by Kevin Walker
University of California, Berkeley
1992
Few theories have held up over time quite as well as Darwin's theory of natural selection. Anthropologists have long sought a comparable theory to explain cultural evolution, for it is the conscious creation and transmission of knowledge that has given humans an evolutionary advantage over other animals. Richard Dawkins1 has shown that perhaps Darwin's theory can explain this, too. He proposes that "memes" -- ideas, artifacts, and other cultural products --Êare analagous to genes, in that they tend to replicate themselves and compete with each other. I will examine memes as selfish entities, both in individuals and in social groups. In particular, I focus on whether memes can control human minds, on their own or "guided" by other humans. The emphasis is not so much on memes as mechanisms of control, but more as a theoretical construct for studying controlling processes.
The concept of the evolution of culture or ideas is hardly new; Elan Moritz traces its roots back to the ancient Greeks.2 In addition to Dawkins, Edward O. Wilson has formulated a similar theory involving what he calls "culturgens". I will draw from both concepts, as well as the work of subsequent scholars who have refined the theory.
Memes, as Dawkins says, are the cultural analogues of genes. They can be ideas, pieces of music, customs, art, fashions, human-made artifacts, mathematical equations -- just about any cultural entity. They compete with each other and evolve over time. Speaking specifically about ideas, Moritz says it doesn't matter whether memes are "true" or not; they exist regardless of their truthfulness. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, elaborating on Dawkins' work, defines cultural evolution as "the differential transmission of information contained in artifacts -- in objects, concepts, beliefs, symbols, and behavior patterns, that exist only because people took the trouble to make them".3 In this sense, a person's memes can live on after he or she has died, even if that person has left no genes behind. But memes, too, have a life cycle. The qualities that regulate a meme's success are, as stated by Dawkins, longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity -- similar to the way genes compete. Memetically, there have been many more generations than genetic ones, and as a result, we in the modernized West live in what is deemed the "Information Age," with all the memetic complexity that goes with it. As Mark Poster observes, the "informed individual" has become a new social ideal.4
Meme "survival machines," to use Dawkins' term, consist of a hierarchy of entities, like words, books, and libraries, for example. It is assumed that memes exist independently of these entites, and that they are "selfish" (though not explicitly so; they just act that way, as Dawkins points out). Csikszentmihalyi shows this by pointing out, for example, that the transition from hunting and gathering to the more regimented life of farming was, at first, bitterly resisted by many humans. Likewise, he says, the diffusion of coins caused similar unhappiness.5 Yet the spread of both phenomena was inevitable. We might say that they were "ideas whose time had come." This phrase shows the importance for a meme of a conducive environment, or "meme pool". A conducive environment means that there are many similar memes around, and/or that individuals are especially receptive to certain memes.
Dawkins, in The Extended Phenotype6, redefines a meme as a "unit of information residing in a brain," in order to underscore the point that memes are real, physical entities. Consciousness is the environment of memes, and as Csikszentmihalyi says, "attention is the medium that makes events occur in consciousness."7 Brain space is the scarce resource memes compete for, both qualitatively (there are some things we simply cannot comprehend) and quantitatively (a person can only concentrate on a few things at a time). But grouping memes together into chunks helps stretch that limited brain space. Linguistic units such as words and phonemes are a good example. A "good meme" saves time and concentration. Or it may provide pleasure -- a good meme may improve the quality of one's experience. Csikszentmihalyi defines pleasure as related to one's skill level and the ability to challenge it without becoming overwhelmed.
But memes, selfish as they are, exploit these qualities for their own benefit. For instance, the stereotype is a particularly attractive meme, because it simplifies the way we perceive a particular group of people, thereby economizing thought. It beats out other memes simply because it is easier to use. We should keep in mind that a stereotype in itself is not inherently bad; indeed, it is often based on some factual information. It only becomes bad when it is used best: to generalize from an individual level to group level. In such a case it becomes parasitic, destroying competing conceptions about the group to which it refers.
The arch¾ologist Colin Renfrew believes that metallurgical innovations spread in the world because at first they were seen as "new and attractive" -- pleasurable -- rather than useful.8 The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga goes further to suggest that most human institutions originate as games, then later become serious things: science began as guessing contests, law began as ritualized debating, religion as collective celebrations, etc.9 So memes for these entities may have become so widespread by capitalizing on their skill in producing pleasure, or in thought-economizing.
We can take the pleasure aspect even further. Memes can produce actual physical sensations. For example, the "God meme" is powerful not only because it has "great psychic appeal" as Dawkins says, (by which he means it economizes thought, explaining many things previously inexplicable); it also can produce strong physical sensations, like euphoria. It even drives people to kill one another. Or consider sexual fantasizing. This can drive people to various states of arousal, and can lead to behaviors that range from harmless to murderous. Being directly linked to genes, sex-related memes are particularly powerful. In both these cases the meme is actually activating other bodily chemicals, be they adrenoline or sex glands. And it may well be that memes -- separate from their phenotypic effects -- are in fact actual neurochemicals, with access to centers of emotion and motor response in the brain.
Another way that memes selfishly parasitize brains is through dependency. This might be called "physical dependency," though not in the same way as drug addiction, but as described above -- dependency on ideas themselves, or on ideas that produce physical sensations. H.K. Henson and A. Lucas believe that there are pre-formed "meme receptor sites" in the brain to facilitate certain ideas, such as a form of God meme.10
Moving to the social level, we must begin with language. Most memes are constructed with language, because it is an easy and widely accepted way of economizing thought. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman argue that becase it is hard to identify discrete units of cultural traits, the evolution of language should be studied.11 Language contains a hierarchical set of meme vehicles, and individual memes can be said to occur at several levels, depending on the particular meme and the appropriate unit of analysis.
John Locke said that we cannot fully know physical entities, only the word-definitions of them. And the nature of the English language, the most widespread in the world, and of rational scientific thought is that they create a priori knowledge. Their very hegemony acts as a controlling process. A more specific example is how doctors define our symptoms for us. This involves a distinctly hierarchical system of power relations, as Michael Taussig shows.12
But note that copying-fidelity is not very good with language: different people will often express the same idea in different words, thereby distorting the idea slightly. In the jargon of critical theorists, individuals "encode" and "decode" language, and the interpretations of senders and receivers match only if they share a common "referent system". Yet the idea -- the real, physical meme -- often remains intact. Written records help, of course. But memic mutation is not necessarily a bad thing, merely another aspect of cultural evolution; natural selection in the collective "marketplace of ideas" determines which memes live longer than others. It is probable, too, that most social conflicts are due to differential interpretation of certain memes.
Technology also shapes memes, in powerful ways. Mark Poster argues that different "modes of information" change the configuration or "wrapping" of language. We reside in an electronic/digital mode, which, he says, can alter our sense of place and even our sense of what is real and what is not. With computers, there has been kind of a meme explosion. Since they have unleashed a flood of memes, making them more accessible to more people (though by no means all), there is even more of a need for simplification and organization of information, or economization of thought.
Good memes "attract attention," and attention, Csikszentmihalyi has shown, is the form of "psychic energy" we invest in them. Dawkins says that "selection favors memes that exploit their cultural environment to their own advantage".13 Csikszentmihalyi adds that selection and retention of variant memes by individuals involves a mostly conscious investment of attention, as does transmission.14
Memes spread by diffusion, a concept used by archaeologists to explain the flow of cultural objects and practices. Csikszentmihalyi notes that individual communities can become centers for certain kinds of memes. Music, for instance, flowered in 19th-century Vienna; mathematics in Gottingen and Budapest; jazz and poetry in 1940s and '50s New York City, and so on. This is often related to economic conditions: a recent manifestation of this phenomenon is that technologies flourish in certain locales, such as the Silicon Valley; there are three world-class hearing aid manufarcturers in a certain region of Switzerland. Harvard's Michael Porter calls these "competitive clusters," a term which not only relates to business, but links memes with geography.16 It pays individuals, and groups of individuals such as companies, to specialize in a certain type of memes. Computer scientists have found that the distribution of information processing is more effective than creating larger processors, and this holds for human meme-processing as well. While many individuals specialize, a few, situated at a higher hierarchical level, coordinate all these individual parts to make an effective whole.
Is there a particular type of community that stimulates meme flow? Friedrich Hayek, were he still alive, might answer that a capitalist economy with an open market and little government interference creates the best, most creative environment.17 Csikszentmihalyi says that a surplus of attention (leisure time) is needed, along with a culture which encourages novelty and makes memic transmission and retention easy.18 Our culture in the modernized West encourages overproduction of memes; it is estimated that the total printed knowledge doubles every eight years, for instance.19 But unless there is a surplus of people's attention, creativity can be wasted. "At the point of saturation," Csikszentmihalyi says, "selection begins to operate."20 Hence, the process that occurs inside individual minds is replicated at the societal level. At a higher hierarchical level, a culture can go further to facilitate the creation and perpetuation of whole "meme complexes". How high can this process go? Some critical theorists speak of a "dominant ideology" which pervades a society. This is basically a set of values (memes), and it often is seen as benefitting some people and forced in some way onto others.
Given that individuals selectively perceive, interpret and retain information, just how can memes be "forced" on people? The easiest way is by limiting the available selection. We often mistake absolute freedom for what is actually a freedom bounded by the "dominant ideology," which is made up of our shared, and often subconscious, memes. We have seen how memes can either ride in on the backs of other, more friendly memes, or expoit their pleasure-giving or thought-economizing qualities. Similarly, the active manipulation of memes by people does occur, and the two most common arenas are advertising and politics. Advertising agencies actively try to link products and product attributes with friendly memes or meme complexes, like sex. In the jargon of critical theorists, this is known as attatching "signifiers" to "signifieds" to form "signs". In politics, too, people try to tap into the mostly subconscious level of memes and meme receptors, by using "code words" and images. The outstanding example was in the 1988 presidential campaign, when the Republicans ran an ad featuring Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who was released from prison, and who also happened to be black. The effect was that many white voters, reacting to a long-standing "fear of blacks" meme, migrated to the Republican party.
Some memes give us explicit direction, like laws and regulations. But the "dominant ideology" of a culture relies on mostly unspoken and unwritten memes. Some of these are what might be called "natural laws". The dominant ideology provides "adaptive reinforcement" for some memes and not others. In addition, the ideology is reproduced through the media by a relatively small number of individuals in positions of power. This is the Marxist view -- that a few elites force a "false consciousness" onto the "masses" who blindly accept it because they lack the autonomy to make real choices. While it is true that individuals form their own subjective meanings about individual memes, the range of interpretations can be delimited by the ideological factors at work in the "texts" that they "decode" in the media, as well as in the culture at large. This is due to the necessary practice of "gatekeeping": the selective transmission of certain memes and not others, due to scarcity of available time and space. This can be very powerful, for how can an individual choose a particular meme if he or she doesn't know that that meme exists? Gatekeeping exists at several levels. In our culture, for instance, libraries must choose certain books and not others, and schools teach a certain cirriculum. The selective transmission and strict control of memes for explicitly political purposes, however, is called propaganda.
Religion is the prime example of memic social control. As William James observed, religion is created for individuals by others, others who have often had experiences that James says could be described in another context as "pathological" -- delusions, hallucinations, etc.21 Dawkins shows how the ideas of God and hellfire are powerful memes, particularly when combined. Csikszentmihalyi adds that the Christian Church spent a lot of time trying to stamp out heresy -- rival memes. "Historically..." he says, "the censorship of new ideas has been informed more often by the desire to maintain a particular power structure than by the desire to maximize the well-being of the population."22 Considering the ability of memes to physically "infect" individuals' brains, Marx's characterization of religion as "opiate of the masses" is apt.
But alas, there are ways of resisting such memes. One linguistic means is to create a new kind of language, by "mutating" the dominant one. Various sub-groups do this quite effectively, creating a "code" only understandable to those in the know. Similarly, the jargon of symbolic computer language is understandable to a relatively few. Another means of resistance is to turn memes against themselves. The phenomenon of "postmodernity" involves an ironic viewing of memes in which they are often removed from their context, and re-situated. Jazz artists practiced a form of this in the 1940s. Many black musicians felt that whites had taken the musical style they created, watered it down, and popularized it with white musicians to create the Big Band era. In rebellion, some black musicians took big band tunes written by whites, and played them so fast that only the most skilled players could play. This gave birth to "be-bop," and once whites became proficient enough to keep pace with them, these black musicians moved on to other styles, always shunning what they viewed as the corrupted, "whitened" version of their music.
So how is it that memes are "selfish" in a social context? They do it through the unintended results of collective human action. Csikszentmihalyi describes how we continually try to compress physical energy, (the latest project is the "supercollider"), not knowing fully whether we will be able to control its release. A similar situation exists for communications technologies, too. Only now are we realizing the implications of having TV cameras virtually everywhere; the Rodney King video and related incidents vividly illustrate this. My experience working at a local television station has convinced me that those who work in TV will inevitably try to use their medium to its fullest, to compete against other stations for viewers' attention. But in this way, memes may be literally killing us, by continually drawing us away from the "reality" for which we were biologically created. So much attention is devoted to creating and utilizing means for individuals to escape from the "real world," (the natural environment and our social surroundings), that these realities have become neglected. The most obvious example is that the entertainment business, our country's largest industry, and largest export.
From an evolutionary perspective, it is clear that memes have evolved because we compete more, now, with humans than with other animals. Thus we are rewarded for good social skills and manipulation of information more than for physical traits such as good vision or strong legs. Hence, the rise of culture is directly related to the decline of other animals in the world. Evolution continues, operating at the level of culture. But in the long run, will this process be beneficial to humans?
1. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed., chapter 11: "Memes: The New Replicators." (N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989)
2. Moritz, Elan. "Memetic Science: I -- General Introduction." Journal of Ideas, v.1, n.1 (1990). Unfortunately, since I received this manuscript on my computer via the telephone line, I cannot give page numbers. The Institute for Memetic Research can be located at P.O. Box 16327, Panama City, FL, 32406-1327. It publishes the quarterly Journal of Ideas. Moritz can also be reached via e-mail at moritz@well.sf.ca.us.
3. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. "Memes vs. Genes: Notes from the Culture Wars," p.111. The Reality Club, ed. John Brockman, pp.107-127. (N.Y.: Lynx Books, 1988)
4. Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information, p.7. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990)
5. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.113.
6. Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype. (N.Y.: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982)
7. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.118.
8. Quoted in Ibid., p.124.
9. Ibid., pp.124-125.
10. Henson, H.K. and A. Lucas. "Memes and Creationism," Journal of Ideas, v.1, n.1, pp.60- 63.
11. Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Feldman, M.W. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981)
12. Taussig, Michael. "Reification and Consciousness of the Patient," Social Science and Medicine, pp.3-13. (London: Pergamon Press, Ltd., 1980)
13. Dawkins, 1989, p.199.
14. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.115.
15. Dyson, F.J. "A Model for the Origin of Life," Journal of Molecular Evolution 18, pp.344- 350. (1982)
16. See Morgan, Dan. "Mapping the Geography of Industrial Success," Washingon Post (National Weekly Edition), April 13, 1992, p.18.
17. Hayek, Friedrich. Law, Legislation and Liberty. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973)
18. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.121.
19. Physicist Carver Mead made this estimate in Inside Information, a PBS special broadcast on KTEH-TV on May 11, 1992.
20. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.120.
21. James, William. "Religion and Neurology," p.24. The Varieties of Religious Experience. (N.Y.: New American Library, 1958)
22. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988, p.122.