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Yes, I agree with a lot of what you say. There's no especial reason to invoke an egregore unless it adds something. We already have an understanding of networks, feedbacks, contingent causes etc.
The agency is a bit misleading as well as there's no intention or teleology necessarily. But to rescue the parts that I like I'd say it's not just a metaphor. The world actually is a distributed network of agents and culture is a collective intelligence where there can be causal action from the higher level entity down onto the agents. There's something about understanding things as a dynamical system that mixes in a variety of factors and agents to give us events that's actually closer to the truth than what I might call traditional history narratives, though the latter has the advantage of talking about tangible things. But I think there's a tendency still to overemphasize individual agents and to neglect the distributed milleu.
The question that you ask stands, what explanatory power does it actually have.
I don't think we have that fundamental a difference here - and for what it's worth I'm really enjoying have a constructive disagreement here, with no rancour!
I appreciate that the language of super-agents or egregores can be useful to direct our attention to the ways in which individual ideas or choices can be just products of the higher-level culture. Something I've been trying to be more aware of for a while is the way that most in-the-moment choices aren't particularly free choices at all. The decisions we make on the spot are often just the froth, the bubbles on top of waves that have been shaped by deep, unseen cultural currents.
An egregore can be a way of realising that, and it's probably better to think of it that way than to believe that that all your on-the-spot decisions are authentic expressions of untrammelled free will.
But I do still think it's worth being careful not to think of such constructs as being, for lack of a better term, 'real'. Thinking of the culture or the memespace as an agent is a simplification of what is actually a much more complex process.
Yep it's a good example of an idea that needs to show it's value.
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