Neuron History
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. We tend to see cultural history as showing a progression, a direction, and that the accumulation of knowledge is increasing in complexity and power, and is ‘passed on’ in such a manner as to influence successive cultures, for good or ill.
In On Deep History and the Brain, Danial Lord Smail suggests 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 1984, by George Orwell, or like Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley. Daniel Lord Smail thinks it will be like Brave New World. Genes, he suggests, want to proliferate, 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 those that stimulate body sensations, particularly pleasure, but also fear, excitement, enhanced perception, and feelings of solidarity. These create mental energy and a sense of virtual 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 “for free” – 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 threatened and uncertain 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 stimulations which activate most effectively the most reward neurons will have the most acceptance and proliferation, and these reward neurons, like pharaoh’s and kings, will 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.
