do state that because not all ideas spread through populations in the same manner, not all ideas can be considered replicators, and therefore memes. Another argument posits that cultural units, or memes, do not form lineages the way genes do. For example, a new copy of a gene can be traced back to a single parent, but one cannot trace a single idea as clearly and cleanly back to a single original source.
Ideas do spread through various means of exposure, and many are in fact reproduced again and again until they become a cultural “norm,” but they are not necessarily copied from one person to another. One way to look at these differences would be the world of baking and cooking. Take a recipe, and pass it on to a hundred people. Those one hundred people may or may not follow that recipe to a T, and there will be some results that are absolute duplicates, and others that are close calls. Yet the initial idea, or information, remains somewhat intact.
Spread a recipe through several generations and that intact structure may become less and less formal, as people try this or tweak that, yet all the while still staying somewhat true to the original recipe.
Information that pertains to life in the form of genes can be transmitted in two ways: either vertically, from parent to child via genetic replication, or horizontally via the
introduction of viruses and so forth. This can also apply to memetics and ideas that spread through generations from parents to offspring, and like viruses through populations, effecting and infecting each person that comes in contact with the idea. Thus, the same drivers in genetics are found present when it comes to memes and ideas.
Mind Viruses
Aaron Lynch, an American author and former engineering physicist at Fermilab, with an educational background in mathematics and philosophy, wrote a seminal book titled Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society, in which he documented his theoretical and mathematical models of idea transmission, many of which had been previously published in the scholarly Journal of Ideas. Lynch posited that ideas were information that was encoded in the human neurons or in other media, but could also take on new intentional meanings and contagious properties as they evolved, even becoming new belief sets. This included erroneous beliefs and misinformation as well, leading Lynch to state, “People don’t learn from each other’s mistakes. They learn each other’s mistakes.” Ideas, therefore, were both embedded and evolving, but did not have a “consciousness” of their own and were driven by things such as fads, trends, mass hysteria, even copycat crimes, and violence—even mob rule mentality.
Viral Mythology Page 3
