In the old days, “exorcising” referred to various ritualistic practices designed to get rid of an evil spirit, or maybe just purge something that was “troublesome, menacing or oppressive” (according to Webster’s Dictionary). We need to do something equivalent – a sort of cultural purge — of the seductive but misleading idea of memes.
The term “meme” was coined by the biologist/popularizer Richard Dawkins in his 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene. He proposed that there is an analogue of the gene in cultural life that he called a meme. Memes, he suggested, include whatever we imitate – information, ideas, behaviors, habits, traditions, even artifacts. Moreover, Dawkins speculated, memes may be “active agents” that have a mind of their own – a causal independence that he also attributed to genes (a claim that he has since walked back). He speculated that: “A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has simply because it is advantageous to itself [his emphasis].”
Dawkins’s dangerous idea (to borrow a line from the philosopher Daniel Dennett) was slow to propagate itself. However, Dennett gave it new life when he enthusiastically endorsed the concept in his influential 1991 book, Consciousness Explained. From a meme’s eye-view, Dennett explained: “A scholar is just a library’s way of making another library.” Psychologist Susan Blackmore, in her book The Meme Machine (1999), went even further and argued that memes are real physical entities, just like genes (DNA). Moreover, they compete among themselves “for their own sake” [Blackmore’s emphasis]. Just as Dawkins characterized organisms as “machines” for making more genes, so Blackmore tells us that every human is “a machine for making more memes…. We are meme machines.”
The trouble is, memes don’t really exist as a discreet causal agency in evolution, and saying they do won’t make it so. As a metaphor for various forms of learned cultural “information”, the term might be quite useful. It has the advantage of being more generic than such familiar terms as “ideas”, “inventions”, “learned behaviors”, “fads”, “artifacts”, etc., and it is certainly preferable to such clumsy neologisms as “culturgens”. But as a shaper of cultural evolution (as a discrete causal agency) independently of the motivations, goals, purposes, compulsions, and judgments — in short, the “minds” of human actors, memes rank right up there with the fiery phlogiston and the heavenly aether.
Neither I nor anyone else (so far) can conceive of a way to demonstrate (or falsify) the assertion that memes are real entities that exercise an autonomous influence in human societies, independently of human minds. Genes, and the coils of DNA that comprise the germ plasm, have an independent physical existence and known causal influences. Memes are labels that have been given to whatever we learn from one another. We are told that anything we imitate is a meme — hair styles, clothes, applause, dances, cigarette smoking, superstitions, songs, jokes, religion, and democracy, not to mention science, technology and the very idea of a meme. Even our language is, presumably, only a bushel basket full of memes waiting to be strung together.
The assertion that minds are “robot vehicles” — passive receptacles for various external cultural inputs — vastly oversimplifies both the neurobiology and the psychology of human learning processes, not to mention the dynamics of cultural life. “Memetics”, as its practitioners like to call their hopeful monster, is a curious throwback to the Behaviorist tabula rasa hypothesis — the claim that human behavior is wholly determined by external inputs (“reinforcers”). To the contrary, memes are always embedded in human minds (anything external is only a “latent” meme), and it is minds that do the creation, selection and use of memes. Humans do not slavishly imitate whatever they see, or hear. They are highly selective, and manipulative, both in terms of their personal choices and in what they may attempt to foist on others. Denial of the primacy of human actors in the selection and transmission of social behavior and cultural information is bad psychology — and bad anthropology. I’m reminded of a whimsical old poem about ghosts, which I’ve modified a bit: “Yesterday upon the stair, I met a meme who wasn’t there. He wasn’t there again today. I wish that he would go away.”
But can’t it also be said that ideas, ideologies, religions, books, music, technologies, etc., “compete” with one another? Well, yes, but only metaphorically. To say that some ideas are better than others is trite. To be precise, memes are differentially selected by prospective users. To be sure, some bad memes do seem to hang around when they are not wanted, rather like parasites. And so do some silly memes, like Kilroy and pet rocks. But memes themselves are powerless. False analogies can do a lot of mischief, so it is important to keep the meme in its proper place as a term of convenience for a broad category of social phenomena – whatever we may imitate — and not as a distinct causal agency. In the final analysis, it is our unique human propensity to observe and imitate one another that is responsible for the creation and transmission of memes. To borrow a famous phrase, man is the measure of all memes.