In a post below Frank McGahon notes that I have a "problem with memetics." Yes, I do, because I think people get so enraptured by the metaphor that they use it to put forward all-encompassing explanations. Nevertheless, I link to both The Meme Machine and The Journal of Memetics because I think modestly envisaged memetics might have a future. I don't a priori close off avenues of inquiry, rather, I am concerned that lay people have taken memetics and applied it to their own real world political or social concerns. Even established sciences don't necessarily map well in the normative non-scientific realm, so this is something to be concerned about.

In any case, I am currently reading Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History, and was intrigued by this paragraph (page 80):

...The mere fact that for a thousand years the Latin Church had based its authority on a translation was significant when scholars heard for the first time the unmediated urgency of the angular street Greek poured out by Jesus' post-Resurrection convert Paul of Tarsus as he wrestled with the problem of how Jesus represented God. The struggle sounded so much less decorous in the original than in the Latin that the shock was bound to stir up new movements in the Church and suggest that it was not so authoritative or normative an interppreter of scritpure as it claimed. If there is any one explanation why the Latin West experienced a Reformation and the Greek-speaking lands to the east did not, it lies in this experience of listening to a new voice in the Next Testament text.

As noted before, I am skeptical of common axiomatic expalantions of societal change (that is, books or ideas being constantly transformative in human society in a salient fashion). Nevertheless, in this case, at this point in history, with the confluence of rag paper, the printing press and the glut of Greek texts brought by refugees fleeing Constantinople, one can make a compelling argument that tens of millioins died between 1500-1700 because of intellectual crises fueled by paradigm shifts among the elite

I will explore the issue in more detail after I finish the book (I am halfway through), but the case above shows the results of a dissolution of a dominant meme, that of the late medieval Latin Church, and the chaos that resulted during the period when new memes crystallized. This is not to deny social changes, national tensions, corruption of Church practice and considerations of realpolitik in aggravating the Wars of Religion, but I think these issues were ancillary to highly abstrue and estoeric theological disputse that issued out of seminaries and colleges.

I view this from the perspective of someone who thinks that theological disputes are generally semantic arguments that arise from the reality that the "facts" being addressed are beyond verbal encapsulation. There were sharp disagreements in logic because the axioms, being "transcendent," would always elude precise definition by definition, they were attempts to translate internal impressions and emotions that became coalitional markers.

Something similar is happening today, Islamists often claim that they detest the West because of its moral degeneracy, yet various other conservative/traditionalist cultures do not display the same tendency toward violent projection of this attitude. At the root is the reality that a substantial subset of Muslims are motivated by these verbal coalitional markers, the need to compel non-Muslims to eventually profess the shahada, even though God is beyond comprehension, even though the general consensus of Sunni Islam favors the circularity of predestination. Such trifles do humans shed blood over.