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Critique and Defense of Memesis
In his article "Memesis Critique" Richard Barbrook presents
a massive critique of memetics and memesis. While great
portions of the article is based on a rather uninformed and
projective understanding of memetics Barbrook does make some
valid points. One of them is:
<i>
"The other major error in the Memesis statement
is its use of dodgy biological analogies."
</i>
<b>Memetics as an idea</B>
Barbrook is correct that the concepts of memetics are not
rigidly scientific. Currently memetics is little more than a
pop-theory. Based on this many people draw the erronous
conclusion that memetics is a bad idea. This is not the
case. The problem lies in the methodology and support fields
rather than in the idea itself. Indeed, Darwin's own idea of
biological evolution was at the time he conceived it nothing
more than a promising idea. The reason it later became a
rigid scientific fact is that Darwin was able to base his
idea on existing scientific disciplines: bothany,
paleontology, geology and taxonomy. (Later also
biochemistry and genetics) Without these displines as
foundation Darwin's nice idea would be just that: a nice
idea. Therefore Barbrook is only partially correct when he
states that:
<i>
"Crucially, evolutionary theory was conceived in the first
truly modern society: Great Britain. The rapid economic and
social changes taking place in this first industrial society
enabled Darwin to understand that nature itself was also in
flux."
</i>
This alone was not enough. The crucial element which
distinguished Darwin's idea from other neat ideas was that
he had very respectible disciplines to back it up. As of now
memetics lacks such supporting disciplines. This is
partially due to the lack of coherence in the social
sciences and partially due to memetics' reluctance/inability
to coordinate its project with existing fields.
I can't imagine any serious scientist who would
object to the above critical characterization of memetics.
As a scientist who have been working a lot with these ideas
I feel competent to outline a sparse list of fields which
memetics should be developed upon: behaviorist sciences,
phenomenology, communication theory, systems theory,
Artificial Sociality (ASoc) and cognitive sciences. This
list is far from complete, but it illustrates the diversity
that is required to turn memetics into a science.
<b>Ontology</b>
Genetics has a primitive, but well-defined ontology.
The ontology of memetics on the other hand is a disaster.
It is a disaster because most people in the field do not
even realize that there is a problem, much less what the
problem is. Even so I will try to briefly summarize it.
If you ask a geneticist what a gene is he can give
you a quite elaborate technical definition. If you however
ask a memeticist what a meme is she can give you a lot of
examples, but no coherent definition. Typical examples of
memes are catch phrases, pop songs, ideas, fashions etc. The
first problem is that of substance, what memes are "made"
of. Note that the above list of examples appear in a wide
range of media and substances: sound waves, CD's, books,
memories, computers, clothes etc. As you can see memes
appear in virtually any medium or substance. The only thing
these seem to have in common is <b>information</b>. Information --
or rather culturally transmitted information -- is therefore
the substance which memes are made of. This is how far
traditional memetic ontology extends.
Now, if the meme-concept is to have any scientific
meaning whatsoever there must exist a _consistent method of
measurment_. Herein lies a major problem. How do we measure
memes? Let me give you an example to illustrate the problem.
Suppose we have a "red scarf with blue dots" meme. Then
after a while people come up with variations of this
fashion. They start wearing blue scarfs with red dots, or a
shirt instead of a scarf, stars instead of dots etc. Are
these mutations new memes or are do we have a cluster of
memes? We wouldn't know because a taxonomy for memes does
not exist.
<b>Consciousness</b>
Another serious problem is what role consciousness
plays in memetics. In this matter the memetic community is
approximately divided into two. 1) those who ban
consciousness (the behaviorists) and 2) those who haven't
reflected over the role of consciousness. Behaviorist
memetics is definitely the branch which has the best
developed taxonomy. To a behaviorist memes are primarily
stored as habits, and habit formation is something
behaviorists have scrutinized for a long time. But
unfortunately this method has great problems dealing with
mental objects such as ideas. Surely ideas are stored in the
form of habits, but without a consciousness observer
included in the model it is impossible to determine the
structure of the idea. Hence measuring ideas is virtually
impossible with current behaviorist methodology.
In any case, no matter which branch they belong to
few people in the memetic community address the problem of
consciousness. In my opinion understanding the machinery of
consciousness is as important to memetics as understanding
the machinery of the cell is to genetics. If this is true
then the realization of a memetic science is far away.
<b>Emergence: the problem of nurture vs nature</b>
One of the places where the role of consciousness
comes most into play is in the grey zone between emergence
and replication. Consider the following scenario: suppose a
woman is called Sherrie Berry (This is a real person!). Many
people who meet her comment that her name reminds them of
cherries. Even so this information is not something that has
spread culturally. People seem to come up with this idea
independent of each other. So then, is the
cherry-association a meme or not? It is not a meme. What we
have here is an example of <b>emergence</b>. That is, the arisal of
a pattern due to the particular structure of the systems with
which Sherrie interacts. This is equivalent to the emergence
of e.g. waves. If you splash your hand in the water you will
create a wave. If you splash it again another wave will
emerge. But the waves you create are not replications.
They are rather the internal dynamics of the system at hand.
This is how it is with the cherry-association. Many people
get the same association because they have a common
biological associative cognitive machinery that behaves
similarly, not because the association replicates.
The complexity of this problem is perhaps made
clearer if I say that consciousness is precisely a field of
emergence. The above example is of course simple and
obvious, but let us consider more complex phenomena. In the
last century racism has popped up in suspiciously many places
in one form or another (social darwinism, scientific racism
in the US and Soviet, nazism in Germany, apartheid in South
Africa etc.) A natural question to ask then is if this
perhaps is a culturally replicated pattern, i.e. a meme. But
as in the above example we will find that these ideas have
often popped up rather independently of each other. Besides,
why have racism become so popular and not e.g. shoe making?
It is as if racism "strikes a chord" in many people, as if
it emerges rather than replicates. Or that it also more
easily replicates because it lies people's hearts more
closer than shoe making? What we have encountered is the
problem of human nature. Humans are by nature culturally
discriminating beings and ideas of racism will therefore
tend to pop up more often than others. Just like waves tend
to arise in water, racism tends to arise in humans that
encounter foreign cultures.
Another example to illustrate the point is the
history of philosophy. If you compare the ideas of the
many great thinkers you will often find extremely similar
ideas across centuries, yes, even across millenia. Again
these ideas often arise independently of each other and so
again we are dealing with emergence rather than replication.
Thus, the problem that memetics has to deal with
greatly resembles that of nurture vs nature. I.e. is the
behavior of people environmentally encoded (i.e. cultural
transmitted) or is it biological (i.e. emergent)? The answer
is yes! (i.e. both) There is an intimate interaction between
emergence and replication. They are inseparable concepts.
This makes the task very difficult for memeticists. Ultimately
memeticists have to map the structure of human nature in
order to fully understand memetic evolution.
<b>System and Form</b>
The problem of emergence is perhaps the best illustration
of the ontological problems that memetics are up against.
But this far from concludes the list of problems. In my
opinion the most pressing practical and theoretical problem
is that of system and form. The biological world is not just
a soup of living creatures, but a highly structured
dynamical system with many emergent forms and archetypes. If
culture is an evolutionary arena then we should expect to
see the same complexity and diversity of forms and
archetypes as we see in the biological world. Naturally a
theory that tries to capture the evolutionary structure of
culture should reflect this complexity. Does memetics
reflect this complexity? No. The key structure of memetics
is based on the concept of the selfish gene coined by Richard
Dawkins. The problem with this idea is that it innately
reduces the complexity of the biosphere by placing too much
importance on the gene. The cell, the multi-cellular
organism, the species, the ecosystem or in general the
<b>organism</b> suffers badly under the selfish gene idea. Even
so the idea is viable biology since there exists a multitude
of biological fields that prevents the idea from going
astray. But in the cultural sphere the idea stands
alone without fields to support it or correct it. Therefore
the idea _has_ gone astray in the case of memetics. Whereas
the virus is generally considered an amusing but peripheral
phenomenon in biology, memeticians use it as their
fundament. This in my view is the single most important
problem with memetics. If a biological analogy should be
used as a fundament for an evolutionary discipline in
social science then that analogy should be built on
well-established biological concepts rather than on a
peripheral concept like the selfish gene. In the short term
the selfish gene idea may have more popular appeal, but in
the long run this is going to insure the death of memetics
as a science.
<b>The Defense</b>
Above I have presented a massive critique of memetics as a
science. But memetics as a science is something totally
different from Memesis as an idea. I will therefore present
a defense of this vision. Barbrook neatly summarizes the essence of the Memesis
statement:
<I>
"The central error of the Memesis statement has become
obvious. It regards machines and information as autonomous
things outside our control."
</I>
However, instead of accepting and embracing the idea he
denies it:
<i>
"Yet, in reality, both technology and culture are expressions
of the social relationships between individual humans."
</i>
What Barbrook fails to realize is that technology outlives
us. Thousands of years ago individual humans started writing
their thoughts and ideas down on paper. Those people are now
long gone, but people today still write down their ideas and
thoughts on paper. In other words, even though technology
is an expression of the social relationships between people
it tends to outlive the individual. Therefore inevitably
technology and culture are to some degree autonomous things
outside our control. Barbrook is wrong when he states that
Memesis reiterates <i>'the old McLuhanite lie that technology
shapes our minds'</i> because that "lie" has a ring of truth to
it. The reason is that technology has a historical tendency
to be used to promote one culture. A culture with a superior
technology also has the power to take over other cultures.
The other cultures have two options: 1) surrender and
perish, or 2) adapt to the technology of the enemy and
survive. Since history is written by the survivers history
is full of arms races, and in the long run the only winner
is technology. As such we <b>are</b> undeniably slaves of
technology whether we like it or not.
Arms races are just one example of technological
autonomy. A more peaceful example is Internet. Internet will
probably outlive us all, and it certainly supercedes the
power of governments. No single government can control
Internet. And as the net becomes increasingly more important
for inter-cultural communication and business the only
opportunity is to embrace it.
The following statement by Barbrook was meant as a
rhetorical question but I will take the liberty to answer it:
<i>
"But, if there is active human involvement in the construction
of cyberspace, how can technology and [memes] be autonomous
forces outside our control?"
</i>
In my view this question is best answered by comparing
culture to the multi-cellular organism. Like cells
constitute the multicellular organism, people constitute
culture. Just like the cells in an organism have a common
genetic material, the people in a culture have a common
language. Let me now rephrase Barbrook's question in terms
of the organism-analogy: If there is cellular activity
involved in the construction of the multi-cellular organism,
how can it be an autonomous entity outside the control of
individual cells? In biology we have no problems viewing the
multi-cellular organism as an autonomous unity built up of
other autonomous unities. Why then should the idea of culture
as autonomous be any more problematic?
<b>Conclusion</b>
As of today memetics is very far from fulfilling the
requirements of a science. But I think it is just a matter of
time before most of these problems have been resolved. The
end result may not be as the current memeticians envision
it, but it will certainly be an evolutionary founded social
science. The lacks of current memetics does however not
discredit the idea of Memesis, or what Francis Heylighen
would call a Meta-System Transition.
<a href="http://www.stud.his.no/~onar/>Onar Åm</a>, May 21 - 1996
