The Meme Machine

232 THE MEME MACHINE
believe that boys and girls are equally good at everything’ and it suddenly has
the enormous weight of ‘self’ behind it. ‘I’ will fight for this idea as though I
were being threatened. I might argue with friends, write opinion pieces, or even
go on marches. The meme is safe inside the haven of ‘self’, even in the face of
evidence against it. ‘My’ ideas are protected by the behaviour they induce.
This suggests that memes can gain an advantage by becoming associated
with a person’s self concept. It does not matter how they do this – whether by
raising strong emotions, by being especially compatible with memes already in
place, or by providing a sense of power or attractiveness – they will fare better
than other memes. These successful memes will more often be passed on, we
will all come across them and so we, too, will get infected with self-enhancing
memes. In this way our selfplexes are all strengthened.
Note that we do not have to agree with or like the memes we pass on, but
only to engage with them in some way. Whether it’s eating pasta, watching The
Simpsons, or listening to jazz, the memes are passed on not just in eating the
food or playing the music but in statements such as ‘I like . . .’ ‘I hate . . .’ ‘I
can’t stand . . .’ Pyper concludes that ‘Dawkins himself has become a “survival
machine” for the bible, a “meme nest” for its dispersed memes which may
induce readers who would otherwise leave their bibles unread to go back to the
text’ (Pyper 1998, pp. 86–7). Presumably, Dawkins did not intend to encourage
religious memes in this way but his powerful response to religion has had that
effect. Memes that provoke no response fare poorly, while those that provoke
emotional arguments can induce their carrier to pass them on. By acquiring the
status of a personal belief a meme gets a big advantage. Ideas that can get inside
a self – that is, become ‘my’ ideas, or ‘my’ opinions, are winners.
Then there are possessions. Some other animals, without memes, might be
said to have possessions: a robin owns the territory he guards, a powerful male
owns his harem of females, and a lioness owns her kill. Human possessions can
serve similar functions, such as enhancing personal status and providing a
genetic advantage. But we should not overlook a big difference, that our
possessions seem to belong to the mythical ‘I’, not just to the body it supposedly
inhabits. Think of something you own and care about, something you would be
sorry to lose, and ask yourself who or what actually owns it. Is it sufficient to
say that your body does? Or are you tempted to think that it is the inner
conscious you who owns it? I am, I realise, with some dismay, that I am partly
defined by my house and garden, my bicycle, my thousands of books, my