On Deep History and the Brain, Daniel Lord Smail, 2008.

Does culture evolve  and if so, how?  This is a big question, for if culture evolves and we can change its course, then perhaps we can change our future.

Some see cultural history as showing a progression, a direction.  They see accumulation of knowledge as increasing in both content and complexity and power, and as being ‘passed on’ in such a manner as to influence successive cultures.  In On Deep History and the Brain,  Danial Lord Smail finds that the engine and logic of cultural evolution lies in the neurology of the human brain.  In his thinking, biologic evolution is about genes getting what they want, and cultural evolution is about neuron’s getting what they want.  Genes and neurons, however,  don’t want the same things, and this may not be good.

It has been said that our future would either be like in 1984, by George Orwell, or like in Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley.  Daniel Lord Smail thinks it will be like Brave New World.  Genes, he suggests, want control, but neurons want soma.

Mr. Smail notes that the ideas and knowledge that ‘take hold’ in the neurons of minds the most avidly, and therefore get passed-on the most powerfully, are ideas and knowledge that stimulate  body sensations, particularly pleasure, but also fear, excitement, emotions, and feelings of solidarity.  These are the ideas and knowledge that mentally stimulate body states of energy and experience.  We crave, after all, experience, because we crave learning, and we particularly crave experience and learning that are low cost in energy.   Vivid brain stimulation and virtual experience can seem like living and learning at low energy cost.

And so, for Mr. Smail, History with a capital H can be seen as a story of seeking, obtaining, and manipulating increasing intensities of mental sensation.   Wars are fought for access to sugar, caffeine,  alcohol, and hallucinogenic drugs, and religious rituals are developed for shared ecstatic mood, body excitement, and feelings of unity.  Greater masses of collective organization are sustained.   Dominant elites achieve influence and control and maintain hierarchy, using both the positives of excited ideology and the negatives of unpredictable physical and emotional abuse.  History becomes a story of excitement, propaganda, group enthusiasm, and the control of the many by the few.

Not unlike mass societies, our brain neurons seem to have a heirarchical structure, with reward neurons at the top.  Mental stimulation that succeeds in activating reward centers will be that which rings the most bells in the body, creates the most powerful sensation of virtual experience.  And these stimulations will have the most compelling power for acceptance and proliferation.  Like pharoahs and kings, the reward neurons drive the lessor neurons to serve their needs.  Think rock concerts, multi-media experiance, drugs and alcohol, the passion of political rallies, movies, television, and “Amusing ourselves to Death“, Neil Postman, 1985.

The direction of culture evolution may not be progress, but intoxication.