From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon 17 Mar 2003 - 00:26:07 GMT
>From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
>Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
>Subject: Re: Dennett article on post-modernism
>Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2003 17:58:33 -0500
>
>At 02:01 PM 16/03/03 -0800, Grant wrote:
>>Keith Henson
>>
>>"PS. It seems very likely that advancing neuroscience will figure out
>>the chemical basis of capture-bonding, that is the mechanisms for complete
>>social reorientation to a new group in a few days. At that point, a
>>person could be subjected to drug/hormone treatments that bonded them to a
>>new group with a different meme driven goals and returned to the society
>>they lived in before it was known they had been captured and turned this
>>way.
>>I.e., the age of chemical mind control may be at hand. (Shades of
>>Heinlein's _The Puppet Masters_!) "
>>
>>There is a long history of men going out and capturing women and bringing
>>them back to the tribe as wives. The middle East is rife with such
>>stories and I have read about it in Tokugawa Japan and some parts of
>>China. The movie "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" was partly based on such
>>a premise.
>>The idea for that certainly didn't come from modern literary tradition.
>>The American Indians also did such things. I don't know exactly how far
>>back in human history the idea goes, but the stories seem to be a
>>worldwide phenomena.
>
>Homer's stories at the dawn of western litterature were based on capturing
>a woman. My bet is that it goes back millions of years because there are
>analogous male chimpanzee behaviors. If it goes back that far, people,
>women especially, would have evolved mechanisms to adjust their internal
>mental state to being captured. Their genes stood a decent chance of
>prospering if they were able to adapt and the line of genes for those who
>could not usually ended. Talk about selection pressure!
>
>It is a remarkably simple model.
>
>
Remarkably simple or overly simplistic? This conjures up the image of
cavemen with clubs dragging their women around. Would there, thus, be
something fundamental to the feminine psyche that is geared towards being
subdued and captured. We're flirting with the simplistic sexist mode of
evolutionary subjugation of women here and the infamous naturalistic
apologia for rape.
Capture bonding itself (or the Stockholm syndrome), as something either sex
might be prone to in certain situations, might be an interesting possibility
to ponder, especially in light of the Hearst case and the recent Smart case
and your ideas about cults, but let's not get carried away with focusing on
women having psychological mechanisms that allow them to adapt to being
captured.
Women obviously aren't fated by their genes to acquiesce to being subjugated
by men. Note the recent cultural emergence of feminism (in its reasonable
versus extremist variations) and the very recent destruction of a perfectly
fine snow phallus as commented on here recently.
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