*Excellent* article. This is kind of long, consisting of three articles
on memetics and evolutionary psychology which were writen over a 12 year
period. If you have read the first two (they have been all over the net)
skip them and read the last one for some tentative insights on the
mechanism which cults use to hook people. Keith Henson
This 40k article on memes is one of few I have written in the past
10-15 years which was not webbed. It was originally published in
_Analog_, August, 1987. A somewhat edited version was reprinted in
_Whole Earth Review_, Fall, 1987 (with some great art work). A short
version was anthologized in WER _Signals_, (1988?) and about a year
later the Reason Foundation sent reprints of the WER version to about
half the high schools in the US for debate resource material. [Reason
Magazine asked me to write an article on memes which was rejected
after they had a management change. That article is widely webbed as
"Memes, MetaMemes and Politics."]
Analog anthologized the '87 article (slightly updated) in the 1990
hardback, ANALOG ESSAYS ON SCIENCE, Copyright (c) 1990 by Davis
Publications, Inc. For some reason I could not find an electronic
copy, and my copy of the (out of print) book has been missing for
years. I finally found a library copy and scanned it in. I did not
update it because it is of historical interest. A few 1997 comments
are in {}, footnotes are in [].
Where it mentions the Soviet Union it is kind of out of date. :-)
H. Keith Henson, Feb. 1997
MEMETICS AND THE MODULAR-MIND
AUGUST 1987
{Lead-in by Stanley Schmidt}
In his Foundation stories, Isaac Asimov proposed a future science
called "psychohistory," in which the collective behavior of human
populations could be predicted with high precision. In our time, the
social sciences are often viewed as sharply different from the
physical sciences because they cannot do much predicting. Is this an
inherent limitation on the social sciences, or might it be possible to
put them on a truly predictive basis by means that have not been
formulated yet? There are a number of lines of research suggesting
that it might. One of them is based on the "meme": a concept created
by analogy with the gene and describing an entity supposed to behave
in a somewhat similar way.
H. Keith Henson was one of the founders, and the first president
of the L5 Society, which has since become part of the National Space
Society. He describes himself as a carrier for several highly
infectious memes relating to space colonies, nanotechnolaay, personal
computers, and cult-watching.
*****************************
SCIENCE fiction writers do not always manage to stay ahead of
science. One significant concept showed up in the scientific
literature 13 years before Charles Sheffield and Arthur Clarke
simultaneously wrote stories that incorporated the "Skyhook" or
"Beanstalk." But in projecting a science of social prediction, SF
writers have been far ahead of the scientists. Isaac Asimov based the
entire Foundation series on "Psychohistory." Robert Heinlein
developed the theme of predicting social movement in his Future
History stories, especially in Revolt in 2100, Methuselah's Children,
and in the unwritten saga of Reverend Nehemiah Scudder.*
[ * "First Prophet," President of the United States, destroyer of
its Constitution, and founder of the Theocracy. If this makes you
vaguely uncomfortable, it is probably because you have been reading
about fundamentalist preacher/presidential candidate Pat Robertson.
As the Ayatollah Khomeini recently demonstrated, fundamentalist
religion and politics can make a nasty mix.]
Science fiction aside, we don't have a science of social
prediction. Until recently, we haven't even had much in the way of
theories. Our continual surprise at the development of cults,
religions, wars, fads, and other social movements is a notable
exception to the steady progress humans have made in building better
models of our environment. When you consider the suffering associated
with some social movements, our lack of good models must he considered
a major deficiency.
A successful theory of the development of social movements will
have to provide a unifying theory for events that make up much of the
evening news. It will have to discover common features that lie
behind the diverse trends causing problems in Nicaragua, South Africa,
Northern Ireland, and the Middle East. A good theory should be able
to evaluate the danger or lack of danger from the LaRouche
organization, whose accidental win in the Democratic primary forced
Adlai Stevenson III to run as an independent in the Illinois
governor's race. (This cult more recently made the news when the FBI
raided its offices in the wake of alleged massive credit card frauds.)
It should be able to produce a plausible model for the breakup of the
Rajneesh cult (whose Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh accumulated 93 Rolls
Royces before abandoning his Oregon community). The theory should be
able to predict the conditions under which Turkey will be subverted by
a fundamentalist version of Islam similar to that which led to so much
grief in Iran.
A tall order! But an emerging field of study, _memetics_, holds
just such promise. Sometimes thought of as "germ theory applied to
ideas," memetics is an outgrowth of evolutionary biology. It provides
models where social movements are seen as side effects of infectious
ideas that spread among people in a way mathematically identical to
the way epidemic disease spreads. It has been noticed, for example,
that use rates for various drugs, most recently "crack," have closely
followed epidemic-like curves that seem to be as oblivious to the
efforts of authorities as the Black Death was in 1348. At a deeper
level, research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence is
starting to develop an understanding of why we are susceptible to
"infectious information," both the benign and the deadly.
As useful as these models may be, they are not without the
potential to seriously affect our cherished institutions. A good
understanding of the mechanisms of our minds and the dynamics that
underlie the spread and persistence of any social or political
movement has the potential to forever alter the way we think about all
other social movements, including those of our own culture, religions,
and nation. When viewed from the perspective of tolerance that has
been developing in Western culture since the Renaissance, the changes
in outlook seem to be positive, but it would not surprise me to find
memetics condemned from the pulpit even more than evolution has been.
Memetics comes from "meme" (which rhymes with "cream"), a word
coined in purposeful analogy to gene by Richard Dawkins in his 1976
book, _The Selfish Gene_. To understand memes, you must have a good
understanding of the modern concepts of evolution, and this is a good
source. In its last chapter, memes were defined as replicating
information patterns that use minds to get themselves copied much as a
virus uses cells to get itself copied. (Dawkins credits several
others for developing the concepts, especially the anthropologist F.
T. Cloak.) Like genes, memes are pure information.*
[*The essence of a gene is in its information. It is still a gene
"for hemoglobin" or "for waltzing behavior in mice" whether the
sequence is coded in DNA, printed on paper, or is written on
magnetic tape.]
They must be
perceived indirectly, most often by their effect on behavior or by
material objects that result from behavior. Humans are not the only
creatures that pass memes about. Bird songs that are learned (and
subject to variation) and the songs of whales are also replicating
information pattern that fit the model of a meme. So is the
"termiteing" behavior that chimps pass from generation to generation.
"Meme" is similar to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. A
passing idea which you do not communicate to others, or one which
fails to take root in others, falls short of being a meme. The
important part of the "meme about memes" is that memes are subject to
adaptive evolutionary forces very similar to those that select for
genes. That is, their variation is subject to selection in the
environment provided by human minds, communication channels, and the
vast collection of cooperating and competing memes that make up human
culture. The analogy is remarkably close. For example, genes in cold
viruses that cause sneezes by irritating noses spread themselves by
this route to new hosts and become more common in the gene pool of a
cold virus. Memes cause those they have successfully infected to
spread the meme by both direct methods (proselytizing) and indirect
methods (such as writing). Such memes become more common in the
culture pool.
The entire topic would be academic except that there are two
levels of evolution (genes and memes) involved and the memetic level
is only loosely coupled to the genetic. Memes which override genetic
survival, such as those which induce young Lebanese Shiites to blow
themselves "into the next world" from the front seat of a truck loaded
with high explosives, or induce untrained Iranians to volunteer to
charge Iraqi machine guns, or the WW II Kamikaze "social movement" in
Japan, are all too well known. I have proposed the term "memeoid" for
people whose behavior is so strongly influenced by a replicating
information pattern (meme) that their survival becomes inconsequential
in their own minds.
For a vivid example we can hark back a few years ago to Rev. Jim
Jones and the People's Temple incident, where 912 people, including
Jones, died of complications--poison and gunshot wounds--induced by an
information disease.
The Children's Crusades of the middle ages were larger and more
lethal; only 2 of 20,000 returned from one. The mass suicide in the
first century by the Jews at Masada is a clear example of information
patterns in people's minds having more influence over their behavior
than the fear of death.
A more seductive example of a social movement set off by a
lethal meme comes from South Africa. In the 1850s, a meme (originally
derived from a dream) led to a great sacrifice by the Xhoas people
during which they killed their cattle, burned their grain, and
refrained from planting in the belief that doing so would cause their
ancestors to come back from the dead and expel the whites. At least
20,000 and perhaps as many as 60,000 starved when the predicted
millennia of plenty failed to arrive. Known as the Cattle Killing, it
was not a unique response for a primitive society being displaced by a
more technically advanced one. The "Ghost Dancers" phenomenon among
American Indians was a similar response.
Memes that bring about suicidal behavior are at least
self-limiting. Those which induce one group of people to kill another
are much worse, and the social movements they induce are often much
larger. The scope of the social movement known as the Inquisition is
seldom mentioned in history textbooks, but:
The number of victims claimed by the witch-hunts, which
lasted for three hundred years, is reckoned by historians to be
between five and six million people; it therefore caused more
deaths than all the wars waged over the period.
It is only when one takes into account the brutal, pitiless,
expression of mass-mania, and that a belief in the devil, his
traffic with witches and warlocks, was constantly being fanned
anew by the Church . . . that it is possible to gain any measure
of understanding. . *
[* Five Thousand Years of Medicine by Gerhard Venzrner, Tr. Marion
Koenig, Taplinger Publishing Co., NY 1968 pg. 163.]
The depredations and brutality of the Inquisition were about
typical of deadly memes stemming from religions or closely related
social movements such as Marxist-Leninist communism.
In the last decade, the people of Kampuchea were infected with an
anti-intellectual, agrarian utopian meme clearly mutated (in the minds
of Pol Pot and his close associates) from the Vietnamese variation of
the communist meme. They were Eric Hoffer's "True Believers" of the
most extreme stripe. The resulting social movement was a massive
self-genocide. Over one third of the population of Kampuchea,
including almost all of the city dwellers and the educated, died
before the Vietnamese (embarrassed by news stories of rivers clogged
with bodies) invaded and put a stop to the killing. Many more would
have died had the social movement run its course without interference.
Kampuchea will take decades to recover, but "'tis an ill wind ..."
The people of Thailand, with a front seat on the slaughter, seem to
have lost all sympathy for their own related social movements.
History classes have made us more aware of the genocidal
depredations resulting from the "master race" meme that was part of
the Nazi meme complex. Considered from the viewpoint of memes, Hitler
was less a prime mover than a willing victim of this particularly
nasty and pervasive variety of information disease. Had plague struck
Germany in the '30s instead of Nazism, we would have understood it in
terms of susceptibility, vectors, and disease organisms. What did
happen may soon be modeled and understood in terms of the social and
economic disruptions of the time increasing the number of people
susceptible to fanatical beliefs, just as poor diet is known to
increase the number of those susceptible to tuberculosis. For
vectors, we have personal contact, the written word, radio, and
amplified voices substituting for rats, lice, mosquitoes, and
coughed-out droplets. A pool of "sub-memes," many of them ancient
myth, contributed to the syncretic Nazi meme in much the same way
mobile genes contribute to the virulence of the influenza viruses.
Nazism was not the only fanatical movement growing and evolving
in the fertile social media of Germany between the wars. The
Marxist-Leninist meme was a visible competitor in the early period.
Even though most of those infected with the Nazi meme were conquered
or killed and Nazism became a suppressed meme, it cannot be said to
have died. As a replicating information pattern that has gone through
a great deal of evolutionary honing, it is still successful in
infecting a few susceptible people today.
A fascinating footnote to the German experience with Nazism and
its horrors happened in 1969 when Ron Jones, a teacher in Palo Alto,
exposed a high school history class to an intensive, five-day
experience with the ideas that made up the Nazi meme. The experience
of that week was originally published as "Take as Directed" in _The
CoEvolution Quarterly,_ {later WER} Spring '76 and a few years ago was
made into a TV movie, _The Wave_. Over four days, Jones introduced
and drilled his students in concepts of Strength Through Discipline,
Community, Action, and Pride. (The fifth day was devoted to showing
them how easily they had started to slip into the abyss.) The
enthusiasm with which most of the class adopted the memes and spread
them to their friends, swelling a 40 student class to 200 in 5 days,
made it one of the most frightening events the teacher had ever
experienced. Given the track record of the Nazi meme, the mini-social
movement his experiment set off is no more surprising in retrospect
than the medical effects would have been if the teacher had sprayed
smallpox virus on the class.
An empirical characteristic of large, long-lived religious
movements or related social movements (at least in the West) is a
scripture or body of written material. This may function to
standardize the meme involved or at least slow its evolution as the
number of people infected with it grows. From Scientology right back
to the Hindu Vedas, I can think of no counter-examples. Social
movements involving more than a few thousand people or lasting more
than a few years may have been rare before writing came along.
It is possible that the breakup of the Rajneesh cult was related
to its lack of an organized written scripture at a critical juncture.
The memes that were the origin of that particular social movement were
characterized by considerable instability; that is, parasitic memes
arose out of the local culture soup at short intervals. Some of them
(tapping phones) made a kind of paranoid sense, but poisoning salad
bars at restaurants with Salmonella bacteria in the hope of
influencing local elections made no sense. The group seems to have
amplified individual crazy impulses at the expense of propagating the
meme.
I have noticed several features of the social movements that
derived from really dangerous memes. One is self-isolation of the
infected group or at least new recruits from the rest of society.
This need not be an "intelligent" action taken by the "leaders."
There may be no more thought involved than the selection of dark moths
in industrial England. The "fanatic cult" memes which incorporate
isolation are the ones we observe; those which do not incorporate
isolation are like light moths, gone and not observable.
In the case of the Soviet Union, the cult-like communist meme
survives in a society largely isolated from the rest of the world. In
recent years the isolation may have resulted from reasoned
considerations about the fragility of the communist meme in open
competition with other memes. A more parsimonious view would note
that without originally having a strong isolation component, the
communist meme would have had no more social influence in the USSR
than it has had in, say, France.*
[* The ferment in the USSR today is certainly consistent with this
point.]
Isolation makes possible exposure to a single meme (or meme set)
many times a day for months or years without much contact with other
memes. Exclusive exposure to one meme (also known as brainwashing)
induces a "dependent mental state" in some people.
Thankfully, most of us have not experienced the dependent mental
state firsthand, but we have all seen such people on the news programs
boarding buses for the front in Iran, or been harassed by them in
airports, or had them knock on our doors and try to infect us. It is
clear that the people who suffer from extreme cases of "information
disease" have lost much of their ability to take care of themselves or
their children. Truly dedicated people often fail to replace
themselves, since too much of their life energies are channeled into
propagating the infecting meme. One example comes from the largest
subdivision of Christianity, where celibacy for its most dedicated has
long been institutionalized. The Rajneesh cult practiced the opposite
of celibacy but discouraged births to the point of sterilizing the
barely pubescent female children of its resident members.
Given that memes have been interfering with our reproduction for
a long time, one must wonder why humans are still so susceptible to
information diseases. The answers to such questions are starting to
come from research in artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and
archeology. It is becoming apparent that our vulnerabilities are a
direct consequence of the way our minds are organized, and that
organization is a direct consequence of our evolutionary history.
Marvin Minsky (a principal founder of Al) and Michael Gazzaniga
(one of the major workers in split-brain research) have independently
come to a virtually identical model of the mind. Both view minds as
vast collections of interacting, largely parallel (co-conscious)
modules, or "agents." The lowest level of such a society of agents
consists of a small number of nerve cells that innervate a section of
muscle. A few of the higher level modules have been isolated in
clever experiments by Gazzaniga, some of them on split-brain patients.
One surprise from this work is that we seem to have our mental
modules arranged in a way that guarantees we will form beliefs. What
we believe in depends, at least in part, on what we are exposed to and
the order in which we are exposed. Gazzaniga argues that we slowly
evolved the ability to form beliefs because the ability provides a
major advantage in surviving. Being able to infer, that is to form
new beliefs, and to learn, in the sense of acquiring such beliefs from
others, was a major advance over learning by trial and error. Being
able to pass the rare new ways our ancestors found for chipping rock
or making pots from person to person and generation to generation was
vital in allowing humans to spread over the earth. But as this
ability became the norm, communicating human minds formed a new
"primal soup" in which a new kind of non-biological evolution, that of
replicating information patterns or memes, could get started. A wide
variety of competing memes has evolved in the intervening seventy
thousand years or so. It should not be surprising that the survivors
of this process, like astrology or religions, are so effective at
inducing their hosts to spread and defend them. It is also plausible
that in the tens of millennia since memetic evolution became a major
factor, there has been a biological co-evolution. The parts of our
brains that hold our belief systems have probably undergone biological
adaptation to be better at detecting dangerous memes and more
skeptical about memes that result in death or seriously interfere with
reproductive success.
This type of co-evolution is known as an "arms race" to
biologists. One such biological arms race has resulted in almost
perfect egg mimicry by the cuckoo and in correspondingly sharp visual
discrimination in the birds it parasitizes. By analogy, while we get
better at spotting dangerous memes, the memes may be evolving to be
more effective at infecting us. Advancing technology (which itself is
an improving collection of memes) changes the environmental conditions
where memes survive or fail as well. The modern telephone system and
the tape cassette player were major factors in the takeover of Iran.
It has been argued that the rise of the Nazis depended strongly on
radio reaching a previously unexposed and unsophisticated population.
Exposure to modern advertising may be one factor which makes a
television broadcast by Lyndon LaRouche attacking (among others) the
L5 Society so absurd that tapes of it are used as entertainment at L5
parties. He might have been taken seriously in the '3Os.
I have picked dangerous examples for vivid illustrations and to
point out that memes have a life of their own. The ones that kill
their hosts make this hard to ignore. However, most memes, like most
microorganisms, are either helpful or at least harmless. Some may
even provide a certain amount of defense from the very harmful ones.
It is the natural progression of parasites to become symbiotes, and
the first symbiotic behavior that emerges in a proto-symbiote is for
it to start protecting its host from other parasites. I have come to
appreciate the common religions in this light. Even if they were
harmful when they started, the ones that survive over generations
evolve and do not cause too much damage to their hosts. Calvin (who
had dozens of people executed over theological disputes) would hardly
recognize Presbyterians three hundred years later. Contrariwise, the
Shaker meme is now confined to books, and the Shakers are gone. It is
clearly safer to believe in a well-aged religion than to be
susceptible to a potentially fatal cult.
History doesn't change, but our interpretation of it can. For
example, the contemporary "causes" of historical epidemics (such as
the miasma theory) have been totally supplanted by germ theory
explanations. Before germ theory came along, memes of causality for
epidemics were remarkably stable. The "explanation" for the Black
Death of 1348 was still in use for the Philadelphia Yellow Fever
epidemic of 1796. Similarly, various "explanations" for wars have
been with us for hundreds of years.
Memetics provides an interesting alternate way to analyze recent
wars and the roots of current disputes. In this view, the ultimate
(though unaware) protagonists of World War II were memes such as the
Nazi "master race" and the Marxist-Leninist meme (MLM). The current
clash between the Soviets and the western world can be viewed as a
meme conflict (for space in minds) between the religion-like,
competition-intolerant mono-meme of communism and the western
meta-meme of tolerance. While it is not a religion by any reasonable
definition, the Marxist-Leninist meme is clearly in competition for
the "belief space" in minds usually occupied by religious memes. It,
and its more cultish offshoots, have the typical virtues and excesses
of cult-stage religious memes. In an amusing twist, the "god-less"
communist meme is the more religion-like of the two in its battle for
mind space with secular western culture!
Reviewers of an earlier draft of this article objected to my
description of Soviet memes. Words like "tolerant" or "intolerant"
have acquired a great deal of positive/negative connotation in the
western world, but in describing memes, I am using them in the same
way we would say that a mold colony is intolerant of a bacterial
invasion. With respect to the belief system that dominates the meme
pool of the other superpower, I am trying to be descriptive, not
partisan.
If anything, I would think that understanding the memetic nature
of religions and related movements like communism would defuse the
emotional connections and substitute something closer to dispassionate
understanding of the parasitic-to-symbiotic memes behind such social
movements. It has had that effect on me. Many, even the most
gruesome, features of communism are what they are simply because those
features were (and are) necessary for the meme to exist in a world of
competing memes. Isolation, for example, is a common feature of
virtually all successful religious memes while they are in the cult
stage. Anyone who has studied history knows that suppression of
competitive memes by the power of the state is a common experience
once a meme of this class has infected the leaders or they have been
replaced by those infected.
And if the Christian religion was a mainstay of the aristocracy,
serving to keep the peasants in place, Soviet Communism is no less
supportive of its own hereditary elite. As a successful and
persistent meme, that has appeal even to people who know the realities
of its practice, it commands a certain grudging respect. From a
meme's viewpoint, tolerance of other memes is not a virtue; it is, in
fact, a fatal characteristic for a particular meme, as memes inducing
intolerance to other memes would soon displace it. On the other hand,
a meta-meme of limited toleration, even cooperation among memes is
possible. The western metamere of tolerance seems to have emerged
from an ecosystem of memes in much the same way that cooperative
behavior has been modeled as emerging from an ecosystem of
individuals.* In the area of meme tolerance the western world may be
unique. We think of censorship as evil; where but in an advanced
ecosystem of memes could such a strange idea have emerged?
[* See _The Evolution of Cooperation_ by Robert Axelrod, 1984 Basic
Books, NY. ]
I have recently had a lot of fun reading history to trace the
development of the meta-meme of tolerance. This particular character
of our ecosystem of memes has been developing at least since the
writings of the Greeks and Romans were a rediscovered during the
Renaissance. Studying inactive pagan religions may have been the
first step in developing tolerance for a variety of religious memes.
The fragmentation of the dominant religion during the Reformation led
to a series of largely indecisive religious wars in most of the major
countries of Europe. Sheer exhaustion may have been one of the most
significant factors in developing a grudging tolerance, which in these
later times has taken on a patina of virtue in the division of our
culture known as "liberal."
In this view, western culture is a vast ecosystem where memes of
many classes engage in "fair" competition with each other. Attempts
to subvert fair competition by changing laws or education (such as
introducing "creation science" into schools) draw opposition from
defenders of a wide variety of memes which have evolved within this
environment. This model may provide testable explanations for both
western culture's tolerance of intolerant memes (such as creation
science and the MLM) and the hostility these memes evoke from various
segments of the culture. David Brin's "Dogma of Otherness" in the
April 1986 Analog prompted considering a memetic explanation for such
peculiar ambiguities in our culture.
Several current social movements are obvious candidates for
examination with memetic theory. Given the available data, we may be
able to predict the remaining course of the "non-literate graffiti
epidemic," which has spread in the past 15 years from New York City to
remote corners of the country. There are substantial financial
reasons (such as the cost of mark-resistant walls) to want to know if
scribbler behavior will be a limited epidemic or will become an
endemic part of our culture.
Drug use, clearly a replicating pattern of behavior passed from
person to person, is another "social movement" where the similarity to
epidemic waxing and waning has been widely used by reporters, and
noted without much explanation in a number of learned journals. If it
were formally considered as an epidemic with memes as the infecting
agents, the ways by which the behavior spreads might get more
attention. Counter-drug programs might be evaluated in terms of how
well they induce reasonable behavior. Some efforts in the past,
especially those which wildly exaggerated the dangers of a drug such
as marijuana, may have increased the behavior of taking other drugs.
These efforts may have immunized those exposed against believing any
official pronouncements about drugs.
Formal consideration of drug use as an epidemic of meme-induced
behavior might also lead to the realization that the percentage of
people susceptible to abusing most drugs is not all that large.
(Cigarette smoking is an exception.) For example, most of the people
I know who have tried cocaine don't care for it. Not liking the
effect, they wouldn't use it if it were free. People who really like
opiates aren't that common, either.
Part of my interest in memes stems from a ten-year (and
continuing) experience of being infected with the space colony meme
which developed in the minds of Gerard O'Neill and his students in the
late '60s. (See "Memes, L5 and the Religion of the Space Colonies,"
September, 1985 and "More on Memes," June 1986, both in _L5 News_.)
Memetics provides candidate explanations for why the space colony meme
spread in the first place, why it is not making much progress now, and
some insight into what might be done to revitalize the meme and
actually accomplish the implicit goals.
From a recent survey of L5 members, there seems to be two main
factors and a minor one that contributed to the attractiveness of the
space colony meme. First was the "new lands" factor. We are the
genetic and memetic heirs of people who moved into vacant areas of the
planet. It should be no surprise that the prospect of new lands is an
irresistible attraction to many people. This may also explain the
higher than proportional membership in L5 from California, where the
last of the restless pioneers piled up. The minor factor (suggested
by Dale Skran of Bell Labs) is fear of random events such as nuclear
war, asteroid impact, worldwide epidemics, or crazy social movements
that could badly damage civilization or even extinguish human life.
As Heinlein put it, one planet is too fragile a basket to put all the
human eggs in. The other main factor was possibility of personal
involvement, of going into space. Surprisingly this is still a very
important factor. Some 60 percent of respondents to a survey at the
1986 L5 annual conference said they expected to live in space.
If the attractiveness of the space colony meme is in the prospect
of large numbers of people being able to live in space within a short
time, these factors are quite at variance with today's reality; since
the Solar Power Satellite project bit the dust, there haven't even
been any widely accepted proposals that would get us out there in the
next 50-100 years. Since the space colony meme never had a fixed
deadline, the lack of correspondence between the meme and reality
hasn't hit as hard as "the day after" hits a millennial religion, but
informal surveys of former members indicate that lack of a timetable
was an important factor in their becoming inactive. If we want to get
out there, we need to tap a very large source of social energy. The
biggest single source of social energy on the planet is the meme
conflict between the MLM and the western metamere. There are ways
this might be tapped to get us into space, but that would take another
article.
The memes which embody the germ theory of disease emerged when
they did partly b&cause "the time was right." The work of von
Leeuwenheok, Semmelweis, Spallanzani, and their less remembered
colleagues established in scientific culture the background memes
about microorganisms. Without these cooperating memes, the ideas of
Pasteur and Koch could not have replicated. The tragic history of
Semmelweis and his statistical work on childbed fever stands as an
example of the failure of a meme to take root in a culture before the
conditions are right for its spread, no matter how true or useful to
humans it may be.
If most conflict in the world is an indirect effect of memes,
memetics holds as much potential for reducing human misery as the germ
theory of disease. Just being able to model the interaction between
the Soviets and the West in terms of memes might go a long way toward
making the world a safer place. It took at least 60 years for the
germ theory of disease to be widely accepted, though, as anyone who
has traveled much knows, it still has a ways to go in many parts of
the world. What are the prospects in the near future for a similar
acceptance of the meme-about-memes? If it were widely accepted, what
changes could we expect to see analogous to public health? Would
widespread awareness of infectious information make us less
susceptible to dangerous memes? Can we separate ourselves from the
memes that possess us?
Further exploration of the analogy between replicating
information patterns and the ecosystems-epidemic models biologists
have painstakingly developed for other purposes may provide badly
needed insight into the origin and courses of social movements and the
nature of meme competition/cooperation. If memetics develops soon
enough, it may provide help in evaluating proposed solutions to
current international problems, predict the course of troublesome
social movements, and suggest solutions for conflicts between social
movements. If this article succeeds in infecting you with the
meme-about-memes, perhaps it will help you be more responsible about
the memes you spread and less likely to be infected by a meme that can
harm you or those around you.
POSTSCRIPT 1989
Lyndon Larouche has now been sent to jail for credit card fraud.
Cults such as this one can almost be defined by the central meme
gaining ascendency in the minds of the infected over all other
considerations, moral and legal.
Computer viruses are an additional analogy to the more
destructive memes. While memes infect _human_ operating systems,
computer viruses and worms infect _computer_ operating systems
Sadly, the meme-about-memes is not spreading as fast as I would
like. Those interested in helping spread it can contact me at:
{1997 updated address}
P.O. Box 60012
Palo Alto, CA 94306
or through email at:
hkhen...@netcom.com or
ke...@xanadu.com
{Additional articles include Memes, MetaMemes and Politics, A
Theoretical Understanding (memes and cryonics), one on meme trapping
of leaders, and a recent one on a connection between cults and
evolutionary psychology}
REFERENCES
In addition to Dawkins's '76 and '82 books, there are a number of
books and articles directly discussing memes. One that reached a
large number of readers was Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas
column "On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures" in
Scientific American (Jan. 1983) and reprinted in his recent book.
There are numerous supporting sources, and a reliable source indicates
that a journal of memetics may be offered soon.
Bohannan, Paul. "The Gene Pool and the Meme Pool," Science 80,
November 1980, pp. 25, 28.
Cloak, F.T. , Jr. "The Causal Logic of Natural Selection: A General
Theory," Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology 3, article 6, 1986. In
press. Preprints available from F.T. Cloak, Jr., 1613 Fruit Avenue,
NW, Albuquerque, NM 87104.
Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of
Selection. W.H. Freeman and Company, Oxford and San Francisco, 1982.
See esp. Chapter 6, pp. 97-117.
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, New
York, 1976. See Chapter 11, first use of "meme."
Drexler, K. Eric. Engines of Creation. Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden
City, New York, 1986. See esp. pp.35-38 and other references to
"memes" in the index.
Henson, H. Keith.
"Memes, L5 and the Religion of the Space Colonies," L-5 News,
September, 1985.
"More on Memes," L-5 News, June 1986.
"Memes, Mental Parasites, and the Evolution of Skepticism,"
unpublished monograph.
"Original Sin and Liberal Guilt," Cryonics, in press. {on the web}
Hofstadter, Douglas R. Metamagical Themas. Basic Books, Inc., New
York, 1985. See esp. Chapter 3, pp. 49-69.
Stefik, Mark. "The Next Knowledge Medium," The AI Magazine, Spring
1986, Vol.7, #1.
Wilson, Edward o. and Charles J. Lumsden. Genes, Mind and Culture: The
Coevolutionary Process. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
1981. See esp. Chapter 3 and earlier definitions of "culturgen" and
"epigenesis."
The following works do not use the word "meme," but their
contents help elucidate human behavior and cultural evolution.
Baker, Sherry. "A Plague Called Violence," Omni, Vol.8, No.11 (August
1986), pp 42ff.
Chase, Stuart. The Tyranny of Words. Harcourt, Brace and World; New
York, 1938.
Cloak, F.T., Jr., et al. "The Adaptive Significance of Cultural
Behavior: Comments and Reply," Human Ecology, Vol.5, No.1(1977),
pp.49-50 (with references appended to the monograph).
Cloak, F.T., Jr., "Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?," Human Ecology,
Vol.3, No.3 (1975), pp.161-82.
Conway, Flo and Jim Siegelman. Snapping. Dell Publishing, New York,
1979.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Social Brain: Discovering the Networks of
the Mind. Basic Books, Inc., New York, 1985.
Kelly, Kevin. "Information as a Communicable Disease," CoEvolution
Quarterly, Summer 1984.
Minsky, Marvin. Society of Mind. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1986.
Nisbett, Richard, and Lee Ross. Human Inference: Strategies and
Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey, 1980.
(LONG article, about 30k bytes) Copyright 1988, Keith Henson, 408-978-7616
1794 Cardel Way, San Jose, CA 95124 For paper publication permission,
contact author
Memes Meta-Memes and Politics
By H. Keith Henson
"For philosophically committed people, politics is primarily a contest over
public policy. The measure is not what people, but what ideas win."
--Morton C. Blackwell
"If you would understand politics, study evolution first."
--H. T. Watcher
Richard Dawkins, perhaps the foremost evolutionary biologist of our times,
starts Chapter 5 of his recent book, The Blind Watchmaker with "It's raining
DNA outside." He goes on to describe a willow tree that is shedding fluffy
seeds far and wide across the landscape. The paragraph ends: "The whole
performance, cotton wool, catkins, tree and all is in aid of one thing and one
thing only, the spreading of DNA around the countryside. Not just any DNA, but
DNA whose coded characters spell out specific instructions for building willow
trees that will shed a new generation of downy seeds. Those fluffy specks are,
literally, spreading instructions for making themselves. They are there because
their ancestors succeeded in doing the same. It is raining instructions out
there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading
algorithms. That's not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any
plainer if it were raining floppy disks."
The paradigm of life as the propagation of genetic information and of
Darwinian evolution as resulting from the selective survival generation after
generation of some part of that information is an outgrowth of the computer age.
This paradigm has led to a number of remarkable advances in evolutionary
biology. For example, seemingly "altruistic" behavior of worker bees is now
understood as a consequence of the improved survival of the "selfish" DNA they
share with the queen. About a decade ago in the mind of the same Dr. Dawkins
this line of thinking led to a new way to view the spread and persistence of the
ideas that make up human culture.
The new study is called memetics after "meme" (which rhymes with cream).
"Meme" is a coined word from a Greek root for memory, and purposefully similar
to "gene." Dawkins devoted the last chapter of his earlier book, The Selfish
Gene, to defining memes and discussing the survival of these replicating
information patterns within the meme-pool (roughly culture). "Meme" is close
to "idea," but not all ideas are memes. An idea which fails to propagate beyond
the person who first thinks of it is not a meme. "Beliefs," especially
organized and promoted beliefs, are memes, or, depending on how you think about
them, cooperating groups of memes. I will use memes, ideas, replicating
information patterns, and beliefs as similar terms in this article.
The study of memetics takes the old saw about ideas having a life of their
own seriously and applies what we know about ecosystems, evolution, and
epidemiology to study the spread and persistence of ideas in cultures. If you
come to understand memetics, I expect your view of politics, religions, and
related social movements to be changed in much the same way the germ theory of
disease changed the attitude of the medical profession about epidemics.
Memetics provides rational explanations for a lot of seemingly irrational human
behavior.
A meme survives in the world because people pass it on to other people,
either vertically to the next generation, or horizontally to our fellows. This
process is analogous to the way willow genes cause willow trees to spread them,
or perhaps closer to the way cold viruses make us sneeze and spread them.
Collections of organisms make up ecosystems. Human culture is a vast
collection of memes, a memetic ecosystem. The diagram below is in terms of
increasing complexity.
Memes (groups form culture, stabilized by meta-memes)
Organisms (groups form ecosystems)
Cells
DNA (informational though embedded in material)
-------------------------------------
molecules material
atoms
sub atomic
Once the informational boundary is crossed, biological models of replication
and survival become applicable. Most of the memes that make up human culture
are of the shoemaking kind. A rationale for the spread and persistence of
these ideas/skills seems obvious: they aid the survival of people who in turn
teach the same ideas and skills to the next generation.
But a good fraction of the memes that make up human culture fall into the
categories of political, philosophical, or religious. A rationale for the
spread and persistence for these memes is a much deeper problem. The spread of
some memes of these classes at the expense of others is of intense concern to
many readers of Reason. If we are to be effective at judging ideas and
promoting the spread of ones we think are more rational, it would be useful to
understand how memes come about, how they use people to spread, and why the
self-interest of the people who spread a meme and the meme's "interest" are not
always the same.
Study of these concepts may provide insight into why some ideas are more
attractive than others and into what "rational" and "objective" mean. Much of
the recent progress in understanding evolution came from a viewpoint shift:
biologists started looking at the world from the viewpoint of genes. Because
genes influence their own survival (via causal loops) the ones we observe seem
as if they were "striving" to be represented by more copies in the next
generation. Memes too seem to "strive." Of course, this is metaphor, since
neither genes nor memes are conscious. In the process of making more copies of
themselves in human minds memes sometimes work at cross purposes with human
genes. At least three different and conflicting viewpoints for determining
"rational" and "objective" exist: from the viewpoint of the genes a person
carries, from the viewpoint of the memes they carry (or are infected with) and
from their conscious mind, shaped by both genes and memes.
Memes and humans have co-evolved. Pre-human minds were, like current human
minds, the substrate for memes. Pre-human minds were the memetic equivalent of
the "primal soup" in which genetic life started. Replicating information
patterns such as the ones which built mental structures for chipping rock or
(much later) controlling fire improved the survival of certain human genes.
These genes in turn built bodies and minds able to learn and pass on the memes.
The result was a double positive feedback cycle where memes for survival-
enhancing behavior and genes for mental hardware able to learn and pass along
memes were both favored. The combination is so successful that human beings and
their complex cultures inhabit the largest ecological range on the planet (at
least for animals of our size).
Any ecological success becomes a fertile ground for parasites. The
environment of the cell nucleus with its raw materials and enzyme systems for
replicating DNA/RNA is hijacked by viruses. Likewise, the human/memetic system
is beset by biological and memetic parasites. Successful parasites (that is the
ones which don't kill off their host) evolve into mutualistic symbionts. The
host also evolves to be resistant to parasites. I think both genetic and memetic
responses to parasitic memes can be recognized.
Parasitic memes have been strongly selected to fit the strange quirks that
developed in human mental systems as they evolved. For example, the ability to
plan into the future confers a strong survival advantage, especially since the
introduction of farming. But being able to think about the future (and past)
generates troubling problems when this ability is applied to questions such as
where-was-I-before-birth or where-will-I-go-after-death. The attractiveness of
religious belief systems largely stems from providing "plausible" answers to
questions that would not be asked except for the hyperdevelopment of this mental
skill.
To illustrate the lifelike quality of memes, here is my story about how a
meme was introduced to a sub-culture, how it thrived, evolved, and finally
became extinct.
When I went to college in 1960, the University of Arizona registration
material included a punch card for religion. I figured (correctly) that they
would sort this card out and send it to the 'church of your choice' so the
churches could send around press gangs on Sunday morning. At the time, I was
drifting away from the church in which I had been raised. (My intellectual and
social development had simply become incompatible with churches of any kind.)I
wasn't expecting this question, hadn't given any thought to what I would put
down, and was in a hurry to get through the lines of registration checkers. I
remembered an old SF story that hinged on a mystery word, Myob, later explained
as an acronym for Mind Your Own Business. Why not? I put down MYOB in the
religion space, and got away with it when they asked me what it meant.
By the next semester I had thought up a better answer. The high school crowd
I ran around with had used runes to write silly messages on the blackboards, and
we actually knew quite a bit about old religions. So I put down Druid, and
got away with it. In fact, the harried registration checkers who asked what was
a Druid didn't let me get more than a sentence or two into my prerecorded rap
about how the Druids had been around a lot longer than the upstart Christians.
It was far too good a prank to keep to myself. Several of my old high school
buddies were also at the U of A and imitated my "Druid registration behavior."
After a few semesters, there were hundreds of people doing it, and in several
mutated forms. Of course, there had to be "Reformed Druids," and that opened a
niche for "Orthodox Druids." There were "Southern Druids." There were the
"Primitive Druids" at one point, and several variations on "Church of the nth
Druid." One of the best was the "Zen Druids." They worshiped trees that may,
or may not, have been there. Winner for the best take-off was the "Latter Day
Druids."
For modeling, this "replicating information pattern, manifesting as behavior
of students claiming to be members of a defunct religion" could be considered as
a fad, a group of fads, or (from the point of view of annoyed school
administrators) a '60s MOVEMENT. My spies in the University administration
reported that it peaked in the late '60s with about 20 percent of the student
body claiming (almost all tongue in cheek) to be some sort of Druids. This
memetic infection was faithfully passed down from year to year infecting the
incoming students, many of whom thumbed their noses in this small way at the
administration for the rest of their college years. At one point there were
three or four rival Druid Student Centers, and the Bandersnatch, an off-campus
humor newspaper, was published by the Druid Free Press.
University administrators created vast amounts of unnecessary paperwork for
the students every semester. There was one card that took at least half an hour
to fill out. They wanted your life history in six point spaces to "create
accurate publicity about you." I very much doubt that one in a thousand of
those were ever used. While wasting student time was irrelevant to
administrators, it was not to the students, and it was easy to get annoyed. In
a rough biological analogy, this created a niche for a meme inducing behavior
that got back in a small, safe way at the administrators.
Once introduced, the "Druid" meme was subject to a large number of small
variations, mutations if you will, but was still recognizable. My introduction
of this idea was not particularly original, but most "new" memes are just old
ones with the serial numbers filed off and a new coat of paint.
In a very lifelike way, the Druid meme in this subculture grew exponentially
over several "cycles" exactly the way an epidemic does. When the susceptible
population was mostly infected it became very much like an endemic disease, with
only the newcomers catching it. It may have jumped to other schools through
transfer students, but I have no direct knowledge.
Did U of A Druids turn into a persistent fad, like illiterate graffiti?
Sorry to say, but no. In the early seventies some smart people in the
university administration removed this question from registration for four years
and interrupted the chain of infection.
I would have considered my Druid example as entirely harmless, but in the mid
'70s I met someone in the same city who had made a serious commitment to the
old religions. I doubt that the memetic infection I introduced had much to do
with the resurgence of pagan religions in the US, and little if anything to do
with activity in England, but it certainly gave me pause to find someone about
to move to a remote place in Iceland where he thought the old religions were
still being practiced. "Replicating ideas" are always changing in the minds of
those they infect, and they can mutate (sometimes a lot) with every new person
they infect. It is hard to predict exactly what behavior a particular meme will
be inducing next week, because you never know how the meme may interact with
other memes, or mutate.
My next example of a meme at work was clearly harmful, in fact lethal.
Remember Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple incident? Jones started out in his
youth infected with a fairly standard version of fundamentalist Christianity.
Later this belief was replaced with--or mutated into--as strange a mix of
socialism, Maoist communism, and personal lunacy as you are likely to find.
Jones first promoted his new beliefs from within the organized outer shell of
his previous one. He moved those he had infected from Indianapolis to Oakland,
and than to an isolated patch of jungle. Jones and his group kept cycling ideas
between the leader and his followers. There was little correction from re-
ality, and, like a wild rumor, the memes got weirder at every cycle.
Eventually, these beliefs (more accurately the mental structures built or
programmed by these memes within the minds of Jones and his followers) reached
the point where they had so much influence over them that their personal
survival became an insignificant influence.
The mass suicide was an unusual (and thus newsworthy) episode. But history
records a number of similar incidents, with similar memetic origins. The
Children's Crusades of the Middle Ages and the mass starvation in the 1850's of
the Xhoas in South Africa are typical examples. Mass suicide episodes do not
seem rational from either a memetic or genetic viewpoint. But they make sense as
a consequence of human susceptibility to beliefs that happen to have fatal
outcomes. They are close analogs of diseases that overkill their victims--like
Dutch elm disease.
Consider the "Killing Fields" of Kampuchea. The people who killed close toa
third of the population of Kampuchea do not seem to have profited from their
efforts much more than Jones. In the memetic view of history, ideas of influence
are seen as more important than the particular people who hold them. Some memes
(for example Nazism) are observed to thrive during periods of economic chaos
just as diseases flourish in an undernourished population. Thus it is not much
of a surprise that Nazi-related beliefs emerged in the Western farm states
during the recent hard times.
Beside being utilitarian and dangerous, memes can be fun. Fads, such as
hula hoops or pet rocks can be considered as the behavioral outcome of memes.
Memetics links the pet rocks fad, the Nazis, drug "epidemics," and the problems
in Belfast, Beirut, Iran, and Central America. *ALL* result from replicating
information patterns which lie behind the whole range of social movements. This
is not to downgrade the effects of population pressure, ecological limits, or
the marketplace. But while these provide substrate and predisposition, the
specific form of social response which emerges in a crisis depends on memes,
either already present or imported, and how well they replicate in the
pre-existing memetic ecosystem.
Why do these "replicating information patterns" jump from mind to mind,
sometimes setting off massive, and occasionally dangerous, social movements?
Memes that are good at inducing those they infect to spread them, and ones that
are easy to catch, simply become more common. Since this is circular reasoning,
I need to restate the question. What, in the evolutionary prehistory of our
race, has predisposed us to be a substrate to memes that can harm us?
The ability to learn from each other is strongly rooted in our evolutionary
past. Mammals are generally good at this, primates depend on it, and we are the
absolute masters of passing information from person to person and generation to
generation. In fact, the amount of data passed on through human culture is much,
much greater than the vast amount of information we pass on through our genes.
We are obligatory "informavores," and simply could not live in most of the world
without vast amounts of information on how to survive there. I am not talking
just about the need to read The Wall Street Journal if you are in the
financial business, but the need for a little child to learn (without using
trial and error!) that cars make streets dangerous places.
Though the evolutionary origins of our susceptibility to memes is fairly
obvious, it is instructive to examine the actual mechanisms of the mind that are
engaged when we are infected with a meme.
Recent research in neurology and artificial intelligence has produced a
remarkable model of the mind. Minds are beginning to be viewed as vast
parallel collections of simpler elements, called "agents" or modules.*
Memes are information patterns which, like a recipe, guide the construction
of some agents, or groups of agents. A "walking under ladders leads to bad
luck" meme has successfully infected someone when it has built agents that
modify a person's behavior when walking near ladders.
Some mental agents are "wired in". The most obvious ones pull our hands back
from hot things. Others are not so obvious, but one which has considerable study
is often called "the inference engine." Split brain research has established it
to be physically located in the left brain of most people, close to or
overlapping the speech area. This module seems to be the source of inferences
that organize the world into a consistent whole. The same hardware seems to
judge externally presented memes for plausibility. This piece of mental
hardware is, at the same time, the wellspring of advances, and the source of
vast error.
-----
*The new models even offer an explanation for that difficult problem, the origin
of consciousness. Each agent is too simple to be conscious, but consciousness
incidentally emerges as a property of the interconnections of these agents. In
Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky uses the analogy that consciousness emerges
from non-conscious elements just as the property of confinement emerges from six
properly arranged boards, none of which (by itself) has any property of
confinement. (And you thought Ids and Egos were complicated.)
Being able to infer, that is to find new relations in the way the world is
organized, and being able to learn inferences from others must rank among our
most useful abilities. Unfortunately, outputs of this piece of mental hardware
are all too often of National Enquirer quality. Unless reined in by
hard-to-learn mental skills, this part of our minds can lead us into disaster.
Experiments detailing the kinds of serious errors this mental module makes can
be found in Human Inference by Nesbitt and Ross and in The Social Brain by
Michael Gazzaniga.
(Sidebar) *****************************************
Gazzaniga demonstrated the activity of the inference engine module with some
very clever experiments on split brain patients. By the module failing, we can
clearly see how it is doing the best it can with insufficient data.
What Gazzaniga did is to present each side of the brain with a simple
conceptual problem. The left side saw a picture of a claw, and the right side
saw a picture of a snow scene. A variety of cards was place in front of the
patient who was asked to pick the card which went with what he saw. The correct
answer for the left hemisphere was a picture of a chicken. For the right
half-brain it was a show shovel.
"After the two pictures are flashed to each half-brain, the subjects are
required to point to the answers. A typical response is that of P.S., who
pointed to the chicken with his right hand and the shovel with the left.
After his response I asked him 'Paul, why did you do that?' Paul looked up
and without a moment's hesitation said from his left hemisphere, 'Oh, that's
easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken and you need a shovel to clean
out the chicken shed.'
"Here was the left half-brain having to explain why the left hand was
pointing to a shovel when the only picture it saw was a claw. The left
brain is not privy to what the right brain saw because of the brain's
disconnection. Yet the patents's own body was doing something. Why was it
doing that? Why was the left hand pointing to the shovel? The left-brain's
cognitive system needed a theory and instantly supplied one that made sense
given the information it had on this particular task . . . ."
The inference engine was a milestone in our evolution. It works far more
often than it fails. But as you can see from the example, the inference engines
will wring blood from a stone; you can count on its finding causal relations
whether they exist or not. Worse yet, the inference engine probably can't
detect when it doesn't have enough data. Even if it could, it has no way to
tell that to the verbal (conscious) self.
(end sidebar) *********************************************
There are both genetic and memetic controls on the dangerous beliefs that
arise in this module, though they don't always work. I can't point to genes for
skepticism but (provided it did not interfere too much with necessary learning)
this characteristic would be of considerable survival advantage. Being entirely
uncritical of the memes you are exposed to can be a fatal trait, or it can
result in reduced (or no) fertility. The classic example of a genetically fatal
belief is the Shaker religion, but intense involvement with a wide variety of
memes (or derived social movements) statistically results in fewer children.
Unlike the Shakers (who practiced total abstinence), the Rajneesh cult in Oregon
practiced a sexual free-for-all. However, they discouraged births--and
children--to the extreme of sterilizing the barely pubescent children of their
members. From the meme's viewpoint, the more effort its host puts into promoting
the meme (living example, proselytizing, etc.) the better. From the host gene's
viewpoint, memes that reduce fertility are a disaster.
Many memes take the shortcut and spread from person to person. Others spread
in concert with the host genes, promoting fertility. Several religious memes
fall into this category: Hutterite beliefs spread exclusively with the genes of
the believers. Mormon memes take both routes--both are long term success
stories. (Though ecological limits or social upheavals will eventually stop
exponential growth in these cases.)
There are other defenses against the uncritical acceptance of potentially
dangerous memes. Most common is the trait of rejecting all newfangled ideas,
where "newfangled" is usually defined as any to which one has not been exposed
before puberty. Societies have similar defenses against new ideas. There are
also powerful meta-memes, that is, memes used to judge other memes. Of these,
the scientific method is perhaps the most effective. Logic is another system by
which memes can be tested, at least for consistency.
In historical times a meta-meme of tolerance (especially religious tolerance)
has emerged in western culture. This is a remarkable event, since memes
inducing tolerance to other memes would be expected to lose in the competition
for mind space to memes which induce intolerance to other beliefs. Within
small, isolated social groups, this is still the case.
But in larger cultural ecosystems, when traders come with obnoxious ideas
and customs, but desirable goods, at least limited tolerance is a requirement if
any trading is to be done. There were many other factors in the development of
modern western tolerance such as the Renaissance and the indecisive religious
wars that swept back and forth across Europe. Still, the advantage of trading
goods may have been the primary force at work in the memetic ecosystem which
caused many belief systems to adopt a tolerant-toward-other-beliefs component.
Cooperative behavior is known to spontaneously emerge from groups (even groups
at war) when certain conditions are present. Free trade may be similarly linked
to the emergence of the meta-meme of tolerance, and in turn to the
respectability of free thought. Testing these speculations would require rating
the trade/tolerance of many groups and seeing if there is (or was) correlation.
With respect to the USSR, trade and tolerance are both at a low level.
Historically trade was a much smaller part of the economy during the time the
rest of Europe was undergoing the Renaissance. The recent attempts to
introduce tolerance to other modes of economic systems in the USSR have more
than a superficial similarity to the Catholic church finally deciding to live
with the Protestants. A modern-day Renaissance in the USSR may be based on the
free exchange of information through computers and free(r) trade.
China presents a classic case of innovative memes spreading from the ports.
Until England intervened and opened a weak China the rulers tried to quarantine
dangerous foreigners and their infectious ideas near the ports. To this day the
most productive parts of China are where capitalist/free market memes spread
from the seaports. It may be that homogeneous, closed groups without the
influence of outsiders reinforce their belief systems into the ground, burning
heretics and stagnating economically, until they are forced to open their ports.
A full analysis may eventually determine that tolerance, innovation, combating
cultural and economic stagnation are *all* dependent on free trade.
Memes and trade are coupled the other way as well. The feedback loop for
many memes is closed through goods made for the marketplace. Better ideas for
how to make shoes, or computers, or (you name it) spread best when they are
tested in the marketplace. Closing the ports (currently a popular idea in
Silicon Valley) to either ideas or goods is a memetic disaster. Bad products and
bad ideas are weeded by market place competition.
Study of ecosystems usually leads to a great deal of appreciation of the
complexity that has been worked into them through evolution. Our actively
evolving memetic ecosystem (culture) has been shaped over many centuries by the
rise and fall of the replicating information patterns which have come down to
us. These memes that make up our culture are essentially living entities. They
struggle against each other for space in minds and lives, they are continually
evolving. New memes arise in human mental modules, old memes mutate, and many
become confined to books. The ferment is most noticeable on the edge of new
scientific knowledge, pop culture, and the ever shifting of ascendant political
ideas. Western culture is as complicated as a rain forest, and deserves no less
respect, admiration, understanding, and care.
The vast majority of the memes we pass from person to person or generation
to generation are either helpful or at least harmless. It is hard to see that
these elements of our culture have a separate identity from us. But a few of
these replicating information patterns are clearly dangerous. By being obviously
harmful, they are easy to see as a separate class of evolving, parasitic,
lifelike forms. A very dangerous group leads to behavior such as the People's
Temple suicides, or similar cases that dot our history. The most dangerous
class leads to vast killings like that of the Nazis in WW II, the Communists in
post-revolutionary Russia, and the Kampuchea self-genocide.
The development of memetics provides improved mental tools (models) for
thinking about the influences, be they benign, silly, or fatal, that replicating
information patterns have on all of us. Here is a source of danger if memetics
comes of age and only a few learn to create meme sets of great influence. Here
too is liberation for those who can recognize and analyze the memes to which
they are exposed. If "the meme about memes" infects enough people, rational
social movements might become more common.
-----
The author gratefully acknowledges ideas and editorial assistance from Arel
Lucas.
A Memetic/Evolutionary Psychology Connection Between Drugs and
Cults
DRAFT VERSION FOR COMMENT--DO NOT WEB, ASK FOR FINAL VER.
By H. Keith Henson (hkhen...@netcom.com,ke...@xanadu.com)
I have studied and written about *memes* for well over ten years.
Much about these *replicating information patterns* is obvious--
given the selfish gene model from which the concept was derived.
Memes, with few exceptions, exist in the context of human carriers
and their artifacts. The information which is passed from person
to person and from generation to generation is the primary factor
which gives humans a competitive advantage over the rest of the
animals. A modern example which shows the power of memes is that
human children do not have to learn that streets are dangerous
places by trial and error.
In the aggregate, memes make up human culture. Most of them are of
the rock-chipping/shoemaking/vehicle-avoiding kind--they provide
clear benefits to those who host them. They are passed from
generation to generation because of the benefits (ultimately to the
genes of their hosts) they provide.
But a whole class of memes fails to have such obvious replication
drivers. Memes of this class, which includes religions, cults and
social movements such as communism, have induced some of the most
spectacular events in human history, including mass suicides, wars,
migrations, crusades, and other forms of large-scale social unrest.
These memes often induce humans to actions which seriously damage
or destroy their potential for reproductive success. The classic
example is the nearly extinct Shakers--whose meme set completely
forbids sex. While inducing such behavior makes sense when viewed
from the *meme's* viewpoint (diverting host time and energy from
bearing and caring for children to propagating the meme) it makes
no sense when considered from the *gene's* viewpoint for a
susceptibility to this class of memes to have evolved.
This is where my understanding about the vulnerability of humans to
this class of memes was stuck for many years. It was recently
unstuck by a new discipline which has grown out of the early work
in sociobiology. This new field is most often called evolutionary
psychology. What evolutionary psychology proposes to do is explain
the features of the human mind in terms of what mental traits led
to *reproductive success* in the *ancestral environment*.
The reason the *ancestral environment* is specified is that
evolution works slowly. There has not been enough time for human
genes to have adjusted much to the changes in the environment in
the last few thousand years--and, in fact, most humans lived in
tribes or small villages until relatively recent generations.
That environment is almost gone--our success has greatly modified
the world--but the few remaining hunter-gatherer groups and our
nearest relatives give us a general picture. While there was
plenty of variation in what people did for a living (depending on
local resources) the picture which emerges of the previous several
million years is that of a social primate living in small bands and
villages.
Of all the things which have been measured in such representative
ancestral environments as we have, social standing or status is the
most predictive of reproductive success. This is true for both
sexes, though the potential rewards for high status were--and still
are--higher for males. High status males had multiple wives or
additional mating opportunities in the ancestral environment (and
for that matter, still do). High status females, from what we can
see in chimpanzees and humans, have no more offspring than low
status ones, but their children are more likely to survive. (In
bad times, much more likely to survive.)
It follows that humans would have evolved to be exquisitely
sensitive to changes in status, which (no surprise) is the observed
situation. Activities which lead to feelings of increasing status
are highly rewarding: that is, they cause the release of chemicals
which induce highly pleasurable states in the brain. This reward
system is fundamental to human motivation, and in the ancestral
environment it worked to enhance reproductive success most of the
time. It makes sense for hunters who brought in the first meat the
tribe has seen in six weeks to get a lot of attention (a mark of
status) from the other tribe members and to experience rewarding
feelings about what they had done as a (real) increase in social
status. Of course, people tend to repeat behavior which led to
flooding their brains with pleasurable chemicals. In our hunter
example, more hunting leads to more protein for the hunter's
mate(s) and children which in turn leads to improved reproductive
success--and thus to another generation of status-seeking hunters
who are rewarded individually with brain chemicals and in the
evolutionary sense by more children. There are two causal loops
involved here. The short term one acts over hours to years, and
the long term one over generations. The long term loop sets up
susceptibility to the short term loop.
In short, an action (such as hunting) leads to attention (an
indicator of status) which in the short term releases rewarding
brain chemicals and in the long term improves reproductive success.
Simple conditioning of the Pavlovian type will move some of the
reward release "upstream" so that the acts which later result in
reward chemical releases will themselves become rewarding.
In time humans discovered drugs which shortcut this action-
attention-reward (AAR) brain mechanism and directly flood the brain
with pleasurable chemicals. The behavior of smoking or injecting
drugs which simulate the natural chemicals is highly rewarding, and
(in some people) leads to the repeated behavior we refer to as
addiction. The brain reward system involved in drug addiction can
be stimulated in other ways, for example by gambling. People who
liken compulsive gambling to drug addiction are right; the rewards
compulsive gamblers get are only one step removed from exogenous
chemicals--with the "Attention" step diminished or removed.
Gambling and drugs cause misfiring of the AAR mechanisms, and often
result in severe damage to reproductive potential, but both are
very recent in human history. In the past, evolution favored those
who were motivated by the mechanism.
The importance of the AAR mechanism is hard to underestimate. It
may well be the most important motivating mechanism behind
virtually all human activities. In previous times it was tied
directly into reproductive success, and it is still a major factor
in this endeavor.
It should come as no surprise that such a powerful mechanism can be
taken over by drug-induced rewards. It seems that this is not the
only way the brain reward system can be parasitized. Memes which
we see as cults and related social movements seem to have
"discovered" the AAR reward system as well. Successful cult memes
induce behavior (typically focused attention) between cult members
which trips the "improving status" detectors. Tripping the
detectors causes the release of reward chemicals without having
much (if any) connection to "real world" improvements in
reproductive success.
Examples of focused attention are "love bombing" in the Moonies and
"auditing" in Scientology. As an explanation for the propagation
of the meme classes mentioned at the top of this article, I propose
that successful cult memes induce behavior between cult members
which results in the release of pleasure inducing chemicals into
the reward system of the brain. This release of chemicals results
in reinforcement of behavior similar to that we see in addicts.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the behavior of people
under the influence of cults is similar to that we observe in
addicts. Typical behavior for both includes draining bank accounts
and education funds, selling or mortgaging property, neglecting
children, destruction of relations with family and friends and lack
of interest in anything except the drug or cult.
Unfortunately, understanding of the mechanisms behind cult or drug
addiction has not yet led to better ways of treating either, but
knowledge of the deep seated and highly evolved brain mechanisms
involved in both may lead to better treatment methods.
[Thanks to Kenneta Watson for the conversation where this
understanding emerged and to Arel Lucas for editing suggestions.]
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