You know the experience where you hear some aggravating catchy tune in the morning, (most probably from some cheesy commercial) and then spend the rest of the day trying to stop it playing over and over again in you head? Why is it so hard to purposefully avoid thinking about something?
Now we all know that people on the average use only 10% of their brains, right? But how many of us know that that's complete and utter bullocks? It's such a baseless statement it's not funny. So why is it then that this piece of false knowledge has infiltrated our minds so that it has become unquestioned common "knowledge"?
Among others, these are the sorts of questions that are on the line of fire when Susan Blackmore introduces us to... well, to ourselves, as seen from the perspective of the meme.
The word "meme" was first coined in the seventies by Richard Dawkins in his ground-braking "The Selfish Gene", and from there has grown a life of it's own, with some fervently supporting it, some vehemently against it, and the rest of us falling somewhere in the healthy middle ground. Quite rightly though, Blackmore warns us of "Meme fear":
"This is a scary idea indeed. And that is perhaps that is why the word 'meme' is so often written with inverted commas around it, as though to apologise for using it. I have even seen eminent lecturers raise both hands and tweak them above their ears when forced to say 'meme' out loud..."
I find this rather amusing, since "meme" is a perfectly good word, with a perfectly good meaning, regardless of whether we acknowledge any social theories based on it.
By just about now, I assume that the reader who doesn't know what a meme is, has either stopped reading in frustration, dug up a dictionary (I hope they have a fairly new one), or, as I hope has happened, merely waited patiently for me to indulge them with the definition.
A Meme is something that gets passed on from person to person - it is a piece of information, a rumour, an instruction, a behaviour, that irritating little excuse for music that's just decided to ruin your day. A meme is anything that can be mimicked.
A Meme that sticks in your mind, and tends to get you to pass it on, is a good meme. It's the meme likely to survive in the long run. Like the silly bit about us using only 10% of our brains, the meme need not be a piece of truthful information - it's enough that it, for whatever reason, sticks to people's minds, and makes good material for drunken bar discussions, or those awkward silences on first dates.
In some ways you can compare memes to viruses - they are the viruses of the mind, spreading from one person to another, and using various tricks to improve their survival. Just like genes, memes have no will of their own, but merely get selected for their ability to survive in the landscape of the minds of people. Just like genes, memes evolve - memes that are poor at getting copied die out, while good, memorable memes tend to spread and thrive.
What Blackmore attempts to do in this ambitious book is to show that memes may have been every bit as important (if not more so) in the development of intelligence as genes were in the emergence of life - she argues that early appearance of the ability to mimic, and the "discovery" of the first memes was the crucial factor that drove us to develop intelligence, language and even the sense of self that we have. The memes took precedence over all other environmental factors, and tilted the selection pressures steeply in favour of better and better mimics, eventually resulting in what we are now - more or less intelligent, more or less articulate, catchy-tune-whistling "Meme Machines".
Blackmore indeed makes a strong case - she extensively deals with the criticism erected against the theory of the meme, and shows how the theory can trivially explain aspects of human behaviour that conventional evolutionary psychology has trouble with, or doesn't even attempt to deal with.
She goes on to explain the phenomena of wide-spread dogmas such as organised religions and political dogmas - she observes that the most successful dogmas are the ones that use the most effective "meme tricks"; ideas and instructions which facilitate the "stickiness" of the meme in the mind of a recipient, and improve the chances of the meme getting passed on by that person. She calls these dogmas "memeplexes", collections of ideas which band together to improve their respective chances of "procreation".
The most controversy the book has created has been due to the last few chapters, in which Blackmore seems to extend the idea of the meme to explain the concept of "self", integrating her own philosophy into the mix. She argues for the "self" being the ultimate meme, the "selfplex" or rather a sort of a coat hanger for memes, which evolved to provide a sort of a fertile soil for ideas to hold on to - after all, if a memeplex gets to your core to the extent that you define yourself by it ("I'm a Muslim", "I am a liberal", "I'm a conservative"), you defend the views attached to it much more vehemently than you would if the idea is just left hanging on it's own.
While I take the last chapters with a grain of salt (Though I am a naturalist, I found her idea of self a bit too simplistic - she should have delved into the neurological basis of the self to strengthen and validify her thoughts), no-one can blame this book for being conventional, or failing to provoke deep thoughts. In many ways, "The Meme Machine" is an eye-opener, and a fascinating book worthy of serious consideration.
I thus concur with the recommendation of Richard Dawkins: "Any theory deserves to be given its best shot, and that is what Susan Blackmore has given the theory of the meme. ...I am delighted to recommend her book"
Recommended:
