In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god
Why the human brain evolved. So that it could dream up pastimes like this:
A radical rabbi once linked to a plot to fire a missile at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, is hiding in Canada, Israeli police said Monday, announcing that he is wanted for his alleged role in a series of ghastly abuses of his followers’ children…[H]e has been described as the “spiritual mentor” of a group involved in the systematic abuse of children, allegedly using his status as a rabbi to convince a mother of eight that her children’s shortcomings could be beaten and burned out of them…Two of the eight children, aged 4 and 5, were hospitalized in serious condition two weeks ago after Mr. Chen allegedly ordered two of his followers to, among other acts, hit the children with hammers and light their fingers on fire, as a way of “correcting” their behaviour…The mother is alleged to have locked her two youngest children in a suitcase for three days, letting them out for only brief periods during that time. She also allegedly shook and beat them, burned their hands with a lighter and a heater, made them take freezing showers and forced them to eat their own feces. The goal, according to police, was to beat “devils” out of the children…The mother and the other two “educators” are also suspected of pouring salt on the burn wounds, gagging the children with a skullcap, and forcing them to drink alcohol until they vomited…Police searched Mr. Chen’s apartment on Thursday, and discovered journals documenting the violence…The notebooks describe how to prepare special drinks for the children, made of alcohol, salt, pepper and turpentine. The children were forced to drink the liquids until they vomited. “You see, they vomit the Satan inside them,” a letter tells the mother. The notebooks also detail how to beat the children with batons and then pour alcohol on their wounds, describing in exact detail how much time to leave the burning liquid on the body of the sufferer.
Makes you proud of the species, doesn’t it?
This story simply beggars the imagination. How is it possible for people to think like this? What would have led mothers to treat their children is such cruel and foolish ways? Thinking in terms of memetics, what would it be about these ideas, these memes, that would make them copyable? It beats me. I mean, hitting children with hammers and lighting their fingers on fire?! Locking them in suitcases?! There is so little to commend the species that one begins to share Benatar’s thesis that existence is always a great harm.
Memes? Memes on B&W? Oh dear. Nice theoretical framework to use.
How about a little Ockham’s Razor instead: These people are mentally disturbed.
Well, I didn’t think I was mulitplying entities. Clearly, the people involved copied some very odd religions memes. But I would say, having read Tony Blair’s speech as a new catholic, that all religious persons are mentally disturbed. It leads them to posit authority where there is none, to imagine the existence of beings they have never seen, felt, heard, smelled or touched, to try to mend their relationships with that being, to ignore the fact that extreme religious beliefs are only variations on moderate ones …. And it’s all done through a fairly automatic process of copying and recopying sets of memes. I mean, they don’t come up with these mad schemes all by themselves, do they?
No, religion is a very deep mental pathology which we have been led to think is normal. Elior Chen is not simply mentally disturbed; he is doing the same kind of thing that people do when they go to communion, trying to find a way of dealing with the memes that fill his head by relating (as the memes tell him to) to an imaginary being who is in need of propitiation of some kind. A hammer is as good as a cross, so long as the relationship is healed. Has no one noticed before that religion is all a bit mad? We call this man mad. Have we not noticed that the pope worships a man who was crucified (instead of having his fingers burnt), and who believes that God did it, not just a Rabbi?
Because this sadistic abuse is performed in the name of religion, I expect we’ll be seeing a UN resolution any day now demanding that journalists, satirists, cartoonists, bloggers, etc. etc. do nothing to cause “offence” to its perpetrators.
I’m not persuaded that we need invoke memetics, here. One of the things our minds do for us — or to us — is to reduce cognitive dissonance to a level with which we can live. And a very common technique for doing this is that of radical identification of self with oppressor. I suspect that there is a tipping point or threshold at which this technique stops working. Now, how do we lower this threshold? Not merely in ourselves, but in general.
No, I suppose, Elliot, that we don’t have to invoke memetics. It just seems to me that it’s helpful. I don’t think reducing cognitive dissonance is enough to go on. What would allow these idiotic ideas to be copied and recopied by so many people in different traditions all over the world? I mean, this case is not the only one where religions have tried to expel ‘demons’, ‘evil spirits’, or whatever from children. Christians have tried it, Jews try it, Mormons try it: all different traditions, but the same mimetic structure, if you like. And there’s something about this that finds host minds to dwell in and so multiply.
As I say, memetics may not be necessary — though I think Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett and others are right when they say that we have a second replicator here — but it helps to understand why the same pattern is repeated over and over again in different contexts.
I think you could be right, Eric. Where humans are involved, it’s unlikely to be One Big Queer Thing. It’s more likely to be a lot of little queer things. We could start with Purity as a meme: the purity of the tribe, and the purity of oneself qua member of the tribe. The suspicion that one may be, in some sense, impure is likely to be a significant source of cognitive dissonance.
Surely the labels woolly thinking and fashionable nonsense apply to the concept of memes.
Completely unfalsifiable…
I think we have to admit (I’m not sure that everyone will) that the meme concept was obiter dicta; nothing canonical about it. It may not be quite so useful as some imagine.
Perhaps so, but even as a framework for discussion, they are rather bizarre and unsupportable, hence unhelpful.
By the by, do animist cultures count as irrational and religious?
DFG, I don’t know. But my intuition, my “prereflective judgement” (AKA prejudice)
is : yes.
Elliot,
Thanks for your response.
Here’s another one: Would you climb Uluru?
(Anyone else is welcome to answer that one, too)
Uluru? first I googled. Then I Wikipaedia’d. Would I attempt to climb that geomorphological object I have always known and loved as Ayre’s Rock?
When one is approaching seventy-one years of age, and is suffering from classic angina, no matter how adequately controlled, there are certain pleasures which one must forgo. Sorry.
Well, your love and knowledge hasn’t helped you spell the name you prefer correctly.