The mystical meme

Socrates cup of poison

A passing thought - the mystical meme – and survival of the fittest individual or group ‘spirit’. There might be a hardwired neural framework to which a ‘mystical meme’ can be attached. In most people most of the time the memes are few and are of low virulence. The mystical potential exists but it needs a suitable epimimetic environment to fire it up. The framework and its filling are latent but waiting (?)

The Axial Age (600-200BC) was a time of great social and cultural upheaval. The beginnings of most of today’s main religions emerged from it. Each religion had a founding father who was something of a mystic who followed a spiritual path.

It might be supposed that in troubled times the power elites would have encouraged the inherent radicalism of the sages rather than repressing them as usual. Desperate times call for desperate measures. There could be more or less formal think tanks that would seek the ideas of tenured academics and freelance philosophers who would be enlivened in their various ways by the ‘mystical meme’.

But there are problems when speaking new paradigm truth to old fashioned power. ‘That man thinks too much – such men are dangerous.’ ‘Keep the peasants in ignorance.’ Keep the thinking men away from the peasants, especially the youth. Let Socrates drink his cup of poison.

The ‘mystical meme’ can be viewed as associated with the wide ranging concept of democracy and the moral issues that it raises. The good news is that there is plenty of variety for natural (or is it cultural) selection to act on.

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory considers the way morality varies between cultures and identifies five (later revised to six) "foundations" that underlie morality in all societies and individuals. He names them using pairs of opposites to indicate that they provide continua along which judgments can be measured. These are:

• Care/harm for others, protecting them from harm.
• Fairness/cheating, Justice, treating others in proportion to their actions, giving them their "just deserts" (He has also referred to this dimension as Proportionality.)
• Liberty/oppression, characterizes judgments in terms of whether subjects are tyrannized.
• Loyalty/betrayal to your group, family, nation. (He has also referred to this dimension as Ingroup.)
• Authority/subversion for tradition and legitimate authority. (He has also connected this foundation to a notion of Respect.)
• Sanctity/degradation, avoiding disgusting things, foods, actions. (He has also referred to this as Purity.)

Haidt found that the more politically liberal or left-wing people are, the more they tend to value care and fairness (proportionality), and the less they tend to value loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Conservatives or right-wing people, tend to value all the moral foundations somewhat equally. Similar results were found across the political spectrum in other countries.

So there are left wing and right wing academics and sages. These are the common and unenlightened sort. They have not risen above petty, partisan party politics. They think in terms of either left or right and of win/lose or lose/lose. They see only the 10,000 things and are limited to sub-cultural consciousness and to promotion of the ‘self’.

The enlightened, mystical, spiritual beings have embraced the mega view. They are rooted in ‘Big History'. They reconcile left and right and aim for win/win outcomes. They intuit and experience the Oneness which is everything. The illusory nature of the ‘self’ manifests. There is  experience of cosmic consciousness.

So are we entering a new axial age? Have we outgrown the old paradigm of fads and fashions in hierarchal, status anxious, globalised, consumer capitalism?

What kind of evidence would be needed to inform reasoned answers to that question? Perhaps an answer would manifest from the unconscious once the mystical meme has grown to a suitable size.