WAR aka We Are Right

IS WAR A MEME?

“What is it with humans and war, in particular most politicians and a large amount of the population in the USA. They’ve got war on the brain there.” I’m Just Sitting Here…

Why has war been a constant in human history? By war, of course, is to be understood actual war and not war in its metaphorical sense, i.e., the “war” on drugs, the “war” on poverty and so on. We’re talking real, shooting war. So, does war tell us something about what human beings are and, if so, is there a philosophical angle which might be explored to shed some light on the matter? We must proceed in our usual philosophically enlightened manner and start by giving counter-examples. Only then can we hope for a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.

We must first distinguish individual and even group violence from war. While obviously violent, war goes beyond the overt aggression of the thug, the chanting mob, the street gangs in the slums and even terrorist bands in the jungle, although a connecting thread can be identified. What is that thread? It is what its author, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene” called the “meme.” So what is a meme?

“Intelligent life on a planet comes of age,” Dawkins writes, “when it first works out the reasons for its own existence.” So what is the reason intelligent life has worked out as the reason for its existence? Dawkins goes on to report that, “Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.” Darwin, of course, proposed the theory of evolution through genetic natural selection, the so-called “survival of the fittest.” Dawkins ran with Darwin’s theory of natural selection based on the gene and bumped it up to the level of natural selection based on culture, to the level of the meme.

The meme replicates culture in the same way as the gene replicates bodily functioning. Examples of meme replication, according to Dawkins, include things like “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building of arches.” As genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool “by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” So, the question is, is war just another meme? I would argue not.

The first point to note is that Dawkins speaks is of intelligent life seeking “reasons” for its own existence but, being a biologist, he can never engage such reasons, only causes. Briefly put, biology does not – and cannot in principle – engage reasons which, by definition, are intentional, purposeful and teleological. The consequence is that evolution, whether in the form of Darwin’s gene or Dawkin’s meme, is the outcome of the forces of random, unintentional and purposeless activity. As such, the derivation of Dawkin’s meme is incoherent.

Further, Dawkins’ production of his own theory of some sort of “natural cultural selection” based on the meme cannot itself be explained in terms of that meme. In other words, in addition to his tunes, catch-phrases and clothing fashions, Dawkins speaks of “ideas” leaping from brain to brain but never reveals just what is the content of those “ideas” might be. Could one be a meme? However, the difficulty here – it is one of principle and so insurmountable – is that higher-level operations can never be explained in terms of lower-level functions. Man’s conceptual universe – his realm of ideas – can never be reduced to his physiology. To do so condemns man to some “iron law” of cultural determinism.

So is war a meme? If it is to be understood as an intentional, purposeful activity – whatever “intelligence” might be assigned to such activity – then we would have to say that no, war is not a meme. To seek the reasons for war – not blind causes but reasons – we must ascend into the realm of ideology, of nationalism and ultimately of romanticism, however distorted. But such ideology, nationalism and romanticism are intentional human constructs, not something handed on in the form of a meme. Briefly, if we are to engage the reasons for war we must leave biology behind and enter the house of philosophy, into the realm of reason. But we have made a start. Yes, as the poster says, man appears to currently have war on the brain but a brain conceived not as some sort an object subject to blind evolutionary forces but rather as a mind conceived as the locus of thought, reflection imagination and world-views. I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!

Would it be possible to distinguish an erroneous connotation from a misinterpretation as they apply to that “inner struggle for self betterment”?

Thank you.