Take Another Look
It looks like a religious war. Muslims of all stripes, secular and fundamentalist,
railing against the United States hegemony (and its Israeli partner), willing
to do desperate, suicidal acts to force everyone to read the Q'uran and to stone
Debby the next time she does Dallas.
But it's not. It's a war over mental protocols that's as old as life on earth.
In Global
Brain, My (unwitting) mentor Howard
Bloom describes two kinds of personalities: Conformity Enforcers and Diversity
Enhancers:
Conformity Enforcers are the key to any successful life
form: bacteria, slime mold, rodents, and humans. They're also the key to successful
superorganisms - bacteria colonies, rat nests, human families, tribes, nations,
Republicans and Democrats. Without 99.9% conformity, nothing would be stable
enough to work - physiology, language, economics, traffic, software, TCP/IP,
HTML.
Diversity Enhancers are the key to progress (sometimes called
evolution - ssshhhh) - why we no longer walk on all fours, how the individual
cells of slime mold learned to come together to be slime mold, but
only when necessary. How so many Americans learned to loath racism and why
Islam fundamentalists can read better than their ancestors could before Muhammad
told them the Qu'ran was important.
It's a weak argument if you're a fundamentalist because you don't believe in
evolution, so why take an interest in a distinction based on it? We can address
their objections later. The rest of us seem to need some intellectual footing
in this quandary over whether to colonize Iraq. Like quantum states, both viewpoints
are valid and both must be present for our culture or any superorganism
to thrive.
Like any blog, this writer and my one remaining reader have agreed to conform
to rigid protocols. Twenty-six specifically shaped symbols are arranged according
to ancient rules and interspersed with modern symbols
("<b><i>symbols</i></b>") and then moved across
glass and wires according to rules so strict that only computers can enforce
and carry out the requirements.
If you tire of all this rigid discipline and escape to a virgin wilderness,
you'll find yourself conforming to rules even more rigid, imposed by elements
and predators so exacting that a single misstep can be deadly. So the next time
we congratulate ourselves on our radical non-conformism, we might remember that
the most edgy behavior is played out on the thinnest margins of our collective
habits. Mike Moore has more in common
with George Bush II than he has differences.
Conversely, the self-satisfied suburbanites, businessmen and politicians who
insist on their narrow vision are blind to the radical inventions that make
their existence possible. Most of us, if transported to 1776, would side with
the British, as did most of the successful people of that time. Like heirs to
industrial age fortunes, the beneficiaries of past innovation resist most innovations.
All of that is biological, enforced by our ROM-based DNA and reinforced by
our RAM-based upbringing. The only thing interesting about those distinctions
is that so few of us are willing to acknowledge our need for conformity and
diversity. Until we collectively get behind both needs, there will be no constructive
engagement.
On Wednesday, John Robb
pointed to a terrific video of Bill Clinton addressing a group at Berkeley.
After the predictable love-in stage of the award ceremony, Clinton spoke of
the greatest current threat to the world - the insistence, by people who know
they have all the answers, to the right to change everybody else, or subjugate
them. Because of the zip codes I've known, I've met a lot more Christians like
that than Muslims. Such fundamentalism is their threat, not their ideologies,
which are just details.
Clinton suggested that we need to emphasize what we have in common rather than
our differences. Jay Leno would probably point out that he may mean that no
politician should be outraged at lies from another politician, but the point
is valid. Civilized people understand that they don't have all the answers and
it pisses off their own people. He cites the fact that Gandhi was killed by
a Hindu and Anwar Sadat by an Egyptian. Much abuse is domestic, raging at the
diversity enhancers.
The only problem is that such appeals don't work and never have, since we're
wired to discover and attack differences.
However, where jawboning is useless, economics has a chance. Sellers are willing
to ignore their differences with buyers and buyers are grateful to those who
solve their problems. Those are functional relationships, so we should concentrate
on them, rather than their opposite which are, I suppose, dysfunctional relationships.
Perhaps that distinction lies at the heart of the rage that patriarchs, fundamentalists
and conservatives feel toward people who question their rigidity in the bright
light of the Agora, as Socrates did. Out there, you can't yell, "Because
I said so!," which works so well with family members who don't go
to school to think for themselves. That's the real problem fundamentalists have
with scientific education, television and the devil's own work, the Internet.
The catalyst is satellite TV, not religious beliefs. Get a bunch of Christian
and Islamic fundamentalists together and they'd have the rules written and the
world carved up as speedily as did Hitler and Mussolini.
So naturally, I see an Internet-based peer-to-peer economy as a candidate to
get the patriarchal fundamentalists' followers to admit that they were just
mouthing the words so they could get the attention of the influential patriarchs.
Once the hierarchies are marginalized by open source transaction web forms,
people will do directly what they thought they needed the patriarchs for - reach
better markets for their energy and engage their genes
for usefulness.
11:05:38 PM 
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