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

366 THE CRANES OF CULTURE The Philosophical Importance of Memes 367
What foundation, then, can we stand on as we struggle to keep our feet in
the meme-storm in which we are engulfed? If replicative might does not
make right, what is to be the eternal ideal relative to which "we" will judge
the value of memes? We should note that the memes for normative concepts—for
ought and good and truth and beauty—are among the most
entrenched denizens of our minds. Among the memes that constitute us, they
play a central role. Our existence as us, as what we as thinkers are—not as
what we as organisms are—is not independent of these memes.
Dawkins ends The Selfish Gene ( 1976, p. 215) with a passage that many
of his critics must not have read, or understood:
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary,
the selfish memes of our indoctrination.... We are built as gene machines
and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against
our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish
replicators.
In distancing himself thus forcefully from the oversimplifications of pop
sociobiology, he somewhat overstates his case. This "we" that transcends not
only its genetic creators but also its memetic creators is, we have just seen, a
myth. Dawkins himself acknowledges that in his later work. In The Extended
Pbenotype ( 1982 ), Dawkins argues for the biological perspective that
recognizes the beaver's dam, the spider's web, the bird's nest as not merely
products of the phenotype—the individual organism considered as a
functional whole—but parts of the phenotype, on a par with the beaver's
teeth, the spider's legs, the bird's wing. From this perspective, the vast
protective networks of memes that we spin is as integral to our pheno-types—
to explaining our competences, our chances, our vicissitudes—as anything in
our more narrowly biological endowment. (This claim is developed in greater
detail in Dennett 1991a.) There is no radical discontinuity; one can be a
mammal, a father, a citizen, a scholar, a Democrat, and an associate professor
with tenure. Just as man-made barns are an integral part of the barn swallow's
ecology, so cathedrals and universities—and factories and prisons—are an
integral part of our ecology, as are the memes without which we could not
live in these environments.
But if I am nothing over and above some complex system of interactions
between my body and the memes that infest it, what happens to personal
responsibility? How could I be held accountable for my misdeeds, or honored
for my triumphs, if I am not the captain of my vessel? Where is the
autonomy I need to act with free will?
"Autonomy" is just a fancy term for "self-control." When the Viking spacecraft
got too far from Earth for the engineers in Houston to control it, they
sent it a new program which removed it from their remote control and put
it under local self-control ( Dennett 1984, p. 55 ). That made it autonomous,
and although the goals it continued to seek were the goals Houston had
installed in it at its birth, it and it alone was responsible for making the
decisions in furtherance of those goals. Now imagine it landed on some
distant planet inhabited by tiny green men who promptly invaded it, tampering
with its software and bending it (exapting it) to their own purposes—
making it into a recreational vehicle, let's say, or a nursery for their young.
Its autonomy would be lost as it came under the control of these alien
controllers. Switching responsibility from my genes to my memes may seem
to be a similarly unpromising step on the road to free will. Have we broken
the tyranny of the selfish genes, only to be taken over by the selfish memes?
Think about symbionts again. Parasites are (by definition) those sym-bionts
that are deleterious to the fitness of the host. Consider the most obvious
meme example: the meme for celibacy (and chastity, I might add, to close a
notorious loophole ). This meme complex inhabits the brains of many a priest
and nun. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, this complex is
deleterious to fitness by definition: anything that virtually guarantees that the
host's germ line is a cul-de-sac, with no further issue, lowers fitness. "But so
what?" a priest might retort. "/ don't want to have progeny!" Exactly. But, you
might say, his body still does. He has distanced himself somewhat from his
own body, in which the machinery designed by Mother Nature keeps right on
running, sometimes giving him problems of self-control. How did this self or
ego with the divergent goal get constituted? We may not know the detailed
history of the infestation. The Jesuits famously say, "Give us the first five
years of a child's life, and you can have the rest," so it may be very early in the
priest's life that this particular meme secured a stronghold. Or it may have
been later, and it may have happened very gradually. But whenever and
however it happened, it has been incorporated by the priest—at least for the
time being—into his identity.
I am not saying that because the priest's body is "doomed" to sire no
offspring, this is a bad or "unnatural" thing. That would be to side with our
selfish genes, which is exactly what we don't want to do. I am saying that this
is just the most extreme, and hence vivid, example of the process that has
made us all: our selves have been created out of the interplay of memes
exploiting and redirecting the machinery Mother Nature has given us. My
brain harbors the memes for celibacy and chastity (I couldn't write about
them otherwise ), but they never managed to get into the driver's seat in me. I
do not identify with them. My brain also harbors the meme for fasting or
dieting, and I wish I could get it more often into the driver's seat (so that I
could more wholeheartedly diet), but, for one reason or another, the
coalitions of memes that would incorporate the meme for dieting into my
whole "heart" seldom form a government with long-term stability. No one