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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies
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Cultural Evolution and its Discontents - Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R4,159
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Cultural Evolution and its Discontents - Cognitive Overload, Parasitic Cultures, and the Humanistic Cure (Hardcover)
Series: Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan
himself - brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures - may seize
control of our world and destroy what's uniquely valuable about the
human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our
cultural systems - especially those whose last names are "ism" -
are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even
notice. Like other parasites, they've blindly evolved to exploit us
for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship
are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas
that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that
have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing
themselves. They aren't necessarily the ones that guide us toward
our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so
heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from
cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems
that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions
of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics,
economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant
Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid
science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What
alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what
alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism?
Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking
working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we
use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has
wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the
same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex
that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the
cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests
that don't correspond to their own.
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