Here I disagree. IMO racism as it is currently thought of, does not exist. It is not because of the different skin color that we bristle, it is because of the memes that that skin color communicates. Psychologically, it is not skin color that is the issue(though we deceive ourselves that it is), but the conflict of their unconscious memes with our unconscious memes. But as you have written over and over it is the memes of "our" tribe that conflict with the memes of "their" tribe. Edward T. Hall in "The Silent Language" writes that a given culture, in its entirety, is a form of communication. And, even more psychologically significantly, the communication is carried out "outside of awareness," i.e., unconsciously.
Kafiri, I'm still not sure. Certainly racism is not merely a matter of differences in skin color or superficial appearance. These things are just used by tribes to denote those of other tribes, markers that are meant to represent various, deeper things. But in my experience of racism and general reading about racism in various cultures and periods of history, what I've seen is very clearly a consciousness in racists that those they projected shadow onto were competing for resources (or imagined to be competing for resources). This is the biggie for the Jim Crow South and European/Roman Empire Jews, as has been widely and carefully examined by many scholars. Jews in the Roman Empire and throughout much of European history were seen by the Romans and Europeans who felt this was their ancestral land as interlopers and "thieves" taking jobs and profits away from the Romans and Europeans who were
entitled to them. In the Jim Crow south, the poor whites already had very little, and when blacks were allowed to own land and could occasionally make a little money, the poor whites felt they were being abused and robbed. They felt they were
entitled to those resources the blacks now had access too.
The skin color or alien cultural practices (monotheism, circumcision, etc. in the case of the Jews) were only the signifiers for the resource competitors. But I don't think that even extreme racists are so unconscious that they don't see below these surfaces to recognize or fear how the blamed people could disrupt the way of life the racist tribes preferred and were used to.
I didn't mention colonialist prejudice above, but it works more or less the same way. White men have especially developed a reputation for colonial prejudice. This is essentially the belief that military and technological power and modernized civilization is superior to less technological, more clearly tribal civilization. Modern and industrial civilization is a totem god . . . and "my god is better than your god". But what colonialists have always really (and very clearly) wanted was access to the resources that less technological and empowered peoples had and were "too ignorant to take advantage of". Colonial racism helps the racist deny and exorcise his or her own "primitive" and unsophisticated shadow. There has been a great deal of this in the development of western civilization, and Jung noted this frequently.
But Matt it is not the case that we choose to act(whether consciously or unconsciously)honorably or dishonorably because of a conflict between tribal memes? And is it not the case that it is somehow easier for "our" tribe to force our memes(democracy) down the throats of the Iraqis, than admit that their memes are equal to ours. Haven't we(basically Judeo-Christian whites, with its core myth of "The Chosen People.") over and over again, unconsciously used force to pound the square peg of another culture into the round hole of our cultural memes? And, in the case of the Irish in this country, skin color was not the issue.
I think the conflict in regard to honor is one between consciousness and unconsciousness. We often imagine that honor is culturally stamped on us like religious laws we must obey, but I don't think real honor works this way. If we only refrain from "sinning", because we do a quick check of the Ten Commandments and realize that coveting our neighbor's ass is forbidden by God's law, we have not acted with moral consciousness. We made our decision based on fear and conformity. To make a decision based on honor, we often have to go against our cultural totems and recognize the essence of the situation, not merely its abstract superficiality. For instance, we have to recognize that actions and choices have consequences, and that the actor is in many ways responsible for these consequences. Recognizing this, the potential actor chooses not to take an action that has harmful consequences that could be avoided with another, more complex decision. To me, this is the essence of honorable or moral consciousness.
We can see that even as we make such honorable decisions on a daily basis, we also live in a world in which especially the empowered make dishonorable decisions all the time. Governments, corporations, etc. These groups even came up with a slew of euphemisms to mask their behavior (like "externalities"). But essentially, they don't want to consider the negative consequences of their behaviors, because their behaviors provide short term profit. Therefor, a culture of profit-worship evolves out of capitalism . . . and the real "purpose" of this tribe and its totemic doctrines and beliefs is to declare that profit is a god, and therefore is entitled to treat its subordinates as terribly as it desires (for it has divine right). The thing to do to belong to this tribe is to declare servitude to this profit god, for which one will earn the protection of tribal ignorance, scapegoating of infidels, unconsciousness of externalities.
But I still don't see the prevalence of memes in these scenarios, because it is not the beliefs that are calling the shots, replicating themselves, demonstrating volition. The actor in all these circumstances is instinct, biological drive and the species-wide structural logic of the human brain. We can call culture "memes" if we want. That's fine with me. But what I see implied in mimetics is that the ideas are driving the biology/instincts, and this strikes me as patently false and unscientific. These beliefs and ideas are arbitrary. They are iron filings that get sucked into the magnetic field pattern of instincts. They have no power to determine instinct or biology. It's the "iron" of memes that is helpless to the mangnetism of biological instinct, not vice versa.
I think the confusion comes from our modern predicament, from being displaced from our environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Our instincts become perverted and dissociated because of this massive environmental displacement. Instincts alone cannot sort out the many complexities of modern culture. We cannot remain entirely unconscious and function in a way that is both personally healthy/adaptive and culturally sustaining or progressive in the modern world. We need to employ consciousness as a plastic interpreter and channeler of instincts in order to navigate modernism adaptively. And we are generally not up to this adaptive challenge. Therefore, anxiety abounds.
In the case of The U.S. invasions and inveiglings in the Middle East, I don't think we are trying to shove our memes for American "democracy" down their throats, to infect and convert them as if by some chemical-ideological weapon. This propaganda about democracy is meant entirely for the U.S. population. No one in the Middle East believes this. The U.S. (or some ideologues in power) wants to control or have stronger influence over oil markets in the Middle East. Resources. Probably this is seen as the "only" way of putting or keeping the U.S. at the top of the global economic food chain. It's just another colonialist maneuver . . . and it's not only dishonorable, but a very radical strategy with a huge potential to backfire even in the minute chance that it could succeed in achieving its design.
Our government and its corporate conductors don't want there to be democracy in the Middle East, and if you follow journalism that is not propaganda-affected, you'll find that they have not made any legitimate efforts to support true democracy in Iraq, but have undermined such a process time and again (e.g., true democracy would elect "too Islamic" and isolationist/anti-American a government). And that doesn't even begin to deal with the ethical and philosophical issue of wanting to bring democracy to a non-democratic foreign country (if that really had been our true intention). What the ideological groups behind the invasion of Iraq want is for Iraq to be subjugated by American corporate power, so Iraq's resources can funnel money into the business interests of these ideological groups. This desire necessitates taking certain anti-Islamic measures, in the sense that Islam is a tribal religion that thrives on its autonomy and righteousness, and "free market capitalism" is invasive like a weed. Free market capitalism needs to get its seeds and roots into all the resource pools. It is opposed to the notion of controlled markets, markets where a resource is controlled by a cartel like OPEC that can set prices on its product at whim. Free market capitalism doesn't serve the cartels or overt monopolists, it serves those "in the know" who can wheel and deal with fiscal flow to their own advantage.
But of course, those wheeler-dealer elites become the new cartels. The "free markets" in free market capitalism are markets that are freed for the ready usage of the new global, corporate elite, freed for the intrusion of these specific tendrils. "Free" in this case is a PR word that doesn't really mean what the word usually means. We could see oil drilling in Alaska in a similar way, except instead of a cartel with absolute control of a resource, the resource is protected by environmental regulations. Free marketeers want to open it up for profitable usage, and they are not concerned with the externalities of this usage. The "freedom" they want is access to every possible market resource, consequences be damned. It is that "freedom" that is worshiped as a god, and the religion surrounding this god grants divine right to the ignorance of externalities. Free market capitalism doesn't think about balance and sustainability. It's based on consumption and the transformation of everything possible into a market resource.
Various kinds of regulations limit this access on the principle that not everything in the world is best used as a market resource. Some things have more value to us (not to mention other species) in their relatively unviolated condition than they do as monetary resources. But free marketeers don't see it this way. They see ideologically, religiously. Profit is God . . . and it is not our place to question this.
But the free marketeers don't want to pass on these memes to others. These memes are things they want to conserve for themselves as much as possible. After all, they know that as soon as every Tom, Dick, and Harry hear about a great investment opportunity, it no longer remains such a great investment opportunity. There isn't really enough wealth to go around (in the minds of the free marketeers). So the religion of free market capitalism (or globalism, as it is sometimes called) must be protected and conserved. It is "secret information" meant only for elite think tanks, top level executives, and their acolytes. Because the concealed lie about free market capitalism is that it doesn't actually work for everyone, only for those who believe, utilize, and protect the sacred information.
This is why the meddlings of free market ventures like World Bank and NAFTA and so forth have typically proved devastating to the countries they have been implanted in. Devastating to the majority of the populations, the workers . . . the indoctrinated, free market globalists have managed to do just fine. But the
countries have not, because countries are not equivalent only to their elite and wealthy (a truth that free market capitalism is not terribly concerned about).
What I mean to say is that there is a great deal more going on here than racism and memes . . . and we can't even begin to talk about an ethereal concept like memes until we actually understand the complex systems they exist in and how power and resources flow in these systems. Maybe, after all these facts and more solid structures are sorted out (the hardware), we will find a place for mimetics in the description of these complex systems. But the core of my gripe with what I've seen of mimetics so far is that it remains unscientifically ignorant of the systems and things it wants to see memes as conducting. I.e., there is no control in the mimetic "testing", and this is why mimetics remains unscientific.
The mimetic perspective is very much like the egoic perspective, it is a fixed lens, a paradigm that greatly limits and conforms what is perceived. The goal of all scientific observation is to remove that observation as much as possible from the egoic persepctive. The egoic persepctive (sometimes also called the subjective factor or the "personal equation" by Jung) must be made a margin of error in scientific observation. The egoic perspective is not only the personal perspective and its limitations and prejudices, but also the cultural limitations and prejudices to which the particular ego perceiving belongs. Ego and culture are inherently and umbilically connected. Ego is constructed primarily by cultural conditioning . . . at least until one's spiritual or individuation journey begins. But the ego can never become wholly the providence of the Self. It must always be the cultural navigator and the conduit between culture and Self/instinct. Ego and Self are always Others to one another.
I think it is only with recognition and acceptance of this (and valuation of the Other) that we can begin to consciously negotiate between the demands of culture and the demands of instinct. Only consciousness allows for the degree of conceptual plasticity that such negotiations (in the modern world) require.
I reiterate that racism itself is not a meme, and I apologize for not being clear about this from the onset. But it seems very clear to me that the concept of memes fits very well with your tribal arguments. What I am seeking now is to see if we can integrate the concept of meme into Jungian thought. In some ways Matt I think we are very close in our thinking here. This is where Social Constructionism" enters the equation of our human nature. Stick with me Matt and I think we can get to a critical item that needs scrutiny.
My stance is not that there is no such thing as memes, merely that "meme" is a word that may not really add much to the concepts it replaces (like "culture"). A major problem is that it remains unclear that memes really do function similarly to genes (as claimed by mimeticists) . . . which is what I have been arguing from the start. If memes can be shown to not actually function like genes in the ways and reasons that they replicate, this calls into question both the naming and the conceiving of memes. I worry that this core discrepancy calls into question all of which memes are applied to as "explanation". It creates a false impression of Darwinian natural selection and self-replication. I am not personally satisfied with the mimeticist's comparisons of memes to genes. Their arguments on this issue do not hold up to the questions I can throw at them (and have in this thread).
Not to be overly difficult, but none of my criticisms and questions of memes has yet to be addressed, let alone resolved by any pro-mimetic arguments. Maybe there
are answers . . . but as they are not yet presented to me (directly or indirectly), I cannot reply with responses and analyses (or acceptances of these arguments' validity). My philosophical method is very logical. This is how I think about everything. I present arguments that could falsify the claims of what I am arguing against and try to investigate the validity of these falsifications. Equally, when I develop my own theories, I throw every argument I can think up at them. The result is that my theories are largely made up of what remains and seems most logical and likely after I have disproved every other assumption that occurred to me. My criterion for acceptance as a component of my theories is an ability to make sense of the data and information that I have observed and considered.
Even as an "intuitive" thinker, I'm not inclined to embrace my intuitions theoretically. Intuition tells me where to look, not what is there. Intuition helps me construct dangerous and useful questions by opening up more, and more complex, avenues of potential analysis. Assuming intuition tells us what is actually there is what I call the "intuitive fallacy". I don't see intuition (and the patterns of semblance it provides) as a reason to believe something. For me, it is a reason to investigate in a specific area using other, more functional tools. I do my best to hold up to extreme scrutiny any idea that would seem to be self-serving or to serve my egoic inclinations. Why might the way I am inclined to see something not be the best or most accurate way to see it? That is the ax I swing at everything.
Meme theory has yet to pass my initial tests. Perhaps those tests are flawed . . . and I consider this possibility constantly and seriously. So far, I have not been able to construct compelling, logical reasons that my criticism of meme theory are flawed. Nor has anyone else attempted to show the flaws in my criticisms. But if we actually want to think about memes scientifically and investigate their validity, these kinds of criticisms have to be addressed and dispelled logically. It is the obligation of mimeticists or advocates of meme theory to construct such arguments. I feel that if they take their theory seriously as a science and not merely as a belief or ideology, they should leap at the chance to demonstrate its validity through testing and logical argument against criticisms.
I think it has been demonstrated that my approach to Jungian psychology (or my revisions of it) is based on these kinds of principles. That is why I am so critical of Jungian ideas. I try to test them and make them account for the data they would have to in order to be valid. Where Jungian theories fail these tests, I have tried to construct revisions that account for the specific flaws in conventional Jungian theories. My obligation to my tribe and philosophical perspective of choice includes scientific methods. I see scientific validity or compatibility as beneficial to the Jungian tribe and its ideologies . . . not as threatening. For any theory that claims scientific validity and usefulness, actual applicability to real and material situations is adaptive.
On the other hand, if what a tribe seeks from its beliefs and philosophies is not scientific functionality, but tribal cohesion, then the goal of the tribe's beliefs is religious. This conflict between religiosity and science in Jungian psychology is also found in mimetics . . . and if mimetics is to be scientific, it will have to be able to scientifically answer the kinds of questions I and other critics have posed for it. Just as Jungian psychology must be able to answer the questions of its critics. I feel that conscientious advocates of either tribe need to have the vision and courage to be able to admit and correct the flaws (failures to adapt) of their own tribes. And this kind of vision and courage is not likely to win one many friends among one's fellow members.
But that is the price of truth and honor . . . and the challenge of adaptation.