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(cross-posted from dsl)
I recently listened to the Tucker and Piers interview, and specifically want to talk about the part on population replacement. Pierced framed the idea of whites becoming a minority in the future with 'so what' and I felt tucker inadequatedly answered the question. (He is not a good debater). More broadly, much of the inadeqacy generally, is folks tripping over themselves to avoid claims of racialism. Everyone is trying so hard not to sound like a racial essentialist, while the other side, gotchas on anything not nailed down.
While thinking about it, I have come up with a propostional idea, I want to share here. I will call it thenetics, a portmaneu of genetics and Theseus (as in the ship). Thenetics is the empty bag that carries genetic and memetic transmission. Much of the disagreement with replacement population (aside from the conflict theory), is one side thinking thenes alone is enough (or better).
Genes tell the story of bodies. Memes tell the story of ideas. But thenes tell the story of arrangements. The social graph, the occupancy of roles, the alignment of persons in an institution across time. When people talk about “losing a country,” they often mean the fading of memes and gene. Thenes are the structural continuity during that transmission or loss.
My thesis is that thenetic continuity without memetic or genetic is empty, and hides actual noncontinuity. It simply preserves the shell of the institution while its substance may have changed entirely.
Consider four churches in one town.
In my pointof view, Church Four is clearly a successor organization in the same 'space'. But from a Ship of Thesian way, #3 is more like 4 than 1 or 2. In both 3 and 4, the memetic and genetic transmission are dead ended. But the difference is the thenetic continuity of 3, which is irrelevant and a distraction from the idea that it's the 'same' church.
Ship of Thesus To answer the question, it's the same ship at the end if the form and function are the same. Replacing a plank with a like plank is genetic (via the 'blueprints'), retaining purpose and aesthetics are memetic. But if the ship is a car at the other end, it's not the same ship, even if it had thenetic transition. Thenetic continuity alone cannot guarantee identity. Thenetic continuity does not determine identity. It can only disguise the loss of it.
The Family The platonic family is biological: parents raising their own children in a shared home. But adoption shows that concept is not confined to genes. A family can be created through transmission of life, but also through transmission of meaning in shared context (family). The bond is thenetic and memetic in place of genetic
But there are limits to this. If a child moves into the house after you have already moved out, that child is not your sibling. Even if you once slept in the same room, the relation is absent. And if two children overlap in the house for a brief season, the degree to which they become family is not measured by the length of the overlap but by the memetic exchange within it. Family is not the structure of occupancy alone. It is the lived transmission that occurs while the structure is shared.
Finally, consider my own experience as father sending his children to the same church and school of my youth. I have many feelings seeing brand new people and families who have in the intervening 30 years carried on, changed or added to the familiar traditions, ideas, identity, and physical space. There are also other families still there or returned (I have old classmates with kids here too) and/or people who are transitionary (a constant chain on relation). The latter is thenetic. But the thenetics only matter if they are transitioning the memes and social graph. If there was a wholesale rip and replace, it would be more obvious and jarring that it was a 'new' community. But so would it be if 'brick by brick' it had fundamentally changed.
TLDR; I appreciate the recent meme that a country is not just an economic zone, because it generally resonates with how I feel about both my side and the other. But I think it risks over-transactionalizing the people on the other side. My main beef is that a country is not a thenetic structure, to be filled with whatever people and ideas fit in.
Thenetics describes the continuity of an institution’s role-structure across time. An institution remains identifiable only when this structural continuity is joined by an appropriate degree of genetic or memetic transmission. Thenetic continuity alone is insufficient to preserve identity.
A society that looks like church #1 sounds like a dystopian nightmare to me. Something like the society in Ayn Rand's book Anthem.
Stagnant in every aspect. No social mobility, no new technology, no new ideas. I suppose the Amish live this way, but even they have a sort of safety valve that allows their young men to leave.
But the Amish can only exist because a much stronger more competitive society shelters them from the rest of the world.
Or it could sound like China.
It's interesting that you equate a stable population with stagnation and lack of social mobility. Care to say more about why you think that is?
Stagnant memetics were more of the problem.
Memetics impacts technology and vice versa.
Ideas of who is in charge and who is the shitty underclass will also remain stagnant.
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It is funny, on one hand church #1 sounds really nice to me, on the other I also kind of hate both the Randian Dystopia and the Randian Protagonist. I'm curious to hear why it triggers that reactions because I feel like it might tell us both something meaningful about ourselves.
I think the Amish are a nice outcome. If the world went this route it would look like Anthem.
The Amish are commensals living on the fringe of a technological society. If the whole world regressed to late medieval technology, we would get late medieval outcomes.
The Amish do not have late medieval tech, their tech level depends on community size but something like ‘victorian’ is probably fair as a rule of thumb, with quite a few exceptions. The Amish are not luddites, they have limitations on relying on non-community members that force them to live off grid. Some communities have electricity and tractors.
They're pacifists. They'd not last.
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The point I am making is that the Amish communities that have tractors don't have tractor factories. If every community tried to regress to an Amish tech level, society as a whole would end up regressing further than that.
Also the Amish only exist at the pleasure of their hosts. It's the affluence of their surrounding nation that allows them to live in their own way, and if that were to change, it would be their final generation-
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The church example was only illustrative. The idea with both genetics and memetics is not that they are stagnant. Children aren’t clones, genetically or ideologically. But that the successive generations are descendants not displacements. To go back to the real example of my child’s school, which is attached to our Church, a tremendous amount has developed, from the technology in the classroom to the buildings to the curriculum. The idea is not stasis. But I also accept that the general positionality of the conservative is undesirable for a libertarian, but preference aside, my post is about taxonomy
I see descendants as very disruptive. I have one daughter that is very like my wife. One daughter that is like neither of us, but maybe like my mother in law or brother in law, and one daughter that is too young to guess. Neither I or my two siblings are anything like my parents in terms of occupation. Neither of my parents were like their parents in terms of occupation. Neither of my mothers parents were like their parents in terms of occupation. (i dont know much about my father's grandparents, but what little I've heard suggests the same pattern). I didn't marry some foreigner, I married someone that is at least three generation American, probably 5 or 6 generation, but they didn't fully keep track. My ancestors were once upper class Americans. They owned slaves, attended the revolutionary war state conventions as representatives, served as officers in that war, and then subsequently the civil war. We then became upper middle class Americans. Doctors, engineers, etc.
I've shared this sentiment on here before. I am American via ancestors that have been here approximately 400 years from England. I find the gatekeeping of people that arrived after my ancestors to be silly and pointless. This has always been a country of immigrants and memetics, and never a country of blood and genetics. I feel like WWII was the definitive answer to countries of genetics like Germany and Japan. We kicked both of their asses at the same time.
China is a country of genetics but not of memetics. They have bounced around to radically different philosophies as the ruling class has changed over the last century.
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