Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, And “God”

“There is a certain uniformity in all types of dedication, of faith, of pursuits of power, of unity and of self sacrifice. There are vast differences in the contents of holy causes and doctrines, but a certain uniformity in the factors which make them effective. He who, like Pascal, finds precise reasons for the effectiveness of Christian doctrine has also found the reasons for the effectiveness of Communist, Nazi, and nationalist doctrine. However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing”. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer, 1951

What we have seen, summed up so far, is that technology creates a “numbing’ effect on people, and each new technology becomes an extension of some part of the body, creating what McLuhan described as “autoamputation”. It is,  wrote McLuhan,  as if each new technology administered a local anesthetic that numbed the bodypart to be replaced by the new technology.

This insight of the numbing effect is also referred to as “narcissism”, and the word “narcissus” comes from the Greek “narcosis”, which is a drug having that numbing effect.

Slater wrote that a machine-like response in the face of danger had no value until men began to make war on each other, and McLuhan observed that the combination of the alphabet and papyrus transferred power from the monopoly of priests to the more mobile military class. “God” as concept shifted from the priesthood to the military leader of the state. the power of military extension, the “numbing” effect of the alphabet as a technology of communication, became the process by which a collective group extended itself into the world. The soldier, as part of that process, was expendable. He was a part, a mere cog in the expansive machine of the state. “God”, conceptually, became part of that military extension, a kind of “viral franchise” of the state.

As McLuhan points out:

“In the Roman world the army was the workforce of a mechanized wealth creating process. By means of soldier as uniform and replaceable parts, the Roman military machine made and delivered the goods, very much in the manner of industry during the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Trade followed the Legions. More than that, the Legions were the industrial machine itself; and numerous new cities were like new factories manned by uniformly trained army personnel. With the spread of literacy and printing, the bond between the uniformed soldier and the wealth-making factory hand became less visible…Napoleon, with his citizen-armies, was the Industrial Revolution itself, as it reached areas long protected from it”.

With the development of paper, the center-margin of the Romans and Muslim world collapsed, and paper made possible the printing press, with its emphasis on standardization and repeatability.

This emergence of print and exact repetition caused a social “stress’ on cultures and civilizations, as they sought “common ground” for their cultural differences. The development of print, as we have seen, lifted “tribal man” out of the cultural tribe and placed him as individual within a rapidly expanding system based on uniformity and repeatability, creating the nation-state and national industrialization.

By the time Hoffer came along, he was able to realize that it was “uniformity”, not “content” of all cults and mass movements that were important, leading to his conclusion at the top of this essay. McLuhan points out that war is nothing less than accelerated technology, and that all wars are fought with the latest technology. Slater has pointed out that:

“Historians have long observed that war is the prime progenitor of technological development”.

McLuhan gives an example of this link between technology, war, and civilization:

“The techniques developed over the centuries for drilling gun barrels provided the means that made possible the steam engine. The piston shaft and the gun barrel presented the same problems i n boring hard steel. Earlier, it had been the lineal stress of perspective that had channeled perception in paths that led to the creation of gunfire….The use of gunpowder for the propelling of missiles in trajectories waited for the coming of perspective in the arts”.

And further, McLuhan writes:

“Since our new electric technology is not an extension of our bodies but of our central nervous systems, we now see all technology, including language, as a means of processing experience, a means of storing and speeding information. And in such a situation, all technology can plausibly regarded as weapons(consider the use of passenger planes in 9/11-Ralph). Previous wars can now be regarded as the processing of difficult and resistant materials by the latest technology, and the speedy dumping of industrial products on an enemy market to the point of social saturation. War, in fact, can be seen as a process of achieving equilibrium among unequal technologies…”

Since electric technologies now make language itself a process of storing and expediting information, telecommunications systems become the new form of war, and now, there is a reversal from centralization and uniformity to de-centralization and individual empowerment. All wars are fought with the latest technology, so “terrorism” acts of violence by individuals, become more threatening to the electric “matrix” of world societies.

Now that we have seen the effects and connections of war, technology, and developing culture, why would there be a tendency to select this particular form of evolution over other forms?
As sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins points out, it is genes that affect our social development, and cause the tendency toward collective social behavior. It also seems to be those genes that select for the “uniformity” that Hoffer describes above.

My next essay will begin with this quote from Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”:

“Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of ‘survival of the stable’