The Meme Machine

OUT OF THE MEME RACE 241
growth it is predicting the summer ahead, but we know this prediction was a
result of past selection. When a cat predicts which way a mouse will go and
pounces at the right moment we know that the ability to behave that way was
naturally selected. Both these creatures have foresight of a kind, even though
their genes did not. When a person predicts what she will do tomorrow or
designs a new computer we somehow think this is different. The difference may
seem a large one; for there is a much cleverer brain making the predictions, and
the predictions may be much more complicated and precise, such as predicting
the exact time of high tide or the moment when an asteroid will hit the earth.
However, this kind of foresight also comes about by selection, only in this case
it is selection between memes. There is no magical conscious mind that ‘really’
has some other kind of foresight.
The ultimate rebellion
Where does this leave us with respect to Dawkins’s claim that ‘We, alone on
earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators’. Dawkins is not
alone in taking the view that there is someone or something inside us who can
step out of the evolutionary process and take it over.
Csikszentmihalyi (1993) explains how memes evolve independently of the
people who nurture them; how the memes of weapons, alcohol and drugs are
successful while doing us no good. He describes the artist not as originator but
as the medium through which artworks evolve. Yet his final message is that we
must take conscious control of our lives and begin directing evolution towards a
more harmonious future. ‘If you achieve control over your mind, your desires,
and your actions, you are likely to increase order around you. If you let them be
controlled by genes and memes, you are missing the opportunity to be yourself’
(Csikszentmihalyi 1993, p. 290).
In his book Virus of the Mind, Brodie exhorts us to ‘consciously choose your
own memetic programming to better serve whatever purpose you choose, upon
reflection, to have for your life’ and says of the memes ‘you get to choose
whether programming yourself with them aids or hinders your life purpose’
(Brodie 1996, pp. 53, 188).
But this is all a cop out. As Dennett says ‘The “independent” mind
struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth’ (1995, p.
365). So we must ask who gets to choose? If we take memetics seriously then
the ‘me’ that could do the choosing is itself a memetic construct: a fluid and
ever-changing group of memes installed in a complicated meme machine. The