memes

I guess I have too much of a proclivity toward what certain people who learned the wrong lessons from Stalin would call "rootless cosmopolitanism," but I think we do have history and the idea of some people having more or less is a fiction, a distortion of reality based on what is easy to narrativize and what people like to have as narratives. Most of my ancestors would spit on me if not worse, so I guess I'm probably not the one to ask, but I don't think that they pass on some magical spirit to me, nor would they if I knew more about them, nor would I want them to (for the traditions of dead generations weigh upon the brains of the living like a nightmare, or however the expression goes). There is a web of causality that in part produced me like other people have semi-overlapping webs of causality that produced them and anything beyond that is just stories that we tell each other and ourselves for basically the same reasons as religious stories are told.

Of course, I'm not going to tell this unprompted to someone who is really into that stuff (hence I never said it on this board before, except to criticize the practice of using blood quanta to appropriate cultural identity), but that's for the same reason I don't bother Christians who are minding their own business.