American Crusades

Woof, I’ve been gone for a while. Well, classes (and video games) will do that to you.

As we currently find ourselves involved in another war, I found it necessary to ruminate over the supposed reasons that have been given. I’ve been told that it’s over oil, to find Bin Laden, or for apple-pie or some shit, but none of those reasons have ever felt right to me. They always rang hollow, not quite getting to the nub of the matter, or outright ignoring certain variables necessary for a convincing model. The theory is flawed. While thinking on this I had a flash of insight that sometimes overtakes the human mind. Thanks to the sort of anarchist nonsense that I tend to feed on, it came to my attention that I was too close to the matter to get a good view of it. Taking a step back and looking at what we are doing without any sort of national pride, and from a more historical perspective, I have realized that we are waging a holy war. Us, the U.S. Not the Arabs. Us. Well, both of us.

Most of the things we have been told are not the reasons we have engaged in war for the past few decades: we are not there for oil. Oil is a reason but it is not the reason; don’t let a former oil-man for president fool you. The “tension” in Libya had gas prices soaring before we let a HEAT fly, and there are plenty of easy ways to make money off oil if you are unscrupulous enough that don’t involve razing the ground over it. I won’t say that oil has nothing to do with these wars, but it’s not why we’re staying over there.

It is not for National Defense. If we wanted Bin Laden, we would find him. Look up “Green Beret” on Wikipedia some time, impressive doesn’t quite cut it. And these guys aren’t even our special forces! We all remember how wrong “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was, and when it comes to protecting the homeland, there are a lot more substantial threats. A nasty place comes to mind, very close to home, run by an evil dictator, riddled with communism (gasp!), mistreating its citizens, and fully willing to commit crazy-suicide war against us: it’s called Cuba.

Heck, the main reason 9/11 was “allowed” to happen was that America was far more concerned with the slew of domestic terrorism that had been happening, and so was not prepared for an extra-national attack. The Unabomber ring a bell? Suffice to say, there were other things on our minds, and for good reason.

Revenge is a silly thing to go to war over, and a silly thing to think we went to war over. Neither was it racism, America is actually smarter than that. It may not seem like it, but we really are. Why worry that someone doesn’t look like you when you can make them think like you? Which neatly segways into the real reason for these wars, religion.

Richard Dawkins called animals “survival machines” in The Selfish Gene, and what he meant was that any creature built from genetics was a tool to ensure the survival of the many genes and genetic material that the machine was built from. Is it simplistic? Of course, it’s an analogy. Dr. Dawkins also coined the term “meme,” the concept of self-replicating ideas that use our minds as an environment. Just as “run” might be an instinctual command from one’s genes, “throw salt over your shoulder” is a habitual command from a meme. In this case, the meme is a superstition, the information form of a virus. It co-opts space in your brain and runtime from your daily activities and replicates itself quite successfully through generations, even though it doesn’t do anything beneficial to the organism it inhabits. And just as the human body can be considered a survival machine for one’s genes, so can a nation be considered a survival machine for a society’s memes. Analogy.

The gene only allows for a society the size of one’s family, it is the meme that swells it to the size of a nation. Numbers for debts and allowances, agriculture for increased food supplies, metallurgy for defense and production, arts, music, language, craft; all these things are ideas that must be learned and are separate from genetics. Humans are special in that we are equally memetic creatures as well as genetic. The nation, however, is almost wholly memetic.

Our nation is built out of certain memetic qualities, some beneficial, some downright cancerous (coughJerseyShorecough), but that’s beside the point. The countries of the Middle East are also built out of certain memetic codes, with a great deal of overlap between them. America has “the Republic,” humanitarianism, Gaiaism, Christianity, and the family heart-history known as Feminism (viral); the East has, well, anything but that. What we have is one organism trying to co-opt the resources – people -  from another organism that shares no family history with it. The common cold is trying to muscle in on the chicken-pox’s turf.

The reason we haven’t pulled out of Iraq is because we are winning. We are converting the country to a western ideology. We are giving birth to our memetic legacy in the minds of Iraqis. Saying it was about spreading Democracy is about the only honest thing Bush said.

People (myself included) are wondering how on earth Obama could possibly think that attacking Libya is a good idea. The answer is simple, he didn’t think at all. No joke here, the memetic code of our society compelled him, and us, to take whatever action necessary to spread western ideology further in the world. The man had about as much to do with it as knocking on the doorframe has with keeping away influenza.

You don’t have to believe me in saying the President had nothing to do with it, evolution works whether you think God started it or not, but it is unassailable that what we are engaged in a war of beliefs; I suppose a better word would be doxa, not religion, or perhaps zeitgeist, though I think that word gets too much attention.

It is the core beliefs we hold, good, bad, or just junk, that compel us to face off against those we do not know because, well, we don’t know them. And for memetics, that is unforgivable. Huh, I guess it is about apple-pie.