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Full Version: Why did witch hunts go viral? The meme proposal
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http://nautil.us/blog/why-did-witch-hunts-go-viral

EXCERPT: It’s hard to make sense of witch hunts. [...] In a new paper, philosopher Maarten Boudry and historian Steije Hofhuis argue that witch hunts weren’t “coordinated intelligent strategies with underlying goals,” even though it often looks like they were. In other words, they weren’t motivated by a desire to, for example, oppress the lower classes or women, and weren’t a result of powerful economic interests.

[...But there...] appears to be no evidence in historical documents of anyone explicitly organizing against particular groups. It is, Boudry and Hofhuis write, “hard to grasp how the witch-hunters could have developed such a shrewd hidden functional purpose, if they did not discuss this with each other.” Instead they offer a Darwinian explanation for witch hunts, involving selfish memes. Put simply, the idea of witches propagated because it was good at propagating, even though no individual really wanted it to. “We argue,” they write, “that witch persecutions form a prime example of a ‘viral’ socio-cultural phenomenon that reproduces ‘selfishly,’ even harming the interests of its human hosts.” Although I’m skeptical, the theory is fascinating and is worth thinking about.

The idea of selfish memes originates from evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his view, famously expounded in The Selfish Gene, genes are “selfish” because replicating takes top priority—genes are “interested” in their own fitness. This supersedes its other effects: To replicate might come at some cost to the organism a gene is in, and yet it persists. Dawkins thought the same principle was at work in cultural evolution. He proposed that bits of culture—various beliefs and behaviors—should be thought of as variants in the same way that there are different variants of the same gene across human populations.

His idea is controversial. What usually concerns critics of meme theory is its usefulness: the degree to which it captures cultural phenomena and explains their emergence. It has been criticized, for instance, for not being of much help in understanding history. But Boudry and Hofhuis disagree, and argue that witch hunts are the sort of historical event for which meme theory does provide some explanatory value.

Many beliefs about witches and practices in witch trials were self-reinforcing—trying and convicting one person for witchcraft often led to trying many more. For example, evidence for being a witch included naming other witches, and accused witches were frequently interrogated by torture. Unsurprisingly, then, successful witch trials often resulted in many more witch trials, and so on. Boudry and Hofhuis propose that selfish memes help to explain the emergence of these witch hunts: Witch hunts escalated because the memes associated with them were selfish...

[...] Convinced? Not me. The self-reinforcing character of witch-hunting practices does not, in itself, demand memes. Boudry and Hofhuis note the self-reinforcing character before they even get to talking about memes: “Witchcraft therefore became known as a crimen exceptum; an extraordinary crime requiring extraordinary means of investigation… Various forms of physical torment were recommended to make alleged witches confess to their evil deeds and to make them name accomplices. Unsurprisingly, the likelihood of suspects pleading guilty significantly increased.” When they draw these connections between some aspects of witch hunts and selfish memes, what we are left with is basically an analogy—a Darwinian vocabulary for saying that those beliefs and practices are self-reinforcing.

To call a belief a metaphorically selfish meme is just to restate its property of self-reinforcement: They are selfish because they are self-reinforcing; they are self-reinforcing because they are selfish. So, while the analogy is not necessarily wrong or inaccurate, selfish meme vocabulary does not help researchers understand or explain witch hunts in any greater depth.

What does explain them, then? Perhaps... (MORE)
Nonsense. Just like how SJWs today get off on shaming and calling out people for being offensive or not politically correct, some people just really like their righteous indignation or even just scapegoating enemies. SJWs aren't really organized either; they just congregate on social media.