theory and practice

The following essay is in reference to the discussion thread, Brian Assam’s The Theory of Social Omnipresence, .

I’ve omitted the first paragraph addressed to the resident sangha of a monastery, and added a few notes in brackets.

INTEGRITY: 1989 Spring     *     Kerry Jikishin Dugan

…

In conceiving of integrity as evident only in behavior I began by asking, “What is it that influences and forms behavior? I find my own answer best expressed in K. Eric Drexler’s writing on memes [in an earlier usage]. He writes, “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain. …As test tube RNA molecules compete for scarce copying machines and subunits, so memes compete for a scarce resource - human attention and effort. Since memes shape behavior their success and failure is a deadly serious matter. Memes themselves face their own matters of life and death: as replicators, they evolve soley to survive and spread. Like viruses they can replicate without aiding their hosts survival. …Experience shows that ideas evolved to be successful replicators need have little to do with the truth. …At best, mental parasites harm people by wasting their time. At worst, they implant deadly misconceptions. Parasites have forced organisms to evolve immune systems. …Parasitic memes have forced minds (to evolve) meme systems that serve as mental immune systems. They suggest standards for judging memes, helping the mind distinguish between parasites and tools.”

A central premise of this essay is that… for the universal Sangha and the ecology of identity in which beings live, meme lineages comprise evolution and are either replicated or “die out”. As twentieth century practitioners of the Buddha Way we may consider the memes, or ways, of the Shape of the Vessel [the time and place, situatedness] identical to Practice.

The purpose of this essay, as taken from the Ango brochure, is “to practice understanding the root of moral disintegration. Why it has come to this. To understand our connection to it in the way we live our lives. How we are responsible for it. What we will do.”

Sensei Shibata speaks of the Samuri view of utility. That the primary use of the sword is to kill the ego, and secondly, to protect the body. The same can be said of all our tools, technologies, offices and institutions. Where these first and second uses are reversed we find a formulae for counter-integrity, or dis-integrity, i.e., that the ego is protected, and the body killed. Be it a body of knowledge, a corporate body, the body politic, or the bodies of our great, great grandchildren.

In setting down a working definition of the theme, The Maintenance of the Innate, I’m neither suggesting that living integrity can be the assuming of a custodial role toward some allotment of content, nor that there can be any predetermined quota of responsibility. When we come to see integrity as the maintenance of the innate we can see as well that what we are born with is born with us. [enactment]

Though our patterns are in some ways foreshown our freedoms are completely reliant on the entirety we inhabit. While we foster the out-workings of potentiality each point of departure/arrival reckons fulfillment while reinstating the nextness of givens. Whether or not a congruence is disclosed it is dispossessed of the un-indigenous and actually unsubject to variables. Here I am concerned with the integrity of human purposes which are only evident in the problematic, negotiable societal processes. Individual integrity, as a challenge belonging to all would-be moderns, is quickly becoming a common mandate irrespective of separatism as operative in resistances to evolutionary imperatives. Who would stand out will be immersed in the personal resurgence of a tribalization.

The laws that govern the function of integrity are not in need of enforcement. It requires no institutional monitoring unless it is an institutional integrity. We can see this where duty to fixed policy/motivation is over-ridden through individual attention to actuals. In a young enlisted John Loori’s [the American Zen Master] disobedience of a theoretical “order” for the sake of practicing the actual, natural order of living values. Conversely, in the Watergate testimonies where a clear deviance from Constitutional Law took the form of acting out of so-called “loyalty to the President”. In Rusty Schwiekart’s realization that those in “the position” to signal him to send warheads toward entire regions often had less accurate information than he himself as an out-ranked flyer. For Col. John Stockwell “the rationale” for his career activities in the CIA had “broken down”. These kinds of instances reveal that events are not so much incidental as they are consequential. Reveal that, although events are completely unique and special case, they are by no means isolated. That we are events makes eventual integrity inevitable. Competence is morality. Though to err is human, it may not be humane.

We’ve tended to guess that because a value, thing or meme is prevalent that it is also “popular”. That since a pattern pervades the more or less synthetic order(ing) that it has passed some common sense scrutiny which endorses it’s proliferation as if by informed decree. But, too often, by the decree of sleep. The perpetuation of the obsolete is voted for, not by a conscious nod of consent, but by a kind of nodding off. A kind of stunted solace that what’s in wide use is what is obviously appropriate for humankind in general.

Though opportunities knock has never been so loud or incessant, and never before come to so many from so many directions, we now risk it’s being drowned out by the co-arisen sirens of warranted whistle-blowing, or muffled by the subtler alarms of angst and domestic discontent. Our genetic, psychological, and ethical constitutions can not quite admit that this century, on the whole, rings-a-bell. Although millennia of exquisite efforts and development might prove apt preparation, preparation and foundation are not all that apply. Some of our age old decisions have rightly lead adherents to pass on the respective “torches”. What, for previous generations might have been noble, illuminating acquisitions we may, with a close look, find to be explosive sticks with wicks. Discerning this, do we choose to pass these aspects of our heritage on? While there are still wicks left to notice, some of the impending pertinent tasks will be clear as day for the immediately, intimately concerned. One such lit wick is what I’ll call, Technototemism.

In early totemism we had the sectarian cartusche, the cliché motifs equated to stabilized communal identity. The totem was an object venerated and “belonged to” by peoples identified with specific historic segments and legendary episodes which defined, focused and rallied intra-clan social nucleation. This totemism was dependent on there being an external natural order to which we’d begun to turn for clues as to what our own appropriate functions were. Technototemism is marked by acculturation as simultaneously engendering in the identity consumer, a credence in possession, a suedo-rational justification for the subversion and/or transference of responsibility, and provides an all-too-plausible motivation for maladaptive, or cancerous, isolations/insulations in favor of a status quo.

[note: here totemism is seen as a root of the Blue/Amber vMeme]

Through animism we began to attend to how our species operates, how we work, what comprises us, and then supposed on our environments the like. Seeing our world cleaved into distinct components, we drew corollaries with the known aspects of our constitution which we’d been categorizing in increasingly specific delineations. Both totemism and animism were socialization phases which necessitated and facilitated the development of lingual codification as transitional between communion and communication.

[note: animism, a root of the Orange vMeme]

With the advent of memes of synthetic pattern replication, of re-presentation in code and the hardwares for the materialization of memory [written language, audio/visual re-presentation], came an increasingly plausible case for an illusory permanence. Societies began to use these memes to derive, construct and manipulate convivial identity. We produced distinct media for the conveying of code addressing independent senses.

Today, of all who believe they’ve heard John Lennon’s voice how many of us have heard John Lennon’s voice? One myth contributing to excessive, obsessive abstraction is that representation is something else, or that one has heard or seen a given thing before. That we can ignore integrity. What’s gone on at the same time is a conceptual dissolution, or displacement of myth of indigen. We’ve shown one another, through metaphor, that what’s occurring currently is not separate from what’s ever happened. That we cannot ignore integrity.

Whatever we do, accountability remains a constant, though we may abdicate our sense of it. So-called leisure, as a parasitic meme of that abdication, has come about with our arranging and evolving occupations and preoccupations with more and more diversification. We’ve delegated the various chores of sustenance into vocations and trades, divvying the tasks of sufficiency further and further from the nuclear hearth. While this assisted and assured that we currently witness unprecedented conscious interdependence, all modes of referral may be reinforcing a maladaptive temptation toward an impersonal world-viewing, where the accent weighs heavily on acquiring and teeters between keeping up with neighbors and keeping neighbors down.

In a referential worldview the directions of inquiring are either reactively channeled or this essential inquiring is prematurely and superficially satiated.

One example of how advances in communications technology have conditioned an era characterized by polarizations and mixed-blessings is the acculturation around the telephone. While enabling us, for several generations already, to realize a pragmatic collapse of the myth of distance, it’s use also tends to propagate and accentuate a myth of prerogative through an exaggerated option built into it’s design that does not represent or teach an actuality. We can “hang up”.

Our designs train the senses and, in turn, “work on” our automatic behaviors (unless adequate mental immune responses are occurring) such as with the design shifts from circular dial to digital clocks, phones, etc. . Previously, the entire spectrum segment basis in use were represented and explicit to the tool user. In digitalization the relations of the units are functionally abstracted from the continuum their relevance is dependent on. These shifts impact our motivational modeling to the degree that our behaviors have become automatic. A change in our consensus-awareness, however, always precedes any technological implementation or reflection of our mutual choices.

User and used, technician and technique, may need to strike a more viable balance if these roles are not to be disproportionately reversed in ways that cancel the effectiveness of both.

The activities and activations of human beings are not mechanistic nor ultimately mechanizable. Despite behaviorist proofs to the contrary we are not, nor is our environment, automized. There’s no autonomy beyond interdependence.

The only suggestion I’ll submit in the way of solution to our crisis in values, is to notice where we are seizing patterns and imposing them inappropriately: in order to begin the practical task of dismantling the common consensus legitamation and paradigmatic alibis in order to reveal how reactivity impedes responsibility. And how we may begin to unlearn to anesthetize one another, unlearn our perpetuating of maladaptive fixations. That in the collective sense we may see into the “second nature” of societies, discover why we’ve become so good at what is clearly no good, and work so hard at what will never work.

With the technological segregation of the senses through single-sense or sense-set media came the gradual acceleration of the historically recent meme replicative method, what I’ll call the ededic schizogeny of transpersonal autism. Ededic as, “being of the senses". Schizogeny, as in biology, is reproduction by multiple, asexual (non-binary) fission, characteristic of sporozoans which are parasitic and named from the Greek “sporadikos“, lit. “isolated“ or “scattered“. Here I apply the word, schizogeny, to “creatures of the mind” as precursors to human conduct. .

The passivity of voyeurisms of ideology or dogma, undiscerning allegiance, uncreative audience, and identity consumerism, as parasitic memes, may eventually be “weeded” from an Information Age through the popular use of interactive media and participatory policy processes: an over-all increased solidarity/congruence of the extensions (re: M. McLuhan) of eyes, ears, noses, tongues, bodies, and minds. [a reference to the Heart Sutra]

Any efforts we’ll exert in nurturing initiatives to create responsive, less fixed tools, institutions, and worldviews, are, by my values, worth our serious consideration and implementation. When we abandon both arena and spectatorship we will no longer breed the martyrs and sacrificial expendabilities of Technototemism’s dehumanization of individuals. By an individual I mean a person as a locus of rights, not as a performer of exclusive programs. By humanization I mean the process of autonomous entrainment with the impetus of service to the equilibrium of the local universe, which necessarily distinguishes the moral agent from the dysfunctional element.

That we happen to imprint to dysfunction doesn’t mean the gig is up. Once our experience of a problem is worked through, our intimacy with the former malady becomes the most expedient basis for eradicating the erroneous pattern from there on. We become carriers of the medicinal memes for the diseases we’ve personally healed.

What is it that we can offer our time? The offerings of ‘totemism are sacrificial, entropic, disintegrative. The offerings of democracy are decentral, holonomic, regenerative, and the eventual, exponential empowering of autonomous, ultimately volitional service. A service possible only when the arrogance of prerogative is sufficiently transmuted and the old amelioration with the “actor” gone.

In the Himalaya a mother submerges her newborn in frigid water. This custom, as an immunity meme, acknowledges that survival of womb conditions is no automatic guarantee of an independent survival. Of all that we create together, all expressions of our lives that determine the character of culture, how much of it are we willing to honor with the wise love of the Himalayan mother? First, the 100% support of placenta, next, the testing threat of autonomy, is an apt way of evolving an organism or an organization in practical feasibility empowered to fare in the spectrum of it’s possible futures.

Where is there to turn to notice and learn from the exemplars of remedial, compensatory strains of initiative native to the gravities of the modern ferment? Who already demonstrates or gestates the healthiest responding to our generation’s dilemmas? Damnation is not a problem of karmic momentum. The transpiring assaults on former order and all the casualties of causality are as lawful and wondrous as the qualitative prosperities of a giver. Horrendous circumstance naturally calls for monumental catharsis. Small wonder things are sudden to the blind.