Mimics

 

Last year, I watched a lecture by Dr. Iain McGilchrist, and one of his minor points stuck with me: that, culturally, we are seeing the rise of mimics.

To put that in context, McGilchrist’s overall theory is that the left and right hemispheres of our brains attend to different views of the world. We need both, but we are currently living in a period in which the left hemisphere’s view of the world (mechanical, dead, closed loop) is ascendant rather than subordinate to the right hemisphere (holistic, seeking depth and context, sensitive to the uniqueness and contradictions of all life). This has profound impacts on all aspects of our culture, including the rise of mimics.

Though this is one of his minor points, it resonates with what I see everywhere. Mimicry has become pervasive in so many parts of the world in my lifetime—for example, the lifelessness of TV and films in the last couple of decades. Like many people, I am unmoved by the Millennial quirk and other mimicry that has all the soul of a spreadsheet. 

Yes, mimicry is clearly useful for teaching children (and adults) new skills, as well as transmitting culture. When I was a kid singing in a choir, the director would teach us simple songs by saying, “First time: listen, second time: try, third time: memorized.” It worked. McGilchrist’s point, though, is that we are too often failing to go beyond the mimicry phase and into original thought, expression, and blooded life. Things and people in the world don’t feel real. Or, rather, their reality is obscured by something. Jobs seem fake, politicians are actors, books are memes, media is narrative detached from reality, education is credentialism, events are people taking selfies, cargo cults are sold online, etc. There’s a deadness rotting too many things across the country (though not everywhere). I’ve barely scratched the surface. AI, the ultimate mimic, is a continuation, not an aberration.

I have fallen into mimicry in my life, too. I won't tell that story, but I will say that adopting the mimic's way of seeing the world was a gateway drug to a victim mentality when things didn’t go my way—which is interesting because it tells us something about what distinguishes a mimic from real life: mimics don’t have a built-in self-correction capacity. They can’t judge their work properly because their self-reflection is a closed loop. There is no connection to a greater force beyond themselves and our cultural dead relics, and thus no room to create. Without self-correction tuned to something greater beyond yourself--an ultimate good--you can’t have responsibility for your own actions and thoughts, and with that, the risk that must be present for us to be fully alive. (This is why people who work dangerous jobs or jobs that depend directly on the weather and other hard realities are less likely to be mimics.) A mimic self-corrects by noticing what others are doing and imitating that new thing; they seek new information, not wisdom. The digital age speeds this up to swipe speed.

And people are miserable.

I have thought for a while that J.S. Bach created the Industrial Revolution. Not literally, of course, but he and other musicians of that time wrote music that created the mental space and imagination for the energy and movement of machines. Listen to this, and you can hear a factory humming to life within the beauty. The music of our time should give us the cultural imagination to create and innovate; great musicians are prophets, not politicians. Organ music strained us to Heaven, Mahler imagined the grand armies and the great corporations of the 20th century, 12-tone and atonal music amplified the spirit disturbances that fed the modern psychology industry, the fugues and double choruses popularized the beauty of inner and outer debate, garage bands showed the way for the startup age, etc. The music in my lifetime imagined anger, complaint, the rise of influencers, and the fully digital life. One voice, autotune, a drum machine. It imagines the self.

Mimics.

Do you see it?

I pay attention to the music to understand where life still flourishes.