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I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween ta
by jxramos 11y ago
I've been meditating a lot on these cultural heritages. The fact that a given religion/culture exists and can be criticized or accepted or anything inbetween takes for granted why this religion exists at all and has perhaps survived many generations, maybe even millennia while those that no longer exist are out of sight out of mind. I can no longer buy the idea of cultures that cross generations with all their traditions being the result of some arbitrary thing open to whatever the fads and fashions of surrounding cultures they pass through. Survival of anything is not random. Hard to articulate these thoughts.
- colechristensen 11y agoThe word 'meme' was coined in "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins as an analog to the gene. A meme is an arbitrary unit of culture in the same way a gene is an arbitrary unit of genetic material. Both, the theory goes, are equal parts of the process of evolution. Memes are inherited and go through the same processes of evolution. You're right, they aren't arbitrary or random, they're evolved. Much like many of our genetic features, the advent of modern society and technology has made much of our cultural inheritance obsolete, vestigial, no longer fit.