The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (66 page)

One of them is that some anti-rational memes evolve against the grain, towards rationality. An example is the transition from an autocratic monarchy to a ‘constitutional monarchy’, which has played a positive role in some democratic systems. Given the instability that I have described, it is not surprising that such transitions often fail.

Another is the formation within the dynamic society of anti-rational subcultures. Recall that anti-rational memes suppress criticism selectively and cause only finely tuned damage. This makes it possible for the members of an anti-rational subculture to function normally in other respects. So such subcultures can survive for a long time, until they are destabilized by the haphazard effects of reach from other fields. For example, racism and other forms of bigotry exist nowadays almost entirely in subcultures that suppress criticism. Bigotry exists not because it benefits the bigots, but despite the harm they do to themselves by using fixed, non-functional criteria to determine their choices in life.

Present-day methods of education still have a lot in common with their static-society predecessors. Despite modern talk of encouraging critical thinking, it remains the case that teaching by rote and inculcating standard patterns of behaviour through psychological pressure are integral parts of education, even though they are now wholly or partly renounced in explicit theory. Moreover, in regard to academic knowledge, it is still taken for granted, in practice, that the main purpose of education is to transmit a standard curriculum faithfully. One consequence is that people are acquiring scientific knowledge in an anaemic and instrumental way. Without a critical, discriminating approach to what they are learning, most of them are not effectively replicating the memes of science and reason into their minds. And so we live in a society in which people can spend their days conscientiously using laser technology to count cells in blood samples, and their evenings sitting cross-legged and chanting to draw supernatural energy out of the Earth.

Existing accounts of memes have neglected the all-important distinction between the rational and anti-rational modes of replication. Consequently they end up missing most of what is happening, and why. Moreover, since the most obvious examples of memes are long-lived anti-rational memes and short-lived arbitrary fads, the tenor of such accounts is usually anti-meme, even when these accounts formally accept that the best and most valuable knowledge also consists of memes.

For example, the psychologist Susan Blackmore, in her book
The Meme Machine
, attempts to provide a fundamental explanation of the human condition in terms of meme evolution. Now, memes are indeed integral to the explanation for the existence of our species – though, as I shall explain in the next chapter, I believe that the specific mechanism she proposes would not have been possible. But, crucially, Blackmore downplays the element of creativity both in the replication of memes and in their origin. This leads her, for example, to doubt that technological progress is best explained as being due to individuals as the conventional narrative would have it. She regards it instead as meme evolution. She cites the historian George Basalla, whose book
The Evolution of Technology
denies ‘the myth of the heroic inventor’.

But that distinction between ‘evolution’ and ‘heroic inventors’ as being the agents of discovery makes sense only in a static society. There, most change is indeed brought about in the way that I guessed jokes might evolve, with no great creativity being exercised by any individual participant. But in a dynamic society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively. That is to say, they emerge from individual minds as novel ideas, having acquired significant adaptations inside those minds. Of course, in both cases, ideas are built from previous ideas by a process of variation and selection, which constitutes evolution. But when evolution takes place largely within an individual mind, it is not meme evolution. It is creativity by a heroic inventor.

Worse, in regard to progress, Blackmore denies that there has been ‘progress towards anything in particular’ – that is to say, no progress towards anything objectively better. She recognizes only increasing
complexity. Why? Because
biological
evolution does not have a ‘better’ or ‘worse’. This despite her own warning that memes and genes evolve differently. Again, her claim is largely true of static societies, but not of ours.

How
should
we understand the existence of the distinctively human emergent phenomena such as creativity and choice, in the light of the fact that part of our behaviour is caused by autonomous entities whose content we do not know? And, worse, given that we are liable to be systematically misled by those entities about the reasons for our own thoughts, opinions and behaviour?

The basic answer is that it should not come as a surprise that we can be badly mistaken in any of our ideas, even about ourselves, and even when we feel strongly that we are right. So we should respond no differently, in principle, from how we respond to the possibility of being in error for any other reason. We are fallible, but through conjecture, criticism and seeking good explanations we may correct some of our errors. Memes hide, but, just as with the optical blind spot, there is nothing to prevent our using a combination of explanation and observation to detect a meme and discover its implicit content indirectly.

For example, whenever we find ourselves enacting a complex or narrowly defined behaviour that has been accurately repeated from one holder to the next, we should be suspicious. If we find that enacting this behaviour thwarts our efforts to attain our personal objectives, or is faithfully continued when the ostensible justifications for it disappear, we should become more suspicious. If we then find ourselves explaining our own behaviour with bad explanations, we should become still more suspicious. Of course, at any given point we may fail either to notice these things or to discover the true explanation of them. But failure need not be permanent in a world in which all evils are due to lack of knowledge. We failed at first to notice the non-existence of a force of gravity. Now we understand it. Locating hang-ups is, in the last analysis, easier.

Another thing that should make us suspicious is the presence of the
conditions
for anti-rational meme evolution, such as deference to authority, static subcultures and so on. Anything that says ‘Because I say so’ or ‘It never did me any harm,’ anything that says ‘Let us suppress
criticism of our idea because it is true,’ suggests static-society thinking. We should examine and criticize laws, customs and other institutions with an eye to whether they set up conditions for anti-rational memes to evolve. Avoiding such conditions is the essence of Popper’s criterion.

The Enlightenment is the moment at which explanatory knowledge is beginning to assume its soon-to-be-normal role as the most important determinant of physical events. At least it could be: we had better remember that what we are attempting – the sustained creation of knowledge – has never worked before. Indeed, everything that we shall ever try to achieve from now on will never have worked before. We have, so far, been transformed from the victims (and enforcers) of an eternal status quo into the mainly passive recipients of the benefits of relatively rapid innovation in a bumpy transition period. We now have to accept, and rejoice in bringing about, our next transformation: to active agents of progress in the emerging rational society – and universe.

Culture
   A set of shared ideas that cause their holders to behave alike in some ways.

Rational meme
   An idea that relies on the recipients’ critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated.

Anti-rational meme
   An idea that relies on disabling the recipients’ critical faculties to cause itself to be replicated.

Static culture/society
   One whose changes happen on a timescale longer than its members can notice. Such cultures are dominated by anti-rational memes.

Dynamic culture/society
   One that is dominated by rational memes.

– Biological evolution was merely a finite preface to the main story of evolution, the unbounded evolution of memes.

– So was the evolution of anti-rational memes in static societies.

Cultures consist of memes, and they evolve. In many ways memes are analogous to genes, but there are also profound differences in the way they evolve. The most important differences are that each meme has to include its own replication mechanism, and that a meme exists alternately in two different physical forms: a mental representation and a behaviour. Hence also a meme, unlike a gene, is separately selected, at each replication, for its ability to cause behaviour and for the ability of that behaviour to cause new recipients to adopt the meme. The holders of memes typically do not know why they are enacting them: we enact the rules of grammar, for instance, much more accurately than we are able to state them. There are only two basic strategies of meme replication: to help prospective holders or to disable the holders’ critical faculties. The two types of meme – rational memes and anti-rational memes – inhibit each other’s replication and the ability of the culture as a whole to propagate itself. Western civilization is in an unstable transitional period between stable, static societies consisting of anti-rational memes and a stable dynamic society consisting of rational memes. Contrary to conventional wisdom, primitive societies are unimaginably unpleasant to live in. Either they are static, and survive only by extinguishing their members’ creativity and breaking their spirits, or they quickly lose their knowledge and disintegrate, and violence takes over. Existing accounts of memes fail to recognize the significance of the rational/anti-rational distinction and hence tend to be implicitly anti-meme. This is tantamount to mistaking Western civilization for a static society, and its citizens for the crushed, pessimistic victims of memes that the members of static societies are.

Of all the countless biological adaptations that have evolved on our planet, creativity is the only one that can produce scientific or mathematical knowledge, art or philosophy. Through the resulting technology and institutions, it has had spectacular physical effects – most noticeably near human habitations, but also further afield: a substantial portion of the Earth’s land area is now used for human purposes. Human choice – itself a product of creativity – determines which other species to exclude and which to tolerate or cultivate, which rivers to divert, which hills to level, and which wildernesses to preserve. In the night sky, a bright, fast-moving spot may well be a space station carrying humans higher and faster than any biological adaptation can carry anything. Or it may be a satellite through which humans communicate across distances that biological communication has never spanned, using phenomena such as radio waves and nuclear reactions, which biology has never harnessed. The unique effects of creativity dominate our experience of the world.

Nowadays that includes the experience of rapid innovation. By the time you read these words, the computer on which I am writing them will be obsolete: there will be functionally better computers that will require less human effort to build. Other books will have been written, and innovative buildings and other artefacts will be constructed, some of which will be quickly superseded while others will stand for longer than the pyramids have so far. Surprising scientific discoveries will be made, some of which will change the standard textbooks for ever. All these consequences of creativity make for an ever-changing way of life,
which is possible only in a long-lived dynamic society – itself a phenomenon that nothing other than creative thought could possibly bring about.

However, as I pointed out in the previous chapter and
Chapter 1
, it was only recently in the history of our species that creativity has had any of those effects. In prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer (say, an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization) that humans were capable of creative thought at all. It would have seemed that we were doing no more than endlessly repeating the lifestyle to which we were genetically adapted, just like all the other billions of species in the biosphere. Clearly, we were tool-users – but so were many other species. We were communicating using symbolic language – but, again, that was not unusual: even bees do that. We were domesticating other species – but so do ants. Closer observation would have revealed that human languages and the knowledge for human tool use were being transmitted through memes and not genes. That made us fairly unusual, but still not obviously creative: several other species have memes. But what they do not have is the means of improving them other than through random trial and error. Nor are they capable of sustained improvement over many generations. Today, the creativity that humans use to improve ideas is what pre-eminently sets us apart from other species. Yet for most of the time that humans have existed it was not noticeably in use.

Creativity would have been even less noticeable in the predecessor of our species. Yet it must already have been evolving in that species, or ours would never have been the result. In fact the advantage conferred by successive mutations that gave our predecessors’ brains slightly more creativity (or, more precisely, more of the ability that
we now think of as creativity
) must have been quite large, for by all accounts modern humans evolved from ape-like ancestors very rapidly by gene-evolution standards. Our ancestors must have been continually out-breeding their cousins who had slightly less ability to create new knowledge. Why? What were they using this knowledge for?

If we did not know better, the natural answer would be that they were using it as we do today, for innovation and for understanding the world, in order to improve their lives. For instance, individuals who could improve stone tools would have ended up with better tools,
and hence with better food and more surviving offspring. They would also have been able to make better weapons, thus denying the holders of rival genes access to food and mates – and so on. Yet if that had happened, the palaeontological record would show those improvements happening on a timescale of generations. But it does not.