Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Evolution and the Meaning of Life

362 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Philosophical Importance of Memes 363
this interloper had to say about culture—not for good reasons, but just in a
sort of immunological rejection. 9
One can see why. The meme's-eye perspective challenges one of the
central axioms of the humanities. Dawkins (1976, p. 214) points out that in
our explanations we tend to overlook the fundamental fact that "a cultural
trait may have evolved in the way it has simply because it is advantageous to
itself." This is a new way of thinking about ideas, but is it a good way? When
we have answered this question, we will know whether or not the meme
meme is one we should exploit and replicate.
The first rules of memes, as for genes, is that replication is not necessarily
for the good of anything; replicators flourish that are good at ... replicating—
for whatever reason!
A meme that made its bodies run over cliffs would have a fate like that of
a gene for making bodies run over cliffs. It would tend to be eliminated
from the meme-pool.... But this does not mean that the ultimate criterion
for success in meme selection is gene survival.... Obviously a meme that
causes individuals bearing it to kill themselves has a grave disadvantage,
but not necessarily a fatal one.... A suicidal meme can spread, as when a
dramatic and well-publicized martyrdom inspires others to die for a deeply
loved cause, and this in turn inspires others to die, and so on. [Dawkins
1982, pp. 110-11.)
The publicity Dawkins speaks about is crucial, and has a direct parallel in
Darwinian medicine. As Williams and Nesse ( 1991) have pointed out, disease
organisms (parasites, bacteria, viruses) depend for their long-term
survival on hopping from host to host, and this carries important implications.
Depending on how they are spread—through a sneeze or sexual
contact, for instance, rather than via a mosquito that bites first an infected
person and then an uninfected person—their future may hinge on their
keeping their host up and about rather than on his deathbed. More benign
variants will be favored by natural selection if the conditions for replication
of the organisms can be rigged so that it is "in their interests" not to harm
their hosts. By the same reasoning, we can see that benign or harmless
memes will tend to flourish, other things being equal, and those that tend to
be fatal to those whose minds carry them can only flourish if they have some
way of publicizing themselves before—or while—they go down with the
Ship. Suppose Jones encounters or dreams up a truly compelling argument in
favor of suicide—so compelling it leads him to kill himself. If he doesn't
leave a note explaining why he has done this, the meme in question—at least
the Jonesian lineage of it—is not going to spread.
The most important point Dawkins makes, then, is that there is no necessary
connection between a meme's replicative power, its "fitness" from its
point of view, and its contribution to our fitness (by whatever standard we
judge that). This is an unsettling observation, but the situation is not totally
desperate. Although some memes definitely manipulate us into collaborating
on their replication in spite o/our judging them useless or ugly or even
dangerous to our health and welfare, many—most, if we are lucky—of the
memes that replicate themselves do so not just with our blessings but
because of our esteem for them. I think there can be little controversy that the
following memes are, all things considered, good from our perspective, and
not just from their own perspective as selfish self-replicators: such very
general memes as cooperation, music, writing, calendars, education,
environmental awareness, arms reduction; and such particular memes as the
Prisoner's Dilemma, The Marriage of Figaro, Moby Dick, returnable bottles,
the SALT agreements. Other memes are more con-troversial; we can see why
they spread, and why, all things considered, we should tolerate them, in spite
of the problems they cause for us: colorization of classic films, advertising on
television, the ideal of political correctness. Still others are pernicious, but
extremely hard to eradicate: anti-Semitism, hijacking airliners, spray-can
graffiti, computer viruses. 10
Our normal view of ideas is also a normative view: it embodies a canon or
an ideal about which ideas we ought to accept or admire or approve of. In
brief, we ought to accept the true and the beautiful. According to the normal
view, the following are virtual tautologies—trivial truths not worth the ink to
write them down:
Idea X was believed by the people because X was deemed true.
People approved of X because people found X to be beautiful.
These norms are not just dead obvious, they are constitutive: they set the
rules whereby we think about ideas. We require explanations only when there
are deviations from these norms. Nobody has to explain why a book Purports
to be full of true sentences, or why an artist might strive to make something
beautiful—it just "stands to reason." The constitutive status of
9. A striking example of the vituperative and uncomprehending dismissal of Dawkins by
a humanist who identifies him as a sociobiologist is found in Midgley 1979, an attack so
wide of the mark that it should not be read without its antidote-. Dawkins 1981. Midgley
1983 is an apologetic but still largely hostile rejoinder. 10. Dawkins 1993 offers an important new perspective on computer viruses and their
relation to other memes.