The meme is not a notion I can dismiss out of hand. It seems to me to describe as well as anything does the obdurate persistence and influence of the genre of writing I have called parascientific. This piece of evidence for its reality might not please its originators, who always seem to assume their own immunity from the illusions and distractions that plague the rest of us. Still, aware as I am that Einstein’s cosmological constant was first of all a sort of fudge, in his view a blunder, I am willing to concede that this idea cannot be wholly discredited by its obvious usefulness to those who have proposed it. It does raise questions within the terms of their conceptual universe, however. For example, let us say altruism is a meme, inexplicably persistent, as other traits associated with religion are also. Then is there any need to make a genetic or sociobiological account of it? If its purpose is to have a part in sustaining related memes by which it would also be sustained, such as “family” or “religious community,” would it be dependent on the process of Darwinian selection represented in the theoretical rescue/non-rescue of the drowning child?
To put the question in more general terms: the role of the meme in this school of thought is to account for the human mind and the promiscuous melange of truth and error, science and mythology, that abides in it and governs it, sometimes promoting and sometimes thwarting the best interests of the organism and the species. Then why assume a genetic basis for any human behavior? Memes would appear to have sprung free from direct dependency on our genes, and to be able to do so potentially where they have not yet done so in fact. And assuming that Homo sapiens are unique in this experience of meme colonization, does this theory not set apart something that might be called human nature, that is, certain qualities of humankind that are unique to us, and not to be accounted for by analogies between ourselves and the hymenoptera? Sociobiology, with its dependency on gradualist neo-Darwinism, is difficult to reconcile with these incorporeal, free-floating, highly contagious memes which, in theory, have somehow managed to grow our physical brains to accommodate their own survival and propagation. Only consider the physiological and societal consequences of those big heads of ours in terms of maternal and infant mortality, the helplessness of infants, and the importance to us of culture, among other things. Does not this theory implicitly marginalize gene-based accounts of human behavior?
Memes and Hamiltonian genes do resemble each other, though only as a stone resembles an oyster. They differ in that the first has a status that is something less than hypothetical, while, of course, genes are actual and are thoroughly mapped and studied. The traits of this notional meme align nicely with the Hamiltonian idea of “selfishness,” that is, the idea that, like the gene, the meme impacts the organism’s function and behavior to perpetuate its own existence through generations. Granting that such an entity as a meme would have an interest in the survival of the one species that can serve as the vehicle of its spread and perpetuation, in individual cases this is clearly at odds with the personal survival of human beings. To choose an illustration of the point at random — the Horst Wessel Lied, a song written in celebration of fallen comrades by a young man who was himself assassinated, was, so to speak, an important modern carrier of that ancient meme and killer of young men, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I think it is generally believed that the martyrdoms of early Christians did much to anchor their religion in the culture of the Mediterranean world. The best case to be made for the correctness of the notion that there are indeed memes, and that they do indeed perpetuate themselves in human culture over time, would be the potency they acquire in the very fact of the destruction of the young and strong. When factions or nations turn on each other, those who win lose from the point of view of the species, in destroying the genetic wealth of their adversaries, and no “selfishness,” however leveraged by equations, intervenes to limit the losses we as a species suffer.
My point is that, despite a superficial resemblance between the hypothetical meme and the hypothetically “selfish” gene, owed no doubt to their shared intellectual paternity, each theory obviates the other, or at best creates any number of disputed boundaries between them. This would be interesting and nothing more than interesting if the neo-Darwinism of Hamilton, Dawkins, Dennett, and others did not offer itself as a monism, as the one thing needful, the one sufficient account for literally everything. If altruism has seemed to be the ragged edge of Darwinism, a worry to T. H. Huxley, finally tucked out of sight by Hamilton’s formula, why should they be so unperturbed by the fact that these mighty memes, granting their existence here for the purposes of argument, provide an alternative account for the whole of human behavior? Why war? Dulce et decorum est. Why altruism? It is more blessed to give than to receive. Whence the bonds of family? I love all the dear silver that shines in her hair, and the brow that is wrinkled and furrowed with care.
Ah, but what is the origin of these memes? Once a shaman was right about where game was to be found, and religion was up and running. But a good many human behaviors and cultural patterns run counter to religion or have no clear source in it. In any case, a stickler might wonder whether some crude metaphysics would not have lurked behind the role of shaman and the idea of consulting him, if shamanism itself ought not to be called a meme. For that matter, one might wonder if some unacknowledged metaphysics lurks behind the parascientific positing of these immortal, incorporeal destinies that possess us to their own inscrutable ends, rather in the manner of the gods of Greek mythology. The question of origins bears a certain similarity to the questions raised by E. O. Wilson’s remarks on altruism. What is the nature of the reality we inhabit if we have to conceal self-interested motives? If nature runs on self-interest to its own ultimate enhancement and ours, where is the shame in it? Isn’t shame as extraneous to the workings of the world, understood from a Hamiltonian perspective, as generosity itself would be? We might be tempted to patch in a meme here — I was hungry and you fed me, I was naked and you clothed me — but if we did, then we would have proposed a sufficient account of altruism, making Hamilton’s equation entirely unnecessary. And, since the benefactor would have been acting purely at the behest of the meme, we would also have excluded deception and self-deception as factors in the altruistic act.
The neo-Darwinism of Hamilton and others shares one consequence with meme theory: both of them represent the mind as a passive conduit of other purposes than those the mind ascribes to itself. It reiterates that essential modernist position, that our minds are not our own. The conviction so generally shared among us, that we think in some ordinary sense of that word, that we reason and learn and choose as individuals in response to our circumstances and capacities, is simply — the one, crucial point of agreement between these otherwise incompatible theories — a persisting illusion serving a force or a process that is essentially unknown and indifferent to us.
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The comparison that is salient here is between the accidental and the intentional in terms of their consequences for the interpretation of anything. In the course of my reading, I have come to the conclusion that the random, the accidental, have a strong attraction for many writers because they simplify by delimiting. Why is there something rather than nothing? Accident. Accident narrows the range of appropriate strategies of interpretation, while intention very much broadens it. Accident closes on itself, while intention implies that, in and beyond any particular fact or circumstance, there is vastly more to be understood. Intention is implicitly communicative, because an actor is described in any intentional act. Why is the human brain the most complex object known to exist in the universe? Because the elaborations of the mammalian brain that promoted the survival of the organism overshot the mark in our case. Or because it is intrinsic to our role in the universe as thinkers and perceivers, participants in a singular capacity for wonder as well as for comprehension.