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How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents? For instance, a social justice warrior doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a pawn of a multidimensional space ideology, emitting memes and discarded by the movement once no longer useful to the prospiracy. Instead they simply think of their morality and righteousness as an objective truth.
Similarly people who express and articulate the desire for an ethnostate are convinced of the righteousness of their position.
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
(The correct answer isn't that none of them are righteous.)
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
What constructive observation can be taken from this?
You can think of causes as vast abstract ideologies puppeteering around people, if you like. Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this. There might be a constructive comment to make on whether thinking about people as 'memetic agents' or causes as 'memes' or 'prospiracies' is useful, I guess, but you haven't gone in that direction.
(For the record I agree that thinking of people as memetic agents in the service of vast impersonal causes is usually foolish. If you spend too much time thinking about 'multidimensional space ideologies' and not about actual people who believe things for all the ordinary human reasons you believe things, you will end up badly astray.)
Instead you've just said that...
Some positions are right and some positions are wrong.
Okay, sure. That's obvious. Some people are right and some are wrong.
So what? I don't see what the point of posting that is. We can discuss reasons why so-and-so cause might be right or wrong, but you haven't made any comment or argument along those lines. We can also discuss what the proper meta-level policy is towards people who hold 'wrong' positions, but again, you haven't offered any ideas, any reasons, that might be discussable.
What's your point?
I might be misreading you, and I'm addressing your parenthetical point, but I don't think your post gives sufficient acknowledgement of the importance of mimesis/memetics.
Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.
The reality is we have agency and can aspire to individual rationality (which also requires wisdom, not just formal logic). But we are also subjects to 'interpellation' from the top down, which helps shape our reality. We are mimetic creatures and look to others to know what to think and care about. We can't avoid the cognitive necessity of 'framing', which necessarily narrows our perception and understanding of reality.
So what, you might say-how does this relate to the culture wars?
My contention is that some people are more able, whether due to upbringing or inherent personality inclination, as well as training, to either orient to truth or to occupy contrariwise positions. Others are more susceptible to going along. So there's that dimension-not everyone will act in the same way in what I will outline here..
Our moment sees postmodernism arise with the internet and institutional decay. This gives rise to mimetic possibilities that draw from culture but then proliferate as a dynamical system and operate back down on the culture. This level of hyperagency, or the egregore, explains qanon and the current gender ideology. It needs to be understood at this level because it's spontaneous, contingent and also not rational - it's the old, 'you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into'. People need to see that we are mimetic creatures that are prey to mass delusions and we should normalise talking at this level.
Other facets of the problem are more mundane, ie good faith vs bad faith, politics, cognitive biases that prevent people appreciating contextual factors in current world problems, conservative vs progressive preferences etc. They feed in, interact with, the culture war issues but aren't enough to explain the phenomenon.
I'd agree that mimesis is a useful concept, but I'm not convinced that agency is the right way to frame it. As I use the term, an agent implies things like deliberate or conscious intent. Emergent agency - the 'agency' of an impersonal system - is a metaphor. There are times when I don't mind that metaphor (e.g. "Germany wanted revenge after the Treaty of Versailles" - sure, Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything, but it's an analogy), but I think you have to be very careful of reifying it.
I disagree that emergent agency is a metaphor. I acknowledge it's somewhat vague in the sense of agency and it's a sketch of a theory but it's helpful in understanding. I guess the bar it needs to meet is being different from other types of causal analysis.
But I think something genuinely emergent can happen where the distributed network of actors and other factors (variation in fundamental institutional, system constraints, technologies etc) adds up to something more than the sum of its parts and that acts back down on the agents. Perhaps a rich causal analysis picks up on this, but the key explanatory power is the phase transition, where the contingent agents and background factors suddenly shift to a kind of hegemony that then whips up large sections of the community into a coordinated hive mind.
I wonder if there's a Chinese-Room-style disagreement here somewhere? I might be modelling consciousness (and derivatively agency) as something unitary and indivisible, and as something that in principle cannot be an emergent property, whereas you would see it as something that's emergent even in case of a human brain?
I acknowledge that if consciousness, intent, agency, etc., are emergent properties of the brain, then it is at least conceivably possible that some macro-scale structure comparable to the brain might also have consciousness or intent. I don't think any such macro-scale structures have been discovered, but it seems conceivable.
That said, I don't think consciousness or agency are emergent properties. I acknowledge that a large structure could emergently behave in agent-like ways - and we might be severely if falsely tempted to attribute agency to it - but it wouldn't have consciousness in the same sense that you or I do.
To the practical side of it, though, the problem I have with the idea of 'hyperagents' as you put it is, well... it's the Gaia hypothesis, isn't it? The Gaia hypothesis is probably the biggest and most successful theory of such an emergent hyperagent. The problem with such hypotheses to me has always been a lack of evidence coupled with a lack of explanatory power - all the systems involved seem to be perfectly explicable without needing to resort to woo. Likewise egregores. What reason do we have to think of egregores as anything more than a hallucination of René Guénon? The social, cultural, and ideological trends of a group of people seem fully explicable without needing to posit this totalising entity.
Yes, I agree with a lot of what you say. There's no especial reason to invoke an egregore unless it adds something. We already have an understanding of networks, feedbacks, contingent causes etc.
The agency is a bit misleading as well as there's no intention or teleology necessarily. But to rescue the parts that I like I'd say it's not just a metaphor. The world actually is a distributed network of agents and culture is a collective intelligence where there can be causal action from the higher level entity down onto the agents. There's something about understanding things as a dynamical system that mixes in a variety of factors and agents to give us events that's actually closer to the truth than what I might call traditional history narratives, though the latter has the advantage of talking about tangible things. But I think there's a tendency still to overemphasize individual agents and to neglect the distributed milleu.
The question that you ask stands, what explanatory power does it actually have.
I don't think we have that fundamental a difference here - and for what it's worth I'm really enjoying have a constructive disagreement here, with no rancour!
I appreciate that the language of super-agents or egregores can be useful to direct our attention to the ways in which individual ideas or choices can be just products of the higher-level culture. Something I've been trying to be more aware of for a while is the way that most in-the-moment choices aren't particularly free choices at all. The decisions we make on the spot are often just the froth, the bubbles on top of waves that have been shaped by deep, unseen cultural currents.
An egregore can be a way of realising that, and it's probably better to think of it that way than to believe that that all your on-the-spot decisions are authentic expressions of untrammelled free will.
But I do still think it's worth being careful not to think of such constructs as being, for lack of a better term, 'real'. Thinking of the culture or the memespace as an agent is a simplification of what is actually a much more complex process.
Yep it's a good example of an idea that needs to show it's value.
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