Meme Wars
I had never heard of the word meme before a bus ride to the Wakonse Institute in May of 2000. In conversation with an architecture professor from the University of Missouri, he suggested I read the book "The Evolving Self" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He couldn't pronouce his name either.
In reading the book that summer, I learned that memes are "any permanent pattern of matter or information produced by an act of human intentionality." The term was created by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, who used it to describe "a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism." Memes are analogous to genes. Memes are mentally passed on; genes are physically passed on. Memes combine and evolve; genes combine and evolve.
"At the moment of its creation, the meme is part of a conscious process directed by human intentionality. But immediately after a meme has come into existence, it begins to react with and transform the consciousness of its creator, and that of other human beings who come into contact with it." The author goes on to give a profound warning: "It is possible that one of the most dangerous illusions we must learn to see through is the belief that the thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will."
Whoa now! Wait a minute! Is he saying we have no control over our thoughts or the products we make from our ideas? He is saying we don't have as much control as we'd like to think. Even the idea that "I am in control of my thoughts" is a meme that came into our mind at some time. It started competing with other thoughts that doubted our ability to control our thoughts. The war was on!
Let's take an idea like "God loves me." We may have been taught that in Sunday school or Sabbath school or from someone attempting to help us feel better about ourselves. Then something "bad" happens to us and we have the thought "God doesn't love me anymore." These are two competing memes that may battle for superiority the rest of our lives. Whichever phrase is most successful at the time will convince us it is right. Whichever phrase we are believing at the time will govern other thoughts and actions which will seem to support the phrase we are believing until the circumstances change enough for the opposing phrase to rise to power.
"I can." "I can't." "I can." "I can't" We may "hear" those two arguing day in and day out, year after year. They are memes at war.
Dr. Don Beck, his mentor and associates have taken the term meme and expanded its application to help understand cultural movements throughout human history. In "Spiral Dynamics" memes are grouped into "Value Meme Codes" that are determined by the life conditions people experience. As life conditions change, the Value Meme Codes change, moving up and down a spiral of evolution. These are not changes in the genetics of people, they are changes in the memetics of people. Memetics is the science of ideas, cultural information passed on from mind to mind.
When we look at conflicting cultures we find that the conflicts are not genetic, they are memetic. There are meme wars going on around the world, memes competing with memes. Most of us think people were fighting people, but why do people fight? Because their ideas conflict. That conflict of memes can be within one mind as I described earlier or two minds in a relationship or small groups or nations. The meme of Christianity conflicts with the meme of Islam. The meme of capitalism conflicts with the meme of socialism. The meme of being an American may conflict with the meme of being a Russian.
A huge mistake we make is to take these conflicts personally. We confuse memes with people. We identify ourselves by our memes. I am an American or I am Italian. We identify others by their memes. They are Republicans or they are Democrats. We think people are against people, when all the time, it is simply memes and Value Meme Codes that are in conflict. When we learn to separate the person, the individual, from their memes, we stop judging the person. When we learn to separate our own memes from us, we stop judging (condemning) ourselves.
We will not have world peace until we learn to make this important separation between people and their memes, between people and the Value Meme Codes that life conditions have brought about within their lives. We can learn to respect the process of evolving ideas and values. We can help people emerge from life conditions that dictate survival values to life conditions that allow people to cooperate with and respect the interdependence of all the levels of creation.
In reading the book that summer, I learned that memes are "any permanent pattern of matter or information produced by an act of human intentionality." The term was created by the British biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, who used it to describe "a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism." Memes are analogous to genes. Memes are mentally passed on; genes are physically passed on. Memes combine and evolve; genes combine and evolve.
"At the moment of its creation, the meme is part of a conscious process directed by human intentionality. But immediately after a meme has come into existence, it begins to react with and transform the consciousness of its creator, and that of other human beings who come into contact with it." The author goes on to give a profound warning: "It is possible that one of the most dangerous illusions we must learn to see through is the belief that the thoughts we think of and the things we make are under our control, that we can manipulate them at will."
Whoa now! Wait a minute! Is he saying we have no control over our thoughts or the products we make from our ideas? He is saying we don't have as much control as we'd like to think. Even the idea that "I am in control of my thoughts" is a meme that came into our mind at some time. It started competing with other thoughts that doubted our ability to control our thoughts. The war was on!
Let's take an idea like "God loves me." We may have been taught that in Sunday school or Sabbath school or from someone attempting to help us feel better about ourselves. Then something "bad" happens to us and we have the thought "God doesn't love me anymore." These are two competing memes that may battle for superiority the rest of our lives. Whichever phrase is most successful at the time will convince us it is right. Whichever phrase we are believing at the time will govern other thoughts and actions which will seem to support the phrase we are believing until the circumstances change enough for the opposing phrase to rise to power.
"I can." "I can't." "I can." "I can't" We may "hear" those two arguing day in and day out, year after year. They are memes at war.
Dr. Don Beck, his mentor and associates have taken the term meme and expanded its application to help understand cultural movements throughout human history. In "Spiral Dynamics" memes are grouped into "Value Meme Codes" that are determined by the life conditions people experience. As life conditions change, the Value Meme Codes change, moving up and down a spiral of evolution. These are not changes in the genetics of people, they are changes in the memetics of people. Memetics is the science of ideas, cultural information passed on from mind to mind.
When we look at conflicting cultures we find that the conflicts are not genetic, they are memetic. There are meme wars going on around the world, memes competing with memes. Most of us think people were fighting people, but why do people fight? Because their ideas conflict. That conflict of memes can be within one mind as I described earlier or two minds in a relationship or small groups or nations. The meme of Christianity conflicts with the meme of Islam. The meme of capitalism conflicts with the meme of socialism. The meme of being an American may conflict with the meme of being a Russian.
A huge mistake we make is to take these conflicts personally. We confuse memes with people. We identify ourselves by our memes. I am an American or I am Italian. We identify others by their memes. They are Republicans or they are Democrats. We think people are against people, when all the time, it is simply memes and Value Meme Codes that are in conflict. When we learn to separate the person, the individual, from their memes, we stop judging the person. When we learn to separate our own memes from us, we stop judging (condemning) ourselves.
We will not have world peace until we learn to make this important separation between people and their memes, between people and the Value Meme Codes that life conditions have brought about within their lives. We can learn to respect the process of evolving ideas and values. We can help people emerge from life conditions that dictate survival values to life conditions that allow people to cooperate with and respect the interdependence of all the levels of creation.
posted by Dick Dalton at
5:51 AM
1 Comments:
Hi Dick,
There is a line from Mikhail Naimy's 'The Book of Mirdad' that resonates with what has been said many times in different ways...and yet never seems to lose its truth:
'So think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire upon the sky for all and everything to see. And so, in truth, it is. So do as if your every deed were to recoil upon your heads. And so, in truth, it does.'
Every thought and act is remembered, and has an effect. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
Memes are the cultural expressions of our genes - and cultural evolution is currently evolving faster than our genetic line...
We can be the creators of our own future.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home