Darwin's Dangerous Idea (69 page)

television, the ideal of political correctness. Still others are pernicious, but extremely hard to eradicate: anti-Semitism, hijacking airliners, spray-can The publicity Dawkins speaks about is crucial, and has a direct parallel in graffiti, computer viruses.10

Darwinian medicine. As Williams and Nesse ( 1991) have pointed out, dis-Our normal view of ideas is also a
normative
view: it embodies a canon or ease organisms (parasites, bacteria, viruses) depend for their long-term an ideal about which ideas we
ought
to accept or admire or approve of. In survival on hopping from host to host, and this carries important implica-brief, we ought to accept the true and the beautiful. According to the normal tions. Depending on how they are spread—through a sneeze or sexual view, the following are virtual tautologies—trivial truths not worth the ink to contact, for instance, rather than via a mosquito that bites first an infected write them down:

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 Idea
X
was believed by the people because
X
was deemed true.

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 People approved of
X
because people found
X
to be beautiful.

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 These norms are not just dead obvious, they are
constitutive:
they set the be fatal to those whose minds carry them can only flourish if they have some rules whereby we think about ideas. We require explanations only when there way of publicizing themselves before—or while—they go down with the 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.

364 THE CRANES OF CULTURE

The Philosophical Importance of Memes
365

these norms grounds the air of paradox in such aberrations as "The Metro about whatever we hold dear—our highest values—are themselves very politan Museum of Banalities" or "The Encyclopedia of Falsehoods." What much a product of the memes that have spread most successfully. We may requires special explanation in the normal view are the cases in which despite want to claim that
we
are in charge of what our
summum bonum
is to be, but the truth or beauty of an idea it is
not
accepted, or despite its ugliness or this is mystical nonsense unless we admit that what
we
are (and hence what falsehood it
is.

we might persuade ourselves to consider the
summum bonum)
is itself The meme's-eye view purports to be an alternative to this normal per-something we have learned to be, in outgrowing our animal heritage. Biology spective. What is tautological for
it
is:

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 Meme
X
spread among the people because
X
is a good replicator.

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.

There is a nice parallel to be found in physics. Aristotelian physics sup-Nevertheless, we have good reason to believe that our meme-immunological posed that an object's continuing to move in a straight line required expla-systems are not hopeless—even if they are not foolproof. We can rely, as a nation, in terms of something like forces continuing to act on it. Central to general, crude rule of thumb, on the coincidence of the two perspectives: by Newton's great perspective shift was the idea that such rectilinear motion did and large, the good memes—good by
our
standards— will tend to be the not require explanation; only deviations from it did—accelerations. An even ones that are also the good replicators.

better parallel can be seen in biology. Before Williams and Dawkins pointed The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human to the alternative gene's-eye perspective, evolutionary theorists tended to mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in think that it was just
obvious
that adaptations existed because they were good order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and for the organisms. Now we know better. The gene-centered perspective is departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various valuable precisely because it handles the "exceptional" cases in which the artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native good of the organism counts for nothing, and shows how the "normal"

Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate circumstance is a derivative and exceptioned regularity, not a truth of pure minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to tile reason, as it seemed to be from the old perspective.

organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages— with The prospects for meme theory become interesting only when we look at some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure, no doubt. Normal human the exceptions, the circumstances under which there is a pulling apart of the brains are not all alike; they vary considerably in size, shape, and the myriad two perspectives. Only if meme theory permits us better to understand the details of connection on which their prowess depends. But the most striking deviations from the normal scheme will it have any warrant for being differences in human prowess depend on microstructural differences (still accepted. (Note that, in its own terms, whether or not the meme meme inscrutable to neuroscience) induced by the various memes that have entered replicates successfully is strictly independent of its epistemological virtue; it them and taken up residence. The memes enhance each other's opportunities: might spread in spite of its perniciousness, or go extinct in spite of its virtue.) the meme for education, for instance, is a meme that reinforces the very Fortunately for us, there is a nonrandom correlation between the two process of meme implantation.

perspectives, just as there is between what is good for General Motors and But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the what is good for America. It is no accident that the memes that replicate tend creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we to be good for us, not for our
biological
fitness (Williams' sardonic considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or commentary on the churchgoers is absolutely right on that score ), but for what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien whatever it is we hold dear.11 And never forget the crucial point: the facts 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 11. Memes that are (relatively) benign to their hosts but vicious to others are not genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop so-uncommon, alas. When ethnic pride turns to xenophobia, for instance, this mirrors the ciobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that phenomenon of a tolerable bacillus that mutates into something deadly—if not necessarily to its original carrier, then to others.

we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes—

thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.

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 it under local self-control ( Dennett 1984, p. 55 ). That made it autonomous, the meme-storm in which we are engulfed? If replicative might does not and although the goals it continued to seek were the goals Houston had make right, what is to be the eternal ideal relative to which "we" will judge installed in it at its birth, it and it alone was responsible for making the the value of memes? We should note that the memes for normative con-decisions in furtherance of those goals. Now imagine it landed on some cepts—for
ought
and
good
and
truth
and
beauty
—are among the most distant planet inhabited by tiny green men who promptly invaded it, tam-entrenched denizens of our minds. Among the memes that constitute us, they pering with its software and bending it (exapting it) to their own purposes—

play a central role. Our existence as us, as what we as thinkers are—not as making it into a recreational vehicle, let's say, or a nursery for their young.

what we as organisms are—is not independent of these memes.

Its autonomy would be lost as it came under the control of these alien Dawkins ends
The Selfish Gene
( 1976, p. 215) with a passage that many controllers. Switching responsibility from my genes to my memes may seem of his critics must not have read, or understood:

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?

We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, Think about symbionts again. Parasites are (by definition) those sym-bionts the selfish memes of our indoctrination.... We are built as gene machines that are deleterious to the fitness of the host. Consider the most obvious and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against meme example: the meme for celibacy (and chastity, I might add, to close a our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish notorious loophole ). This meme complex inhabits the brains of many a priest replicators.

and nun. From the point of view of evolutionary biology, this complex is deleterious to
fitness
by definition: anything that virtually guarantees that the In distancing himself thus forcefully from the oversimplifications of pop host's germ line is a cul-de-sac, with no further issue, lowers fitness. "But so sociobiology, he somewhat overstates his case. This "we" that transcends not what?" a priest might retort. "/ don't
want
to have progeny!" Exactly. But, you only its genetic creators but also its memetic creators is, we have just seen, a might say, his body still does. He has distanced
himself
somewhat from his myth. Dawkins himself acknowledges that in his later work. In
The Extended
own body, in which the machinery designed by Mother Nature keeps right on
Pbenotype
( 1982 ), Dawkins argues for the biological perspective that running, sometimes giving
him
problems of self-control. How did this
self
or recognizes the beaver's dam, the spider's web, the bird's nest as not merely
ego
with the divergent goal get constituted? We may not know the detailed products of the phenotype—the individual organism considered as a history of the infestation. The Jesuits famously say, "Give us the first five functional whole—but parts of the phenotype, on a par with the beaver's years of a child's life, and you can have the rest," so it may be very early in the teeth, the spider's legs, the bird's wing. From this perspective, the vast priest's life that this particular meme secured a stronghold. Or it may have protective networks of memes that we spin is as integral to our pheno-types—

been later, and it may have happened very gradually. But whenever and to explaining our competences, our chances, our vicissitudes—as anything in however it happened, it has been incorporated by the priest—at least for the our more narrowly biological endowment. (This claim is developed in greater time being—into his identity.

detail in Dennett 1991a.) There is no radical discontinuity; one can be a I am
not
saying that because the priest's body is "doomed" to sire no mammal, a father, a citizen, a scholar, a Democrat, and an associate professor offspring, this is a bad or "unnatural" thing. That would be to side with our with tenure. Just as man-made barns are an integral part of the barn swallow's selfish genes, which is exactly what we don't want to do. I
am
saying that this ecology, so cathedrals and universities—and factories and prisons—are an is just the most extreme, and hence vivid, example of the process that has integral part of our ecology, as are the memes without which we could not made us all: our
selves
have been created out of the interplay of memes live in these environments.

exploiting and redirecting the machinery Mother Nature has given us. My But if I am nothing over and above some complex system of interactions brain harbors the memes for celibacy and chastity (I couldn't write about between my body and the memes that infest it, what happens to personal them otherwise ), but they never managed to get into the driver's seat in me. I responsibility? How could I be held accountable for my misdeeds, or hon-do not
identify
with them. My brain also harbors the meme for fasting or ored for my triumphs, if I am not the captain of my vessel? Where is the dieting, and I wish I could get it more often into the driver's seat (so that I autonomy I need to act with free will?

could more
wholeheartedly
diet), but, for one reason or another, the

"Autonomy" is just a fancy term for "self-control." When the Viking space-coalitions of memes that would incorporate the meme for dieting into my craft got too far from Earth for the engineers in Houston to control it, they whole "heart" seldom form a government with long-term stability. No one sent it a new program which removed it from their
remote
control and put 368 THE CRANES OF CULTURE