Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

COMPARATIVE CIVILIZATIONS AND HOW WE ENDED UP HERE: MINDFULNESS AS ALGORITHMIC COMPUTATION

(context: human groups and computation)

You don’t learn about religion – particularly your own – by studying it. You learn by studying all religions past and present, and the consequences of their practice.

Likewise, you don’t learn about economic, law, or state without comparative study. And most of all you don’t learn about civilizational differences without studying civilizational strategies.

Let’s do a few comparisons:

The division of labor produces a commensurability of prejudices (“pre-judgments”), a commensurability of norms, a commensurability of paradigms, that result in a concentration of efforts producing common beneficial ends.

So, just as the change from particular knowledge (many different incompatible processes) to scientific knowledge (general rules of general application) created a convergence in understanding and convergence in all formal knowledge to a universal paradigm, the same is true for informal knowledge – not just science. And this convergence to general rules accounts for a substantial difference in the increase in demonstrated intelligence (crystalized intelligence) across all peoples (if not fluid or biological intelligence). So via negativa, we remove frictions of not only ignorance but incommensurability concentrate our thinking (efficiency) on producing greater returns as a result.

We emphasize the most obvious benefit of the division of labor: the increase in productivity from the division of labor. But not the more influential increase in productivity, and a decrease in incommensurability.

If we understand the (virtuous) self-reinforcing cycle between the division of labor and optimal norms: it produces commensurability interest, norm, and paradigm. It produces the same returns in normative thought in informal knowledge as it science does in formal knowledge.

And then we see how economic reality, together with the law that prohibits resistance to it, also explain the evolution of religion in primitive societies with primitive production: in those societies, their adaptation is slow and innovation all but suppressed, but the production of norm and paradigm are heavily reinforced, in return for the continuous expansion of those who could not compete otherwise. And with trade and law, the evolution of tort (property), and the continuous suppression of irreciprocity(parasitism), increases at the expense of the reproduction of the uncompetitive.

So we are faced with a problem of misapplication of childhood indoctrination to group strategy, and adult adaptation of the economy within that strategy. And we can also understand as a consequence why religiosity creates ignorance, dysgenia, poverty, and resists innovation, adaptation and change.

As such we can judge not only group strategies, but religions that reinforce them, by tests of dysgenia, poverty, ignorance, superstition(Recitationism), and maladaptation, versus eugenic, wealth, knowledge, empiricism (Testimonialism), and adaptation.

From this, we can understand the benefit of truthful religions and false religions: Universe (perhaps anthropomorphized as a god or gods), Nature (the world we are part of), Ancestors (whose investments made us possible), Archetypal Heroes(whose investments made successful adaptation possible), Kin (those who mutually invest in our shared genetic interests, and State (the corporealization of our people as an organization acting in our interests.)

And so it is not that religion (indoctrination -long term) is less necessary than law, or law less so than science, or science, less than military prowess, less so than strategy. It is that this hierarchy provides a developmental hierarchy from the child to the adult, to the intellectual, to the strategic and political. And likewise, this hierarchy provides graceful failure in the absence of sufficient knowledge to make a judgment.

However, this hierarchy can only fulfill its function under certain conditions: and that is when the religious have no economic and political power, the economic have no political and strategic power, and the political and strategic have no economic power.

But under universal democracy we have granted equal power to unequal knowledge, and unequal cognitive development, thus replicating the dysgenics of religious civilizations within our legal and martial civilization. When throughout our history we had separate ‘houses’ for the monarchy (the military), the senate (the economic elites), and the commoners (the house in pre-Semitic, or the church in Semitic eras)

So by the victorian period, we had restored the losses of the fall of the roman empire and largely recovered from the semiticism (Judaic Christianity) that prevented its restoration, and we’d produced rule of law by natural law, a monarchy for its function, a senate(upper house) for the macro-nobility having demonstrated interests in the preservation of the polity, the lower house, having demonstrated interests in the economy and productivity, and the church representing the demonstrated interests of families, women, children, the poor and the incompetent. And in doing so created houses for all classes rather than just the upper middle and upper classes.

And upon the dissolution of the church by the combination of darwin, industrialization, literacy, and the evolution of Semitic religion from superstition to pseudoscientific) yes – anti-civilizational marxism, socialism, boazianism, Freudianism etc), we failed to rename the house of commons (lower house) as the house of common market participants, and create a new house as the house of labor, family, children, and the poor. Or even two houses: one for Labor, and one for women children, and the poor.

So we are stuck as a consequence with the American system of two parties, the european system of multiple parties, and insufficient number of houses, and the tendencies of parties to replace houses, producing ideological rather than empirical judgments.

Had we maintained our market for the production of commons, had we made this innovation instead of universal democracy, we would have preserved the market for competition between (a) the stages of development including the emotional, cognitive, knowledge, and responsibility, (b) demonstrated responsibility for self, productivity, family, business, industry, knowledge (science), polity. (c) our ability to use houses of government as yet another expansion of the jury (as we had for 5000 years), where in each class issued verdict on policy.

The Jews and Muslims never solved the problem of politics, and christianity failed to repeat the egyptian and byzantine ambitions – religion is antithetical to it.

The Hindus are relatively opaque but solved the problem of religion, state and law through an odd combination of mythology and philosophy – and the only reason they survived is a vast territory, a vast population, a vast underclass, and a peninsula that provided no strategic value.

The Chinese solved the problem of ethno-state as culture and professional bureaucracy, but not politics or law.

The Russians incrementally defeated the steppe warriors (Mongols), and decolonized Russia, then almost all of north Eurasia, producing a fully re-militarized society. Had the Jewish Bolsheviks not been successful in destroying Russian civilization (as they destroyed german, and now American) from within, Russia might have emerged as the Sparta of great powers, as Britain the Athens of great powers, and America the Rome.

The French killed the middle class, then the aristocracy, then set out to destroy the heart of europe: the holy roman empire -then secularized the church, and achieved by secular means the church’s ambition of a conquest of europe by authoritarian socialist rule. This is the correct undrestanding of french ambitions: a feminist rule of Europe in opposition of a prussian masculinist rule of europe. In opposition to a russian mongolian or chinese rule of eurasia.

The germans solved the problem of professional bureaucracy, but only afterward democracy, and abandoned european law in favor of Continental rule. The secret to german success however, is german culture which like hindu culture appears not a matter of state but of perpetuation of ancient tradition of “we must be best because we are surrounded”.

The British solved law first by never abandoning it, then politics by multiple houses, then a professional bureaucracy that evolved out of the military. And it it is british civilization, least bound by historical geographic constraints in europe that restored the european tradition of germanic, roman, and greek civilizations. The British were more ‘free to evolve’ by experimentation than other nations of Europe – yet another virtue of island culture.

The Americans solved law most thoroughly, unfortunately, took the advice of the french (the french are always wrong on everything), in an attempt to take the best of european civilization: european traditional law of individual sovereignty, British empirical rule of law, contract, and process; the political order of the holy roman empire (which was still intact at the time) as an alliance of states this time under a political rather than monarchical bureaucracy, and but utterly failed to create a professional bureaucracy and instead developed clientelism.

Had we also completed Babbage’s innovation, and developed operationalism and computationalism before the postwar period, we might have defeated the pseudoscientific movement, and in particular, the evolution of pseudoscientific law we call positive law. We certainly would have avoided the total waste of a century in philosophy, and perhaps closed philosophy as we had closed theology – limiting it to the adaptation of current paradigms to new discoveries of truth (sciences) which is the only function it can provide.

So in retrospect the industrial revolution came early; gave the false promise of escape from physical(scarcity), natural (amorality, reciprocity), and evolutionary (regression to the mean,dysgenia), governments adapted too slowly; the law failed to understand itself, and failed to increase its precision as a formal logic, and human cooperation as formal computation by trial and error, and the church collapsed, leaving the academy, which was taken over by a new pseudoscientific religion that continued to violate those physical, natural and evolutionary laws, under the false promise of freedom from scarcity, the inescapable amorality of human nature, the inescapable spectrum of adaptability in humans.

There is no reason today that a complete understanding of man, history, economics, law, politics, and groups strategy is not taught every child – except that it would forever end the dysgenic and semitic religions and the false promise of this second religion: the pseudosciences that would bring about another dark age.

Today’s lesson in Synthesis. 😉