Book: The Meme Machine

Author: Susan Blackmore
Publisher:

By Susan Blackmore

Reviewed by Mohammad Gill

A couple of weeks back, I was idly surfing on the internet trying to find something stimulating to my mind, something on which I could dwell and concentrate and hopefully work with. If Susan Blackmore were to read this sentence, she would say I was looking for a creative (?) meme. It so happened that I came upon a piece written by her which started with the following story:

On a warm 4th of July evening, my family and I were driving back to California from Oregon. We hit the town Ashland just before sundown and decided to stop and see if we could find a fireworks show. The downtown area was loaded with people so we figured the show must be downtown. We looked long and hard for a parking place before counting ourselves lucky to have found in such a crowded place. We asked someone where the fireworks were going to be shot from, but they didn’t know. They pointed us in a general direction though. Since most of the people were headed that way, we did too. After about a mile of walking (no easy task with a tired one – and three year old BTW) we asked again. This next person said they were going off at the college further down the street. I decided to go back and get the car so we wouldn’t all have to walk the long distance back. By the time I got back the kids were far too tired to walk any further so we plopped down on a nearby grassy embankment. We still didn’t know if we were close enough to see the show, but we didn’t really care too much at that point. A family in a similar predicament came by and asked where the fireworks were. We said we were out-of-towners and didn’t know. They were tired (and not from Ashland) too and had three or four kids so they sat down next to us. Soon thereafter, numerous people sat down nearby to watch the fireworks we had front row seats for. Cars began to stop and park so they could watch from our vantage point. When the festivities finally began less than an hour later, hundreds of people were seated around us. It turned out we were much too far away from a good view and a large tree obstructed the limited view we all had.

She followed it up with the discussion of memes. I do not know if I adequately comprehended the meme concept but I was hooked by its novelty. It was the first time in my life I had heard or read about it.

What is a Meme?

Let me begin with the definition of the word meme, if indeed there is any which is sharply specific and definitive. It is not easy because meme is so ubiquitous; it shows up at all the unlikely places. In fact the world is full of memes. Fortunately, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) has baptized this new word in 1990’s and has included it in its sanctified population of the English words. According to SOED, meme is ‘an element of a culture or system of behaviour that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, esp. imitation. Note the emphasis on non-genetic because if it is spread (replicated) genetically then it wouldn’t be because of memes; it would be due to genes.

The word meme is said to have been crafted by Richard Dawkins, in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’. I had read this book selectively a few years back but I had failed to make an acquaintance with meme at that time. According to the context in which Dawkins created this word (from the Greek mimesis, meaning imitation), a meme is an idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation. Memes are not genes. For better comprehension, let me produce some textual narration from Chapter 4 of the book, titled “Taking the meme’s eye view”. Dr. Blackmore writes:

We can start to look at the world in a new way. I shall call this the meme’s eye view, though of course, memes do not really have eyes or points of view. They cannot see anything and they cannot predict anything. However, the point of this perspective is the same as the ‘gene’s eye view’ in biology. Memes are replicators and tend to increase in number whenever they have the chance.

Then in this chapter under a section “Not everything is a meme”, she perhaps says everything in this caption. Before reading this, I tended to believe that everything that is not gene is meme. However one exception that the author makes in her text is “..that the emphasis on imitation allows us to rule out all kinds of things which cannot be passed on and therefore cannot be counted as memes.”

In Chapter 5, the author describes “three problems with memes”, which are, (1). We cannot specify the unit of meme, (2). We do not know the mechanism for copying and storing memes, and (3). Memetic evolution is Lamarckian. According to the first problem, meme cannot be quantitatively measured. Objectively, one cannot really say X has more memes than Y. So, quantitative comparisons are difficult if not impossible. Some general statements can however be made, I hope, without kicking up much controversy. For example, since Christians are more numerous in the world than, say, the Muslims, there are more Christian memes than the Islamic ones. But what good is this inference?

Discussion on the third problem begins with: “Biological evolution is not Lamarckian and cultural evolution is – or so I have heard. There was a big intellectual battle between the Lamarckian view of evolution and the genetic one in the past. Genes had won over the memes in that battle.

In Chapter 3, there is a section on sociobiology with a ticklish caption “Sociobiology and culture on a leash”. There are several chapters and sections in the book which bear ticklish titles such as “An orgasm saved my life” (chapter 10) and “Sex in the modern world” (chapter 11) among others. The section on culture on a leash begins with:

While Dawkins was writing ‘The Selfish Gene’, the new science of sociobiology was being established – studying the genetic and evolutionary basis of behaviour. There was at the same time, a great outcry against applying sociobiology to human behaviour. Some of this came from sociologists, anthropologists and others who argued that human behaviour was almost entirely free from the constraints of the genes and could not be understood by what they saw as (horror of horrors) ‘genetic determinism’. The genes they claimed, only give us a ‘capacity for culture’. Some came from ordinary people who rejected the idea that their cherished beliefs, decisions and actions were constrained by their genetic make-up – what about ‘free will’?

One of the inferences, right or wrong, from the above controversy was ‘the whites are genetically superior to others”. This smelled of fascism and hence created a great deal of heated discussion. The furor has died down now. According to the author, both, genes and memes, are on a leash tugging at each other. Sometimes the memes overcome the tug and at others the genes prevail.

Aggregations of numerous similar memes constitute what are called meme-plexes, such as religion, science, etc.

The concept of memes is so general (and non-specific) that the discussion can go for ever endlessly. But let me round up this review before I go beyond the limited space. There are other interesting chapters and sections which I have not mentioned. The author is a very skillful writer; the book will hold the reader’s attention most of the time. You’ll like to finish reading the book from cover to cover once you have begun it. The foreword of the book is written by Richard Dawkins.

In the preface of the book, the author describes the inception of the idea of writing this book. She stated:

This book owes its existence to an illness. In September 1995 I caught a nasty virus, and struggled to keep working until I was finally forced to give up and take to my bed. I stayed there for many months, unable to walk more than a few steps, unable to talk for more than a few minutes, unable to use my computer – in fact unable to do anything but read and think.

….At about the same time one of my Ph D students, Nick Rose, wrote me an essay on “Memes and Consciousness”. Somehow the meme meme got to me. I had read Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene many years before but, I suppose, had dismissed the idea of memes as nothing more than a bit of fun. Suddenly, I realized that there was a powerful idea, capable of transforming our understanding of the human mind – and I had not even noticed it.

And notice she did now and the book was born.

The duality of mind and matter is very old – historical and ancient indeed. There had been so much discussion (and it still continues) on this mind-body problem that a kind of cynicism prevailed in the philosophical circles. This cynicism showed in “What is matter? Never mind” and “What is mind? Does not matter” kind of playful metaphors. It now appears that this duality has taken a new life in meme and gene hypothesis, discussion and debate.

Meme is a mental gene.

Although this is perhaps only the third book on the subject, the meme virus seems to have spread on the internet like a contagious disease or a wild fire. I recommend the readers to acquire the book and read it. The reader will be enchanted by the author’s delightful writing.

The book was published in 1999 by the Oxford University Press. The author is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol where she lectures on the psychology of consciousness.

The author has published several books. I remember her ‘Dying to Live’ which I had started to read but could not continue. I am not much into the paranormal experiences which the book discussed.