• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 999 0

in 1958, it was the product, the physical manifestation of a meme, or memes: the craving for hula hoops; the swaying, swinging, twirling skill set of hula-hooping. The hula hoop itself is a meme vehicle. So, for that matter, is each human hula hooper—a strikingly effective meme vehicle, in the sense neatly explained by the philosopher Daniel Dennett: “A wagon with spoked wheels carries not only grain or freight from place to place; it carries the brilliant idea of a wagon with spoked wheels from mind to mind.”♦ Hula hoopers did that for the hula hoop’s memes—and in 1958 they found a new transmission vector, broadcast television, sending its messages immeasurably faster and farther than any wagon. The moving image of the hula hooper seduced new minds by hundreds, and then by thousands, and then by millions. The meme is not the dancer but the dance.

We are their vehicles and their enablers. For most of our biological history they existed fleetingly; their main mode of transmission was the one called “word of mouth.” Lately, however, they have managed to adhere in solid substance: clay tablets, cave walls, paper sheets. They achieve longevity through our pens and printing presses, magnetic tapes and optical disks. They spread via broadcast towers and digital networks. Memes may be stories, recipes, skills, legends, and fashions. We copy them, one person at a time. Alternatively, in Dawkins’s meme-centered perspective, they copy themselves. At first some of Dawkins’s readers wondered how literally to take that. Did he mean to give memes anthropomorphic desires, intentions, and goals? It was the selfish gene all over again. (Typical salvo: “Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological.”♦ Typical rebuttal: a reminder that selfishness is defined by the geneticist as the tendency to increase one’s chances of survival relative to its competitors.)

Dawkins’s way of speaking was not meant to suggest that memes are conscious actors, only that they are entities with interests that can be furthered by natural selection. Their interests are not our interests. “A meme,” Dennett says, “is an information packet with attitude.”♦ When we speak of fighting for a principle or dying for an idea, we may be more literal than we know. “To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble,”♦ H. L. Mencken wrote. “But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true!”

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor … Rhyme and rhythm help people remember bits of text. Or: rhyme and rhythm help bits of text get remembered. Rhyme and rhythm are qualities that aid a meme’s survival, just as strength and speed aid an animal’s. Patterned language has an evolutionary advantage. Rhyme, rhythm, and reason—for reason, too, is a form of pattern. I was promised on a time to have reason for my rhyme; from that time unto this season, I received nor rhyme nor reason.♦

Like genes, memes have effects on the wide world beyond themselves: phenotypic effects. In some cases (the meme for making fire; for wearing clothes; for the resurrection of Jesus) the effects can be powerful indeed. As they broadcast their influence on the world, memes thus influence the conditions affecting their own chances of survival. The meme or memes composing Morse code had strong positive feedback effects. “I believe that, given the right conditions, replicators automatically band together to create systems, or machines, that carry them around and work to favour their continued replication,”♦ wrote Dawkins. Some memes have evident benefits for their human hosts (“look before you leap,” knowledge of CPR, belief in hand washing before cooking), but memetic success and genetic success are not the same. Memes can replicate with impressive virulence while leaving swaths of collateral damage—patent medicines and psychic surgery, astrology and satanism, racist myths, superstitions, and (a special case) computer viruses. In a way, these are the most interesting—the memes that thrive to their hosts’ detriment, such as the idea that