Memes or Me? is most uncharacteristic behaviour on my part, and is all because of a brief encounter with a very sexy and very attractive...new word.
It was an unlikely setting for a new idea: a conference on the role of churches in community education. But in the course of the day the vice-principal of a London FE college got up to speak. In the middle of his snazzy OHP presentation was buried a small, but I thought potentially beautiful, little thing - the word “meme”. And I don’t think its appeal lay solely in its resemblance to “me:me”.
The speaker explained “meme” as originating in the cross-over between “genes” and “memory”, going on to say that memes were “a bit like soundbites” (better and better, I love a good soundbite), and (now it starts getting really interesting), “a way of achieving cultural paradigm shifts through language”. To succeed, he said, a college like his needs “effective memes”. The examples he gave: “we make students fit for the world and a world fit for our students”; “the future is not a place we are going to but a place we are making”, and “more than a college, more than an education”.
Some of you will no doubt by now be groaning at New Labour-inspired preoccupation with style over content, or the tyranny of spin-doctoring or some such old-fashioned nonsense. But not so fast. Here we have, it seemed and seems to me, an example of nonrealist linguistic philosophy in action.
So I made a mental note there and then to think more about memes.
On my way home, I popped into that obscenely large Dillons near Euston and, by coincidence (or was it?), the first thing I saw was a book entitled The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore (Foreword by Richard Dawkins, but I still bought it).
And so it was revealed to me that the word “meme” was first used by Dawkins in 1976 in The Selfish Gene, and since then has been used increasingly by people to refer to “a postulated gene analogue”. Now it appears in the OED as “an element of culture that may be considered to be passed on by non- [= been reading a science book! This genetic means, eg imitation”. Susan Blackmore’s book (which many SoFers will find compelling) is a detailed exploration of how we would see the world, the universe and our place in it if we were to embrace her theory of memes. That theory being that memes are to the evolution of culture as genes are to biological evolution.
The most interesting outworkings are, of course, theological and philosophical.
So, what are memes, how do they work, and what does all this mean for human ontology?
When Dawkins first used the word, he suggested as examples things like tunes, ideas, catchphrases, clothes fashions, scientific ideas - all those things which jump from human brain to human brain and propagate themselves around the world. He wrote of religions as groups of memes with a high survival value (and Blackmore takes up this theme, dedicating a whole chapter to it). Memes are stored in human brains (or books, or inventions), and are passed on by imitation.
Looking at the world from “a meme’s eye view” (metaphorically speaking, of course!), Blackmore says (p. 7), “Instead of thinking of our ideas as our own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied. We humans, because of our powers of imitation [which, she says, no other species has] have become just the physical ‘hosts’ needed for the memes to get around.” Memes are therefore a “second replicator” through which “selective imitation” happens, and therefore cultural evolution. Some behaviours get copied and some do not.
Those which get copied are the “effective memes” (or “fit” memes in Darwinian terms) - these she describes as “those that cause high fidelity, longlasting memory”. “Genes fight it out to get into the next generation, and in the process biological design comes about.
Memes fight it out to get passed on into another brain or book or object, and in the process cultural and mental design comes about” (p. 236).
Groups of memes she calls “memeplexes” (of which religion is one - or, more accurately, several), but the most pervasive memeplex of all is the “selfplex” - “the desire we all seem to have to describe ourselves (falsely) as a self in control of our lives” (p. 227). The origin of this tendency, she says, lies with memes themselves, for “by acquiring the status of a personal belief meme gets a big advantage. Ideas that can get inside a self - that is, become ‘my’ ideas or ‘my’ opinions, are winners” (p. 232). In the social context in which we live, she says, and therefore in most people, “the selfplex is contantly being reinforced. Everything that happens is referred to the self...me in charge, me responsible, me suffering” (p. 243).
Memetic modification In the final section of the book, and all too briefly, she strays into territory whic! is reminiscent of the Buddhist assertion of “no self’, and Cupittian understandings of solarity and the dispersal of the self as we embrace “the flux”. Her language becomes religious as she urges us all to “...have iaith in the memetic view; to accept that the selection of genes and memes will determine the action and there is no need for an extra ‘me’ to get involved. ‘To live honestly, I must just get out of the way and allow decisions to make themselves” (p. 244).
Having stated that science and spirituality are often opposed but ought not to be, her conclusion to the whole book, which is worth quoting in full, is this: “memetics thus brings us to a new vision of how we might live our lives. \ can carry on our lives as most people do under the illusion that there is a persistent conscious self inside who is i1 charge, who is responsible for my action: and who makes me me. Or we can live as human being, body, brain and memes living out our lives as a complex interplay of replicators and environmen! in the knowledge that that is all there ts.
Then we are no longer victims of the selfish selfplex. In this sense we can be truly free” (p. 246).
There’s a lot here for SoFers to get their heads round, and more books to come, apparently. As Seafarer would say: discuss. i?