Selfish Memes (feat. Barrack Obama, Richard Dawkins, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and The Orange One)5/10/2020 Lately, my mind has been wandering. (Okay, just more than it usually does.) Physically constrained as I’ve been by Covid-19, the restlessness that haunts my every spring trends exponential. On those rare days when the Brockport air is leavened by a gentle southwestern wind and the sky glows blue as robin’s eggs, the urge to drive toward some beautifully open spatials (the High Plains come to mind), to slip on my hiking boots and just move, is almost unbearable. But in this era of N95 face masks and latex gloves, of bizarre virus anti-briefings and an economy gone fallow, I am mostly reduced (perhaps restricted is a better word) to mental journeys—random walks that trail off into one iPhone labyrinth or another. (“All those wasted hours,” as my friend Mac Bates says.) But occasionally those Markov chains lead to a juxtaposition of ideas that dovetail in some satisfying way—rising out of the ether like those weird quirks of the nocturnal atmosphere that delivered 1970s-era AM radio waves from half a continent away (an all-night trucker’s station out of Amarillo, or Motown from Detroit). And so it is with Barrack Obama, Richard Dawkins, and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, whoever he was. And oh, yes—Trump makes the mix, too, but I won’t get around to The Orange One until later. What started me down the path to Obama, Dawkins, and Hutchinson was a question about ideology: what exactly is it, and how is it manifested in the Covid-19 crisis? So out comes the iPhone and this definition, courtesy of Merriam-Webster: “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture.” Innocuous enough, but then I recalled a quote from Obama’s The Audacity of Hope that captures the inherent dangers of ideology: “values are faithfully applied to the facts before us, while ideology overrides whatever facts call theory into question.” Thus ideology—whether nested in Marxism, trickle-down economics, xenophobia, anti-vaccine hysteria, fundamentalist religion, or MAGA—is a lens through which people view the world, or some critical slice of it. These lenses are inherently powerful and selective, but they do more than “override” or distort facts—they destroy them. Nothing new here, I suppose. But the most dangerous aspect of these lenses is that they are more resistant than gold to change. And this idea led me (obviously?) to the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin’s Rottweiler. Back in 1976 Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, a book that had (and continues to have) a major impact on evolutionary thinking. Dawkins’s basic idea was that organisms do what they do not to help themselves, but to promote copies of their genes, which he also called “selfish replicators.” Thus individuals become “ephemeral vehicles for genes” (Matt Ridley). Without delving into the details of Dawkins’s arguments, or debates about the centrality of natural selection as a driver of evolutionary change, what’s important is that in The Selfish Gene Dawkins also developed the concept of the meme, which he defined as a “unit of cultural transmission.” (So thanks, Richard Dawkins, for all those gifs featuring cute kittens, Leonard Nimoy, and characters from Friends). Anyway, Dawkins said this about memes: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” These memes also are selfish, as Dawkins pointed out in a 1999 essay in Time. But not only are they selfish, they are terribly (and I use that word in its most powerful sense) resistant to change, at least in any direction leading toward moderation. Which called to mind G. Evelyn Hutchinson, the British-American ecologist whom I once mentioned in the context of landscape aesthetics. Hutchinson was a polymath who has been called “the father of modern ecology.” Among his many books is “The Ecological Theater and the Evolutionary Play”—and just as evolution occurs in an ecological context, there is an analogous “ideological theater and cognitive play,” in which selfish memes are selected for and propagate themselves in particular ideological ecologies, often to the detriment of the humans who carry the memes. And ideology is a particularly powerful selective agent because it reinforces the human desire for certainty and belonging. This is how the world or some important portion of it works; I want to share this belief with my brothers and sisters, and nuance, uncertainty, and change frighten me. Thus, any meme-mutation that reduces certainty and threatens membership in a particular social (cognitive) team is rigorously selected against, even if it ultimately reduces the fitness of the “vehicle”—think anti-vaxxers, neo-Nazis, 1930s leftists who embraced Stalin, the poor who vote for trickle-down economic charlatans, or the screaming protesters who refuse to wear facemasks because it “interferes with their freedom.” On and on. A train of thought which then carried me toward Donald Trump and his meme-infested, ideological MAGA world. My choice for the ultimate, most in-your-face MAGA-meme features Trump doing his very best Rambo imitation. I often see one of these meme-banners on my way to work: a physique born from punishing gym workouts (never mind the irony there) and all the steroids a body can handle, headband, a full head of blond hair (ignore that irony, too), armed with a mega- (MAGA?) rocket launcher, loaded and primed to destroy “the swamp,” elitists, purveyors of fake news, immigrants, anyone who thinks differently than him, and most certainly those goddamned facts. Don’t tread on me, don’t tread on him, and don’t tread on his pathological view of the world. And the most dangerous thing about this infinitely selfish meme is that it reflects an ideology (like any other ideology) that refuses to evolve, will never admit to not knowing, will never accept a world view in which inconvenient facts might lead to change of mind and heart. And in this current Covid-19 crisis, which will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, and has destroyed our economy and savaged the lives of so many people, Trump and his fellow travelers have that ideologically-powered rocket launcher aimed directly at the only things that can rescue us: science, unity of purpose, a clear and sustained and focused governmental effort, and (most critically) empathy and love for one another. Just pull the trigger and all that threatens Team Trump will explode, leaving what?—some Ayn Rand-type of knock-off world in which everyone is free to be exploited by those with the most money and power, and cared for by nothing that resembles a greater empathetic community. Don’t tread on me, but for God’s sake let me tread on others. Throughout human history, ideology has given us ignorance, hubris, hatred, suffering, and the damning identification of “Other.” And so instead of ideologically-powered rocket launchers, what we desperately need now (and always) are values “that are faithfully applied to the facts before us,” values capable of evolving in the theater of fact and reason and empathy. A pox on the ideology of MAGA, a pox on all ideologies, everywhere. If only some miraculous blossoming of human reason and compassion and humility—those forces most lethal to ideology—could rid us of the blind mindsets and selfish memes that plague our species, and the very Earth we all too frequently suffer and die upon.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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