Of 'Memes and Men'

Close on the heels of a paradox that I was talking about a few days ago (that on the one hand, everyone seems to be talking about 'love'; on the other, only a few people seem to have a clue about what that word 'refers to'), here is a similar one about 'freedom'. Some of the bloodiest battles in European history have been fought in the 'name of freedom'; great empires and apparently stable governments have been toppled by the seekers of 'freedom'; and critical Marxist theorists, post-colonialists, subaltern groups, feminists and their friends use every possible opportunity to raise the cry for 'freedom'. And yet, in spite of all the rivers of ink and blood that have been spilled over the question of freedom, there seems to be no dearth of people who will tell you that freedom is an illusion, that it never existed, that it is a subterfuge to hide one's Machiavellian intentions, and so on and on.

Freedom, of course, can come in various forms : political freedom, religious freedom, social freedom and so on. In the following, I shall be concerned with only what might be called 'intellectual freedom' : Are we free to choose which truth-claims to accept and which to reject? There is a very curious 'science' called Mimetics which seems to tell us that we cannot really help believing in what we do, and this is especially so if our beliefs belong to that set that is loosely called 'religious'.

Richard Dawkins says, clearly with religious believers in mind, ‘I am suspicious of strongly held beliefs that are unsupported by evidence’ (see his book A Devil’s Chaplain, p.117). Is he really? For if he were suspicious of such beliefs, he might have hesitated in postulating the existence of what he has termed as the ‘meme’ in spite of the fact that there is no evidence for the existence of memes. A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, it is a cultural replicator on analogy with the gene which is the replicator in evolutionary biology. Just as genes 'jump' from one body to another and propagate themselves in the gene pool, so too memes 'jump' from one brain to another and propagate themselves in the meme pool. Consequently, people who believe in the existence of God do so, argues Dawkins, because a certain meme (we may call it the ‘G-meme’) jumps like an contagion from one brain to another. The basic questions, in this context, are three-fold :

(A) Do memes really exist? Dawkins says that any ‘scientific’ approach is characterized by ‘testability, evidential support, precision, quantifiability, consistency, intersubjectivity, repeatability…..’ (A Devil’s Chaplain, p.145). When it comes to the question of the 'meme', one might therefore ask (in line with the above definition) whether we can test what memes are made of; what the evidential support is for the existence of the meme; whether memes can be precisely located in some part of the brain; whether they are quantifiable; whether there is an intersubjective consensus among scientists regarding its existence; whether they can be repeatedly observed, and so on and on. If the answers to these questions are in the negative, one might consequently wonder if there is anything ‘scientific’ about the hypothesis of the meme, by Dawkins’ own definition of what is to be regarded as ‘scientific’.

Indeed, in places where Dawkins is not indulging himself in frivolous rhetoric against religious belief but writing in a calm and well-reasoned manner, he admits as much : ‘Memes may partially blend with each other in ways that genes do not … These differences may prove sufficient to render the analogy with genetic selection worthless, or positively misleading’ (The Extended Phenotype, p. 112). If that is indeed so, why should a ‘scientist’ hypothesize such a ‘misleading’ and ‘un-scientific’ entity as a ‘meme’?

(B) Let it be accepted that religious believers believe in God because they have a G-meme. It can then also be argued that atheists disbelieve in the existence of God because they have another meme, let us call it the A-meme. Indeed, one may go further than that. One can argue that Richard Dawkins, and his followers, believe in what he writes in his books because they share with one another a specific meme, let us call it the D-meme. One might also want to know why Dawkins' scientific ideas in particular (Dawkins is a proponent of Neo-Darwinism) should be accepted, for one could then argue that these ideas too are simply the effect of some meme (call them the ND-meme), and Dawkins cannot 'boot-strap' himself out from this trap of self-referentiality.

What does all of that really prove? Nothing much. It neither proves nor disproves that there is no extra-mental reality called God; only that God-believers have the G-meme, atheists have the A-meme, and Dawkins himself has the D-meme/ND-meme. This being the case, how shall we decide whether a certain meme is ‘good’ or ‘bad’? There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of a meme that allows us to label some memes as ‘good’ and others as ‘bad’. Why then is the G-meme ‘bad’ and the A-meme ‘good’? The answer is pretty clear : ‘Because I, Richard Dawkins, have declared them to be such!'

(C) From (A) and (B), we can see that Dawkins has simply built up a circular argument about memes, and injected his own subjective set of values into the allegedly 'neutral' definition of memes. If the meme hypothesis is to be accepted, it would make nonsense of our propositional claims since we could then prove neither the validity nor the invalidity of any system of beliefs : the most we could do is to point out that this system is a product of certain memes, and say that the matter ends there. Therefore, we may say that those who accept Newtonian mechanics have the N-meme, those who are into quantum mechanics possess the QM-meme, Marxists have the M-meme, Muslims the Mu-meme, Jews the J-meme, Bolsheviks the B-meme, and the list would not end; but there is nothing in the concept of a meme which will enable us to say that one of the above systems is 'true' and the others are 'false'. Again, even if someone were to say that there is no such thing as 'truth' that claim itself would be a mimetic product of the NT-meme ('no truth'-meme). In short, the concept of a meme remains so empirically indeterminate that it can neither be verified nor falsified; surely not a concept that anyone would wish to refer to as 'scientific'.

To conclude, then, why do some people persist nevertheless in believing in the existence of 'memes'? I can only surmise that there exists such a thing as a M-meme (a meme for the 'meme') which such people have in common with one another. There also exists, one may postulate, such an entity as a NM-meme (a meme for the 'not-meme'), and people who believe that the meme concept is just a linguistic quirk probably have this NM-meme.

I shall conclude with a comment by Simon Conway Morris in this context : 'Memes are trivial, to be banished by simple mental exercises. In any wider context, they are hopelessly, if not hilariously, simplistic. To conjure up memes not only reveals a strange imprecision of thought but ... if memes really existed they would ultimately deny the reality of reflective thought'. (Life's Solution : Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 324)