Broken Symmetry

Homophily and Mimetic Desire

From Rene Girard:

My work has often been presented as a discussion of archaic religion through comparative anthropology. Its goal is to shed light on the process of hominization: the fascinating passage from animality to humanity that occurred thousands of years ago.

In all of this, my hypothesis has concerned mimesis: Because humans imitate one another, they have had to find a means of dealing with contagious similarity, which could lead to the pure and simple disappearance of their society. The mechanism by which they have done that is sacrifice, which reintroduces difference into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else.

Seemed topical given the recent post on homophily and influence.

See also this earlier post relating mirror neuron's to Girard's theory of mimesis.

Csikszentmihalyi on Flow

See here for an introduction to flow psychology written by Csikszentmihalyi himself:

A successful interaction involves finding some compatibility between our goals and those of the other person or persons, and becoming willing to invest attention in the other person's goals. When these conditions are met, it is possible to experience the flow that comes from optimal interaction. For example, to experience the simple pleasures of parenting, one has to pay attention, to know what the child is "proud of" or "into"; then to share those activities with her. The same holds true for any other type of interaction. The secret of starting a good conversation is to find out what the other person's goals are: What is he interested in at the moment? What is she involved in? What has he or she accomplished, or is trying to accomplish? If any of this sounds worth pursuing, the next step is to utilize one's own experience or expertise on the topics raised by the other person--without trying to take over the conversation, but developing it jointly. A good conversation is like a jam session in jazz, where one starts with conventional elements and then introduces spontaneous variations that create an exciting new composition.

For a particularly inspiring historical example of how flow can be achieved in even the humblest of lifestyles, see here.

Hive Psychology?

From the Journal of Legal Studies, Hive Psychology, Happiness, and Public Policy by Jonathan Haidt, J. Patrick Seder, & Selin Kesebir:

Economists care about preference satisfaction, but where do these preferences come from? Evolutionary psychology offers what is arguably the most comprehensive explanation: we want things that helped our ancestors succeed at leaving surviving offspring in the environments in which the human mind was shaped by natural selection (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992). Our love of sweet and fatty foods, even when we know that we now eat too much of them; the desire for prestige and our concern for the opinions of others, even when we wish not to care; the desperate passion to protect our own children and the rapidly declining concern we show for more distantly related children; all of these human preferences flow readily from an analysis of the preferences that led early hunter-gatherers to succeed as individuals. David Buss (2000) has even offered a catalog of evolutionarily-informed methods for increasing human happiness in the modern environments we now inhabit. But nearly all analyses of happiness from evolutionary psychology, like those from economics, focus on individuals and their preferences. Might there be group-level preferences too? Might individuals be happiest when their groups are doing things that led, over eons of evolution, to group success?

Why are the Reasons for Cultural Norms Forgotten?

At the very end of Skepticism and Freedom, Richard Epstein observes:

What is so difficult to fathom is how political knowledge ebbs and flows while scientific and technical knowledge is able to grow and progress in continuous, if not wholly orderly, fashion.

This is indeed a puzzle, and one worth spending considerable time pondering because of its central importance to humanity.

Via the BackReaction blog, today we have a partial answer from a computer scientist: click here for link to pdf.  One implication seems to be that cultural norms, to stay durable, probably require their underlying reasons or theories to be re-articulated by each new generation.  That's because when we don't re-articulate, we forget.

Actually, this principle seems to be deeply embedded in certain religious traditions (such as liturgies).  Religious doctrine, like other cultural norms, can become disconnected from original motivating reasons for the doctrine as collective memory fades into empty repetition.