From: Gene Doty (gdoty@fidnet.com)
Date: Thu 01 Jul 2004 - 14:55:25 GMT
Chris Taylor wrote:
snip
>
> Capitalism _is_ alive in the Lovelockian/Gaian sense (work with me here
> a bit) in that it alters its environment to further its own aims (in a
> completely unconcious way -- good old anthropomorphisisation shorthand).
> It is composed of lots of selfish memes in the Dawkinsian sense (I'm
> just Mr Neology today...) that have ended up 'cooperating' (i.e. not
> screwing each other up) in a thoroughly unconcious way. That's not to
> say people don't have lots of grubby little conspiracies etc. but they
> are like the cleaner wrasses / pick-a-parasite of the economic world.
> Nature red in tooth and claw -- capitalism is just another pattern
> replicating because it can, composed of lots of little ones replicating
> still, because they did before.
>
snip
> Cheers, Chris.
>
Chris,
Your assertion of the "living" quality of capitalism reminds me of a
book I read some years ago. It was written by a Dutch theologian, whose
last name, I believe, was Berkhof, somewhere in the mid-20th c. I found
out about it through the writings of the Mennonite scholar, John Yoder.
Anyway, Berkhof argues that the "demons" that the New Testament talks
about--the "powers-that-be"--are actually social structures like racism,
classism, and so on. Your comment about capitalism suggests that these
"demons" could be easily seen as memes. The memetic approach has several
advantages, of course, not having any aura of supernaturalism or link to
religious beliefs. I suspect that Yoder, at least, would have been
receptive to the idea. If anyone is interested I can try to identify the
Berkhof book and provide some info on Yoder.
I was reading them back in the days when I was a left-wing evangelical
Christian--a la Sojourners or _The_Other_Side_ magazine. That memeplex
is dormant right now ;-)
Gene
-- Gene Doty http://www.umr.edu/~gdoty http://www.ghazalpage.net =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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