The Meme Machine (32 page)

Exactly the same argument applies to the increasingly widespread practice of refusing to eat meat. Humans were clearly designed to eat a certain amount of meat. Meat is high in protein and fat, and was probably necessary to feed the increasingly large brain of our far ancestors. Yet now many people, myself included, do not eat meat. Some argue that they feel better on a vegetarian diet and a few do not like meat, but most say they are affected by the suffering of the animals bred and killed for food. I suggest that vegetarianism succeeds as a meme because we all want to be like the
nice
people who care about animals, and we copy them. Not everyone will get infected by this meme; some like meat too much and others have sets of memes that are not very compatible with this one. Nevertheless, it does quite well. Vegetarianism is a memetically spread altruistic fashion.

If this is right we should expect to be able to trace the historical origins of such memes as they gradually appear and take hold of whole populations. We would not expect to find such actions in societies with little communication and few ways for memes to spread. We would expect them to be most common in societies in which people have plenty of resources to spare and plenty of opportunities for picking up new memes. We should not necessarily expect people to brag about being kind to animals, but simply to find themselves wanting to be so.

Note that it is not necessary that the superficially kind actions should
actually help the animals in question. An injured animal that is rescued is helped in the short term, and a potential battery hen that is never hatched is almost certainly better off for never having existed. But the long–term prospects are dubious, especially when it comes to schemes for saving whole habitats or species. The memetic approach makes it easy to understand why particular behaviours spread even when they do not achieve what they are supposed to achieve. It is not just that people make mistakes in their reasoning, which we know all too well, but that they are especially likely to make certain sorts of mistakes – in this case copying behaviours that
look
altruistic.

A final example of this kind is recycling waste. Recycling is certainly a meme – that is, a behaviour that people pick up by copying other people, whether they read about it, see it on television or discover that all their neighbours are doing it. Many people put a great deal of effort into separating different kinds of waste, storing them in their house or garage, taking them to recycling points, and buying recyclable goods. The recycling meme has been an enormously successful one, spreading far and wide in the developed world and driving a massive amount of human activity. Some experts argue that the energy thus used is far more than would be needed if the materials were simply dumped and new ones made. I have no idea whether this is true, but from the memetic point of view it does not matter. We would expect these kinds of behaviour to spread because they are easily picked up by people who already do all kinds of generous, caring and ‘green’ activities, who are therefore seen as altruistic and are therefore copied. The whole ‘green movement’, and the effort put into it, is just what you would expect of meme–driven altruism in action.

Memes which have nothing to do with altruism can benefit from ‘copy–the-altruist’ by just tagging along for free. Like Kev the caveman’s flashy blue–feathered arrows, some memes may just by luck happen to be carried by more altruistic people, but this luck is not a memetic process that can be relied on. Instead, we can expect memes to have devised strategies for getting into altruistic people without actually being altruism memes themselves (or more accurately – memes that happened to have such strategies should have survived better than those without, and we should be able to observe them around us). Are there such examples?

Yes. They range from little groups of co–memes to very complicated
memeplexes. Remember that the essence of any memeplex is that the memes inside it can replicate better as part of the group than they can on their own. Some simple ones will show the principle. For the first type we need to assume that people want to be liked. This is part of the principle I have been following that people imitate people they like more than people they do not. Imitating people you like should be a good way to become liked yourself and being liked should ensure that people are nicer to you.

Now, let us take some actions a parent might try to persuade a child to do, such as keep clean, say please and thank you to Auntie Dawn, or stay a virgin until after marriage. Why should children obey the instructions? They might obey out of fear or coercion, but a common trick is to turn the instruction into ‘Good children keep their clothes clean’, ‘Nice people say please and thank you’, or ‘Good girls don’t have sex before marriage’. These simple memeplexes consist of just two parts; the instruction and the idea of being good. ‘People won’t like you if you do that’ is another, as are hints that nice people vote conservative, people like us eat dinner at eight, or kind people go to church.

More complicated memeplexes can build up around the kinds of altruism I considered before, such as kindness to animals or recycling, and lots of other memes can jump on board. The recycling symbol is a little scrap of information that has been very successfully copied around the world. The names and logos of all the charities are other examples, as are the collecting boxes that are rattled in the street, the practices of having charity shops, of distributing special bags to collect goods in, and many other activities that thrive in the world of charitable giving. As memeplexes evolve and become more complicated, new niches are created in which new kinds of meme can thrive. In the examples I have given here, the spread of charitable giving opens up niches for all sorts of other memes to thrive.

You can even sell music and fashions using altruism. Bob Geldof really did give money to the starving in Africa but he sold millions of records at the same time. Princess Diana’s memorial fund really is funding her charities but it is spreading millions of Diana memes in the process -pictures, stories, personal reminiscences, speculations and scandals, videos of her life and times, not to mention the words and tune of Candle in the Wind.

These are simple examples, but they are sufficient to show that meme–driven altruism is an obvious meme–trick ready for exploitation. It should not, therefore, surprise us to find that many of the most powerful and widespread memeplexes use it in various forms. Pre–eminent are the religions. One of the mechanisms is simple, once you think about it
memetically. A religion which persuades its followers to be more altruistic will spread because of the altruism trick.

I was once cycling in a park in Bristol when my bicycle chain fell off. Before I could jump off to put it back two young men raced up to me, politely offered help, expertly put the chain back on, and stood smiling kindly at me. ‘Thank you very much’, I said, feeling a little bewildered. For I had never seen them before and I was not a ravishing sight in my Felix–the-cat bike helmet. God was soon on their lips, quickly followed by Joseph Smith and Salt Lake City. The Mormon faith is ably and deliberately spread by the altruism trick. It doesn’t work on everyone, but it works well enough to keep the memes alive.

The altruism trick works like this. Take a political party, a religious sect, a cult, a local benevolent society, or any complex belief system. Incorporate within it the idea that its followers should do good works. These good works will then make the followers more likeable and so people will copy them – copying in the process all the other memes in the belief system. Of course, this mechanism does involve actual ‘good works’, as did Geldof and Diana. Others only give the appearance of doing good, or just persuade their followers to
think
they are doing good. Others exploit the sense of obligation induced by giving gifts – the proselyte does you a good turn, you now feel obligated to him, and the obvious way to repay this obligation is to do what he wants, that is, to take on his memes (or at least give the appearance of doing so). There are many variations on this basic ‘altruism trick’. I will consider how some of them work, as well as further implications of Allison’s (1992) beneficent norms, when dealing in more detail with religions.

Note that this trick effectively makes people work for the memes they carry. People who join the cults or adopt the ideologies give away their possessions, do good works, or help others, because this helps copy the memes that have infected them. Other people then copy them and they also begin to work for the memes. This is one reason why memeplexes that use this trick have survived in the past and why there are so many of them around now. This is the second time we have met the idea of people working for their memes (the first was in relation to sex and spreading memes rather than genes) and we will meet it again. In this sense we can say that the memes are driving human behaviour.

If this seems frightening then we need to ask ourselves why. What does drive human behaviour? Much of the antagonism towards Darwinism, sociobiology, and indeed any science of human behaviour, stems from an apparent desire to see ourselves as magical autonomous agents in charge of our own destinies. I shall tackle the basis of this view later, but for now
just say that yes, memetics does undermine this view. We can describe any behaviour in numerous different ways for different purposes, but underneath them all lies the competition between the replicators. Memes provide the driving force behind what we do, and the tools with which we do it. Just as the design of our bodies can be understood only in terms of natural selection, so the design of our minds can be understood only in terms of memetic selection.

Can the theory of memetic altruism be tested? One approach would be to test the basic assumptions on which it rests. The main assumption is that people preferentially copy the people they like. I have assumed this because there are substantial hints in the literature that this is so. In his widely cited book on the psychology of persuasion, the American psychologist, Robert Cialdini (1994) reviews the evidence that people are more easily influenced by, and more likely to agree to a request or buy a product from people they like. Tupperware parties work because the hostess invites friends who like her and are therefore more likely to buy products they do not want. Successful car dealers charm their intended purchasers by complimenting them, appearing to be similar to them, giving away small concessions or appearing to take their part against the boss, all of which increases the clients’ liking for the dealers and hence the ease with which the victims can be separated from their money. The major factors that increase liking include physical attractiveness, similarity, cooperativeness, and the belief that the other person likes you. One record–breaking salesman even used to send out thirteen thousand cards a month to his clients saying ‘I like you’ – and presumably he was not wasting his money.

What is not so clear is whether liking leads directly to imitation. This has not been much studied by social psychologists, perhaps because the importance of imitation
per se
has not been emphasised. If it does, the other consequences should follow; that people buy products from, are persuaded to change their minds by, and more often agree with people they like. In other words, the social psychological findings described above may be a consequence of a deeper underlying tendency to want to copy people we like. The experiments that need to be done, therefore, should look more closely at the imitation of actions carried out by likeable and unlikeable people. For example, we might ask people to watch liked and disliked models carrying out a task in different ways, and
then do the task themselves. Experiments could then go on to find out just how best to manipulate liking so as to produce the most effective imitation. If the same manipulations affect simple imitation of actions as well as persuasion and agreement with beliefs, this would be suggestive that a similar process is going on in both. I have also assumed that altruistic behaviour makes people more likeable. This may seem too obvious to need testing, but we could use similar experiments to test the main consequence of this – that is, that acting altruistically will induce people to imitate you. If these predictions were not born out the entire basis of this kind of meme–drive altruism would be undermined.

The outcome of such experiments might be complicated by the effects of the ‘reciprocation rule’. It is well known in social psychology that people feel obliged to repay any kindness shown to them, and feel obligated if they do not (Cialdini 1995). This tendency is culturally widespread and probably related to the fact that aid from rich to poor countries is not always well received (Moghaddam
et al.
1993). Presumably, reciprocity stems from our evolved use of reciprocal altruism. Now, if an observer in one of our experiments has a kindness done to them they may feel obligated to the model – an unpleasant feeling which might disincline them to like the model and so complicate the issue. The most interesting outcome from the memetic point of view would be if imitating the altruist (i.e. taking on their memes) acted as a kind of reciprocation. By this I mean that one person could ‘pay back’ a kindness by taking on the other person’s ideas.

This effect can be seen to follow from a combination of the ‘reciprocation rule’ which derives from reciprocal altruism, and Allison’s beneficent norm ‘Be good to those who imitate you’. According to this rule, if A imitates B, B should now feel obliged to A. So, for example, not only does the professor want to be nice to her students but all of us should be kinder to people who agree with us, or take on our ideas, or imitate us in other ways. If the process works both ways then if C gives D a gift, D will feel obligated to C and may pay back the obligation by agreeing with C (or taking on her memes in some other way). In ordinary life we may be seeing this in the tendency of guests to agree with their host’s ideas, or of people in subordinate positions to agree with those who have power over them, or in the tricks used by religions that I discussed above. Finally, this could lead to people trading off their obligations by bartering goods against imitation in all possible combinations. So, for example, the guest who brings a fine present should feel under less obligation to agree with the host than one who does not.