The Necessity of Destruction for Transformation

It is generally assumed that the Ark that we have introduced in the previous part of the book and the individual that seeks shelter inside it are two different entities. If we, however, think of the Ark as a metaphorical concept of the values framing a culture or an individual and the people inside the Ark as people living in that culture or adhering to its values, this differentiation becomes obsolete. We have to think of the Ark as narrated body, a body that is inhabited by the subjects and only arises in the process of this inhabitance. One could not live without the other.

The values embedded in the culture and expressed in the individual are transmitted through generations - the narrated body is passed on. On the one hand, such transmission has been suggested to be manifested in stories that are being imitated. The cultural “plays” that we act out in our everyday lives form the basis for imitation, which in turn is the foundation for the maintenance of a shared conceptual metaphorical framework (Schechtman, 2007). Such plays are expressed in crystallised literature such as folk tales, poems, novels etcetera but also entail every day narratives which we act out in our lives (Nelson, 1999; Cronon, 1992).

Those narratives are sometimes clearly visible and sometimes have to be inferred (eg. Polkinghorne, 1995). They form the basis for what we have earlier described as ‘inferred continuity’ which is made possible by complex neural networks in our brain (i.e. the mirror Neuron system).

In recent neuroscientific research, intergenerational memory has been proposed to be underpinned by the expression of certain genes (Bird, 2002; Kacsoh, et. al., 2019; Kandel, 2001; Keene, & Waddell, 2007, Langmead, et al., 2009). Previous to that hypothesis, it has been assumed that memory is encoded in the difference between weights of units within the brain (as discussed extensively earlier in the book). However, this view reduces memory to a single lifetime and leaves no space for the biological formation of cultural memories.

In doing so, it fails to explain people’s 106 | Part II apparent proneness to the acquiring of information related to their own culture in opposition to that of other cultures (eg. Golby et al., 2001). This phenomenon has been proposed as an underlying mechanism of the understanding of memes (Heylighen, 1998). Memes are pictures, sentences or pieces of information that entail a certain (often funny) message that are only understood by people with a specific background knowledge.

Traditionally, it has been believed that such background knowledge is of fluid nature, and can therefore be acquired by being exposed to the respective underlying stimuli (for example watching a certain movie that the joke in the meme relates to). However, the research suggests that even if the knowledge about the underlying information is present, memes are better understood and more appropriately reacted to people that are born into the framework those memes relate to (Heylighen, 1998). This could suggest a genetic component underpinning information processing and thus supports the hypothesis that memory is encoded in our genes. Beliefs, ideologies, ways of acting and reacting, however feasible they may be in diverse contexts, lose their feasibility when their context changes.

A solution that applies to a problem today might not apply to a problem tomorrow (eg. Feldmann, Aoki, & Kumm, 1996). Let us assume that social learning is in part based on genetically predisposed phenotypes and in part on stories that are re-enacted. The interaction of these forms the foundation of how individuals behave in response to their environment.

This essentially has two consequences: First, even though specific ways of behaving are being acquired ‘fluidly’, people have preexisting, ‘crystallised’ dispositions for specific behaviours. This increases their success in learning certain behaviours over others. For example, we know that chickens prefer biological motion of predators over non-biological motion of their own kind at birth (Vallortigara, Regolin, & Marconato, 2005). From psychological research, especially from twin studies, we know that personality traits measured by scales such as the big five personality scale are heritable with a factor of .4 (40%) to .6 (60%) which makes them more genetically determined than physical properties such as height (Jang, Livesley, & Vemon, 1996).

Personality traits are furthermore fairly stable across one’s life span, namely up to .7 (70%) over a 30 to 40 year period (Judge, et. al., 1999). Even though personality does not equal the abstract concept we have referred to here as Ark - namely the cultural sets of values in accordance to which one acts - it can be seen as a facet or an expression or manifestation of values we hold.

Sources

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Feldman, M. W., Aoki, K., & Kumm, J. (1996). Individual versus social learning: Evolutionary analysis in a fluctuating environment. Anthropological Science, 104(3), 209–231.

Golby, A. J., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Chiao, J. Y., & Eberhardt, J. L. (2001). Differential responses in the fusiform region to same-race and other-race faces. Nature Neuroscience, 4(8), 845–850.

Heylighen, F. (1998). What makes a meme successful? Selection criteria for cultural evolution. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress on Cybernetics (pp. 418–423). Namur: Association Internationale de Cybernétique.

Jang, K. L., Livesley, W. J., & Vernon, P. A. (1996). Heritability of the Big Five personality dimensions and their facets: A twin study. Journal of Personality, 64(3), 577–591.

Judge, T. A., Higgins, C. A., Thoresen, C. J., & Barrick, M. R. (1999). The Big Five personality traits, general mental ability, and career success across the life span. Personnel Psychology, 52(3), 621–652.

Kandel, E. R. (2001). The molecular biology of memory storage: A dialogue between genes and synapses. Science, 294(5544), 1030–1038.

Keene, A. C., & Waddell, S. (2007). Drosophila olfactory memory: Single genes to complex neural circuits. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(5), 341–354.

Nelson, K. (1999). Event representations, narrative development and internal working models. Attachment & Human Development, 1(3), 239–252.

Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5–23.

Schechtman, M. (2007). Stories, lives, and basic survival: A refinement and defense of the narrative view. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 60, 155–178.

Vallortigara, G., Regolin, L., & Marconato, F. (2005). Visually inexperienced chicks exhibit spontaneous preference for biological motion