#idea diffusion

One of the distinctive ideas of big history is that of collective learning. David Christian describes collective learning in this way in his Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History:

Human language... allows more precise and efficient transmission of knowledge from brain to brain. That means that humans can share information with great precision, creating a common pool of ecological and technical knowledge... The possibility of learning collectively changes everything... Collective learning is what gives humans a history, because it means that the ecological skills available to humans have changed over time. And there is a clear directionality to this process. Over time, processes of collective learning ensure that humans as a species will get better at extracting resources from the environment, and their increasing ecological skills ensure that, over time, human populations will increase.

Collective learning brings a new perspective to how human beings and human communities differ cognitively from other species, including even the most closely related primates, and it does so in a purely naturalistic fashion, without even appealing to any special faculty of the mind. In this way, this big history perspective on human cognition is compatible with the reductivist and eliminativist philosophies of mind commonly found among contemporary scientists. One can easily see, then, the attraction of this formulation. 

Another way to think about collective learning (or, if you like, another way to use the formulation of collective learning to think about big history) is that collective learning allows minds to do what genetic inheritance allows bodies to do: with collective learning there can be a flow of ideas from mind to mind and social group to social group, as in biological inheritance there is a flow of genes from individual to individual and population to population.

This is nothing other than the "idea flow" mentioned by futurist Cadell Last that I mentioned in my post on the third day of the 2014 IBHA conference, and the source of idea diffusion, which has long been at the center of discussions about the origins of evolution of civilization. Idea flow, idea diffusion, and collective learning are all intimately related concepts. Is any one of them more fundamental than the others, so that it can be used in the exposition of the others? Or is there is yet more fundamental idea to which these all implicitly appeal?

Economists make a distinction between demand-pull inflation and cost-push inflation -- this is the pushmi-pullyu of economic theory, since inflation can be pulled by high demand or pushed by high cost. It occurred to me that a somewhat parallel distinction might be made in with idea diffusion, i.e., that there is both a push of idea diffusion and a pull of idea diffusion.

Idea diffusion as typically formulated is a somewhat passive and unexciting term to describe the gradual dissemination of ideas, and there is some justification of this passivity and gradualism when speaking in terms of the earliest human societies. Idea diffusion probably began in the most haphazard way, entirely at the whim of particular individuals who happened to have an interest in in some idea, and so borrowed it from another society and diffused in in their own society.

Perhaps it would be appropriate to say that idea diffusion simpliciter is appropriate to this gradual and haphazard model of the movement of ideas. When societies become more complex, and ideas begin to matter more for the constitution of the social order, then more active forms of idea diffusion begin to emerge, and among these more active forms of idea diffusion we can distinguish from idea diffusion push and idea diffusion pull.

When we consider the centrality of religious ideas for the organization of society under agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, it is not surprising that the transmission of religious ideas becomes of paramount importance,and we begin to find religious idea diffusion push in the form of evangelism and conversion. This did not occur, however, until late in the development of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, after the axialization of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, when we begin to find proselytizing religions.

For most of agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, religion was closely tied to the idea of the territorial principle in law: religion, like law, belonged to a particular ethnic community, and conversion would mean the loss of ones ethnic community, hence the loss of one's identity (in societies dominated by the primary mask). 

Idea diffusion pull appears as soon as societies become sufficiently complex that espionage becomes important to the function of a state diplomacy and warfare. When states or other agents feel the need for specialized knowledge of competing societies in order to expand at the expense of their neighbors, or to resist the expansion of their neighbors, they begin the systematic collection of intelligence on competing powers and so engage in idea diffusion pull.