It Ain’t Eugenics. It’s Just Memetics.


'Douglas Rushkoff Douglas Rushkoff

I’m certainly not a scientist, nor even a social theorist in the strict sense of the title. I am just an American who has probably watched far too much TV and spent a bit too much time online. I wrote a few books – Media Virus, Cyberia, and Playing the Future – and have taken a lot of heat for advocating some seemingly cyberutopian-come-fascist memes. The meme that’s gotten me in the most trouble is the meme "meme" itself.

Although many social scientists originally embraced the notion of memes for its ability to ground a fairly inexact discipline in the language of hard science, the debate over their effectiveness in describing cultural phenomena quickly degenerated into a fearful premonition of neo-eugenic, civilization-wide fascism.

Couched in philosophical jargon, the debate is nothing more than a better-articulated version of the dialectic occurring in forums as banal as American talk radio, presidential primaries, and televangelism. All this negative fuss about memes and neo-evolutionary theory really just boils down a deep-rooted fear of the human spirit. We seem to fear that, left to our own devices, we will rape and pillage one another. Unchecked, the cautious social theorists warn, human beings will drive relentless towards facism.

I disagree.

The acceptance of memes as the driving force behind cultural innovation is a logical and appropriate step in a world where media, the Internet, and other global networks have generated enough traffic and turbulence to turn our intimately intersecting and overlapping cultures into a full-fledged, chaotic dynamical system. It is, like any natural system, a freemarketplace – not of genes or species, but of ideas. The best, or most useful ones tend to survive.

But observing how evolution takes place in society and advocating social Darwinism are two very different things. Just because Darwin, in retrospect, appears to have used his evolutionary theories to justify a Malthusian race schema doesn’t mean that everyone else who understands evolution must also yield to the Imperialist notions of an inevitable race war or some environmentally-rationalized ethnic cleansing.

Yet, whenever I mention memes in public, social theorists and God-fearing Christians alike immediately object.

The social theorists are the victims of a campaign of social pessimism that began, as far as I can tell, shortly after World War II. The powerful few who managed to escape the war and fascism relatively unscathed came to promote a perverse social theory that advocates vigilance above all else. Social scientists were taught in graduate schools that the masses, too stupid and easily swayed towards social policies as destabilizing as Nazism, must be led by a benevolent elite. The masses must be carefully monitored and analyzed through polls and other testing, and then adjustments in public relations strategies carried out accordingly.

It’s no wonder that social scientists from this school – and there’s more of us affected by this re-education campaign than we care to admit – reject the assertion that culture itself is an articulation of evolution or that, worse, technology is an articulation of cultural evolution. They see society as an ocean that must be contained; they don’t realize that their social theories are like the temporary plugs in a dike that will never hold up against the tide.

Memes can’t be real, they argue, because if they are all is lost. If the meme concept is correct, they fear, then culture war must be civilization’s template. They believe that only the "fittest" social ideas will survive, and that those fittest ideas – in the sense that the stupid masses will promote them – are fascism and race war. [How can people wake up in the morning, I wonder, if they believe that the unfettered human will hungers for elimination of everyone else?] What the social theorists don’t realize is that evolution doesn’t always favor certain individuals over others.

Natural selection occasionally goes into effect if there’s not enough stuff to go around. But very often the easiest way to promote the survival of an individual is to promote the survival of rest. That’s why mosquito bites itch and make us sweat [so the others can smell us]. It allows mosquitoes to help one another in their mutual struggle to stay alive.

Mightn’t unfettered social evolution allow us to develop world consciousness? If, indeed, Malthus is right on a few counts and there are limited resources on the planet, isn’t the best solution to develop global compassion? Can’t we see the Internet and other mediating technologies as the articulation of an overwhelming cultural survival mechanism, designed to promote at least the beginnings of global awareness?

The fundamentalists can’t. Like the sad social theorists, they developed their own mind control techniques in order to stop social evolution in its tracks. Their intent was to resist change and maintain their own power. Their technique was to distort Christianity – an extremely pro-progress religion, really – into an anti-evolutionary ideology. They believe that, deep down, people are sinful. We are born that way. If we were allowed to roam free, we would have no choice but to succumb to our basest desires.

The mythology of the apocalypse is no different from the Malthusian fears of environmental decline. The fundamentalists use apocalypse as a way of denying progress. To them, every story has an ending. Our only choice, as human beings, is whether or not we want to be "saved" on judgment day. To be saved, we must accept our roles as children of the lord. Children who must never be trusted to exercise our own judgment. No, we surrender to judgment from above, and remain culturally pre-pubescent.

Those who fear memes and evolution really just fear progress. That’s why so many well-spoken social theorists hate us pro-Internet, California-style utopians. They call us blind optimists because they want to discredit any vision of the future that doesn’t advocate caution, vigilance, and a winding down of the cultural engine.

There has been an intentionally-foisted battle against time itself by those who believe there is no way to avert the apocalypse. But I’m here to assure you that there is a way out. Change. Progress. Evolution.

To fight evolution is to thwart our only possible adaptation to the world ahead. Civilization only begins to behave like nature itself when there is enough motion and exchange of memes to generate turbulence. If we attempt to slow the transmission of memes through culture, we will surely weaken and rot like the overly inbred royal families of centuries past. Only by promoting a "let her rip" attitude towards memesis can we hope to serve nature in its evolutionary goal towards greater awareness, organization, and dynamic interplay.

But I suppose I shouldn’t worry. The anti-evolutionists are fighting a losing battle. Since their memes don’t ultimately promote anything but social decay, they will surely perish in the long run.