[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dave,

Dave said:
For me that makes the problem even more difficult. 
Biological evolution by natural selection at least has  a 
well defined theory with dedicated scientists/philosophers 
working on it. Evolution, unfolding, at the physical, social, 
and intellectual levels really don't have any evolutionary 
theories per se let alone people exploring them from that 
POV.

Matt:
For me to rightly assess the level of difficulty you perceive 
in these kinds of exploration, I think it would turn on 
what you perceive as a good "theory."

To my mind, a general framework for perceiving cultural 
evolution is supplied well by Richard Rorty when he 
analogizes cultures to what Wittgenstein meant by 
lebensform (forms of life), and says that, just like in 
Darwinian biological evolution, forms of life kill each other 
off as the outlive their ability to survive.  I don't see the 
problem in having a big view like that, and then taking 
the individual disciplines as marking out different little 
pieces in the big picture.

For instance, why did the epic, as a literary genre, die?  A 
short answer would be that the epic was a form of 
narrative that grew in response to humans needing a 
manner in which to store knowledge.  In oral cultures, 
since nothing could be written down, knowledge was 
_literally_ what you could remember, and so we can 
explain the epic's use of narrative, epithetic formula, 
heroes, gods, and archetypal thematics as instruments 
for "storing" knowledge (with its increased ease of recall).  
The epic began to die when writing came on the scene 
and written prose took on it's cultural storage function.  
With that gone, poets began to experiment and found the 
epic boring, and moved beyond it.  Nobody goes back to it 
partly because of not needing its noetic function, partly 
because poetry and literature generally became rooted in 
the search for technical novelty (also rooted in the 
creation of writing), but partly because of other cultural 
transformations that began afterwards, like our changing 
sense of what a "god" is.  That's why Milton wrote the last 
epic.  The epic couldn't survive in our cultural climate now 
that we have other ways of storing knowledge, and other 
attendant beliefs about what poets should be doing.

That's just a small story about one little blip on the 
cultural screen, and it uses a lot of different kinds of 
resources from different disciplines (anthropology, literary 
history, archaeology, media studies).  For my money, we'll 
just get better at integrating little stories like this, and we 
need no bigger theory to house them than Rorty's 
extrapolation of the Darwinian theory of natural selection 
to human artifacts (both physical and cultural).

Do you see a different kind a problem at the level of 
theory, or are you just thinking of this kind of current 
stratification of disciplines?  (What you said later 
suggests the latter to me.)

Matt
 		 	   		  
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