Dual inheritance theory

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory 

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution.

'Culture', in this context is defined as 'socially learned behavior', and 'social learning' is defined as copying behaviors observed in others or acquiring behaviors through being taught by others. Most of the modelling done in the field relies on the first dynamic (copying) though it can be extended to teaching. Social learning at its simplest involves blind copying of behaviors from a model (someone observed behaving), though it is also understood to have many potential biases, including success bias (copying from those who are perceived to be better off), status bias (copying from those with higher status), homophily (copying from those most like ourselves), conformist bias (disproportionately picking up behaviors that more people are performing), etc.. Understanding social learning is a system of pattern replication, and understanding that there are different rates of survival for different socially learned cultural variants, this sets up, by definition, an evolutionary structure: cultural evolution.

Because genetic evolution is relatively well understood, most of DIT examines cultural evolution and the interactions between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

Theoretical basis

DIT holds that genetic and cultural evolution interacted in the evolution of Homo sapiens. DIT recognizes that the natural selection of genotypes is an important component of the evolution of human behavior and that cultural traits can be constrained by genetic imperatives. However, DIT also recognizes that genetic evolution has endowed the human species with a parallel evolutionary process of cultural evolution. DIT makes three main claims:

Culture capacities are adaptations

The human capacity to store and transmit culture arose from genetically evolved psychological mechanisms. This implies that at some point during the evolution of the human species a type of social learning leading to cumulative cultural evolution was evolutionarily advantageous.

Culture evolves

Social learning processes give rise to cultural evolution. Cultural traits are transmitted differently from genetic traits and, therefore, result in different population-level effects on behavioral variation.

Genes and culture co-evolve

Cultural traits alter the social and physical environments under which genetic selection operates. For example, the cultural adoptions of agriculture and dairying have, in humans, caused genetic selection for the traits to digest starch and lactose, respectively. As another example, it is likely that once culture became adaptive, genetic selection caused a refinement of the cognitive architecture that stores and transmits cultural information. This refinement may have further influenced the way culture is stored and the biases that govern its transmission.

DIT also predicts that, under certain situations, cultural evolution may select for traits that are genetically maladaptive. An example of this is the demographic transition, which describes the fall of birth rates within industrialized societies. Dual inheritance theorists hypothesize that the demographic transition may be a result of a prestige bias, where individuals that forgo reproduction to gain more influence in industrial societies are more likely to be chosen as cultural models.

View of culture

People have defined the word "culture" to describe a large set of different phenomena. A definition that sums up what is meant by "culture" in DIT is:

Culture is socially learned information stored in individuals' brains that is capable of affecting behavior.

This view of culture emphasizes population thinking by focusing on the process by which culture is generated and maintained. It also views culture as a dynamic property of individuals, as opposed to a view of culture as a superorganic entity to which individuals must conform. This view's main advantage is that it connects individual-level processes to population-level outcomes.

Genetic influence on cultural evolution

Genes affect cultural evolution via psychological predispositions on cultural learning. Genes encode much of the information needed to form the human brain. Genes constrain the brain's structure and, hence, the ability of the brain to acquire and store culture. Genes may also endow individuals with certain types of transmission bias (described below).

Cultural influences on genetic evolution

Culture can profoundly influence gene frequencies in a population.

Lactase persistence

One of the best known examples is the prevalence of the genotype for adult lactose absorption in human populations, such as Northern Europeans and some African societies, with a long history of raising cattle for milk. Until around 7,500 years ago, lactase production stopped shortly after weaning, and in societies which did not develop dairying, such as East Asians and Amerindians, this is still true today. In areas with lactase persistence, it is believed that by domesticating animals, a source of milk became available while an adult and thus strong selection for lactase persistence could occur, in a Scandinavian population the estimated selection coefficient was 0.09-0.19. This implies that the cultural practice of raising cattle first for meat and later for milk led to selection for genetic traits for lactose digestion. Recently, analysis of natural selection on the human genome suggests that civilization has accelerated genetic change in humans over the past 10,000 years.

Food processing

Culture has driven changes to the human digestive systems making many digestive organs, like our teeth or stomach, smaller than expected for primates of a similar size, and has been attributed to one of the reasons why humans have such large brains compared to other great apes. This is due to food processing. Early examples of food processing include pounding, marinating and most notably cooking. Pounding meat breaks down the muscle fibres, hence taking away some of the job from the mouth, teeth and jaw. Marinating emulates the action of the stomach with high acid levels. Cooking partially breaks down food making it more easily digestible. Food enters the body effectively partly digested, and as such food processing reduces the work that the digestive system has to do. This means that there is selection for smaller digestive organs as the tissue is energetically expensive, those with smaller digestive organs can process their food but at a lower energetic cost than those with larger organs. Cooking is notable because the energy available from food increases when cooked and this also means less time is spent looking for food.

Humans living on cooked diets spend only a fraction of their day chewing compared to other extant primates living on raw diets. American girls and boys spent on average 8 and 7 percent of their day chewing respectively, compared to chimpanzees who spend more than 6 hours a day chewing. This frees up time which can be used for hunting. A raw diet means hunting is constrained since time spent hunting is time not spent eating and chewing plant material, but cooking reduces the time required to get the day's energy requirements, allowing for more subsistence activities. Digestibility of cooked carbohydrates is approximately on average 30% higher than digestibility of non cooked carbohydrates. This increased energy intake, more free time and savings made on tissue used in the digestive system allowed for the selection of genes for larger brain size.

Despite its benefits, brain tissue requires a large amount of calories, hence a main constraint in selection for larger brains is calorie intake. A greater calorie intake can support greater quantities of brain tissue. This is argued to explain why human brains can be much larger than other apes, since humans are the only ape to engage in food processing. The cooking of food has influenced genes to the extent that, research suggests, humans cannot live without cooking. A study on 513 individuals consuming long term raw diets found that as the percentage of their diet which was made up of raw food and/or the length they had been on a diet of raw food increased, their BMI decreased. This is despite access to many non thermal processing, like grinding, pounding or heating to 48 deg. c. (118 deg. F). With approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain and 60–70 kg body mass, an exclusively raw diet close to that of what extant primates have would be not viable as, when modelled, it is argued that it would require an infeasible level of more than nine hours of feeding everyday. However, this is contested, with alternative modelling showing enough calories could be obtained within 5–6 hours per day. Some scientists and anthropologists point to evidence that brain size in the Homo lineage started to increase well before the advent of cooking due to increased consumption of meat and that basic food processing (slicing) accounts for the size reduction in organs related to chewing. Cornélio et al. argues that improving cooperative abilities and a varying of diet to more meat and seeds improved foraging and hunting efficiency. It is this that allowed for the brain expansion, independent of cooking which they argue came much later, a consequence from the complex cognition that developed. Yet this is still an example of a cultural shift in diet and the resulting genetic evolution. Further criticism comes from the controversy of the archaeological evidence available. Some claim there is a lack of evidence of fire control when brain sizes first started expanding. Wrangham argues that anatomical evidence around the time of the origin of Homo erectus (1.8 million years ago), indicates that the control of fire and hence cooking occurred. At this time, the largest reductions in tooth size in the entirety of human evolution occurred, indicating that softer foods became prevalent in the diet. Also at this time was a narrowing of the pelvis indicating a smaller gut and also there is evidence that there was a loss of the ability to climb which Wrangham argues indicates the control of fire, since sleeping on the ground needs fire to ward off predators. The proposed increases in brain size from food processing will have led to a greater mental capacity for further cultural innovation in food processing which will have increased digestive efficiency further providing more energy for further gains in brain size. This positive feedback loop is argued to have led to the rapid brain size increases seen in the Homo lineage.

Mechanisms of cultural evolution

In DIT, the evolution and maintenance of cultures is described by five major mechanisms: natural selection of cultural variants, random variation, cultural drift, guided variation and transmission bias.

Natural selection

Cultural differences among individuals can lead to differential survival of individuals. The patterns of this selective process depend on transmission biases and can result in behavior that is more adaptive to a given environment.

Random variation

Random variation arises from errors in the learning, display or recall of cultural information, and is roughly analogous to the process of mutation in genetic evolution.

Cultural drift

Cultural drift is a process roughly analogous to genetic drift in evolutionary biology. In cultural drift, the frequency of cultural traits in a population may be subject to random fluctuations due to chance variations in which traits are observed and transmitted (sometimes called "sampling error"). These fluctuations might cause cultural variants to disappear from a population. This effect should be especially strong in small populations. A model by Hahn and Bentley shows that cultural drift gives a reasonably good approximation to changes in the popularity of American baby names. Drift processes have also been suggested to explain changes in archaeological pottery and technology patent applications. Changes in the songs of song birds are also thought to arise from drift processes, where distinct dialects in different groups occur due to errors in songbird singing and acquisition by successive generations. Cultural drift is also observed in an early computer model of cultural evolution.

Guided variation

Cultural traits may be gained in a population through the process of individual learning. Once an individual learns a novel trait, it can be transmitted to other members of the population. The process of guided variation depends on an adaptive standard that determines what cultural variants are learned.

Biased transmission

Understanding the different ways that culture traits can be transmitted between individuals has been an important part of DIT research since the 1970s. Transmission biases occur when some cultural variants are favored over others during the process of cultural transmission. Boyd and Richerson (1985) defined and analytically modeled a number of possible transmission biases. The list of biases has been refined over the years, especially by Henrich and McElreath.

Content bias

Content biases result from situations where some aspect of a cultural variant's content makes them more likely to be adopted. Content biases can result from genetic preferences, preferences determined by existing cultural traits, or a combination of the two. For example, food preferences can result from genetic preferences for sugary or fatty foods and socially-learned eating practices and taboos. Content biases are sometimes called "direct biases."

Context bias

Context biases result from individuals using clues about the social structure of their population to determine what cultural variants to adopt. This determination is made without reference to the content of the variant. There are two major categories of context biases: model-based biases, and frequency-dependent biases.

Model-based biases

Model-based biases result when an individual is biased to choose a particular "cultural model" to imitate. There are four major categories of model-based biases: prestige bias, skill bias, success bias, and similarity bias. A "prestige bias" results when individuals are more likely to imitate cultural models that are seen as having more prestige. A measure of prestige could be the amount of deference shown to a potential cultural model by other individuals. A "skill bias" results when individuals can directly observe different cultural models performing a learned skill and are more likely to imitate cultural models that perform better at the specific skill. A "success bias" results from individuals preferentially imitating cultural models that they determine are most generally successful (as opposed to successful at a specific skill as in the skill bias.) A "similarity bias" results when individuals are more likely to imitate cultural models that are perceived as being similar to the individual based on specific traits.

Frequency-dependent biases

Frequency-dependent biases result when an individual is biased to choose particular cultural variants based on their perceived frequency in the population. The most explored frequency-dependent bias is the "conformity bias." Conformity biases result when individuals attempt to copy the mean or the mode cultural variant in the population. Another possible frequency dependent bias is the "rarity bias." The rarity bias results when individuals preferentially choose cultural variants that are less common in the population. The rarity bias is also sometimes called a "nonconformist" or "anti-conformist" bias.

Social learning and cumulative cultural evolution

In DIT, the evolution of culture is dependent on the evolution of social learning. Analytic models show that social learning becomes evolutionarily beneficial when the environment changes with enough frequency that genetic inheritance can not track the changes, but not fast enough that individual learning is more efficient. For environments that have very little variability, social learning is not needed since genes can adapt fast enough to the changes that occur, and innate behaviour is able to deal with the constant environment. In fast changing environments cultural learning would not be useful because what the previous generation knew is now outdated and will provide no benefit in the changed environment, and hence individual learning is more beneficial. It is only in the moderately changing environment where cultural learning becomes useful since each generation shares a mostly similar environment but genes have insufficient time to change to changes in the environment. While other species have social learning, and thus some level of culture, only humans, some birds and chimpanzees are known to have cumulative culture. Boyd and Richerson argue that the evolution of cumulative culture depends on observational learning and is uncommon in other species because it is ineffective when it is rare in a population. They propose that the environmental changes occurring in the Pleistocene may have provided the right environmental conditions. Michael Tomasello argues that cumulative cultural evolution results from a ratchet effect that began when humans developed the cognitive architecture to understand others as mental agents. Furthermore, Tomasello proposed in the 80s that there are some disparities between the observational learning mechanisms found in humans and great apes - which go some way to explain the observable difference between great ape traditions and human types of culture.

Cultural group selection

Although group selection is commonly thought to be nonexistent or unimportant in genetic evolution, DIT predicts that, due to the nature of cultural inheritance, it may be an important force in cultural evolution. Group selection occurs in cultural evolution because conformist biases make it difficult for novel cultural traits to spread through a population (see above section on transmission biases). Conformist bias also helps maintain variation between groups. These two properties, rare in genetic transmission, are necessary for group selection to operate. Based on an earlier model by Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman, Boyd and Richerson show that conformist biases are almost inevitable when traits spread through social learning, implying that group selection is common in cultural evolution. Analysis of small groups in New Guinea imply that cultural group selection might be a good explanation for slowly changing aspects of social structure, but not for rapidly changing fads. The ability of cultural evolution to maintain intergroup diversity is what allows for the study of cultural phylogenetics.

Historical development

The idea that human cultures undergo a similar evolutionary process as genetic evolution goes back at least to Darwin In the 1960s, Donald T. Campbell published some of the first theoretical work that adapted principles of evolutionary theory to the evolution of cultures. In 1976, two developments in cultural evolutionary theory set the stage for DIT. In that year Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene introduced ideas of cultural evolution to a popular audience. Although one of the best-selling science books of all time, because of its lack of mathematical rigor, it had little effect on the development of DIT. Also in 1976, geneticists Marcus Feldman and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza published the first dynamic models of gene–culture coevolution. These models were to form the basis for subsequent work on DIT, heralded by the publication of three seminal books in the 1980s.

The first was Charles Lumsden and E.O. Wilson's Genes, Mind and Culture. This book outlined a series of mathematical models of how genetic evolution might favor the selection of cultural traits and how cultural traits might, in turn, affect the speed of genetic evolution. While it was the first book published describing how genes and culture might coevolve, it had relatively little effect on the further development of DIT. Some critics felt that their models depended too heavily on genetic mechanisms at the expense of cultural mechanisms. Controversy surrounding Wilson's sociobiological theories may also have decreased the lasting effect of this book.

The second 1981 book was Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman's Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Borrowing heavily from population genetics and epidemiology, this book built a mathematical theory concerning the spread of cultural traits. It describes the evolutionary implications of vertical transmission, passing cultural traits from parents to offspring; oblique transmission, passing cultural traits from any member of an older generation to a younger generation; and horizontal transmission, passing traits between members of the same population.

The next significant DIT publication was Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's 1985 Culture and the Evolutionary Process. This book presents the now-standard mathematical models of the evolution of social learning under different environmental conditions, the population effects of social learning, various forces of selection on cultural learning rules, different forms of biased transmission and their population-level effects, and conflicts between cultural and genetic evolution. The book's conclusion also outlined areas for future research that are still relevant today.

Current and future research

In their 1985 book, Boyd and Richerson outlined an agenda for future DIT research. This agenda, outlined below, called for the development of both theoretical models and empirical research. DIT has since built a rich tradition of theoretical models over the past two decades. However, there has not been a comparable level of empirical work.

In a 2006 interview Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson expressed disappointment at the little attention afforded to DIT:

"...for some reason I haven't fully fathomed, this most promising frontier of scientific research has attracted very few people and very little effort."

Kevin Laland and Gillian Ruth Brown attribute this lack of attention to DIT's heavy reliance on formal modeling.

"In many ways the most complex and potentially rewarding of all approaches, [DIT], with its multiple processes and cerebral onslaught of sigmas and deltas, may appear too abstract to all but the most enthusiastic reader. Until such a time as the theoretical hieroglyphics can be translated into a respectable empirical science most observers will remain immune to its message."

Economist Herbert Gintis disagrees with this critique, citing empirical work as well as more recent work using techniques from behavioral economics. These behavioral economic techniques have been adapted to test predictions of cultural evolutionary models in laboratory settings as well as studying differences in cooperation in fifteen small-scale societies in the field.

Since one of the goals of DIT is to explain the distribution of human cultural traits, ethnographic and ethnologic techniques may also be useful for testing hypothesis stemming from DIT. Although findings from traditional ethnologic studies have been used to buttress DIT arguments, thus far there have been little ethnographic fieldwork designed to explicitly test these hypotheses.

Herb Gintis has named DIT one of the two major conceptual theories with potential for unifying the behavioral sciences, including economics, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology and political science. Because it addresses both the genetic and cultural components of human inheritance, Gintis sees DIT models as providing the best explanations for the ultimate cause of human behavior and the best paradigm for integrating those disciplines with evolutionary theory. In a review of competing evolutionary perspectives on human behavior, Laland and Brown see DIT as the best candidate for uniting the other evolutionary perspectives under one theoretical umbrella.

Relation to other fields

Sociology and cultural anthropology

Two major topics of study in both sociology and cultural anthropology are human cultures and cultural variation. However, Dual Inheritance theorists charge that both disciplines too often treat culture as a static superorganic entity that dictates human behavior. Cultures are defined by a suite of common traits shared by a large group of people. DIT theorists argue that this doesn't sufficiently explain variation in cultural traits at the individual level. By contrast, DIT models human culture at the individual level and views culture as the result of a dynamic evolutionary process at the population level.

Human sociobiology and evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychologists study the evolved architecture of the human mind. They see it as composed of many different programs that process information, each with assumptions and procedures that were specialized by natural selection to solve a different adaptive problem faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors (e.g., choosing mates, hunting, avoiding predators, cooperating, using aggression). These evolved programs contain content-rich assumptions about how the world and other people work. As ideas are passed from mind to mind, they are changed by these evolved inference systems (much like messages get changed in a game of telephone). But the changes are not random. Evolved programs add and subtract information, reshaping the ideas in ways that make them more "intuitive", more memorable, and more attention-grabbing. In other words, "memes" (ideas) are not like genes. Genes are copied faithfully as they are replicated, but ideas are not. It’s not just that ideas mutate every once in awhile, like genes do. Ideas are transformed every time they are passed from mind to mind, because the sender's message is being interpreted by evolved inference systems in the receiver. There is no necessary contradiction between evolutionary psychology and DIT, but evolutionary psychologists argue that the psychology implicit in many DIT models is too simple; evolved programs have a rich inferential structure not captured by the idea of a "content bias". They also argue that some of the phenomena DIT models attribute to cultural evolution are cases of "evoked culture"—situations in which different evolved programs are activated in different places, in response to cues in the environment.

Human sociobiologists try to understand how maximizing genetic fitness, in either the modern era or past environments, can explain human behavior. When faced with a trait that seems maladaptive, some sociobiologists try to determine how the trait actually increases genetic fitness (maybe through kin selection or by speculating about early evolutionary environments). Dual inheritance theorists, in contrast, will consider a variety of genetic and cultural processes in addition to natural selection on genes.

Human behavioral ecology

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) and DIT have a similar relationship to what ecology and evolutionary biology have in the biological sciences. HBE is more concerned about ecological process and DIT more focused on historical process. One difference is that human behavioral ecologists often assume that culture is a system that produces the most adaptive outcome in a given environment. This implies that similar behavioral traditions should be found in similar environments. However, this is not always the case. A study of African cultures showed that cultural history was a better predictor of cultural traits than local ecological conditions.

Memetics

Memetics, which comes from the meme idea described in Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, is similar to DIT in that it treats culture as an evolutionary process that is distinct from genetic transmission. However, there are some philosophical differences between memetics and DIT. One difference is that memetics' focus is on the selection potential of discrete replicators (memes), where DIT allows for transmission of both non-replicators and non-discrete cultural variants. DIT does not assume that replicators are necessary for cumulative adaptive evolution. DIT also more strongly emphasizes the role of genetic inheritance in shaping the capacity for cultural evolution. But perhaps the biggest difference is a difference in academic lineage. Memetics as a label is more influential in popular culture than in academia. Critics of memetics argue that it is lacking in empirical support or is conceptually ill-founded, and question whether there is hope for the memetic research program succeeding. Proponents point out that many cultural traits are discrete, and that many existing models of cultural inheritance assume discrete cultural units, and hence involve memes.

Shortcomings and Criticisms

Psychologist Liane Gabora has criticised DIT. She argues that use of the term ‘dual inheritance’ to refer to not just traits that are transmitted by way of a self-assembly code (as in genetic evolution) but also traits that are not transmitted by way of a self-assembly code (as in cultural evolution) is misleading, because this second use does not capture the algorithmic structure that makes an inheritance system require a particular kind of mathematical framework.

Other criticisms of the effort to frame culture in Darwinian terms have been leveled by Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge, and Stuart Kauffman.

Cultural evolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_evolution

Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations, but anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, evolutionary and biological influences.

There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, cultural evolutionism and other variants on cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories and methods that they apply to its study. In recent years, there has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.

History

Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity. In 1873 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".

Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.

Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.

The early years of the 20th century and particularly the First World War saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word evolution carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation." Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, especially by Fisher, Haldane and Wright, who developed the first population genetic models and as it became known the modern synthesis.

Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there were one influential individual in the revival it was probably Donald T. Campbell. In 1960 he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965 (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field). Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he perceived cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".

Others pursued more specific analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. (Ted) Cloak who argued in 1975 for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels. The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day.

Unilinear theory

In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures progressively develop over time. The underlying assumption was that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and development of civilization.

Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century declared indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.

Under the theory of unilinear Cultural Evolution, all societies and cultures develop on the same path. The first to present a general unilineal theory was Herbert Spencer. Spencer suggested that humans develop into more complex beings as culture progresses, where people originally lived in "undifferentiated hordes" culture progresses and develops to the point where civilization develops hierarchies. The concept behind unilinear theory is that the steady accumulation of knowledge and culture leads to the separation of the various modern day sciences and the build-up of cultural norms present in modern-day society.

In Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877), Morgan labels seven differing stages of human culture: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He justifies this staging classification by referencing societies whose cultural traits resembled those of each of his stage classifications of the cultural progression. Morgan gave no example of lower savagery, as even at the time of writing few examples remained of this cultural type. At the time of expounding his theory, Morgan's work was highly respected and became a foundation for much of anthropological study that was to follow.

Cultural particularism

There began a widespread condemnation of unilinear theory in the late 19th century. Unilinear cultural evolution implicitly assumes that culture was borne out of the United States and Western Europe. That was seen by many to be racist, as it assumed that some individuals and cultures were more evolved than others.

Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution. That differed to the unilinear approach that used to be favoured in the sense that cultures were no longer compared, but they were assessed uniquely. Boas, along with several of his pupils, notably A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, changed the focus of anthropological research to the effect that instead of generalizing cultures, the attention was now on collecting empirical evidence of how individual cultures change and develop.

Multilinear theory

Cultural particularism dominated popular thought for the first half of the 20th century before American anthropologists, including Leslie A. White, Julian H. Steward, Marshall D. Sahlins, and Elman R. Service, revived the debate on cultural evolution. These theorists were the first to introduce the idea of multilinear cultural evolution.

Under multilinear theory, there are no fixed stages (as in unilinear theory) towards cultural development. Instead, there are several stages of differing lengths and forms. Although, individual cultures develop differently and cultural evolution occurs differently, multilinear theory acknowledges that cultures and societies do tend to develop and move forward.

Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.

Memetics

Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene proposed the concept of the "meme", which is analogous to that of the gene. A meme is an idea-replicator that can reproduce itself, by jumping from mind to mind via the process of one human learning from another via imitation. Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.), which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process enables Darwinian evolution among memeplexes and therefore is a candidate for a mechanism of cultural evolution. As memes are "selfish" in that they are "interested" only in their own success, they could well be in conflict with their biological host's genetic interests. Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account for certain evolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.

Evolutionary epistemology

"Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to changes in the body of knowledge surrounding it.

Evolutionary epistemology is a naturalistic approach to epistemology, which emphasizes the importance of natural selection in two primary roles. In the first role, selection is the generator and maintainer of the reliability of our senses and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the "fit" between those mechanisms and the world. In the second role, trial and error learning and the evolution of scientific theories are construed as selection processes.

One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the most rigorous empirical tests available does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to survive future testing. Karl Popper used Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable but were nevertheless overturned by Albert Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived.

Popper is considered by many to have given evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, bur Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.

Dual inheritance theory

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution."

Criticism and controversy

As a relatively new and growing scientific field, cultural evolution is undergoing much formative debate. Some of the prominent conversations are revolving around Universal Darwinism, dual inheritance theory, and memetics.

More recently, cultural evolution has drawn conversations from multi-disciplinary sources with movement towards a unified view between the natural and social sciences. There remains some accusation of biological reductionism, as opposed to cultural naturalism, and scientific efforts are often mistakenly associated with Social Darwinism. However, some useful parallels between biological and social evolution still appear to be found.

Criticism of historic approaches to cultural evolution

Cultural evolution has been criticized over the past two centuries that it has advanced its development into the form it holds today. Morgan's theory of evolution implies that all cultures follow the same basic pattern. Human culture is not linear, different cultures develop in different directions and at differing paces, and it is not satisfactory or productive to assume cultures develop in the same way.

A further key critique of cultural evolutionism is what is known as "armchair anthropology". The name results from the fact that many of the anthropologists advancing theories had not seen first hand the cultures they were studying. The research and data collected was carried out by explorers and missionaries as opposed to the anthropologists themselves. Edward Tylor was the epitome of that and did very little of his own research. Cultural evolution is also criticized for being ethnocentric; cultures are still seen as attempting to emulate western civilization. Under ethnocentricity, primitive societies are said to not yet be at the cultural levels of other Western societies.

Much of the criticism aimed at cultural evolution is focused on the unilinear approach to social change. Broadly speaking in the second half of the 20th century the criticisms of cultural evolution have been answered by the multilinear theory. Ethnocentricity, for example, is more prevalent under the unilinear theory.

Some recent approaches, such as dual inheritance theory, make use of empirical methods including psychological and animal studies, field site research, and computational models.

Praxeology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology 

In philosophy, praxeology or praxiology (/ˌpræksiˈɒlədʒi/; from Ancient Greek πρᾶξις (praxis) 'deed, action', and -λογία (-logia) 'study of') is the theory of human action, based on the notion that humans engage in purposeful behavior, as opposed to reflexive behavior and other unintentional behavior.

French social philosopher Alfred Espinas gave the term its modern meaning, and praxeology was developed independently by two principal groups: the Austrian school, led by Ludwig von Mises, and the Polish school, led by Tadeusz Kotarbiński.

Origin and etymology

Coinage of the word praxeology (praxéologie) is often credited to Louis Bourdeau, the French author of a classification of the sciences, which he published in his Théorie des sciences: Plan de Science intégrale in 1882:

On account of their dual natures of specialty and generality, these functions should be the subject of a separate science. Some of its parts have been studied for a long time, because this kind of research, in which man could be the main subject, has always presented the greatest interest. Physiology, hygiene, medicine, psychology, animal history, human history, political economy, morality, etc. represent fragments of a science that we would like to establish, but as fragments scattered and uncoordinated have remained until now only parts of particular sciences. They should be joined together and made whole in order to highlight the order of the whole and its unity. Now you have a science, so far unnamed, which we propose to call Praxeology (from πραξις, action), or by referring to the influence of the environment, Mesology (from μεσος, environment).

However, the term was used at least once previously (with a slight spelling difference), in 1608, by Clemens Timpler in his Philosophiae practicae systema methodicum:

There was Aretology: Following that Praxiology: which is the second part of the Ethics, in general, commenting on the actions of the moral virtues.

It was later mentioned by Robert Flint in 1904 in a review of Bourdeau's Théorie des sciences.

The modern definition of the word was first given by Alfred V. Espinas (1844–1922), the French philosopher and sociologist; he was the forerunner of the Polish school of the science of efficient action. The Austrian school of economics was based on a philosophical science of the same kind.

With a different spelling, the word was used by the English psychologist Charles Arthur Mercier (in 1911), and proposed by Knight Dunlap to John B. Watson as a better name for his behaviorism. Watson rejected it. But the Chinese physiologist of behavior, Zing-Yang Kuo (b. 1898) adopted the term in 1935. It was also used by William McDougall (in 1928 and later).

Previously the word praxiology, with the meaning Espinas gave to it, was used by Tadeusz Kotarbiński (in 1923). Several economists, such as the Ukrainian, Eugene Slutsky (1926) used it in his attempt to base economics on a theory of action. It was also used by Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1933), Russian Marxist Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) during the Second International Congress of History of Science and Technology in London (in 1931), and Polish scholar Oscar Lange (1904–1965) in 1959, and later.

The Italian philosopher, Carmelo Ottaviano, was using the Italianised version, prassiologia, in his treatises starting from 1935, but in his own way, as a theory of politics. After the Second World War the use of the term praxeology spread widely. After the emigration of Mises to America his pupil Murray Rothbard defended the praxeological approach. A revival of Espinas's approach in France was revealed in the works of Pierre Massé (1946), the eminent cybernetician, Georges Théodule Guilbaud (1953), the Belgian logician, Leo Apostel (1957), the cybernetician, Anatol Rapoport (1962), Henry Pierron, psychologist and lexicographer (1957), François Perroux, economist (1957), the social psychologist, Robert Daval (1963), the well-known sociologist, Raymond Aron (1963) and the methodologists, Abraham Antoine Moles and Roland Caude (1965).

Under the influence of Tadeusz Kotarbiński, praxeology flourished in Poland. A special "Centre of Praxeology" (Zaklad Prakseologiczny) was created under the organizational guidance of the Polish Academy of Sciences, with its own periodical (from 1962), called at first Materiały Prakseologiczne (Praxeological Papers), and then abbreviated to Prakseologia. It published hundreds of papers by different authors, and the materials for a special vocabulary edited by Professor Tadeusz Pszczolowski, the leading praxeologist of the younger generation. A sweeping survey of the praxeological approach is to be found in the paper by the French statistician Micheline Petruszewycz, "A propos de la praxéologie".

Ludwig von Mises was influenced by several theories in forming his work on praxeology, including Immanuel Kant's works, Max Weber's work on methodological individualism, and Carl Menger's development of the subjective theory of value.

Philosopher of science Mario Bunge published works of systematic philosophy that included contributions to praxeology, and Bunge dismissed von Mises's version of praxeology as "nothing but the principle of maximization of subjective utility—a fancy version of egoism". Bunge, who was also a fierce critic of pseudoscience, warned that when "conceived in extremely general terms and detached from both ethics and science, praxiology has hardly any practical value".

Austrian economics

Austrian economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises relies heavily on praxeology in the development of its economic theories. Mises considered economics to be a sub-discipline of praxeology. Austrian School economists, following Mises, continue to use praxeology and deduction, rather than empirical studies, to determine economic principles. According to these theorists, with the action axiom as the starting point, it is possible to draw conclusions about human behavior that are both objective and universal. For example, the notion that humans engage in acts of choice implies that they have preferences, and this must be true for anyone who exhibits intentional behavior.

Advocates of praxeology also say that it provides insights for the field of ethics.

Subdivisions

In 1951, Murray Rothbard divided the subfields of praxeology as follows:

A. The Theory of the Isolated Individual (Crusoe Economics)

B. The Theory of Voluntary Interpersonal Exchange (Catallactics, or the Economics of the Market)

1. Barter

2. With Medium of Exchange

a. On the Unhampered Market

b. Effects of Violent Intervention with the Market

c. Effects of Violent Abolition of the Market (Socialism)

C. The Theory of War – Hostile Action

D. The Theory of Games (Game Theory) (e.g., von Neumann and Morgenstern)

E. Unknown

At the time, topics C, D, and E were regarded by Rothbard as open research problems.

Criticisms

Thomas Mayer has argued that, because praxeology rejects positivism and empiricism in the development of theories, it constitutes nothing less than a rejection of the scientific method. For Mayer, this invalidates the methodologies of the Austrian school of economics. Austrians argue that empirical data itself is insufficient to describe economics; that consequently empirical data cannot falsify economic theory; that logical positivism cannot predict or explain human action; and that the methodological requirements of logical positivism are impossible to obtain for economic questions. Ludwig von Mises in particular argued against empiricist approaches to the social sciences in general, because human events are unique and "unrepeatable," whereas scientific experiments are necessarily reproducible.

However, economist Antony Davies argues that because statistical tests are predicated on the independent development of theory, some form of praxeology is essential for model selection; conversely, praxeology can illustrate surprising philosophical consequences of economic models.

Marx's theory of alienation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation 

 

19th-century German intellectual Karl Marx (1818–1883) identified and described Entfremdung (Alienation of Labor) as Laborers not owning the products they labor to create

Karl Marx's theory of alienation describes the social alienation (German: Entfremdung, lit. 'estrangement') of people from aspects of their human nature (Gattungswesen, 'species-essence') as a consequence of living in a society of stratified social classes. The alienation from the self is a consequence of being a mechanistic part of a social class, the condition of which estranges a person from their humanity.

The theoretical basis of alienation within the capitalist mode of production is that the worker invariably loses the ability to determine life and destiny when deprived of the right to think (conceive) of themselves as the director of their own actions; to determine the character of said actions; to define relationships with other people; and to own those items of value from goods and services, produced by their own labour. Although the worker is an autonomous, self-realized human being, as an economic entity this worker is directed to goals and diverted to activities that are dictated by the bourgeoisie—who own the means of production—in order to extract from the worker the maximum amount of surplus value in the course of business competition among industrialists.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932), Karl Marx expressed the Entfremdung theory—of estrangement from the self. Philosophically, the theory of Entfremdung relies upon The Essence of Christianity (1841) by Ludwig Feuerbach, which states that the idea of a supernatural god has alienated the natural characteristics of the human being. Moreover, Max Stirner extended Feuerbach's analysis in The Ego and its Own (1845) that even the idea of 'humanity' is an alienating concept for individuals to intellectually consider in its full philosophic implication. Marx and Friedrich Engels responded to these philosophical propositions in The German Ideology (1845).

Types of alienation

In a capitalist society, the worker's alienation from their humanity occurs because the worker can express labour—a fundamental social aspect of personal individuality—only through a private system of industrial production in which each worker is an instrument: i.e., a thing, not a person. In the "Comment on James Mill" (1844), Marx explained alienation thus:

Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. (i) In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. (ii) In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature.

In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844/1932), Marx identified four types of alienation that occur to the worker labouring under a capitalist system of industrial production. They are alienation of the worker from their product, from the act of production, from their Gattungswesen ('species-essence') and from other workers.

From their product

The design of the product and how it is produced are determined, not by the producers who make it (the workers), nor by the consumers of the product (the buyers), but by the capitalist class who besides accommodating the worker's manual labour also accommodate the intellectual labour of the engineer and the industrial designer who create the product in order to shape the taste of the consumer to buy the goods and services at a price that yields a maximal profit. Aside from the workers having no control over the design-and-production protocol, alienation (Entfremdung) broadly describes the conversion of labour (work as an activity), which is performed to generate a use value (the product), into a commodity, which—like products—can be assigned an exchange value. That is, the capitalist gains control of the manual and intellectual workers and the benefits of their labour, with a system of industrial production that converts said labour into concrete products (goods and services) that benefit the consumer. Moreover, the capitalist production system also reifies labour into the "concrete" concept of "work" (a job), for which the worker is paid wages—at the lowest-possible rate—that maintain a maximum rate of return on the capitalist's investment capital; this is an aspect of exploitation. Furthermore, with such a reified system of industrial production, the profit (exchange value) generated by the sale of the goods and services (products) that could be paid to the workers is instead paid to the capitalist classes: the functional capitalist, who manages the means of production; and the rentier capitalist, who owns the means of production.

From the act of production

Strikers confronted by soldiers during the 1912 textile factory strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, United States, called when owners reduced wages after a state law reduced the work week from 56 to 54 hours

In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms; wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labor). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family. The distribution of private property in the hands of wealth owners, combined with government enforced taxes compel workers to labor. In a capitalist world, our means of survival is based on monetary exchange, therefore we have no other choice than to sell our labour power and consequently be bound to the demands of the capitalist.

The worker "[d]oes not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself;" "[l]abor is external to the worker," it is not a part of their essential being. During work, the worker is miserable, unhappy and drained of their energy, work "mortifies his body and ruins his mind." The production content, direction and form are imposed by the capitalist. The worker is being controlled and told what to do since they do not own the means of production they have no say in production, "labor is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being. A person's mind should be free and conscious, instead it is controlled and directed by the capitalist, "the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own but someone else's, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another." This means he cannot freely and spontaneously create according to his own directive as labor's form and direction belong to someone else.

From their Gattungswesen (species-essence)

The Gattungswesen ('species-essence' or 'human nature'), human nature of individuals is not discrete (separate and apart) from their activity as a worker and as such species-essence also comprises all of innate human potential as a person.

Conceptually, in the term species-essence, the word species describes the intrinsic human mental essence that is characterized by a "plurality of interests" and "psychological dynamism," whereby every individual has the desire and the tendency to engage in the many activities that promote mutual human survival and psychological well-being, by means of emotional connections with other people, with society. The psychic value of a human consists in being able to conceive (think) of the ends of their actions as purposeful ideas, which are distinct from the actions required to realize a given idea. That is, humans are able to objectify their intentions by means of an idea of themselves as "the subject" and an idea of the thing that they produce, "the object." Conversely, unlike a human being an animal does not objectify itself as "the subject" nor its products as ideas, "the object," because an animal engages in directly self-sustaining actions that have neither a future intention, nor a conscious intention. Whereas a person's Gattungswesen does not exist independently of specific, historically conditioned activities, the essential nature of a human being is actualized when an individual—within their given historical circumstance—is free to subordinate their will to the internal demands they have imposed upon themselves by their imagination and not the external demands imposed upon individuals by other people.

Relations of production

Whatever the character of a person's consciousness (will and imagination), societal existence is conditioned by their relationships with the people and things that facilitate survival, which is fundamentally dependent upon cooperation with others, thus, a person's consciousness is determined inter-subjectively (collectively), not subjectively (individually), because humans are a social animal. In the course of history, to ensure individual survival societies have organized themselves into groups who have different, basic relationships to the means of production. One societal group (class) owned and controlled the means of production while another societal class worked the means of production and in the relations of production of that status quo the goal of the owner-class was to economically benefit as much as possible from the labour of the working class. In the course of economic development when a new type of economy displaced an old type of economy—agrarian feudalism superseded by mercantilism, in turn superseded by the Industrial Revolution—the rearranged economic order of the social classes favored the social class who controlled the technologies (the means of production) that made possible the change in the relations of production. Likewise, there occurred a corresponding rearrangement of the human nature (Gattungswesen) and the system of values of the owner-class and of the working-class, which allowed each group of people to accept and to function in the rearranged status quo of production-relations.

Despite the ideological promise of industrialization—that the mechanization of industrial production would raise the mass of the workers from a brutish life of subsistence existence to honorable work—the division of labour inherent to the capitalist mode of production thwarted the human nature (Gattungswesen) of the worker and so rendered each individual into a mechanistic part of an industrialized system of production, from being a person capable of defining their value through direct, purposeful activity. Moreover, the near-total mechanization and automation of the industrial production system would allow the (newly) dominant bourgeois capitalist social class to exploit the working class to the degree that the value obtained from their labour would diminish the ability of the worker to materially survive. Hence [?], when the proletarian working-class become a sufficiently developed political force, they will effect a revolution and re-orient the relations of production to the means of production—from a capitalist mode of production to a communist mode of production. In the resultant communist society, the fundamental relation of the workers to the means of production would be equal and non-conflictual because there would be no artificial distinctions about the value of a worker's labour; the worker's humanity (Gattungswesen) thus respected, men and women would not become alienated.

In the communist socio-economic organization, the relations of production would operate the mode of production and employ each worker according to their abilities and benefit each worker according to their needs. Hence, each worker could direct their labour to productive work suitable to their own innate abilities, rather than be forced into a narrowly defined, minimum-wage "job" meant to extract maximal profit from individual labour as determined by and dictated under the capitalist mode of production. In the classless, collectively-managed communist society, the exchange of value between the objectified productive labour of one worker and the consumption benefit derived from that production will not be determined by or directed to the narrow interests of a bourgeois capitalist class, but instead will be directed to meet the needs of each producer and consumer. Although production will be differentiated by the degree of each worker's abilities, the purpose of the communist system of industrial production will be determined by the collective requirements of society, not by the profit-oriented demands of a capitalist social class who live at the expense of the greater society. Under the collective ownership of the means of production, the relation of each worker to the mode of production will be identical and will assume the character that corresponds to the universal interests of the communist society. The direct distribution of the fruits of the labour of each worker to fulfill the interests of the working class—and thus to an individuals own interest and benefit—will constitute an un-alienated state of labour conditions, which restores to the worker the fullest exercise and determination of their human nature.

From other workers

Capitalism reduces the labour of the worker to a commercial commodity that can be traded in the competitive labour-market, rather than as a constructive socio-economic activity that is part of the collective common effort performed for personal survival and the betterment of society. In a capitalist economy, the businesses who own the means of production establish a competitive labour-market meant to extract from the worker as much labour (value) as possible in the form of capital. The capitalist economy's arrangement of the relations of production provokes social conflict by pitting worker against worker in a competition for "higher wages", thereby alienating them from their mutual economic interests; the effect is a false consciousness, which is a form of ideological control exercised by the capitalist bourgeoisie through its cultural hegemony. Furthermore, in the capitalist mode of production the philosophic collusion of religion in justifying the relations of production facilitates the realization and then worsens the alienation (Entfremdung) of the worker from their humanity; it is a socio-economic role independent of religion being "the opiate of the masses".

Philosophical significance and influences

Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) postulated the idealism that Marx countered with dialectical materialism

 

Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872) analysed religion from a psychological perspective in The Essence of Christianity (1841) and according to him divinity is humanity's projection of their human nature

In Marxist theory, Entfremdung ('alienation') is a foundational proposition about man's progress towards self-actualisation. In the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2005), Ted Honderich described the influences of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach upon Karl Marx:

For Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is divided against itself, separated from its "essence", which it has placed in a "beyond".

As used by philosophers Hegel and Marx, the reflexive German verbs entäussern ('to divest one's self of') and entfremden ('to become estranged') indicate that the term alienation denotes self-alienation: to be estranged from one's essential nature. Therefore, alienation is a lack of self-worth, the absence of meaning in one's life, consequent to being coerced to lead a life without opportunity for self-fulfillment, without the opportunity to become actualized, to become one's self.

In The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel described the stages in the development of the human Geist ('spirit'), by which men and women progress from ignorance to knowledge, of the self and of the world. Developing Hegel's human-spirit proposition, Marx said that those poles of idealism—"spiritual ignorance" and "self-understanding"—are replaced with material categories, whereby "spiritual ignorance" becomes "alienation" and "self-understanding" becomes man's realisation of his Gattungswesen (species-essence).

Entfremdung and the theory of history

In Part I: "Feuerbach – Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook" of The German Ideology (1846), Karl Marx said the following:

Things have now come to such a pass that the individuals must appropriate the existing totality of productive forces, not only to achieve self-activity, but also, merely, to safeguard their very existence.

That humans psychologically require the life activities that lead to their self-actualisation as persons remains a consideration of secondary historical relevance because the capitalist mode of production eventually will exploit and impoverish the proletariat until compelling them to social revolution for survival. Yet, social alienation remains a practical concern, especially among the contemporary philosophers of Marxist humanism. In The Marxist-Humanist Theory of State-Capitalism (1992), Raya Dunayevskaya discusses and describes the existence of the desire for self-activity and self-actualisation among wage-labour workers struggling to achieve the elementary goals of material life in a capitalist economy.

Entfremdung and social class

In Chapter 4 of The Holy Family (1845), Marx said that capitalists and proletarians are equally alienated, but that each social class experiences alienation in a different form:

The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power, and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated, this means that they cease to exist in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and in the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement, the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. Within this antithesis, the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, and the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it.

Criticism

In discussion of "random materialism" (matérialisme aléatoire), French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized such a teleological (goal-oriented) interpretation of Marx's theory of alienation because it rendered the proletariat as the subject of history; an interpretation tainted with the Hegelian idealism of the "philosophy of the subject," which he criticized as the "bourgeois ideology of philosophy" (see History and Class Consciousness [1923] by György Lukács).

Hyperreality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality

Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins. It allows the co-mingling of physical reality with virtual reality (VR) and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (AI).

Individuals may find themselves, for different reasons, more in tune or involved with the hyperreal world and less with the physical real world. Some famous theorists of hyperreality/hyperrealism include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel J. Boorstin, Neil Postman and Umberto Eco.

Origins and usage

The postmodern semiotic concept of "hyperreality" was contentiously coined by French sociologist Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation. Baudrillard defined "hyperreality" as "the generation by models of a real without origin or reality"; hyperreality is a representation, a sign, without an original referent. According to Baudrillard, the commodities in this theoretical state do not have use-value as defined by Karl Marx but can be understood as signs as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure. He believes hyperreality goes further than confusing or blending the 'real' with the symbol which represents it; it involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers which represent something that does not actually exist, like Santa Claus. Baudrillard borrows, from Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" (already borrowed from Lewis Carroll), the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape. He says that, in such a case, neither the representation nor the real remains, just the hyperreal.

Baudrillard's idea of hyperreality was heavily influenced by phenomenology, semiotics, and Marshall McLuhan. Baudrillard and Eco explained that it is "the unlimited existence of "hyperreal" numbers or "non-standard reals", infinite and infinitesimal, that cluster about assumedly fixed or real numbers and factor through transference differentials." Baudrillard, however, challenges McLuhan's famous statement that the 'medium is the message', by suggesting that information devours its own content. He also suggested that there is a difference between the media and reality and what they represent. Hyperreality is the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies. However, Baudrillard's hyperreality theory goes a step further than McLuhan's medium theory: "There is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct action of the medium can no longer be determined".

American author Micah Dunham explores the notion of hyperreality further by suggesting that the action of hyperreality is to desire reality and in the attempt to achieve that desire, to fabricate a false reality that is to be consumed as real. Linked to contemporary western culture Umberto Eco and post-structuralists would argue, that in current cultures fundamental ideals are built on desire and particular sign-systems.

Significance

Hyperreality is significant as a paradigm to explain current cultural conditions. Consumerism, because of its reliance on sign exchange value (e.g. brand X shows that one is fashionable, car Y indicates one's wealth), could be seen as a contributing factor in the creation of hyperreality or the hyperreal condition. Hyperreality tricks consciousness into detaching from any real emotional engagement, instead opting for artificial simulation, and endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearance. Essentially (although Baudrillard himself may balk at the use of this word), fulfillment or happiness is found through simulation and imitation of a transient simulacrum of reality, rather than any interaction with any "real" reality.

While hyperreality is not a relatively new concept, its effects are more relevant today than when it was first conceptualized, since society becoming more technologically advanced, allows it to use such concepts as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and neurotechnology (simulated reality), among other advancement. This is attributed to the way it effectively captured the postmodern condition, particularly how people in the postmodern world seek stimulation by creating unreal worlds of spectacle and seduction and nothing more. There are dangers to the use of hyperreality within our culture; individuals may observe and accept hyperreal images as role models when the images don't necessarily represent real physical people. This can result in a desire to strive for an unobtainable ideal, or it may lead to a lack of unimpaired role models. Daniel J. Boorstin cautions against confusing celebrity worship with hero worship, "we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but who are famous because they are great". He bemoans the loss of old heroes like Moses, Ulysses S. Grant, Aeneas, Jesus, Julius Caesar, Muhammed, Joan of Arc, William Shakespeare, George Washington, Napoleon, and Abraham Lincoln, who did not have public relations (PR) agencies to construct hyperreal images of themselves. The dangers of hyperreality are also facilitated by information technologies, which provide tools to dominant powers that seek to encourage it to drive consumption and materialism. The danger in the pursuit of stimulation and seduction emerge not in the lack of meaning but, as Baudrillard maintained, "we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us."

Hyperreality, some sources point out, may provide insights into the postmodern movement by analyzing how simulations disrupt the binary opposition between reality and illusion but it does not address or resolve the contradictions inherent in this tension.

Key relational themes

Simulation/Simulacra: The concepts most fundamental to hyperreality are those of simulation and the simulacrum, first conceptualized by Jean Baudrillard in his book Simulacra and Simulation. The two terms are separate entities with relational origin connections to Baudrillard's theory of hyperreality.

Simulation

Simulation is characterized by a blending of 'reality' and representation, where there is no clear indication of where the former stops and the latter begins. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance; "It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal." Baudrillard suggests that simulation no longer takes place in a physical realm; it takes place within a space not categorized by physical limits i.e., within ourselves, technological simulations, etc.

Simulacrum

The simulacrum is often defined as a copy with no original, or as Gilles Deleuze (1990) describes it, "the simulacrum is an image without resemblance". Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right. He created four steps of reproduction: (1) basic reflection of reality, (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretense of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which "bears no relation to any reality whatsoever".

Definitions

• "A real without origin or reality" – Jean Baudrillard
• "The authentic fake." – Umberto Eco

Quotations

"Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map." — Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," Simulacra and Simulation

Examples

Disneyland

Both Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard refer to Disneyland as an example of hyperreality. Eco believes that Disneyland with its settings such as Main Street and full sized houses has been created to look "absolutely realistic", taking visitors' imagination to a "fantastic past". This false reality creates an illusion and makes it more desirable for people to buy this reality. Disneyland works in a system that enables visitors to feel that technology and the created atmosphere "can give us more reality than nature can". The "fake nature" of Disneyland satisfies our imagination and daydream fantasies in real life. The idea is that nothing in this world is real. Nothing is original, but all are endless copies of reality. Since we do not imagine the reality of simulations, both imagined and real are equally hyperreal, for example, the numerous simulated rides, including the submarine ride and the Mississippi boat tour. When entering Disneyland, consumers form into lines to gain access to each attraction. Then they are ordered by people with special uniforms to follow the rules, such as where to stand or where to sit. If the consumers follow each rule correctly, they can enjoy "the real thing" and see things that are not available to them outside of Disneyland's doors.

In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard argues the "imaginary world" of Disneyland magnetizes people inside and has been presented as "imaginary" to make people believe that all its surroundings are "real". But he believes that the Los Angeles area is not real; thus it is hyperreal. Disneyland is a set of apparatuses which tries to bring imagination and fiction to what is called "real". This concerns the American values and way of life in a sense and "concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle."

"The Disneyland imaginary is neither true or false: it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real. Whence the debility, the infantile degeneration of this imaginary. It's meant to be an infantile world, in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that real childishness is everywhere, particularly among those adults who go there to act the child in order to foster illusions of their real childishness."

Filmography

• Existenz. Dir. David Cronenberg. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law. Miramax, 1999. Film.
• The 2008 film Synecdoche, New York in which the life of the main character Caden Cotard is lived in the confines of a warehouse made to be the set of a play which is about his life, blurring all distinction between what is real and the simulation.
• The 2014 film Birdman portrays a theater director haunted by making his show as authentic as possible, leading to people getting hurt.

Other examples

• Films in which characters and settings are either digitally enhanced or created entirely from CGI (e.g.: 300, where the entire film was shot in front of a blue/green screen, with all settings super-imposed).
• In A Clockwork Orange when Alex says, "It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen" when he undergoes Ludovico's Technique.
• A well-manicured garden (nature as hyperreal).
• Any massively promoted versions of historical or present "facts" (e.g. "General Ignorance" from QI, where the questions have seemingly obvious answers, which are actually wrong).
• Professional sports athletes as super, invincible versions of human beings.
• Many world cities and places which did not evolve as functional places with some basis in reality, as if they were creatio ex nihilo (literally 'creation out of nothing'): Black Rock City; Disney World; Dubai; Celebration, Florida; Cancun and Las Vegas.
• TV and film in general (especially "reality" TV), due to its creation of a world of fantasy and its dependence that the viewer will engage with these fantasy worlds. The current trend is to glamorize the mundane using histrionics.
• A retail store that looks completely stocked and perfect due to facing, creating an illusion of more merchandise than there actually is.
• A high end sex doll used as a simulacrum of an unattainable partner.
• A newly made building or item designed to look old, or to recreate or reproduce an older artifact, by simulating the feel of age or aging.
• Constructed languages (such as E-Prime) or "reconstructed" extinct dialects.
• Second Life: The distinction becomes blurred when it becomes the platform for RL (Real Life) courses and conferences such as Alcoholics Anonymous meetings or leads to real world interactions behind the scenes.
• Weak virtual reality.
• The superfictional airline company Ingold Airlines.
• Works within the spectrum of the Vaporwave musical genre often encompass themes of hyperreality through parody of the information revolution.
• Plastic surgery: the constructed face that effaces the distinction between "natural" and "artificial" in the syntax of beauty.
• Airbrushed images of men and women. For example, Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty.
• The superfictional video game Petscop.