Pip: If you want to understand why ancient myths stick around for centuries and then quietly vanish, it helps to ask whether they were wired into us from birth or just very good at spreading — and surtymind has thoughts on exactly that.
Mara: This episode follows one long, layered piece that puts Jungian archetypes, Peterson's enactivism, Dennett's memetics, and an Irish death-spirit in the same room to see who blinks first. Let's start with the argument itself — archetypes, memes, and the Banshee.
Jordan Peterson, Dan Dennett, and the Wailing at the Door
Pip: The core question here is whether the myths humans keep telling — across cultures, across centuries — are echoes of something innate in us, or just ideas that turned out to be very good at replicating themselves. That distinction matters enormously for how we explain culture at all.
Mara: The post opens with Jung's foundational claim, grounded in his clinical work: "Consequently, we must look for motifs which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet behave functionally in his dream in such a manner as to coincide with the functioning of the archetype known from historical sources."
Pip: So the argument is that patients dreamed in symbols they had no biographical reason to know — which Jung read as evidence of a shared, inherited unconscious. The trouble is that argument is doing a lot of work on very thin scaffolding.
Mara: The post makes exactly that criticism. Jung's case rests on what the post calls a poverty of stimulus argument — the patient couldn't have learned X, therefore X must be innate — but without the precision Chomsky brought to the same style of reasoning in linguistics. The post notes Jung "never articulated his argument for innate archetypes in this clear a manner," which makes his claims hard to test either way.
Pip: Peterson inherits this problem and, strangely, doesn't fix it. The post points out that Maps of Meaning barely engages with evolutionary psychology or the developmental work of researchers like Carey and Spelke, which would have been the obvious empirical ammunition for a Jungian in the 1990s.
Mara: Instead, Peterson defends archetypes through what the post calls enactivism — the idea that procedural, behavioral knowledge gets passed down imitatively, then abstracted into story, then myth, then religion. The post quotes him directly: "Behaviour is imitated, then abstracted into play, formalized into drama and story, crystallized into myth and codified into religion — and only then criticized in philosophy, provided post-hoc, with rational underpinnings."
Pip: Which is a genuinely interesting account of cultural transmission — and also not obviously different from what a memetics theorist would say, which the post flags as a real problem for Peterson's critique of Dennett.
Mara: On the Dennett side, the post lays out the meme as a unit of cultural information whose only imperative is replication — indifferent to whether it benefits its host. The Banshee fits that frame neatly: a story about a wailing woman who appears before death, tracked to Irish families of prominence, first recorded in the eighth century, possibly imported from the Norse fylgja tradition and then localized.
Pip: The ecological niche argument for the Banshee's eventual disappearance is where the memetic account gets genuinely compelling — and slightly melancholy. Literacy, radio, electric streetlights, the telephone. Each one a small hole in the dark that the Banshee needed to survive.
Mara: The post quotes Patricia Lysaght on exactly that: "Light from lampposts and other outside lights which had become increasingly common even in small villages and private houses in the country, will no doubt have dispelled many an image, which might otherwise have impressed itself on the observer's mind as a banshee or some supernatural being." The myth needed isolation, darkness, and semi-literacy to thrive.
Pip: Peterson's counter is that the Banshee failed not because of competition but because it was a degraded version of the Great Mother archetype — it kept the dread and the howling but lost the hero and the possibility of transformation. A myth with no redemptive arc has limited staying power.
Mara: The post treats both accounts as partially convincing and neither as decisive. The conclusion is candid: Peterson's archetypal readings are "massively underdetermined by the data," and Dennett's memetic story is "an interesting just so story which it is impossible at present to test." The post flags a follow-up on evolutionary and developmental psychology as the next attempt at something more rigorous.
Pip: So the honest answer to archetypes versus memes is: we have two evocative frameworks, one Irish ghost, and a lot more work to do.
Mara: What stays with me is that both accounts agree on the core fact — humans keep generating the same kinds of stories — and disagree only on why.
Pip: Whether that's biology or contagion, the Banshee was real enough to someone hearing a strange noise in the dark. The next episode will try to say something more precise about that.
