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If genes are the "digital" operations or production, and they seek to replicate themselves by exact copying, it seems they will seek "strategies" that will serve to extend their control over their environment.
In this regard, Philip Slater got me to thinking about compatibility of ideology with the replicative algorithm when he defined narcissism as the linear extension of oneself into the environment.
Dawkins further caught my attention when he wreote of the replicative algorithm as a "self normalizing" process.
Add to this the "digital" nature of print media as described by Marshall McLuhan in "Understanding Media":
"Socially, the typographic extension of man brought in nationalism, industrialism, mass markets, and universal literacy and education. For print presented an image of repeatable precision that inspired totally new forms of extending social energies. print released great psychic and social energies in the Renaissance...by breaking the individual out of the traditional group while providing a model of how to add individual to individual in massive agglomeration of power".
The "release of psychic and social energies" is merely the linear extension of single processes of thought, designed to unite humans minds under a general banner of collective "truth".
As each individual was added to the "agglomeration" the self normalizing process described by Dawkins was an extension from individual in a collective to to a "cog in the machine", a specialist part in a universal whole.
Western religion accommodated this process by the proselytizing zeal, which, as Eric Hoffer defines it, is merely a way to show proof that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth.
Mathematics, as a linear extension of this very thought process, was the powerful technology of thought that further extended the socialization or even the 'spiritualization" of human minds into a collective universal entity.
That is, all our accomplishments occurred because humans are merely a gene's way of making another human. |
