The prediction and modeling of social orders is one of the hottest cross-disciplinary topics in computers and the social sciences. But memetics, at least on the popular level presented by Lynch, is far from the kind of quantitative exactitude that computer models need. With its object of study as inherently unpredictable as how people embrace ideas such as the nuclear family, Mormonism, diet fads, astrology, and gay gender differences (a random list of topics essayed in Lynch's book), it's hard to imagine that memetics will be quick to leap from a collection of just-so stories to a science that can predict what will happen with ideas tomorrow.
Lynch promises that he will render "apparently arbitrary currents of culture freshly comprehensible." He starts by listing the seven main modes of meme transmission: 1) quantity parental (idea encourages those who hold it to have more children); 2) efficiency parental (idea increases probability that children will hold their parents' ideas); 3) proselytic (idea encourages holders to try to convert nonholders); 4) preservational (idea encourages holders to remain holders); 5) adversative (idea encourages holders to attack or harm nonholders); 6) cognitive (idea seems reasonable or cogent to others); and 7) motivational (holding idea yields social benefits).
This is a recognizable method of social science: systematizing a collection of what might seem, after one hears them, to be truisms. And indeed, it is almost certainly true that ideas will spread further if their adherents have lots of children and encourage their children to hold their ideas and spread them to others. It's also helpful if the ideas strike most thoughtful human beings as sensible -- and of course, one must never underestimate the motive of personal gain.
But Lynch almost completely ignores one important realm of ideology -- morality, or a sense of right and wrong -- that lies at the heart of many of the battles he discusses: family structure, sexual behavior, policy issues like guns, abortion, and drugs. He may be implicitly saying that morality is just a mask draped over one of his seven memetic modes, but he never grapples with the issue directly.
Does memetics deliver the explanatory or predictive goods? When discussing such inflammatory political topics as drug use/abuse and gun control, memetic thinking comes to these daring conclusions: "Society could thus face continuing cycles of waxing and waning drug consumption" and "Strong replication advantages thus work on both sides of the firearms issue in modern America." (Lynch thinks one of the main reasons people profess opposition to gun control is to frighten potential attackers into assuming they must have a gun.)
Too often, Lynch's analysis comes down to this: Any widely held idea has some reason for existing. When your list of transmission modes includes such givens as "the idea makes sense" and "holding the idea gives advantages to the holder," it's not too hard to cobble up endless just-so stories that show how your theory can explain everything. Of course, a theory that can explain everything explains nothing.
Even on his own terms, Lynch's argument often slips. While he is careful to acknowledge at certain points that not every idea has 100 percent efficiency parental spread, he occasionally falls into implicitly assuming that memes are like genes, transmitting perfectly from generation to generation.
And for someone who is attempting to explain historical events, Lynch seems strangely uninterested in looking into or even addressing areas where non-memetic history could shed light. He posits a memetic take on why Christians believe in the resurrection, one that involves speculating on the relative growth of different Christian sects, without any discussion of standard histories of the early church. He also comes to a memetically reasonable conclusion that the financially well-off should have more children than the worse off and doesn't seem aware of the real-world evidence that just the opposite is true.
On a simpler level of historical blindness, Lynch blithely assumes that those who condemn masturbation in fact don't masturbate -- not a proposition I would bet on. But that's emblematic of the weakness in Lynch's entire memetic structure: It too often treats people as mere victims, in a sense, of ideas. Despite modes six and seven, which actually treat individuals as thinking actors, most of the book concentrates on the modes involving parents or the preservation of the ideas themselves, ignoring the question of why an individual should embrace an idea just because the idea has qualities that help it spread.
Burke and Lynch, without meaning to, offer opposing parables about human liberty. In terms of both positive liberty (there's more we're able to do) and negative liberty (there's more that it's almost impossible to stop us from doing), the technologies whose stories Burke tells have been tremendously significant -- even more significant, in some ways, than the ideology of liberty. (Of course, there's a feedback loop -- a certain degree of liberty was necessary for these technologies to spread.) And despite memetics' weaknesses, it does perhaps shed some light on the ideology of liberty's failure to sweep the world (it's good in the proselytic and cognitive modes, weak in all the others). Fortunately, biologically derived metaphors like memetics can never be the last word when it comes to human beings, who have volition on a level that genes do not. And Burke's technologies can expand human freedom without the need for the designers, the users, or the potential tyrants to understand the ideas.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 3:25AM|#
mctjgh