I don't follow the mystical wing of the memetics movement that seeks to see memes as forces of nature or other such fanciful nonsense. A meme is as a meme does. If it memes it is a meme. The verb form of meme is the key. It is an abstraction, not real in the sense that objects are real and not real in the way that God is said to be real either. But real in the way that capitalism, Greece, rock and roll and globalization are real.
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Memes work towards their own replication in the way that genes work toward their replication. Meaning that they don't. But it seems like they do, and imagining them as working towards their own ends is a powerful predictive tool. A gene does not work towards replicating itself. It does not. In any way. It is incapable of consciousness and incapable of working to an end, or having an end. Thinking that it does is teleological mystification of the kind that calls patterns of behaviour in disparate people forces of nature or names them as gods, devils or muses. Woolly headed thinking of the worst kind. Memes are not forces of nature or even forces of culture. They are just ideas. Ideas carried as pictures, text, speech or remembered in the simplest outline of human memory. All ideas are memes if they spread. Language is a complex of memes. Culture is a complex of memes. Ideologies and religions are complexes of memes. By saying that an idea is a meme does nothing to say whether it is good or bad, true or false, worthy or unworthy. Arches were invented in the Roman era (The Greeks and ancient Egyptians had none) they spread as memes and have mutated and improved along the journey. Calling arches memes is not to belittle the arch or to see it as an evil idea manipulating people into building copies of it. The arch works because it works; as architecture and memetics. It is because the arch solves real problems for builders that it is so successful as a meme. That is the same way that the meme of Darwinism is successful. Darwinism is a very successful meme because it solves real problems. The power to explain is awesome. Memetics is also a meme, but a less powerful meme, it has a power to explain but that explanation is not as convincing, it convinces fewer people. Yes memetics is a meme, and no that doesn't prove anything. Many religious people who are aware of memetics find the idea of seeing us hoist by our own petard as entertaining. But that merely shows their ignorance of memetics. It is inherent in the theory of memetics that any scientific theory is a meme, including every correct axiom and every fanciful speculation. You can analyse religion with memetics, and every possible combination in either direction. Religions define memetics as the work of the devil or the work of sinful man or as competing false religions. None of that analysis is very convincing to the memeticist. Neither is the characterization of memetics as a meme much of a knock down argument. I don't understand how the theory of memetics is supposed to prove that objectivity is impossible in a world of memes and genes and so it is all futile, so presumably we should abandon it and take up medieval superstition instead because at least that maintains its own internal consistency through the simple expedient of substituting faith for logic. I do agree that perfect objectivity is probably a practical impossibility; as is a perfect vacuum, a sterile dressing and a guilt free life, but that doesn't mean that we should stop trying just because we can never obtain total perfection. It is possible to be reasonably objective, to strive for greater objectivity, to be aware of our own prejudices, to make allowances. Just as it is possible to produce food that is virtually free of contamination and lead a marriage that is faithful in deed even if not entirely in thought. We need not let the perfect be the enemy of the very good. |
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