The Meme Machine

22 THE MEME MACHINE
congested communications networks leaving trails that provide information
about the best and worst areas of congestion, or to mimic human users in games
and virtual environments. Might such simple creatures gang up together to
create powerful groups just as genes have done?
These ideas seem to stretch the analogy with biological viruses a bit far (and
we must be very careful of-such analogies), but they do remind us that
replicators vary in their usefulness. We tend to call something a virus when it is
clearly acting mainly for its own replication by stealing the replicating resources
of some other system – and especially when it does harm to that system. We
usually give it a different name when it is useful to us.
Just the same can be seen in the world of the mind. Dawkins (1993) coined
the term ‘viruses of the mind’ to apply to such memeplexes as religions and
cults – which spread themselves through vast populations of people by using all
kinds of clever copying tricks, and can have disastrous consequences for those
infected. Children’s games and crazes spread like infections (Marsden 1998a),
and Dawkins suggested that children are vulnerable to ‘mental infections’ that
more sophisticated adults can easily reject. He tried to distinguish useful
memeplexes, such as science, from viral ones – an issue to which we will return.
This theme has been taken up in popular books on memetics, such as Richard
Brodie’s Virus of the Mind (1996) and Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion
(1996), both of which provide many examples of how memes spread through
society and both of which emphasise the more dangerous and pernicious kinds
of memes. We can now see that the idea of a virus is applicable in all three
worlds – of biology, of computer programs and of human minds. The reason is
that all three systems involve replicators and we call particularly useless and
self-serving replicating ‘viruses’.
But if the theory of memetics is right, viruses are not the only memes, and
memetics should not become a science of mind viruses. Indeed, the vast
majority of memes (like the vast majority- of genes) cannot be considered as
viral at all – they are the very stuff of our minds. Our memes is who we are.
According to Dennett, our minds and selves are created by the interplay of
the memes. Not only are memes replicating like genes (and fit his evolutionary
algorithm perfectly) but human consciousness itself is a product of memes. He
has shown how the competition between memes to get into our brains has made
us the kinds of creatures we are. As he puts it ‘The haven all memes depend on
reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artefact created when
memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes’
(Dennett 1991, p. 207).