Women go strolling
Whenever things get a little slow, and there seems to be nothing pressing to do, and it’s just really hard to think of any way to interfere with everyone – that’s when it’s time to get busy telling women what to do. It’s a thankless task, but somebody’s got to do it. It’s a job that’s never done, so somebody’s got to keep doing it over and over and over again. The horrible slags never listen, but somebody’s got to keep trying all the same – and anyway when desperate somebody can just kill them when they don’t listen.
A powerful state body regulating the role of Islam in Turkey has come under fire over an article on sexual behaviour…”Women have to be more careful, since they have stimulants…His highness the prophet Muhammad did not think kindly of women who put on perfumes outside their homes and go strolling and saw this as immoral behaviour.”
No; we know. Tough shit. His highness the prophet Muhammad should have minded his own business, and so should you.
The article said women and men should not be alone together unless married and questioned the role of females in mixed-gender workplaces. It blamed “social and moral” decline in the west for the legalisation of abortion…Yusuf Kanli, a columnist in the English-language Turkish Daily News, said it reflected a “very primitive mindset”, adding: “Is this mentality at all different with that of the Taliban that placed Afghan women behind chadors?”…The article is especially striking since Diyanet has a reputation for promoting a moderate interpretation of Islam. It is sponsoring a study of the hadiths, the sayings ascribed to Muhammad, with a view to striking out those judged inauthentic or misogynistic.
Well…so much for that idea then.
There must be some kind of natural law (governing religious memes, I suppose) regarding the place and role of women in society. When memes have nothing better to do, they scout around for the most vulernable members of society – not counting children, and, besides, they’re already disadvantaged by youth – just to see if they can be made more vulnerable. And since men have most of the guns, it often succeeds. It’s an interesting phenomenon; perhaps we should study it. Of course, really, in the end, I suspect, it has to do with men’s vulnerability, but they’re not going to just come right out and say it.
Memes! More Memes!
Where can I spot these wandering, free-radical-style memes? What detector can I use?
RD has some good ideas, but memes are just pathetic.
DFG,
In the Selfish Gene, the concept of a meme is used as an analogy for the whole argument of that book – that genes have evolved as self propagating units of DNA and that such self-propagation can cause the organism made up of those genes to engage in what, view objectively, is self-destructive or self-harmful behaviour.
Dawkins has stated many times that he does not think that memes actually exist, just that it is one way of explaining the longevity of religions and other superstitions. In 2006 he said “This is not something that I’ve ever wanted to push as a theory of human culture, but I originally proposed it as … almost an anti-gene, to make the point that Darwinism requires accurate replicators with phenotypic power, but they don’t necessarily have to be genes.”
The fact that the Selfish Gene was published in 1976 but meme did not become a frequently used term until the rise of the internet, and particularly Web 2.0, suggests that it is not Dawkins who has had anything to do with spreading the concept. Ironically, the concept of a meme appears to be a meme.
If you believe in that sort of thing.
Yeah, true on the RD side.
But the use of ‘meme’ in the cultural transmission sense….oh dear.
G. Tingey has referred me to his comment regarding religion and women. I think the analysis is just about right. Religions are male dominated because they were created largely to deal with male power issues.
At the same time, I suggest, in response to DFG, that the idea of memes is not pathetic. While it is difficult to pinpoint memes as separable entities, there is a reasonable case to be made — not a knock-down one — that we are dealing here with cultural replicators which can be understood by analogy to genes. However, they are not genes, and they do not behave in the same way that genes do. Susan Blackmore makes a very compelling case for memes in her book “The Meme Machine”, and I wouldn’t dismiss memes as pathetic until I had at least tried to understand what she has to say.
I have not applied the idea of memes to religious development and diversification, though Dennett has done so in some simple ways in his book “Breaking the Spell,” but I suspect that, looked at close up, we will see that religious complexes are built up of (semi-discrete*) memes, whose adaption to new and ever renewable, often recursive, structures employing the memes in different but related ways, make religions into almost unbreachable fastnesses, where people are enabled to live out the whole of their lives without encountering anything that cannot be absorbed into or subsumed under the religious form of life.
This becomes particularly obvious in cases where the religion is beginning to break down, and religious officials make ridiculous forays into the surruonding cultural countryside, like the Bishop of Stafford who recently equated SUV owners and drivers with Josef Fritzl, the Austrian who locked up his daughter and her children in a basement dungeon for 24 years. There you see the bare bones of religious meme creation at work, in a particularly embarrassing example (embarrassing for the bishop and the church he serves).
Where it does well, however, it has enormous emotional power which, backed up by physical force, and dire threats of something that happens after death, can keep people in a state of cultural mummification from which it is almost impossible to escape.
*This is clearly the overriding problem with meme theory; that is, how to identify memes.
Sorry, I stand by that statement.
Memes are a prime example of woolly-thinking.
A sterling example of evidence being sought out that suits the hypothesis.
Another circumstance of attempting to emulate science in order to enhance the legitimacy of a theory.