More on memes
The meme meme — the concept of memes — seems to have a lot of power, though it’s still maddeningly imprecise. And it gets its power much the way Darwin’s theory gets its power: it provides an explanation for so many things and a new way of looking at the world around us.
In particular, I can see memes peeking out everywhere in Bruce Brander’s Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization. Indeed, “Western Civilization” is a vast collection of memes that to some degree control to what we will give our attention and toward what goals we will work.
Intimations of Western Civilization’s decline began tentatively but very early, though the earliest warnings may be due to particularly dyspeptic individuals. But with the Industrial Revolution and the dark Satanic Mills, the warnings became more frequent. The complaint was that Western Civilization was setting down the wrong path with all its technology—and yet the technological meme was irresistible. To those with the power to direct the course of nations, it promised wealth and power: a continuing advance in the tools of commerce and war. The American Civil War (1861-65) showed the results of warfare with modern weapons—a lesson repeated in WW I and WW II.
By the end of the 19th Century, a general malaise and feeling that things were not working out well was common enough to be given a name: fin-de-siècle. Many saw Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1897, as the apogee of Western Civilization, with decline to follow. Although the early years of the 20th Century was a time when the public in general felt that everything was improving—perhaps even war would retreat to minor skirmishes on distant frontiers…
But then The Great War put an end to that, and it was followed by the Great Depression and World War II. Those are not good signs.
The people writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries complained that the West had lost its spiritual direction and separated itself from Nature. I had a hard time understanding that complaint, until a thought struck me as I watched The Tall T. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and up until the early 20th century, people in Western Civilization were surrounded by and dependent upon animals: horses, mules, oxen, dogs—beasts of burden that provided much of the muscle for our labor. That close relationship with animals—where the animal’s continued welfare was important to the owner, and people knew animals: what they needed, how to recognize their moods, how to work with them. This close connection could not but have forced a recognition that humanity has a role and a place among the animals and must find its own balance with nature.
The animals, for most of us, are long gone, except for pets (whose importance I don’t minimize): machines have taken over their jobs and most of us live lives that are far removed from direct involvement with the land, animals, and seasonal rhythms. In this disconnection, the appeal of the technology meme continues to grow: do more things, with less effort—and yet the course we’re on is clearly wrong. The government is growing more and more resistant to an open sharing of power with the people, and the planet (with global warming) is showing the effects of our wrong direction.
The role of the technology meme cannot be ignored, and as pointed out in Brodie’s Virus of the Mind, memes evolve to become popular whether or not they are good for us. And some of the memes seem to have been very bad for us in general.
I don’t wish to romanticize a simpler life: it’s a lot of work for everyone, and it does not by any means preclude injustice and evil. But those we seem to be stuck with, regardless of our way of life.
UPDATE: Let me say it this way. (I’m still trying to figure it out, so these explanations are mostly to myself.) Before the machine age, people lived closer to nature, willy nilly, and had a stronger grasp that they were in a kind of partnership with domestic animals and with the earth. As the technological meme proliferated and evolved, we moved into an age of manufacture and machines, which in the 20′s was deliberately augmented with the introduction of the meme of consumerism (to serve the meme of capitalism), and today, many in advanced nations live urban lives, surrounded by and dependent on technology, with no real feel for their connection to nature and the planet. That’s how businesses are able to get away with despoiling the environment with toxins and wastes to the point where we are in substantial and growing danger of loosing that connection altogether and with it our livelihoods.
