7 tweets · April 2020 · 19 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (each organism gestates as lesser life forms) was a notion from early 1800s evolutionary biology, now considered basically mythology. Why does it persist in relation to memeplexes? 🧐 "individual development recapitulates cultural development"
Some ideas: • as with biology, there *are* some resemblances; these get reified • laziness: there are too many developmental models, and people just want to map them onto each other • insufficient teasing apart of dimensions *within* developmental arcs
Maybe also the meta-models (eg AQAL, above) are being assembled by people who are mostly model-building by synthesizing other theories, rather than by people who are actually interacting a lot with people at all ages & stages, PLUS other cultures. (I admit, this includes me 😂)
@HFreinacht insists "any true metamodernist must also be a postmodernist". Um, no. A kid growing up in a modern society doesn't need to grok & critique postfaustian Catholic society first. I think this is only needed to *write cultural philosophy*, not to embody a culture.
That being said, there's something that I think *does* emerge at Tier-2 / metamodern stages, which is a much richer qualitative & experiential recognition of the extent to which cultural context (including value meme etc) affects how people experience themselves & the world.
Most people underappreciate (by a factor of maybe 50×) how powerful cultural context is, such that children & even infants are having radically different experiences now than they were 100s or 1000s of years ago. And how different we could yet make it 👇
Which brings us back to this memetic ontogeny-phylogeny thing! What do you think is going on here? Half-assed takes totally welcome!