MEMETICS - PARASITES AND VIRUS

 I still find it difficult to fathom the ontology of memes. Comparing them to words is incorrect. Words have a nominal existence with a fate that is completely identical with the social and political circumstances of the culture that gave birth to the language that incorporates them. Memes are purported to be substantial and have 'attitudes'.

A meme is a package of information.It can be a childrens song, the thought that product x can best be bought at store y, the thought that jezus could really walk on water, etc. The memes who have the least probability to be proven, are the most rigorously fought about, thats a strange correlation there.Human brains can be subject to,or hijacked to parasitic ideas.Many people have led down their lives for 'causes'-communism,capitalism,different religions. The ideas are infectious.

 Most of cultural spread that goes in not really novel,brilliant thinking.And the hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. One set of ideas,in essence,have simply replaced biological imperatives in our own lives.This is a profound,yet missed or unrecognised,biological effect.It is a subordination of genetic interest to others.It is unique to us,no other species does anything like that.If one wants to theorise this,one shall seemingly come across a host of theories.Yet we need a common factor,the thread of relevant continuity of essence in all these possible theories. And we hit upon memetics,which stripped to its bare essence,signifies an idea-the idea of replication of ideas when they pass from brain to brain.
 Now when we do that,we are all responsible for not just the indented effects of our ideas,but for their possible misuse,which in today's world,is becoming easier and faster.We clearly perceive it around us.People become scared of these ideas being caricatured,and they run off readily from one dire purpose or another.If we are increasingly becoming conscious hosts of spreading memes,we have a responsibility to undertake.We have to keep on plugging away,trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants would spread.

 Richard Dawkins,the official father of memetics,once declared: Memes are like viruses,as unassuming in structural content and as potent to replicate rapidly and better than competition does.A meme is so similar to a virus(which is nothing but a string of nucleic acids with an "attitude",an information packet with an attitude. Ideas can continue to exist and thrive without genetic passing over.The way to fight against 'toxic' memes is to also spread 'medicine' memes, like 'only believe proven things.

 When the Conquistadores invaded the American continent to flourish and rule there,the local tribes were wiped out not only guns and metallic swords.The Europeans brought with them the germs to which they,themselves,had become immuned over hundreds or even thousands of years,living with domesticated animals,who wore the source of pathogens,alien to the American natives who had no immunity.
 Similarly,memes while spreading out cross time and space(thanks to our rapidly advancing technologies)do consist of ''toxins'-ideas that can threaten conservatively closed socio-religio-cultural communities who become apprehensive of losing their self-identities and exhibit social behaviour on a mass scale,that is potentially harmful to humankind as a whole.Terrorism based on fanatic ideologies is an easily identifiable example.The way to fight against 'toxic' memes is to also spread 'medicine' memes, like 'only believe proven things.

It is not the spread of ideas that is dangerous. The repression of ideas is what's dangerous.
So-called toxic notions can only really take hold in a vacuum. The more information one has at his disposal, and the more open one's culture is, the less likely it is that one would be willing to die for a country or a religion. In other words, open information is what produces an "immunity" to the less "liberal" communities and religions.In fact, that is precisely why, throughout history, there have been attempts to censor or repress information.
And suppression of information doesn't just happen in dictatorships.Ideas can be suppressed by direct means, such as throwing people in jails for writing certain books. But more insidious is the indirect suppression, such as corporate control of the TV and newspaper media that result in the marginalization of anti-capitalist notions.

With rapid globalisation with increasing consumerism,these memes are in essence,wiping off boundaries,cultures,languages and ethnic identities. We,the carriers of memes,have become morally immune(the 'healthy' and positively active section of society)to the bad elements of our culture by marginalising them to the edge of social and moral profile of our entities e.g. Drug abuse,pornography,paedophilia(the list is quite long)and keep them off our basic existential units,our families.But we should be alert and conscious while spreading technology and education should be aware of these veiled social negatives. When we are the innocent vectors of memes,devoid of malintent,we are in effect subjecting the next line of vectors who might be identifying the memes as a counter-threat to their own memes,for which they are preparing to die for.

Following the theory of Discourse that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have been expounding over two decades now, I believe there is a more parsimonious and rigorous explanation about the spread of ideas and ideologies. Their explanation does not reside in non falsifiable entities like memetics does. I also find the 'neutrality' thesis not only dubious but ideologically suspect.As Richard Dawkins theorised,memes are morally neutral,as morality is a relative concept.I feel it is theoretically correct,but potentially unhealthy.Yet it is an absolute reality.Morality simply refers to an ideal code of conduct..We live in a society that is empathetic to others within our group. That is why we have the morality that we do.And we exhibit  EMPATHY. This was developed within apes through darwinian evolution by natural selection.

 

Globalization puts us in ever greater contact with memes that cause us anxiety because they undermine our respective cultural worldviews. And as recent history has shown, some people are all too willing to kill to overcome or avoid this anxiety. This accelerating process of "conflicting memes" will either make (through evolution, assimiliation, tolerance) or break our species. Thinking of the capacity for self-annihilation we now possess in the form of nuclear weapons, I am not unequivocally optimistic about the eventual outcome.

Globalisation,which is inevitable(and necessary)should be done with delicate caution so that the memes,which we are vectors of,can appear less threatening to communities which are less open and as a result possess less immunity,showing more reactionary behaviourial patterns to those aspects of our culture that we have made ourselves immune to,and marginalised to the periphery. If one catches AIDS,we don't hate the person.We hate the HIV virus,and while it is seemingly impossible to wipe out of the strain,less virulent mutations can be brought in.I hope the reader catches the analogy.As memes are morally neutral,man can never wipe out their negative elements.But he can show a more responsible approach while interacting with communities in such a way that these negative elements can be ''detoxified' of cultural aggression to a large extent,and appear less threatening to relatively closed cultural groups.

Maybe the answer lies in better qualitative perception of the possible effects of memes on communities which possess a relatively restricted interactive potential as far as culture and morality are concerned. Sociological research seems to overlook this factor.We have to look back on history and put stress on identifying new parameters of social behaviour.
Otherwise I don't see any perceptible change in the world-wide-war of fanatic ideologies,intolerance and senseless loss of human lives.

How I wish I was a social scientist.