What memes are

In the continuing thread on conservative Darwinism, Ian B. explains that “meme” is not a synonym for “idea” or “belief.” While an idea or belief is formed by a thinking self seeking to understand truth, a meme is a kind of virus that infects brains in mindless fashion. Indeed, Ian continues, Richard Dawkins “came up with the meme concept precisely to remove intentionality and rational thought even from our thoughts themselves.”

Ian’s insights support my own tentative description of memes as the mental equivalent of genes. Just as genes, according to Darwinian evolutionary theory, are the randomly mutated and naturally selected instrument of totally non-intentional biological evolution, memes, according to Dawkins’s sociobiological theory, are the randomly generated and naturally (or socially) selected instrument of totally non-intentional social, mental, and moral evolution. Thus, in Dawkins’s scheme, the entire complex of human values is without any basis in truth or intentionality. I still haven’t figured out, though, how Dawkins explains and justifies his own values—his love of science, his (constantly advertised) delectation of the wonders of Darwinian evolution, his “Einsteinian religion,” his theological hatred of the Christian religion and virtually genocidal hatred of Christians, his perfectly PC liberal ideology, his gargantuan narcissism, and on and on.

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LA writes:

I have never used the word meme prior to posting these current entries. Of course I’ve seen it used repeatedly in the last several years on the Web, in the sense of a phrase, a trope, a slogan, that takes on a life of its own (yes, like a virus) and is replicated by lots of people. (I’ve vaguely aware that the word has more profound meanings, but I don’t know enough about that to speak about it.)

Notice that meme in its common usage is not used in a complimentary sense of an idea. No one says, “Smith had a great meme.” It’s used in the sense of a mental tidbit or construct that spreads mechanically, without conscious intent, like the common cold.

Because of its cheesy, reductive implications, I’ve never been attracted to the word, I’ve always disliked it and felt there was something bad about it, because it seems to be saying that there are no true ideas, no true thoughts, there are only memes, and isn’t that cool.

Yes, there is mechanical thinking, in which people imitate a phrase or slogan used by other people. Ouspensky, following his teacher Gurdjieff, had a very useful term for this: formatory thoughts. Which I define as: thought that operates only by the external form of a thought, not by its meaning, and that spreads by imitation and association, not by reasoning.

There are infinite examples of this. One would be the way that the Bush administration and its journalistic supporters began using the word “freedom” after 2003.

Formatory thinking has its place, for performing low level tasks of memory and association, and the ordinary stuff of verbal interchange. It is out of place and very destructive when it replaces intellectual thought. And it does so all the time.

The key difference between “formatory thinking” and “memes” is that the term “formatory thinking” is critical, it implies there is true thought as compared with formatory thinking, while “memes” implies that there is no true thought, there are only memes.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 13, 2009 03:19 PM | Send