The Meme Machine

140 THE MEME MACHINE
concerned with family values and the pleasures of having lots of children.
On the other hand, women who have only one or two children, or none at all,
are far more likely to have jobs outside the home, to have an exciting social life,
to use e-mail, to write books and papers and articles, to become politicians or
broadcasters, or do any number of other things that will spread their memes,
including the memes for birth control and the pleasures of a small family. These
are the women whose pictures appear in the media, whose success inspires
others, and who provide role models for other women to copy.
There is a battle going on here – a battle between memes and genes to take
control over the machinery of replication – in this case a woman’s body and
mind. Any one person has only so much time and energy in their lifetime. They
can divide it as they choose but they cannot have lots of children and devote
maximal time and effort to spreading memes. This particular battle is played out
largely in the lives of women and is becoming ever more important as women
take a more prominent role in modern meme-driven society. My argument is
simply this – the women who devote more time to memes and less to genes are
the more visible ones, and therefore the ones most likely to be copied. In the
process, they are effectively encouraging more women to desert gene-spreading
in favour of meme-spreading.
This simple bias ensures that memes for birth control will spread even though
they are disastrous for the genes of the people carrying them. These memes
include not only ideas about small families and the benefits of birth control, but
the pills, condoms, and caps that actually do the work; all the ideas in our
society concerning sex for fun; the films, books, and television programmes that
promote them; and the programmes of sex education that help our children to
cope with sex in a permissive society without getting pregnant or catching
AIDS. If this theory is right, birth rates are unlikely to rise again because this
simple bias will keep them down.
Is this theory right? It makes a number of assumptions that could be
challenged. One crucial assumption is that women with fewer children copy
more memes. This seems to be true in a world in which middle class women
with more money and more access to information have fewer children, but it
could easily be tested by measuring, for example, the number of social contacts
they have, the time they spend talking to others, the amount they read, their
output of written or broadcast material, how many of them use e-mail, or own
fax machines. The theory can work only if memetic output correlates negatively
with the number of children a woman has.