Kishkumen wrote:If there were an argument to be made against memic evolution as a worthwhile concept this might be it. I don’t know how many of us readily think of passages of the Koran or the Tibetan Book of the Dead such that we would casually assign these texts to the repository of world wisdom, and that would have little merit as a method of assigning importance to these texts.
This sounds to me like an implicitly culturally specific and narrow idea of wisdom, presumed to be universal but really not in the least. Of course one would expect a privileged, educated Western white guy to mention eastern and Stoic sages. (I generally go there too, as a fellow, privileged white guy.) Maybe not so much Native American myths, or Egyptian proverbs.
What does it mean for an ex-Mormon to say that the Book of Mormon has no real wisdom in it? Not much.
I find it interesting how honor refers to “I will go and do,” reflexively pulling out the least interesting and least noteworthy part of the passage—leaving aside the question of whether it is world-class wisdom.
What is at least marginally more interesting is what follows: “for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.”
Mormons find wisdom in this. We might say it is stylistically clunky or unoriginal, but wisdom sayings are not primarily valued for their novelty. The idea is probably much less dated and offensive than a lot of what one finds in Proverbs. It could be that, putting together the idea, its language, and its narrative context, this story is very powerful and useful to the community that values this text.
So, is it a mistake that many, many Mormons find it memorable and quote portions of it regularly in their community?
I suppose if we are each discussing what is personally enriching, or we are participating in the received, fashionable elite culture of our times, then we folk here on MDB probably will not immediately quote Egyptian proverbs, coyote stories, or Nephi.
What measure is that of their value, use, or wisdom?
I know nothing about "memic evolution" but I take your point while also wanting to modify it somewhat. As I see it, what is significant in these traditions is not that some Europeans or European descendants have found them valuable but that these traditions have developed around and out of these texts in the first place. That was not simply a collision of random groups of people interacting with random texts but textual communities that created something through mining, enacting, and interpreting these texts and connecting them to their patterns of life. That sense of "wisdom" (not the word I would use myself, but it works as a shorthand here) comes from that.
Is the Book of Mormon comparable yet? I don't think so. It's not that there is no "there" there necessarily but that Mormons haven't really done much with it. The most significant reasons that the Book of Mormon has become the central feature that it is today were basically due to a series of administrative decisions from the 1950s to the 1980s. In other words, its status today is the result of largely top-down directives. There is nothing artificial or unnatural about that, of course, but if we put all that on the X-axis, on the Y-axis we have to put time. Mormonism is still a very young religion, and the Book of Mormon has only had its current iconic status for a generation or two. Unfortunately, the Church is very jealous of the prerogatives that it claims, and as result you don't really get people doing all that much with it because the space for creativity is so constricted.
Quotation is nice but where are the plays, the films, the novels, the poems? Some Mormons have tried to initiate a cultural embrace of the thing before but attempts have sporadic and short-lived. Nibley had an explanation for it (cultural production is a substitute for the "Gospel," but since we have the Gospel, we don't bother with cultural production), but there are bigger and deeper holes to be filled by, for example, Mormon intellectuals. Where is the great commentary or philosophical response to the thing? Where are the books that use the Book of Mormon as foundation to construct a vision for Mormon life and belief?
All that exists at the moment is stuff like the
Interpreter and Book of Mormon Central, with their historicist fixations, and then the New Maxwell Institute, which is little more than an academic exercise in applying tired cliches and obviously left wing preoccupations to Mormon topics in a way that mostly backgrounds those topics. The one is a doomed project, the other ephemeral.
Why is that? It might be a matter of time, but it also just might be that there's no "there" there. I don't know myself. But I am with you in the sense that "wisdom" needs people to draw it out from a source; I am with Honorentheos to the extent that there must be a source for people to draw from. You can't sculpt if you don't have material to work with. The greatest failing of the apologists, I have said over and over here, is that they don't create. A lot of people here would say, "well, look what they have to work with!"
Time and text are necessary but not sufficient.
"As to any slivers of light or any particles of darkness of the past, we forget about them."
—B. Redd McConkie
