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

364 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Philosophical Importance of Memes 365
these norms grounds the air of paradox in such aberrations as "The Metro
politan Museum of Banalities" or "The Encyclopedia of Falsehoods." What
requires special explanation in the normal view are the cases in which despite
the truth or beauty of an idea it is not accepted, or despite its ugliness or
falsehood it is.
The meme's-eye view purports to be an alternative to this normal perspective.
What is tautological for it is:
Meme X spread among the people because X is a good replicator.
There is a nice parallel to be found in physics. Aristotelian physics supposed
that an object's continuing to move in a straight line required explanation,
in terms of something like forces continuing to act on it. Central to
Newton's great perspective shift was the idea that such rectilinear motion did
not require explanation; only deviations from it did—accelerations. An even
better parallel can be seen in biology. Before Williams and Dawkins pointed
to the alternative gene's-eye perspective, evolutionary theorists tended to
think that it was just obvious that adaptations existed because they were good
for the organisms. Now we know better. The gene-centered perspective is
valuable precisely because it handles the "exceptional" cases in which the
good of the organism counts for nothing, and shows how the "normal"
circumstance is a derivative and exceptioned regularity, not a truth of pure
reason, as it seemed to be from the old perspective.
The prospects for meme theory become interesting only when we look at
the exceptions, the circumstances under which there is a pulling apart of the
two perspectives. Only if meme theory permits us better to understand the
deviations from the normal scheme will it have any warrant for being
accepted. (Note that, in its own terms, whether or not the meme meme
replicates successfully is strictly independent of its epistemological virtue; it
might spread in spite of its perniciousness, or go extinct in spite of its virtue.)
Fortunately for us, there is a nonrandom correlation between the two
perspectives, just as there is between what is good for General Motors and
what is good for America. It is no accident that the memes that replicate tend
to be good for us, not for our biological fitness (Williams' sardonic
commentary on the churchgoers is absolutely right on that score ), but for
whatever it is we hold dear. 11 And never forget the crucial point: the facts
11. Memes that are (relatively) benign to their hosts but vicious to others are not
uncommon, alas. When ethnic pride turns to xenophobia, for instance, this mirrors the
phenomenon of a tolerable bacillus that mutates into something deadly—if not necessarily
to its original carrier, then to others.
about whatever we hold dear—our highest values—are themselves very
much a product of the memes that have spread most successfully. We may
want to claim that we are in charge of what our summum bonum is to be, but
this is mystical nonsense unless we admit that what we are (and hence what
we might persuade ourselves to consider the summum bonum) is itself
something we have learned to be, in outgrowing our animal heritage. Biology
puts some constraint on what we could value; in the long run, we would not
survive unless we had a better-than-chance habit of choosing the memes that
help us, but we haven't seen the long run yet. Mother Nature's experiment
with culture on this planet is only a few thousand generations old.
Nevertheless, we have good reason to believe that our meme-immunological
systems are not hopeless—even if they are not foolproof. We can rely, as a
general, crude rule of thumb, on the coincidence of the two perspectives: by
and large, the good memes—good by our standards— will tend to be the
ones that are also the good replicators.
The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human
mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in
order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and
departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various
artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native
Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate
minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to tile
organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages— with
some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure, no doubt. Normal human
brains are not all alike; they vary considerably in size, shape, and the myriad
details of connection on which their prowess depends. But the most striking
differences in human prowess depend on microstructural differences (still
inscrutable to neuroscience) induced by the various memes that have entered
them and taken up residence. The memes enhance each other's opportunities:
the meme for education, for instance, is a meme that reinforces the very
process of meme implantation.
But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the
creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we
considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations
of memes have already played a major role in determining who or
what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien
and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the
biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives
of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our
genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology.
Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that
we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes—
thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.