We live near a little town in Vermont made up of a bunch of houses, a post office and a general store—and a sweet, smiling, petite woman named Mim who writes a weekly column in the local newspaper. Somebody recently put up a colorful sign that says, "You are now leaving...( the name of the town) “Home of Mim.” If you ever visit someone and Mim spots your car, you’ll be listed as a visitor of so and so in the next week’s paper. She reports on who has planted lilies where. She has written a book about the weather in her hometown. Mim is, I’ve decided, a meme for “This is who we are. So there!”
The biologist Richard Dawkin coined the word meme over 30 years ago to define a unit of cultural information. It comes from the Greek word mimesis or imitation. Memes get passed along and ingrained—operating a bit like genes and cells in the human body. They need a Petri dish or a bacteria field in which to grow and spread. (think talk shows and Internet blogs) And memes replicate, in ways we can’t predict. We might find some memes very attractive when we first encounter them, so we adopt them. And then they take on a life of their own. Memes feed on our minds.
Take the flying meme, for instance. In his book The Evolving Self Milhaly Csikszentmihaly says “To soar above the earth was thought to be the privilege of superior beings: angels, dragons, spirits.” Memes survive, he claims, because people first store them in memory and then reproduce them through their behavior. For instance, we defied gravity in the desire to become like birds and we began to fly. Flying became a cultural meme. We can do it. We can fly faster and farther. The flying meme took on a life of its own and as result we use up a lot of precious resources doing it—and sometimes we fall into the Atlantic.
Or take the smoking meme. My dad always had a pack of Luckies in his left breast shirt pocket. And usually had one hanging from his lip. I saw curling smoke coming out of the mouths of nearly every actor and actress in the movies I saw as a kid. I married a guy who’d been smoking since his 15th birthday. Then one day ash from his cigarette dropped onto the blanket of our newborn; he put that cigarette out and grabbed for a new meme, a new view of himself that wasn’t built around the old meme “I am a smoker.” To foster his “I am not a smoker” meme, he had to give up coffee for a while, as the old meme was wound tightly around that cup. And he no longer lit up every time he got into the car. Some people have finally adopted this new meme: smoking causes lung cancer.
Most of us adopt this meme: "If I win the lottery I'll be happy." Or "the world was created 6,000 years ago." (Half of the people in the U.S. cling to that meme.) Or, consider the gun meme. First we had stone axes and then everybody had to have one. Then it was swords. Eventually some people in the Tuscan town of Pistoria figured out how to carry small guns. Then everybody wanted a pistol. The gun meme grew into tons of Kalashnikovs and Uzis. We’re addicted to guns. There’s a meme afloat now in the bacteria-rich Internet that says “Obama’s going to take them away. Stock up on ammunition.”
When a meme is created, it becomes a part of our conscious process. The information we generate may seem benign at the start, but it eventually takes on a life of its own. And nobody can predict where it’s going. We’ve seen memes play out just in the very recent past around phrases like “Tiller the baby killer” and “Obama’s a Muslim—without a valid birth certificate, yet!” and “It’s time to kill all the Jews” and “Gay marriage destroys our way of life.” We wallow in hate and fear memes.
According to people who study genetics, 94% of our genuine material overlaps with chimpanzees. Like chimpanzees and other primates, we operate on who’s the most powerful. The most influential. The smartest. And who we have to watch out for. We all carry those memes around inside us.
But I live in the quiet expectation that the other 6% of what makes us different from chimps will kick in soon and we’ll actually begin to foster the love meme. The “I’m not afraid of you” meme. The Mim meme: “I live here. You live here. We honor each other, so there!”
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