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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.
I'm curious, did you have actual churches around you in mind when you wrote this? Have you been through this process, or been to churches that have been through it, or is this occurring within your mind?
I have not personally been through it, my church baptized me and it exists today, and has in fact grown as it has absorbed some outlying parishes. But this kind of thing is very common over time in my area of Pennsylvania countryside, and if you look this dynamic really does exist. I'd suggest if you want to develop the concept further, and I think there's some meat on that bone, you could endeavor to find examples of this and even to speak to people who have been through it. The Northeast is riddled with historic protestant churches that have changed denominations over time.
And I think you ignore one of the most common scenarios that you see:
Church Five A traditional mainline Lutheran church, with a beautiful building built by loyal families in a long tradition, gets a charismatic preacher, who reads and thinks extensively about theological and philosophical questions, and the beloved charismatic young preacher convinces the congregation to change to a new doctrine, and the beautiful old Lutheran church becomes the Unitarian/Moravian/Mennonite/UCC/etc. church, and it has the same people in the same building following the same preacher until the same congregation, until a new preacher comes in to the new doctrine to the same congregation in unbroken succession.
Sometimes, a breakaway remnant that actually cared about doctrine founds a new Lutheran church across the other side of the valley, and that church inevitably in my experience, from Maryland to Maine, will make the same joke: We Kept the Faith, They Kept the Furniture.
Over time, both churches thrive as the region grows. The Unitarian church in the beautiful old building remains the church for the old families around town, who have become Unitarian over time, and those interested in joining those circles or becoming Unitarian join that old church. As additional migrants come to the town, the Lutheran church thrives off of Lutherans who drift in, and as a general sort of church, but few of the original old family members are prominent.
Which is Church Five?
I do like your post, and I think this is one of the most underanalyzed aspects of politics. Not be too Freudian about, but I think it can be summarized simply as:
Do you think that you make your (Founding) Father(s) proud of you?
I think the split between small-c conservatives of either tribe and radicals/reactionaries of either tribe. The conservative believes that the founding fathers love him and that they would be proud of what America has become. The reactionary believes that the founding fathers would weep to see America today, and that we must RETVRN to values that they would be proud of. The radical believes that the founding fathers would hate America, and that's a good thing actually and we should move even further from that. This is almost universally projectable from the personal to the political, as to the man as to the polis, the conservative is a person who has a good relationship with his father and thinks his father is proud of him.
There is a long running strain of American leftism, from Frederick Douglass to Lincoln to Teddy to FDR to JFK to Barack Obama, that operated under the assumption that the Founding Fathers would be proud of the continued progression of America to the left. This is embodied in the classic musical 1776, and it's overhyped successor in Hamilton. In most ways, I can buy into this. Some, anyway, of the Founding Fathers would be proud of what America has become. But more than anything, this is embodied in the genre of Boomer Re-litigating the 60s Movies. Forrest Gump, American Graffiti, but most importantly for the father-relationship: Field of Dreams.
People miss that Field of Dreams is about the 60s, because that aspect gets squeezed into a monologue introduction, but the break in the boomer-child and traditional-father relationship is when Kevin Costner goes to college and "majors in the 60s" and washes up in Iowa , along with his favorite author J.D. Salinger (explicitly in the book, implicitly in the film). Certainly MLB doesn't bring up the idea of uniting the ideals of the counterculture with the basic chthonic Americana joy of Baseball when they play their annual Field of Dreams game in the middle of a cornfield! But that is the subtext of the film, both Kevin Costner coming to terms with his father, and Kevin Costner coming to understand that his father loved him and is proud of what he became.
I have a close relationship with my own father, and I think he's proud of me. We talk a freakish amount for adult family, and while I have different hobbies and interests than he had, we respect each other's thoughts. I can explain my interests to him, and understand his. And in my imagination, that relationship translates. I watched 1776 so many times with my mother growing up that if you threw me into a production of the play tonight, I wouldn't get every line in every song right off-book, but I'd be able to hack through every scene and every tune well enough to put on community theater. When I imagine sitting down to lunch in Philly with John Adams and Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, I imagine those portrayals, and I imagine explaining my own America to them, and I think they'd be proud of it. I'm not sure they'd be proud of every part of America, but I think they'll be proud of Wawa.
And I think that's a different way to look at the whole question. The Church is still the Church as long as the founders would be proud of what it has become.
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