Meme This: An Essay for a Day

by Phineas Dash

Blogger has switched to a new system which seems unable or unwilling to publish longer entries. I assume this is a temporary problem, so for now I’ve sliced this essay up into separate posts, but you should be able to follow it easily in the normal way, from top to bottom being from start to finish. Just ignore the time checks.


Something called a "meme" is a highly fashionable idea at the moment. What is it? A meme is a highly fashionable idea.

Richard Dawkins is credited with naming it, as a kind of imitation (from the French meme) as an analogue to genes, because it is copied and transmitted from one person to another. Darwinists like Dawkins sometimes use the term as if memes were genes for ideas or information.
But they also use it as if memes are viruses. People become infected with ideas or information, such as buzz-words, fads, "urban legends," and so on.

In that sense, as Lee Cronk writes, "The idea of the meme is itself a meme, and a successful one at that..." Highly respected thinkers like Daniel Dennett use the term. For the short time I was a consulting editor for them, the folks at Adbusters Magazine swallowed it whole. Perhaps they saw in it an alternate pedigree as well, from William Burroughs and his idea of language as a virus.

Are you confused yet? I am. And I suspect we're supposed to be. This meme stuff has the smell of semiotics and deconstructionism, both perfectly good tools until they became dogmas, with their own clergy and secret language. Memeticists who might chance to read the rest of this commentary might simply dismiss it by saying that I don't understand what they mean by "memes." And they may be right. But rather than saying I'm sorry, I am inclined to get loudly in their faces with the simple retort, THEN YOU DIDN'T EXPLAIN IT VERY WELL, DID YOU?

So let's get down to it. First off, no one has ever seen a meme. They have not mapped them as they appear in the human organism, as they have genes. They have not studied them under microscopes, as they have viruses. I mention this because, though sometimes memes are treated as metaphors or similes, they are also sometimes treated as if they have the same effects as genes and viruses---that they are genes and viruses of a sort.

But of what sort? And in what realm? Here is a source of major confusion. Genes are physical things that get passed on from person to person through sexual reproduction. The genes themselves pass on stuff that interacts with other stuff that forms yet other stuff into organized stuff that becomes feet and ears and brains. We say "Genes pass on information" but really, that in itself is pretty close to a metaphorical description. This is how we describe what genes do, in effect.

But memes aren't physical in the sense that genes are. So if genes replicate in the body, and viruses operate in the body, where do memes replicate and operate? Damn good question. (Remember, these are evolutionary biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, etc. talking about memes, not neuroscientists.) Name the realm better, then we can talk. Maybe you're making some sort of sense, or maybe you're just you're violating the categorical imperative by telling me that apples act like automobiles on television except when they don't.

But memes are very popular. The idea that ideas are infectious is infectious. We're enthralled by the speed at which commercial culture, corporate buzz-words, fad-driven media and electronic communication pass "facts", fashions, catch-phrases, images and ideas around.

But look at the words I've used so far, and how many different kinds of ideas and information they describe (don't forget "dogma"). Just exactly what do we gain by grouping them all, and more, under a single heading? Far less than what we lose, I think.

Sure, a phrase, a slogan, a hairstyle, a "look" will "catch on." Melodies can be "catchy," they are "infectious melodies." Certain books and authors, or political leaders, or movie stars, will "catch fire" with the public. Those are nice descriptions of particular phenomena. But they aren't all the same.

A fad is not the same as a dogma, though they both have a social component, a "belonging," a sense that exhibiting the same idea or image is a necessity of membership. But we have far more to learn by finding likenesses and differences, contrasting and comparing, and going deeper, than we do by equating them.

And they are certainly not the same as dogma, as cultural norms, as expectations, as legends, as discoveries, as new theories, as old assumptions, as wisdom. Yes, we can probably learn a few things by looking at them together. But we learn a lot more, with more accuracy and significance, by analyzing them separately, or within a restricted domain, and then comparing them, relating them, synthesizing something from them.

To me, memes are also a dodge, a way of avoiding personal and societal responsibility. We no longer have to worry about such phenomena as conditioning, as social pressure, self-censorship or the economic pressure to conform not only in certain behaviors but in certain worldviews and beliefs and even emotions. (It's not enough anymore to do a job for money; one has to be "committed" to it, be "an associate" and "part of the team," and one must even be "excited" by the goals and sometimes literally the gods of the employer. Giving control of the body and part of the mind to the economy is no longer enough in increasing areas of paid-for endeavor. They demand your soul as a condition of employment and therefore of a certain kind of survival.)

Once you posit ideas as behaving like and practically being biological entities, inherited or caught as infections, self-replicating entities for which you are merely some sort of carrier and they are somehow (like the selfish gene) only interested in their own survival (so to speak), then we are helpless, or require some unspecified form of medical attention (drugs probably.) What's really laughable is that the same sort of people who decry a culture of victimization---who prefer that people with emotional trauma, physical addictions and psychological pathologies just stop whining and get on with it---are now telling us that we're not responsible for what we believe, accept, favor, admire or choose. It's a different flavor of dehumanization, the mirror image of 1950s behaviorism.

Some adherents would say that by positing memes as infections, they are using a potent metaphor easily understood in today's world, in order to warn people that they need to fight off these infections, these pernicious ideas or skewed values or downright lies and subterfuge buried beneath the surface of a cheery commercial image or slogan. Fair enough-but what do you need "memes" for? And once you've gotten your point across, that these are powerfully infectious messages, that in some sense they are feed addictions to consumerism and so on, aren't they pretty useless? Don't they start getting in the way, when you're trying for more precise analysis? Or are you content to fight meme with meme?

Memes institutionalize the superficial. They discourage making distinctions, or developing and communicating more meaningful and significant explanations, or looking for cause (and maybe even cure) in social, cultural, political, economic and interpersonal realms.

Some would say that memes, like genes, are just one factor, and insofar as they are infectious, we can call upon the antibodies of consciousness and good sense to combat them. Fine. As some sort of new simile, as a weak metaphor meant to suggest the power of vivid images in a world high on connection and low on judgment, okay. But I don't think that's how the concept is usually used. Memes are real to their adherents. And they are certainly real enough to spawn an academic discipline, with its conferences, journal articles and books. To which I say, pish, tosh. Get in line behind deconstructionism, semiotics and postmodernism as dogmas that were pushed to absurd heights, and like stock market bubbles of ideas, deflated to nothing, leaving a lot of stale, stinking air.

Part of this also reflects what seems to me an overly mechanistic approach to Darwinist evolution and genetics. But I am not arguing that there is no biological basis for how we receive and judge ideas. New ideas are attractive, I'd guess, because humans survived by taking new information seriously, and not resting until every aspect of it, every possibility, was thoroughly explored. There is survival value in a stable and dependable set of beliefs and practices. (Plus there is resistance to new information by those heavily invested in the old, especially those who derive their power from the established order.) But humanity, and I suspect other creatures, haven't survived by ignoring new information completely. (Plus some will be excited by the old guard's resistance, especially those with less power.)

New information of a negative kind is the most obvious, such as the novelty of a new predator in the neighborhood. (If you think this doesn't still impress people, try the phrase "9-11.") But positive novelty is also important, beginning with new food sources or ways of getting food. We are curious creatures, as many creatures are, and among social creatures, new information that gets the attention of others provides identity and status.

There's also little doubt that humans (like other creatures) find certain qualities in the form of information-melody and rhyme for example-that may indicate some survival value as direct as making information easier to remember, and as indirect as that they cause pleasure, and pleasure has positive physical effects that can enhance survival and fitness for reproduction. And perhaps these qualities are akin to the burrs that encase seeds so the burrs will stick to animal fur and fall off on distant ground where the seeds propagate. But information doesn't come in catch-phrases and melodies. Corporations pay billions to have information crafted, shaped, formed in precisely the most infectious images, sounds and words that money can buy and, more to the point, human minds can devise, because they are trying very hard to do just that.

Some information---like push-button patriotic phrases, expressions of race hatred, or to some extent like the information in commercials and political persuasion-may bypass consciousness and go directly to the unconscious. (I suspect meme-meisters don't make this claim because "unconscious" is not a fashionable idea in their neighborhood.) Again, I find this terminology more useful, more fruitful, for contemplation, analysis and action (the action is: make it conscious and deal with it) than the blunt instrument of memes.

I could go on, but my box of memes is empty. Except for one more: I've concluded that memes make sense to extraverts, because extraverts are oriented towards information more fully formed from outside. So information would appear to them to be like an infection coming into a body. And since most people are extraverts, memes are a popular idea.

Intraverts have their own problems, but some-like being taken over like zombies (or patsies) by the belief that stock markets always go up, or believing in memes and selfish genes mostly because they're cute, fashionable, endlessly repeated, and the boss says so -we are immune to.