by Thomas Neuburger
I'm going to start a little experiment: posting some general thoughts for weekend consideration. Many of these have appeared in other places, but they still (and perhaps always) have relevance. I hope you find them valuable.
Let's begin with this, a broad consideration of how a society, like DNA, replicates itself, and what happens when that process fails.
Our Failure of ‘Mimesis’
“Mimesis” means imitation in Greek. Think of the now-English word “mime.” In sociological terms, it means the passing of one generation’s values and “ways” — its culture, as we’ve discussed already — to the next generation. In this way, a society replicates a version of itself and achieves continuity. A “failure of mimesis” in a culture disrupts a culture’s continuity. In particular, it causes the young to reject values they cannot honor and refuse to inherit.
Does this apply today? I wrote earlier this week how it’s possible that our rulers’ love affair with Israeli genocide could cause a critical mass–split between our lords and the ruled — between the already-unhappy many and the tiny, hubristic few who have most of the power.
Here’s more on that in sociological terms. The piece is called “The Republicans Foolish War on the ICC,” but it applies across our whole society. In it we read:
Human cultures — like human languages — propagate between generations through a process of imitation. The Greek word “mimesis” means precisely that — imitation — though it should be understood more like “re-representation”, rather than mere copying. A person who studies classical music under the great masters and then composes his own magnum opus is not copying a sheet of music; he has absorbed the craft and the essence of the art form, and that allows him to compose something new. A child who learns to speak English from his parents will not speak exactly the same as they did — language shifts even within the span of a human lifetime — but through the act of mimesis, he is still the carrier of a living language.
None of the above is hard to understand, but the kicker here is that what goes for language or classical music also goes for societal and political norms. For a society to actually maintain basic function over time, the younger generations have to be brought into its values and mores, internalising them and making them their own. In normal times, this happens more or less automatically; a medieval peasant generally doesn’t have to spare a lot of thought to the question of whether his children will inherit proper peasant values or not.
In certain cases, however, mimesis breaks down completely. To take one example, peasant cultural mores that had been stable in Russia for hundreds of years started to rapidly break down towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The reasons were fairly straightforward: if you are no longer a peasant, but an industrial worker crammed into crummy tenement room with 12 other people, working in a dirty, dangerous factory for 14 hours a day, what use are those peasant values and mores? At that point, the moral and cultural universe inhabited by peasants in the countryside is neither something you’re in a position to successfully imitate, nor would it even do you any good if you did.
The author concludes, correctly, that “In America today, mimesis is rapidly breaking down for reasons that are fairly similar.” He couldn’t be more right.
I’ll save the expansion of that thought for another time, but we all can fill in the blanks. People entering and leaving college today, or those of similar age who are priced out of that option, know that they have no real future. They certainly don’t have the future their parents had. That seems forever lost.
Add in the climate and … well, their rulers have done them no favors, a fact they well know. See my earlier piece on why this could matter. Especially, keep your eye on “critical mass.”
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