In the past few generations, the medium of human communication has undergone such exponential change that we are finding it difficult to comprehend the consequences of its evolution. As the process is still in flux, collective consensus seems unimaginable. In an effort to help us tame this chaotic social environment and understand the consequences resulting from it, we try to communicate to one another about communication itself, reaching for simple and straightforward examples which deal with the ‘big picture’, such as the effect of the telephone or 24-hour TV news on society. These examples are mostly clichés now. The temporal dimension of information transfer has been completely compressed by media technology, from telegrams to twitter. Time is no longer a barrier to communication, just as the spatial dimension ceased to be a barrier with the development of globe-spanning ships and aircraft.
In this essay, I wish to explore an idea related to this observation. It is an idea that draws abhorrence out of the supposed rational thinker, because it is an inherently eschatological idea, and perhaps “the” eschatological idea. It is an idea that may just be my own attempt at grasping for a simplifying metaphor while suffering from future shock. It is also not my idea.
It is simply this: We are approaching the end of History.
I: The Eschatological Meme
Among those attempting to understand and explain the chaotic flux of mass communication, the concept of the meme is primary. A meme is a unit of information that is transmitted through any communicative media. Richard Dawkins coined the word in his book The Selfish Gene, which discussed the spreading of ideas and cultural phenomena in relation to evolutionary principles, which are, of course, memes themselves. The concept of a meme is itself, a meme, and a powerful one at that. It permeates all discussion about communicative media, and is multi-faceted in its meaning, making effective communication about it troublesome. For example, the term meme has a secondary meaning; a unit of information that is so widespread that it can be deemed ‘popular’. In this case, a meme acts like a social currency, an abstraction that can deepen communication between people. Among some Internet communities, new memes become something that are sought after and created intentionally, the idea presumably being to become aware of a meme before it is popular, helping to maintain a façade of social elitism within the community.I find it is a concept that is best explained through examples: While the chair you are sitting on is itself not a meme, the idea of a chair, a construct to sit on, is. In the secondary sphere, the understanding of a meme as a widely spread idea, a catchphrase such as Homer Simpson’s “D’oh!” is a meme whereas the character Milhouse is not, despite pleas to the contrary. When I use the term in the following paragraphs, I use it with both primary and secondary meanings because I consider Dawkins’ evaluation to be correct; memes respond to the pressures of natural selection, and while this does not mean that the most popular ideas at the moment are necessarily the strongest, the overarching trend is for the best memes to be.
It is very difficult to avoid contradictions and gross generalizations such as this when taking about memes. They are, of course, generalizations themselves, and rife with contradiction. The fashionable solution to this problem is to disregard it; if your meme is strong, it will overcome opposition in its climb to the top of the informational hierarchy, a position only now made possible by a global peer review process based on a wealth of shared resources. This is the solution I will adopt: I am no scholar, nor is this my meme, absolving me of the need to prove it as truth. If it is bunk, it will be bunk.
The idea that History is ending is a subunit of a greater cultural meme: Eschatology. In its broadest sense, Eschatology is the study of the end of the world. It is an old idea, and is present in many religious and philosophical systems. All major world religions have an Eschatology; a realm of thought and scripture related to end times. Even Scientism has an Eschatology, through the idea of a technological singularity. In present times, the eschatological meme is most pronounced in the 2012 mythology, which posits that the supposed end of the Mayan long-count calendar on December 21st 2012 will herald a world-changing, if not world-ending event. My own biases are weaved within this meme and its subsets. The idea that History is ending was one I first heard while listening to a lecture by the late Terence McKenna, who was the creator/discover of a fractal model of time he called the Timewave, which in his estimation reaches its zero point in concordance with the Mayan long-count calendar.
I however, do not believe in the end of the world, nor do I believe that the end of History will occur during an unremarkable winter solstice in 2012. I do not know the future, and cannot claim to. I can only take all the information available to me at present and to try and create a working model that can help me to more accurately predict what might be around the corner, even if I cannot see it. Ultimately though, models, like memes, flatten reality in order make it more manageable. They are not absolute truth (ironically an artificial idea in itself). At the end of History, whether it is in two years or two thousand million, as the victorious memes jewel the crown of human intellectual endeavor, the following will be understood:
They are not truth, but are, as McKenna might say, “True enough”.
II: History’s end.
At the core of my argument that we are approaching the end of History is my understanding of what History actually is. For a high school pupil, History is a subject to be studied that involves novel events and their consequences. From a wider perspective, History is a record of the past, an informational resource that we can learn from. One of the most widespread memes regarding History is that it goes in cycles. I particularly like the saying “History never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.” It is obvious to the layman, from a brief analysis of History, that mankind has made the same mistakes over and over again. One reading of this could be that these mistakes are actually just very resilient memes - the necessity of war is a pertinent example. Related to this is another widespread meme; History is always written by the winners, and therefore contains obvious biases. My own understanding of History is that it is a human phenomenon and not the objective passage of time since its beginning, as is commonly understood. To be precise, I consider History to be an intermediary stage between two major points in the greater passage of time. These points are the birth of communication, and the point at which communication is no longer bound by time and space.
The events of History are widely spread memes in and of themselves. One of the greatest problems in the struggle for truth over the course of History has been the creation of memes that are not based in the reality of their origin. Religious myths provide the best example of this: It is not a matter of historical record whether Jesus Christ lived or not, it is a matter of faith or opinion. What is a matter of historical record though, as far as we can discern with the information available to us, is that there was no census being held at the time of his supposed birth. In more recent times, the Allies’ victory in World War II allowed for the historical record to be skewed in their favour, and the question of who financed the Third Reich to be quietly ignored. History if it is anything, is a story of amnesia.
The problem of History can be reduced down to a simple idea: How can we objectively know what happened at any given point in time if we ourselves were not there to witness it? To compound this problem, witnessing is not enough. We continually skew our own input data to suit our biases. Could you, for example, objectively explain to me what you have done since waking today? Historical artifacts are inherently biased: the closest we can get to objectivity is a video recording, and that in itself is open to manipulation by the person behind the camera. As a result, collective consensus based in rational and objective understanding becomes considerably more difficult the more complex the subject is. On the other hand, Scientism, an interpretation of reality apparently based on rational and objective understanding, flounders precisely because it is biased toward the pursuit of absolute truth, or to put it differently, toward the isolation of truth.
The question of how to transcend the problems created in the historical process is an important one, and as the reader might expect, not one with a clear cut answer. Post-History is a difficult concept to imagine, let alone model. I contend however, that post-History will be characterized by a state where the domains of time and space are completely negated for human communication. In a sense, this is a point that has already been reached. However, barriers to communication still persist. The end of History will occur when all memes have the complete freedom to propagate following the laws of natural selection. When all information becomes transparent and accessible to all, all can make correct decisions. Mistakes result from a lack of quality information, or to put it differently, from the artificial bias placed upon incomplete or incoherent memes. History may tell us stories of the subjugation and persecution of humanity, but what History really is, is the oppression of ideas themselves.
III: The infowar at the end of History.
Underpinning my own biases with regard to this essay is a simple and powerful meme, ironically enough originating from Jesus Christ, whose historical legitimacy I previously questioned. It is, of course: “The truth shall set you free.”
I consider truth and freedom to be the same thing. Absolute truth is an insidious meme borne of an idea that has wreaked havoc throughout History: The difference between right and wrong. This is an artificial construct, and in my estimation, the greatest sin of all. A presupposition to this idea, that man has the right to judge, is that man is capable of judging. If this is the case, does it not render a righteous god obsolete? Perhaps the great appeal of this meme has been precisely the fact that it considers man as a god. However, as a man who does not consider himself religious, the great folly in this idea for me is that any action or thought can be only considered as one or the other, never both. This approach to understanding evaluates everything in a degree of isolation, and forbids the connectivity and complexity underlying all process and situations. In framing my own understanding of the world I favour a different meme: “Nature does not understand right and wrong; it only understands balance.”
Although the domains of time and space have been negated, and the end of History is possible, artificial biases still persist, and the root cause of this is another sinister meme: Secrecy. This is the final hurdle to jump, and our rapid approach to it has begun. At the time of writing, the release of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks has recently begun, and has thrown the issue of secrecy into the spotlight. The past few days have provided an excellent example of the adapted version of the previously mentioned quote: “The truth will set you free, but at first it will piss you off.”
The only reasonable objection to the release I have read so far, is that it will prevent US diplomats from doing important work in countries with oppressive governments. At the heart of this argument however, is the assumption that the US should be doing this work in the first place. If the US, or any government for that matter, truly wants to spread democracy and human rights all over the planet, the action they need to take is simple: Provide people with the tools and information that will catalyse the process. Trust in a bottom-up approach, not a top-down one. However, Democracy - government for the people, by the people - is barely practiced in the countries that evangelise it. If it were, the diplomatic cables would not need to be released. They would be in the public domain already.
It is my hope that Wikileaks have checkmate in sight, and that the process of dismantling the spurious elitism based on secrecy will not be hindered by their actions. Ultimately however, it is a done deal. If Wikileaks fails, some other force will carry on the crusade. Information wants to be shared, and memes need to be spread – the medium of human communication has now developed to the point that secrecy is no longer possible. Truth will find a way into the light.
The infowar at the end of History has begun. When the dust settles, there will be no winners preserving their version of events in stone. The only winners will be ideas themselves, and it is in all likelihood that they will compel us to leave the nightmare of History behind forever, and awaken into a new world that is, at this moment, unimaginable.
Conclusion
I hope that the reader understands my cause for optimism, despite what I am actually saying. Things will get very messy. Truth will get horribly twisted. Chaos will dominate, and fear will permeate. This is what has to happen; nature only recognizes balance, and we have maxed out our karmic credit. It is time to work our way out of this debt. We cannot know what awaits us at the end of this process. We do not have control over memes, and no one can have a monopoly on truth. What is important is that we embrace what is to come, and have pure intentions.
That we are approaching the end of History is the meme that I wish to spread. It is not my idea, nor are any of the ideas explored in this essay. I do not consider it an idea that needs to be proved. The duty for you and I is not to try and convince others what is the right or wrong, or what is real or not. Our only duty is to spread the memes and let them fight it out themselves.
(Tl;dr) The infowar at the end of History has begun. May the best memes win.