XX & Epistemological War
Not a book review, more a call to arms
Hello!
I’m Faris. But I’m also you, right now, because the voice in your head you are hearing is your own interior monologue. I’ve co-opted it for the time being, to transmit some ideas into your brain, under the radar, disguised as your own thoughts, appearing as you read this on a screen.
However, I regret to inform you, the voice in your head is not entirely your own. It is a product of every word, story, song, film, and idea you have consumed. It is created from culture, which of course includes which language you think in, filtered through your specific genetic make up and lived experiences, assembled into who you think you are.
I’m here to tell you why a book called XX by Rian Hughes is interesting and why I think you should read it.
However, to do the book justice and avoid spoilers this is not going to be a book review. Rather I’m going to hijack your brain with a few of what I think are the very important ideas contained therein.
The nomadic creative consultancy I run with my wife Rosie is called Genius Steals because we believe nothing comes from nothing, ideas are new combinations and originality is a myth.
Ideas are made of other ideas and the set of ideas I want to put forward come very directly, with attribution and the greatest respect, from one tiny section of this remarkable book. I’m quoting and borrowing, which is an idea that also features in the book. One character muses:
“Where do these new ideas come from? Forever replicating from a twist of an old idea, or some novel interbreeding of two or more to create a fascinating and seductive new strain.”
I could tell you XX is an extraordinarily ambitious science fiction novel by an excellent graphic designer, expansive in narrative, concept and form, but you can get that from Amazon. The set of ideas I want to retransmit are about today, the time and ideaspace we currently live in.
They are about why people refuse to believe things that are provably true and strongly believe things that are demonstrably false.
“Some of the oldest ideas we have ever thought are still with us today, myths grown stronger despite their disagreement with scientific or rational discourse.
Unaware of the irony, they are using the products of modernity — electronic reproduction, the Internet, social media, to spread…{We} can easily be infected with the mimetic virus called faith. Faith is belief without evidence.”
Ideas that are most common are, by definition, the one that are best at replicating through people. These are sometimes called memes, in Dawkin’s original conception, but the meme of memes has also evolved on the internet, becoming something else, something more or less. Something different.
Ideas evolve, regardless of what is originally intended.
An Infectious idea spreads through populations like a pandemic, by presenting an “inarguable three-fold case for itself:
One. It offers new knowledge: Seduction.
Two. It supplants all alternatives: Persuasion.
Three. It becomes an imperative: Conviction. These three steps turn an idea into action.
Conviction, one arrived at, is very hard to shake, and pretty impervious to rational argument. And it can do this all while convincing you that you’ve come to these conclusions of your own free will.”
Ideas arise from and collate into cultures:
“Differing subtly in their beliefs, norms and social conventions, each evolves and develops, casting off old ideas and taking on new ones. Just like an individual, a culture can, in effect, ‘change its mind’.
In the past, different cultures evolved in isolation; as travel and communications spread, so cultures with very different ideas came into contact with each other for the first time. They had to negotiate mutual -
ence or face assimilation or extermination.
The high-speed mimetic nervous system that is the internet has now demolished the last geographical barriers to communication.
Thus we see different ‘personalities’ of evolved cultures duking it out on the world’s stage; the last big heavyweight punch-up of long embedded ideologies.”
How does that sound to you, as you say it yourself?
When I heard it in my head it felt true, and I felt the need to retransmit it.
So, I just did.
THE BATTLE FOR MEANING
It seems to me, and probably to you as well, that we are in the middle of an epistemological war.
You may not have thought about it in those terms before but now you have, or at least have heard that phrase in your head. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with what can be known, it is the study of knowledge itself. How can we know things and what does it mean to know something? What are the sources of knowledge?
The vast majority of things we know we learn second hand, which means we absorb them from culture, second hand. This is partially why there is what is known as a ‘culture war’ tearing into our societies.
Who gets to decide what is true?
One of the most famous examples of this idea is the fact that the world is round…
(Well, It’s not round really, it’s three dimensional so it’s a sphere…well actually it’s an oblate spheroid, which is like a sphere that is squashed at the top and bottom, because of the rotation of the planet, which means the circumference around the poles is less than the circumference around the equator.
But you get the idea.)
We used to think it was as flat as it appears to be. Of late, some people have decided they prefer that idea and, what’s more, many people have decided they get to decide what they want to believe more generally about things we had largely already agreed upon.
Indirect knowledge is drawn from authorities, etymologically that which was written down or ‘authored’, but now everyone can write anything down and perhaps because of that people feel empowered to believe whatever they want. This is written down, or digitally typed and rendered anyway — do you believe me?
Ideologies are memeplexes, idea stacks that coalesce, achieving some kind of internal consistency, impervious to facts from the outside. All too often it leads to this ‘either I already believe it or I’m not going to’ mentality.
Science and history are constantly being renegotiated, challenged by various ideologies, updated or re-interpreted. The inherent fallibility of people is being used as a cudgel to dismantle the entire edifice of modern knowledge, in hopes of creating a new stable orthodoxy that favors the ideologies that aren’t satisfied with the status quo, or where they think things are going.
We should always challenge received notions, question authority and orthodoxy, but the key is to hold ideas lightly and abandon them when evidence suggests they are wrong.
In the absence of trust in authorities, governments, experts, corporations, academia, and so on, the danger is we leave ourselves, our culture, exposed. When you take antibiotics, you eradicate vast swaths of useful, symbiotic bacteria in your microbiome as well as the ones causing the illness. This leaves fertile uncontrolled territory for new bacteria to colonize, some of which may be harmful.
When we abandon authority, or expertise, we leave culture open to potentially harmful mimetic viruses — faiths — that are impervious to arguments, and lead people to do themselves potentially fatal harm.
Neil deGrasse Tyson once tweeted ‘The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it’ and that’s true, in the sense that the natural laws being described by science don’t care what we all believe.
But for us as societies, it matters very much whether or not we believe in science as the ever evolving body of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t.
People are usually very keen on their own survival but ideas don’t care if people live or die, which we can clearly see in hospitals all over the USA in 2021, as people who reject the science of vaccines die in huge, unnecessary, numbers.
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BUY AND READ XX BY RIAN HUGHES ON AMAZON IT’S VERY GOOD!
