Dawkins's "Meme" Meme: A Wonderfully Creepy and Haunting Idea

Not long ago I dropped the word meme into one of my spoken sentences and a bright young person stopped me and said, "Huh?" I had to explain that it was an idea about...ideas. And that the brilliant biologist and public intellectual Richard Dawkins had coined it in the early 1970s. It rhymes with "cream" and is the unit of replication outside the body, as genes can be thought of as the unit of replication inside the body.

"Oh! Cool!" Yep.

Going on, I did what I always try to do and make a new idea seem as wonderfully dramatic as possible. The meme is an easy one.

"Do you know the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers?," I asked.

She nodded yes.

I then explained that memes are ideas that parasitize our brains. And Dawkins thought memes might have their own purposes in "mind," just as he'd convinced himself and (most?) of his readers that genes want to make more of themselves, so they...sorta control your thinking. Catch my drift?

She shifted uneasily. I knew what she meant.
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I was recently reading a wonderful book called On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail. Lately I've been reading scads of stuff on "deep history," so it was quite a find. In one very short section Smail discusses Dawkins's meme idea, and at one point writes this:

"Ideas 'possess' people's brains in a way that wheels do not and therefore, apparently, are more appealing: you can speak of a meme as a body-snatcher, replicating itself with little regard for the adaptive fitness of the brain it is currently operating." (pp.95-96)

This I found pleasing because I had used the "body-snatcher" analogy the day before I read this. Smail and I like horror films, apparently. Or: the ideas about disease, metaphors of loss of agency and colonization from without and then within...are these "memes" that go way back? Perhaps to the Silk Road? And now they are common currency in our daily discourse? To try to remain on the level here: I'm talking about body snatching, bacteria and viruses, memes, and body snatching and diseases as memes.


Hoo-KAY!

That's one of the weirdities about memes: when you talk about them, you soon find you're using metaphors that...are...or seem to be...memes themselves!

Lest the Reader think Smail or I were being overly eldritch about Dawkins's idea, here's what Dawkins says about them in his The Selfish Gene, first published in 1976:

"When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell." (p.192 of the 1989 edition, in paperback on Oxford Press.)
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None of this is new to those of you who have immersed yourselves in memes, but one paradox - or it still seems like one to me - is that memes are not necessarily adaptive to the host organism. The idea of suicide, for example. Or of a vengeful, jealous "god." Then...if human minds picked up on these ideas and they hopped from mind to mind, colonizing untold millions...why do they survive?

I can surmise that there are competing biochemicals that have to do with depression and hopelessness, and the ideas that are concomitant with them, and look at suicide from another level. "Hey! Things are so bleak and without hope and I'm no good and will never live up to my loved ones or my own expectations...suicide is an idea that's always been there for me. Everyone's heard of it. I think I'll do it!"

This just seems bizarre when I think of it: suicide as a meme. But I don't reject it out of hand.

If Edward O. Wilson and his "consilience" idea, and the whole sociobiology and evolutionary psychology crowd want Darwinian ideas to be at the center of history and the social sciences, doesn't the idea of the meme-as-parasite sort of take the edge off their own designs on the sociology of knowledge? I think of suicide from a biosocial perspective as my main view, but I emphasize biochemicals and thoughts and ideation, that, once established, encourage a circular, causal-feedback-loop that feeds upon itself. (This is one reason I find it maddening that, say, Catholics are so down on people who commit suicide.) But from a Darwinian point of view, what was the advantage of suicide as a "meme"? How many brilliant artists and thinkers have been manic-depressive!

Or as a Darwinist, do you say, "Well, we don't fully know what junk DNA does yet either. We're not sure why it exists, but it does."? Then if it exists, somehow it was adaptive? I can see this point if I squint, but it sure starts to look like playing tennis with the net down.

On the other hand, OF COURSE memes arise from our own biological processes. Where else would they come from? The Platonic Realm of Pure Ideas? Straight from the quantum foam? (This seems basically the gist of what Dawkins considers his best contribution to Darwinian thought: the "extended phenotype," or how genes extend themselves via bodies and minds into the wider environment.)

Still, the idea seems wonderfully creepy to me.
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Notice also that memes can exist without really taking hold of you. You can know all about suicide, but you love life, even though times are hard right now. You may have never even spent a serious moment thinking of offing yourself. Celibacy is another one here. I know a lot about God, theology, the gods, etc, but I'm not a conventionally religious person by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly this meme has parasitized the brains of countless others.

About celibacy as a meme, Daniel Dennett has challenged Dawkins by wondering that, if, say, "celibacy" is a meme that only becomes active when "expressed," then anything thought of is a meme, then the meme idea seems to retreat to some sort of ontological status that's negligible. If I take the hard drive out of my computer and drop it into a volcano, in 100 years do my various noodlings once "there" have much to say about me or anything?
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Where Smail and others before him have rescued Dawkins's idea has to do with this: even though you know about suicide, celibacy and God but do not "express" these memes, they do condition your neural pathways. You think about the ideas with regards your fellow humans. These ideas do alter moods. When David Foster Wallace committed suicide, I was quite sad - even to the point of tears - for at least a week. The suicide meme meant a lot to me, in a manner of speaking, in that week.
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So: does the idea of will  or human agency qualify as a meme too? As of today I think it doesn't matter much, because so many of us find it good to believe (most of the time) in these ideas. And besides, as Smail points out, in medieval Europe, military aristocrats with too many sons and daughters and not enough estates and dowries found "celibacy"a good idea to propagate. That seems Darwinian enough for me. Similarly, the Catholic Church's holdings of land had grown so extensively that making priests and other churchmen take a vow of celibacy was a good way of keeping control of their land and away from the previously "legitimate" claims of the sons of churchmen.

I hope whatever colonization of your mind I have made here will be found as more felicitous than depredating.

Here's a 53 second clip of Dawkins talking about memetics:

Google Gives To Right Wing Groups Now Too

I just saw THIS at HuffPo, and while dismayed (what? I still had some idealism left?), it does figure. To non-Unistatians, check out one of the "think" (and I use that word VERY loosely) tanks, the Heritage Foundation and what they stand for. You'll be informed that Google now is playing all sides (like oil companies and other multinationals), that the Heritage Foundation stands for just about everything I think is wrong with Murrrkin politics, and...probably something else.

But this all points to something I've harped on ever since I moved to Berkeley six years ago, from Los Angeles: it's damned near impossible to steer clear of contributing to the politically odious.

I'm on Blogger. That's Google. Oh, well...If you drive a car that uses gas: oil companies. If you use the financial system in any way...jeez I could go on and on; this is too easy and most of you are probably way ahead of me.

A classic Berkeley story from a dinner party the other night:

Oh, but let me back up a little. First, a bit of background about Berkeley for any friends/readers in other parts of the world: Berkeley considers itself VERY progressive and leftish, a rare thing in Unistat. (And in very many admirable ways, it is. But that's not my point here, now.)

We were all sitting around talking about mutual friends and how some of them seem to reflexively want to tell you about their new diet. Not that they're trying to lose weight, no. In Berkeley, ideological/political "purity" seems to exist as a very difficult yet obtainable goal. I've looked into that; it's a chimera.

Nope: Some friends want to tell you they're a vegan now when they used to be a mere vegetarian. Or vice-versa. Some will suddenly change the subject from something interesting to the personal information that, as of last Tuesday night when they saw a documentary on Third World living conditions, now they only eat certified free-range poultry, blessed by a left-wing rabbi. Or a Tibetan monk. Oh, so-and-so is now a flexitarian, a real backslider. Gee, thanks for that. To me, there are few things more boring than talking about your new diet and what you refuse to eat, and why.

So here's the anecdote: a friend recalls a recent potluck in which quite a lot of food was brought and there were many leftovers, and after the party, the hostess was trying to package plates of food so people could take some home. My friend asked if the hostess wanted to just keep the vegetables my friend had brought.

Hostess: Are they certified organic?

My friend: Uhhh...no. I got 'em from Safeway.

Hostess: Forget it. Take it away.

                                        This dude seems to sum up most of what I'm groping for here.

The thing is, just as in the Bad Book, "There were giants in those days,"* today giants control almost everything - or far too much from my political stance - : the airways (have you seen how your cell phone provider has given to right wing/fascist politicians?), and just about anything you'd consume. And I personally see no reversal of this in sight. Au contraire: the right-wing move to "privatize" everything is going full guns. They call it privatization, because "government is evil, can't do anything right and private enterprise is much better; the American way." I call this bullshit on so many levels it will take a number of blog posts to enumerate how flawed this idea has already proven in practice. Also, instead of "privatization," I call it "privateering." Anyway...

What's so interesting to me is not that we vote with our pocketbook and we very often can't help but vote for people whose values we find putrid; it's the perennial quest for purity that so fascinates me. I find this admirable in some ways, and embarrassingly naive in others. It's a mixed bag. Choice - that aspect in the big bag of liberty and freedom - is quite often illusory. And, to me, this goes for the "choice" between Democrats and Republicans.

And purity? It would almost seem cruel to drop jokes on that, so I'll let it be. (Besides, Terry Southern did it far better than I ever could. Recall the "purity of essence"? The denial of "my precious bodily fluids"? See a 3 min clip at the end of this post from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove if you don't know what I mean. Suffice and albeit: as much given an omnipresence of pollution and other corrupting elements, many of us seem to have a misplaced hierarchy of health concerns? Aye? Wot? Our big brains. Our big, hyperactive neocortices, abstracting about abstracting about abstracting. In a word: paranoia.)

Regarding this ideological purity, the Quest for a Chimera, I'm moved by the intent. I am not impressed by the hardcore ideological standards. It's naive and snooty, and epidemic in towns in which you find outstanding universities. Why?

Because educated young people sometimes "know" too much. (And I blame their professors for only 37.23% of that, btw. Ask me about math later.) That is, they "know" that which is dubious at best. Or they're partly or even mostly "right" but have lost too much perspective. (On some issues I think the kids in their twenties are in the vanguard, but that's for another blogpost.) And I think that's because it's the educated who feel very strongly about ideas that can become strong ideologies. Save the Whales didn't start with a bunch of 9-5 blue collar factory workers in the Rust Belt. These things start on campuses. Because that's where people are privileged enough to care about such things, and they will often give you staggering amounts of information and very persuasive rhetoric about why you ought to care, too.

Another way to put it: you can become well-off enough to worry yourself to death about things that most people in the world can't afford to even think about worrying about.

I've seen people camping out on Wall Street, and I'm with them in spirit; I admire the protesting gesture, and for their underlying ideas I have almost total sympathy. But I also saw THIS little item, and wondered which gesture was more powerful. I think the latter. But bravo to all. We need to pick our fights, enact our values with integrity...but fer crissakes! Let us keep our senses of humor! Without that, we have much, much, much less. Without our sense of humor, what do we have left?

Some of us can also afford to take ourselves a lot less seriously. Less seriousness is valuable and costs much less than a choi-soy free-range free-trade latte with mare's milk from the locavore down the street.
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That which is not forbidden is compulsory. The forbidden comes to you via hardcore Moralists, who care about what you do with your body and mind, even in the "privacy" of your own home. The compulsory comes to you via those Delightful Persons called corporations. Try not to feel asphyxiation pending. Try.
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This Post Brought To You By: The good folks at Google, Exxon, Goldman-Sachs, and the Heritage Foundation, all supporting the troops and families, goodness and the flag, since, like, forever, man! They bring Good Things to life!

* Genesis 6:1-4. Some translations use "Nephilim." I prefer "giants" because a football team called the New York Nephilim somehow just sounds wrong.