The Meme Machine

166 THE MEME MACHINE
stamps. Many psychological studies have shown that people will work to reduce
the dissonance between incompatible ideas, and also that consistency itself is
generally admired and emulated (Cialdini 1994; Festinger 1957). The idea is
less likely to take hold of Gavin. He should suffer no cognitive dissonance by
refusing to help in this or any other way.
The need for consistency and the avoidance of dissonance provide the
context in which memes club together in different people. Once someone is
committed to a particular set of memes, other memes are more or less likely to
find a safe home in that person’s repertoire of arguments, beliefs, and
behaviours. We find this kind of generalisation of memes in all sorts of
contexts. You might think it is just common sense that nice people do nice
things and nasty people do nasty things but memetics puts this common-sense
fact in a slightly different light. Memes can succeed or fail because of the
genetic propensities of the people they come across, but also because of the
memes that are already present in those people.
The situation is all the more complex because of changing fashions. The
memes which are acceptable will shift as the whole meme pool changes. At one
time, certain types of charitable giving will seem appropriate, but a few years
later, completely different kinds will take over. But this complexity should not
cloud the basic principle. Once meme-driven altruism has got going it will
generalise. Memes for all sorts of kind and generous acts can take hold more
easily in people who are already infected with altruistic memes and who have
invested in a particular view of themselves. These people are copied more than
other people and so these memes spread more widely.
This process can be used to understand all sorts of otherwise rather baffling
actions. Let us take kindness to animals. Many people go out of their way to
help animals in distress. There are homes for dogs and cats, and refuges for sick
donkeys and injured wildlife. There are game parks and great international
attempts to save species from extinction. There are ‘Save the Animals’ charity
shops, and greetings cards that support wildlife organisations.
I say this is baffling because there is no easy explanation of all this interspecies
kindness in terms of rational self-interest, genetic advantage, or
evolutionary psychology. Rescuing an injured tiger would not benefit a huntergatherer.
Animals were not domesticated until about ten thousand years ago in
the ‘Fertile Crescent’ to the east of the Mediterranean, as recently as one
thousand years ago in America, and not at all in some parts of the world
(Diamond 1997). Therefore during most of our evolutionary past, he animals
around us have mostly been either potential prey for eating or predators trying to