Investigations of a Dog

Oh no! Bill Turkel has tagged me for a meme! Is this the end of civilisation as we know it? When I started this weblog I was determined to stick to substantial original content. There would be no room for memes or other self-indulgent timewasting — I already have a LiveJournal for that. However, Bill managed to turn this particular meme into some interesting analysis of memetics and the blogosphere. That’s inspired me to move even further away from the original meme and post some random thoughts about memes. I won’t be tagging anyone at the end, because I hope to demonstrate that history bloggers don’t need to tag each other.

I first encountered the concept of the meme in 2004 after I started my LiveJournal. Back then I didn’t know anything about the theory behind it or that the term had been invented by Richard Dawkins. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word and came up with my own folk etymology that it must be derived from the word “me” because the whole thing was an outlet for egotism and self-indulgence (this is almost as good as my folk etymology for “emo bands”, which I thought referred to their singers’ whiny nasal voices sounding like Emo Philips). As far as I could see it was a piece of harmless fun, but potentially addictive enough to turn into a serious waste of time. (At this point it’s worth noting that I’m falling back on a familiar plot device for this blog: the autobiographical journey of discovery, beginning with “look how ignorant I used to be” and teleologically progressing to “but I got better”.)

But I got better. Some of my friends know about science and write about it in their LiveJournals, so eventually I realised what memes were really about. The meme could potentially be useful idea to explain how human culture spreads and changes. The Marxist model in which economic base determines cultural superstructure is now realised to be completely inadequate (the passive voice there: I’m not just standing alone and saying I think it’s completely inadequate, but it would be tempting fate to assert that everyone thinks it’s inadequate). More subtle Marxist thinkers like Althusser and Gramsci moved away from simple economic determinism but still assumed that ideological hegemony served the interests of the elite.

Feminist and queer approaches to history and literature focus on gender ideology. In some ways gender fits the Marxist model, being widely assumed to be natural even though the feminist distinction between sex and gender exposes how unnatural gender can be. In other ways, gender ideology brings out the limitations of a model of cultural change based on social and economic class. Although gender ideology can’t be directly linked to an economic base, it has changed over time, and historians need to account for those changes somehow (mainly because explaining change is part of historians’ claim to importance, and therefore explanations have to be produced somehow or other; I’m having increasing doubts about whether we, the historians, can ever explain why anything happened, since even finding out what happened gives us more than enough methodological problems).

Dror Wahrman has suggested that England experienced a “gender panic” in the 1780s caused by the American Revolution (’Percy’s Prologue‘, Past and Present, 159, 1998). The dates match up well enough, but we (as in everyone, I hope) all know that correlation doesn’t prove causation. Americans rejecting British government can easily be seen as a blow to patriarchy which might have had knock-on effects for British women. I’m actually really impressed by Wahrman’s article, but I’m just not entirely convinced by the conclusion. We (as in absolutely everyone in the world) don’t know enough about how culture works to be able to draw this kind of conclusion. We can’t even arrive at an adequate definition of what culture is. John Tosh was also sceptical of Wahrman’s conclusions, suggesting that cultural change might be independent of other factors (in Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen eds. English Masculinities, 1660-1800, 1999, ISBN: 0582319226). We might even have to consider the possibility that changes in economies, societies, and politics are driven by culture. After all, if cultural assumptions say that economy and society should be a certain way, and if those assumptions are so hegemonic that nobody ever thinks of questioning them, how can economy and society actually change? Doesn’t the idea of change have to come first?

The problem with this line of thinking is that it makes it much harder to explain cultural change. This is where Richard Dawkins comes in. These days he’s widely perceived as the angry red-faced militant atheist who can’t tolerate anyone who thinks differently from him, and as the leader of a pack of extreme reductionists who see absolutely everything as serving an evolutionary purpose (someone will probably comment that Dawkins isn’t a militant because he doesn’t use weapons or physical violence, and I’ll probably reply condescendingly that reductionists don’t understand metaphors). But it wasn’t always like this. In fact Dawkins recognised that biological evolution can’t account for everything in human history. There are some aspects of culture which don’t have any obvious connection with natural selection, or which even work against it. His proposed solution was the meme. Although this model was based on the transmission of DNA it can’t be dismissed as simple biological determinism. The meme is roughly analogous to the gene, but it’s really a cultural solution to a cultural problem.

When Dawkins came up with the idea of memes it was just a hypothesis, and one which wasn’t particularly important for the main arguments in The Selfish Gene. Dawkins himself doesn’t take his hypothesis very seriously (Bill Benzon said this somewhere on The Valve but I can’t find it now). Other people have enthusiastically taken it up and run with it. Does this prove that the hypothesis is true (memetics is a successful meme itself), or is it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?

One of my LiveJournal friends, who is a scientist, posted a succinct and eloquent summary of meme theory. We had an informed debate in the comments, and although it petered out just as it was getting more interesting, it at least showed me where I stand on the issue. I don’t think the meme lives up to the hype because it doesn’t really help to explain anything about culture. As far as I can see, the meme is just an arbitrary unit of information (in the strict sense of Shannon’s Information Theory, in which information and meaning are separate). Focusing on the transmission of a piece of information might be interesting up to a point but doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about how or why it spreads or whether its propagation has any significance.

Ultimately memetics doesn’t help us to avoid or solve the problem of meaning. What is meaning? How is it made? Can it be fixed? How far and how fast can it slip? These are fundamental questions which can’t be answered yet, and might never be answered. Structuralism suggests that language can be fixed in relation to itself, and that meaning derives from the differences between words, which still leaves us with the problem of how language relates to reality. Post-structuralism suggests that the meanings of words can slip rapidly and unpredictably. Few people who have given the matter any thought are naive enough to believe that words have direct and unproblematic relationships with objects. That mental concepts come somewhere in between isn’t a particularly controversial statement, but there’s plenty of room for controversy about how far those mental concepts influence perception and communication. I’m hoping that cognitive science will give us some more definite answers (although it shouldn’t be assumed that those answers will necessarily be reductionist or realist) but right now the jury is still out.

If memes rely on meaning then they are as problematic as anything else which relies on meaning, but if we exclude meaning from memetics then it doesn’t seem to be much use. We still need to work out some basic things about language, culture, and the human brain (to a certain extent that “we” is really “I”, because I know far too little about the current state of cognitive science, but there is almost certainly more work to be done). Until then, explaining human culture is likely to remain beyond the scope of memetics.

On the other hand, the model might be usefully applied to the propagation of information independently of human language and culture. Computer viruses are self-replicating information, but they can only replicate if some of that information has meaning within the context of a computer’s operating system. This fits perfectly into the structuralist paradigm while avoiding some of the difficult questions raised by post-structuralism. A computer language is an arbitrary system which is fixed in relation to itself but which does not have a fixed relationship with reality. Unlike human language, computer languages don’t normally slip. We can clearly see a synchronic moment between changes in a language specification (compare that to human language, where a complete picture of a language system in a synchronic moment is unattainable in practice). Non-standard implementations could be classed as slippage, but they could just as well be classed as different language systems in their own synchronic moments. I’m not sure whether this gets us anywhere since memes aren’t necessary to explain computer languages or operating systems.

While I reject the meme as a tool for explaining human culture there clearly are ideas circulating in the blogosphere through copying from one blog to another. In this context, there are memes, but when they’re explicitly called memes they’re often pretty much what I first thought: fun but pointless. However, since I graduated from LiveJournal to Wordpress last October and joined the history blogosphere I’ve been able to take part in a much more interesting exchange of ideas than just telling the world which dysfunctional Care Bear I am (you can probably guess that it was Nihilist Bear anyway). Until today this blog has officially been a meme free zone, but I’ve written several posts that were inspired by reading other people’s blogs. In fact around a quarter of my posts so far have been responding to something on another history blog. For example, my post on Grand Narratives of Global War was originally going to be posted as a comment on Airminded until it got so long and complicated that it had to be a post in its own right . In the light of this, I don’t think there’s any need for history bloggers to tag each other with memes, because we’re already interacting in a more interesting and productive way.

Bibliography

1. Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds.), English masculinities, 1660-1800 (Addison Wesley: London, 1999).
2. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s prologue’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), pp. 113-60.