Work has been slow here in the philosophy corner. The situation has not been helped by the “intransigency” of the philosophy channel of late—philosophical discussion has been as rare as mathematics in a brothel. Perhaps philosophy channels are not for philosophy. If so, I don’t know what they’re for.
But on to business. I was reminded this morning that I have an as yet unfinished project to find out more about this Theory of Enformed Systems (read more here) that Gnomon brought to my attention. It’s rare that we see anybody in the business of philosophy go anywhere beyond the limits of materialism, but this seems to have promise. Who knows, we might even discover that we exist 
… as unlikely as that is.
I have been thinking more about the problem of social cadaveration (the process by which each instance of a society cadaverizes itself). It seems evident that cadaveration has been the chief attribute of western civilization since the onslaught of the middle ages, which began right after the terminus of the so-called Dark Ages (which immediately followed the fall of the Roman Empire-thingy). The mediaeval ages, often looked down on by moderns as a hopelessly primitive era, was in fact a time of invention, social experimentation, the emergence of freemen, itinerant traders, and corporations. Say around 1100 A.D. and the emergence of the french nation under the leadership of Charlemagne, and the creation of the West Indian Trading Company in the Netherlands, things were set for rapid change—and change it has. Things haven’t been stable since.
At this point, it looks like society has three main mechanisms for coping with the difficulties of trying to communicate itself to the next generation. (“Education” is not the answer, since it begs the question of teaching what to whom, and how). The first is specialization, perhaps a more specific form than the general notion that is presumed to have begun with the earliest civilizations. We separate people into groups, each of which is to be taught a different area of practice, whether music, engineering, carpet weaving, or what have you, it’s just not feasible because of the sheer volume of the material involved, to pass on the technical knowledge of our society to everyone. This potentially crippling situation where most of the society wanders around ignorant of the crafts and techniques needed to sustain their society, is balanced against the advantages gained from a special cadre devoted to the study of their one subject, to the point of becoming experts.
A second element of the strategy is fragmentation. We simply don’t expect our societies to be made up of the same kind of people. Instead we have competing minorities, some of whom want to advance gay rights, some of whom want to be burghers and fight for the right of free trade, others who believe the best society is rigidly organized under strong leadership, while yet others brandish pitch forks and flags and sing “Long Live the Revolution!” This isn’t a peculiar state of affairs at random junctures of history; this is the constant state in which we live, and have lived for hundreds of years. And yet it isn’t natural. In ancient history, societies were much quieter. Revolution came from without, and only rarely from within. The biggest threat to the Chinese was the mongols, not other Chinese. Akhenaten brought discord into the egyptian kingdom with his preaching of monotheism, but his revolution died when he died.
A third element of the strategy is fashion. We have simply taken the fact of continually rebuilding our society, for the sheer fact that we just don’t know how the old one worked (don’t know or don’t care), and turned it into a business. Kids who have failed to absorb their parents’ way of life, busy themselves with inventing new clothes, new ways of speaking, new music, new technologies, and hail this change as progress, revoution, and freedom.
