Take a whole Jung (make sure its fresh), a handful of finely chopped archetypes, a squeeze of Darwin and you have the makings of a lovely Meme Soup.
In Jungian psychology, the collective unconscious is thought of as having an existence beyond the personal; likewise, in archetypal psychology, the archetypal imagination is seen as transpersonal, inhabiting a sort of realm of its own. We are quite used to these ideas, but give them a squeeze of Darwin and we can see it all in the light of evolution.
From The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised); meme noun: biology – an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.
Biologist Richard Dawkins invented the word ‘memes’ to describe how ideas are similar to genetic information in the way they replicate, spread and evolve. ‘Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission’, he said. Both are copying and evolving processes. ‘Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches’.[i] Just as genes propagate themselves, so too do ideas, jumping from mind to mind creating all kinds of myths, vogues and movements that seems to take hold of the collective imagination.
Sounds reasonable enough. But here’s the pièce de résistance: memes are literally alive; they are ‘self-replicating’ and behave exactly like living organisms or viruses And the ‘primal soup’ in which they breed are human brains/minds. Seeing it this way can make all the difference. Over time we can see how these collective ideas are subject to natural selection to create not only short live crazes and fads that quickly go extinct, but also building great cultural institutions that survive. And, very importantly, we can understand how some memes are pathogenic viruses – I mean, they make us ill. If you are host to some of the most malicious, they can kill you. Things like teenage binge drinking, suicide bombing and fundamental religion are not just fads, they are lethal meme infections.
We can completely imagine this from the biological perspective. We can regard culture as a step in organic evolution and see how cultural ideas are meme life-forms with the ability to replicate and spread – just as all living organisms do. In this way, cultural ideas are organisms that breed using humans as their hosts. This is not so different as the notion that we are ‘run’ by archetypes, except that now we can imagine them as part of biological evolution rather than inhabiting an eternal and separate realm. The reason for taking such a unifying step is that ideas and culture bear all the hallmarks of evolutionary growth through natural selection.
It’s difficult to imagine a new pop song as an independent life form with its own replicating mechanism, just like a computer virus. It’s hard to imagine because it is a viewpoint that is foreign to us. Ideas are supposed to be only ‘mental’ – whatever that means. We create ideas and we think of ourselves as responsible for spreading them around; all that happens is we simply communicate mental ideas to each other – that’s the standard view.
And it’s right up to a point – but take one more step and imagine that ideas have a life of their own with all the characteristics of living organisms. Just like bacteria or viruses, they are ‘information packages’ and they replicate by infecting other hosts; and, like computer viruses their ‘purpose’ is to breed by infecting other computers. Once created, an idea has the capacity to spread like wildfire and, under favourable conditions, it does. No single person is responsible for the way it does this. A panic on the stock market spreads in a few moments across the whole world. Whether or not there is any foundation in the panic-idea that starts it is beside the point – it’s whether people believe it. Many memes have defence code in them that says should be believed and are trustworthy.
Once installed, the virus is ‘executable’ and can take command of various functions of a computer. We might say that it is not really ‘alive’, but it behaves as though it is. And you know the old saying: if a thing looks like a rose, smells like a rose, and feels like a rose – it probably is a rose !
The human body is host to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbic life-forms. There is ten times number of these organisms than our own cells in the body. From our point of view we have different kinds of symbiotic relationships with microbes – some are friends and some are foes. With friends we both benefit. We would not survive without them. This relationship, mutualism, is a two way deal: the microbes derive their nutriment from us and in return they help us with digestion, stimulate the immune system and use up space that would otherwise be colonised by pathogens. But then, there is also parasitism where the bacteria benefit while the host is harmed. It is a fascinating thought that the one place in the body where no organisms are allowed is in the human brain. This has to remain sterile; but it is the place that memes colonise.
N.K. Humphrey’s said memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
We are most concerned with memes that resemble parasites – that is, ideas that, once a person is infected, as a host, they are driven to infect other people also. This they will do even though the meme harms the host – as, for example, with the meme instructing a suicide bomber to blow himself up. We must understand that that the compulsion to infect others is not the fault of the host, rather it is in the programming of the meme. In a religious meme it might be the instruction to ‘save’ others or do God’s work.
The analogy of the executable computer virus is quite apt. Religious memes can also be fail-safe; that is, they incorporate code which makes them impervious to any counter measures. For example, all three Abrahamic religions have code that says that the code itself was dictated by God – and God is by definition infallible. This circular bit of programming cannot be invalidated – both terms lead to and confirm each other. The Code is right because it was dictated by God; and God is right because it says so in the code. And all three of these religious memes carry the instruction for hosts to proselytise – that is, replicate the meme across the cultures and down the generations.
Ideas have the power to spread from person to person and to make copies of themselves as they go. Ideas replicate and spread. Ideas that are commonly shared is what distinguishes one culture from another. When successful they aggregating in clusters (or bodies) that we call social institutions that can survive for centuries, like the Catholic Church for example.
Some would say that religions memes can be mutualistic, that is, they can benefit both the meme and the host. This could be so, but is obviously not the case where the meme causes the destruction of the host. Not only is this true of suicide bombers, but is also where the meme requires an action that runs counter to natural human wellbeing. An extreme example of which would be female genital mutilation.
From the meme’s point of view it is irrelevant whether the meme kills the host so long as it can replicate before doing so. So long as a meme is copied and passed on before it kills the host its survival-line is assured. There are many examples of this in the animal kingdom; the bacteria of tuberculosis are a simple example. We always have to remember that in natural selection no one is ‘guiding’ anything.
There are other pathological memes that run counter to human wellbeing. Political doctrines like communism and fascism put the state above the welfare of the individual. In his last hours Hitler said, ‘Individuals die - that is nothing, the state goes on’. The survival of that cluster of ideas called ‘the state’ is what must survive. The people who propagate such memes are irrelevant in themselves. A meme like this has its own compulsive program – a human being is merely a host who incubates it and passes it on. Remember, these are actually ideas that people have in their minds – they believe them, act on them and pass them on. These are what we are calling parasitic memes. They are harmful to their hosts.
Not all memes are bad, of course. We are looking at the whole evolving ecosystem of culture. Just as most of the bacteria we host are harmless or beneficial; so most of the memes that give rise to human culture are likewise helpful to us or neutral.
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