Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Moral Evil is Memetically justified
Post 106.February 16, 2020 continued . . .
The Lucifer Principle
Moral Evil is Memetic
The old deflect-the-blame trick — “it wasn’t me, it was him” — may be as old as human nature. Even small children use it instinctively when put on the spot. When practiced by social groups, Bloom calls it “the perceptual trick that manufactures devils”. As mentioned before, the Jews, when forced to explain how Evil could exist in God’s creation, chose to ignore the obvious pairing of good & evil in natural systems, and placed the blame for anything less than perfect in this world on the ultimate Bad Guy. Thus was born the myth of Satan, and his alter ego : Lucifer. It has long been known that humans prefer to ignore their own faults, yet are quick to criticize the sins of others. In Matthew 7:3, Jesus says, “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Likewise, Bloom notes, “What happens to those realities that consciousness shuns? They become part of the process that makes the notion of an enemy click. . . . Where do the ugly events and the aspects of ourselves we need to forget go? We imagine them as parts of our enemy.” In very egregious cases, the “enemy” is labeled as abstract Evil. or is embodied in the persona of Satan.
The old Us-vs-Them perceptual trick all too often becomes institutionalized in the constitution of superorganisms, such as tribes, religions, corporations, and nations. “Each culture chooses an enemy on which to blame a goodly portion of the earth’s evil, and turns hatred of that group into a virtue.” Bloom didn’t give the obvious example of Hitler’s scapegoating of the Jews to deflect blame for Germany’s socio-economic ills after WWI. Der Fuhrer defined the Jews — not as a religious community — but as an inferior race to be despised. Yet Bloom did note that “the demon one society wants to eradicate is all too frequently the god of some rival group.” Such official or traditional or popular group beliefs are technically labeled as “memeplexes”. “Memes are ideas, the snatches of nothingness that leap from mind to mind. . . . They are the memes that construct social superorganisms”. Common goals & beliefs are the memetic glue that holds together the structure of large social organizations.
Originally human tribes were defined, not by beliefs, but by genes. They were extensions of families. For example, the 12 tribes of Israel were defined as descendents of a specific patriarch (ancient father), Jacob. But Bloom says that “early human groups were stuck with the same problem. How do you tell who’s family and who’s not?” This became vitally important because, in their tribal religion, “only those who shared the same genes could share the same god.” Yet, since genetics was not a known science in those days, they relied on memes (beliefs & practices, such as circumcision) to serve as proxies of genetics. Based on such ideological attributes, they institutionalized the Us-vs-Them meme into an artificial physical distinction between Jews and Gentiles. They didn’t ask, “do you believe in god”, but “are you one of the Chosen People?” Although all humans were literally children of god, only the Israelites had a formal tribal contract (covenant) with their god. Ironically, centuries later St. Paul amended that contract to allow the outsider genetics of gentiles into the reborn super-organism of Christianity.
Post 106 continued . . . click Next
Us versus Them Tribalism is inherent in human nature
The Lucifer Principle
A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History Howard Bloom
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