The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (65 page)

But our society (the West) is not a static society. It is the only known instance of a long-lived dynamic (rapidly changing) society. It is unique in history for its ability to mediate long-term, rapid, peaceful change and improvement, including improvements in the broad consensus about values and aims, as I described in
Chapter 13
. This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which, though still ‘selfish’, are not necessarily harmful to individuals.

To explain the nature of these new memes, let me pose the question: what sort of meme can cause itself to be replicated for long periods
in a rapidly changing environment
? In such an environment, people are continually being faced with unpredictable problems and opportunities. Hence their needs and wishes are changing unpredictably too. How can a meme remain unchanged under such a regime? The memes of a static society remain unchanged by effectively eliminating all the individuals’ choices: people choose neither which ideas to acquire nor which to enact. Those memes also combine to make the society static, so that people’s circumstances vary as little as possible. But once the stasis has broken down, and people are choosing, they will choose, in part, according to their individual circumstances and ideas, in which case memes will face selection criteria that vary unpredictably from recipient to recipient as well as over time.

To be transferred to a single person, a meme need seem useful only to that person. To be transferred to a group of similar people under unchanging circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth. But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives? A
true
idea is a good candidate. But not just any truth will do. It must seem useful to
all
those people, for it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not. ‘Useful’ in this context does not necessarily mean functionally useful: it refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it, such as being interesting, funny, elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on. And the best way
to
seem
useful to diverse people under diverse, unpredictable circumstances is to
be
useful. Such an idea is, or embodies, a truth in the broadest sense: factually true if it is an assertion of fact, beautiful if it is an artistic value or behaviour, objectively right if it is a moral value, funny if it is a joke, and so on.

The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths. People are fallible; they often have preferences for false, shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas. But
which
false ideas they prefer differs from one person to another, and changes with time. Under changed circumstances, a specious falsehood or parochial truth can survive only by luck. But a true, deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods. For instance, Newton’s laws are useful for building better cathedrals, but also for building better bridges and designing better artillery. Because of this reach, they get themselves remembered and enacted by all sorts of people, many of them vehemently opposed to each other’s objectives, over many generations. This is the kind of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society.

In fact such memes are not merely
capable
of surviving under rapidly changing criteria of criticism, they positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication. Unprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people’s critical faculties, they are criticized,
but so are their rivals
, and the rivals fare worse, and are not enacted. In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded.

Thus, memes of this new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought to get themselves replicated faithfully. So I shall call them
rational memes
. Memes of the older, static-society kind, which survive by disabling their holders’ critical faculties, I shall call
anti-rational memes
. Rational and anti-rational memes have sharply differing properties, originating in their fundamentally different replication strategies. They are about as different from each other as they both are from genes.

If a certain type of hobgoblin has the property that, if children fear it, they will grow up to make
their
children fear it, then the behaviour of telling stories about that type of hobgoblin is a meme. Suppose it is a rational meme. Then criticism, over generations, will cast doubt on the story’s truth. Since in reality there are no hobgoblins, the meme might evolve away to extinction. Note that it does not ‘care’ if it goes extinct. Memes do what they have to do: they have no intentions, even about themselves. But there are also other paths that it might evolve down. It might become overtly fictional. Because rational memes must be seen as beneficial by the holders, those that evoke unpleasant emotions are at a disadvantage, so it may also evolve away from evoking terror and towards, for instance, being pleasantly thrilling – or else (if it settled on a genuine danger) exploring practicalities for the present and optimism for the future.

Now suppose it is an anti-rational meme. Evoking unpleasant emotions will then be useful in doing the harm that it needs to do – namely disabling the listener’s ability to be rid of the hobgoblin and entrenching the compulsion to think and therefore speak of it. The more accurately the hobgoblin’s attributes exploit genuine, widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate. If the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that its implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep. But its overt content – the idea of the hobgoblin’s existence – need contain no truth. On the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin helps to make the meme a better replicator, because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree combatable. And that will be all the more so if the story can also manage to undermine the principle of optimism. Thus, just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them.

As usual, mixing the above two replication strategies does no good. If a meme contains true and beneficial knowledge for the recipient, but disables the recipient’s critical faculties in regard to itself, then the recipient will be less able to correct errors in that knowledge, and so will reduce the faithfulness of transmission. And if a meme relies on the recipients’ belief that it is beneficial, but it is not in fact beneficial,
then that increases the chance that the recipient will reject it or refuse to enact it.

Similarly, a rational meme’s natural home is a dynamic society – more or less any dynamic society – because there the tradition of criticism (optimistically directed at problem-solving) will suppress variants of the meme with even slightly less truth. Moreover, the rapid progress will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving. An anti-rational meme’s natural home is a static society – not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved – for all the converse reasons. And therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of the
opposite
kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated.

Our society in the West became dynamic not through the sudden failure of a static society, but through generations of static-society-type evolution. Where and when the transition began is not very well defined, but I suspect that it began with the philosophy of Galileo and perhaps became irreversible with the discoveries of Newton. In meme terms, Newton’s laws replicated themselves as rational memes, and their fidelity was very high – because they were so useful for so many purposes. This success made it increasingly difficult to ignore the philosophical implications of the fact that nature had been understood in unprecedented depth, and of the methods of science and reason by which this had been achieved.

In any case, following Newton, there was no way of missing the fact that rapid progress was under way. (Some philosophers, notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, did try – but only by arguing that reason was harmful, civilization bad and primitive life happy.) There was such an avalanche of further improvements – scientific, philosophical and political – that the possibility of resuming stasis was swept away. Western society would become the beginning of infinity or be destroyed. Nations beyond the West today are also changing rapidly, sometimes through the exigencies of warfare with their neighbours, but more often and even more powerfully by the peaceful transmission of Western
memes. Their cultures, too, cannot become static again. They must either become ‘Western’ in their mode of operation or lose all their knowledge and thus cease to exist – a dilemma which is becoming increasingly significant in world politics.

Even in the West, the Enlightenment today is nowhere near complete. It is relatively advanced in a few, vital areas: the physical sciences and Western political and economic institutions are prime examples. In those areas ideas are now fairly open to criticism and experimentation, and to choice and change. But in many other areas memes are still replicated in the old manner, by means that suppress the recipients’ critical faculties and ignore their preferences. When girls strive to be ladylike and to meet culturally defined standards of shape and appearance, and when boys do their utmost to look strong and not to cry when distressed, they are struggling to replicate ancient ‘gender-stereotyping’ memes that are still part of our culture – despite the fact that explicitly endorsing them has become a stigmatized behaviour. Those memes have the effect of preventing vast ranges of ideas about what sort of life one should lead from ever crossing the holders’ minds. If their thoughts ever wander in the forbidden directions, they feel uneasiness and embarrassment, and the same sort of fear and loss of centredness as religious people have felt since time immemorial at the thought of betraying their gods. And their world views and critical faculties are left disabled in precisely such a way that they will in due course draw the next generation into the same pattern of thought and behaviour.

That anti-rational memes are still, today, a substantial part of our culture, and of the mind of every individual, is a difficult fact for us to accept. Ironically, it is harder for us than it would have been for the profoundly closed-minded people of earlier societies. They would not have been troubled by the proposition that most of their lives were spent enacting elaborate rituals rather than making their own choices and pursuing their own goals. On the contrary, the degree to which a person’s life was controlled by duty, obedience to authority, piety, faith and so on was the very measure by which people judged themselves and others. Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviours that did not seem functional would be told ‘Because I say so’, and in due course they would give their children the same
reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true though its holders do not believe it.) But today, with our eagerness for change and our unprecedented openness to new ideas and to self-criticism, it conflicts with most people’s self-image that we are still, to a significant degree, the slaves of anti-rational memes. Most of us would admit to having a hang-up or two, but in the main we consider our behaviour to be determined by our own decisions, and our decisions by our reasoned assessment of the arguments and evidence about what is in our rational self-interest. This rational self-image is itself a recent development of our society, many of whose memes explicitly promote, and implicitly give effect to, values such as reason, freedom of thought, and the inherent value of individual human beings. We naturally try to explain ourselves in terms of meeting those values.

Obviously there is truth in this; but it is not the whole story. One need look no further than our clothing styles, and the way we decorate our homes, to find evidence. Consider how you would be judged by other people if you went shopping in pyjamas, or painted your home with blue and brown stripes. That gives a hint of the narrowness of the conventions that govern even these objectively trivial and inconsequential choices about style, and the steepness of the social costs of violating them. Is the same thing true of the more momentous patterns in our lives, such as careers, relationships, education, morality, political outlook and national identity? Consider what we should
expect
to happen when a static society is gradually switching from anti-rational to rational memes.

Such a transition is necessarily gradual, because keeping a dynamic society stable requires a great deal of knowledge. Creating that knowledge, starting with only the means available in a static society – namely small amounts of creativity and knowledge, many misconceptions, the blind evolution of memes, and trial and error – must necessarily take time.

Moreover, the society has to continue to function throughout. But the coexistence of rational and anti-rational memes makes this transition unstable. Memes of each type cause behaviours that impede the faithful replication of the other: to replicate faithfully, anti-rational memes need people to avoid thinking critically about their choices,
while rational memes need people to think as critically as possible. That means that no memes in our society replicate as reliably as the most successful memes of either a very static society or an (as yet hypothetical) fully dynamic society. This causes a number of phenomena that are peculiar to our transitional era.