Re: what is a meme?
From: Steven Thiele (sthiele@metz.une.edu.au)
Date: Wed 28 Jan 2004 - 23:20:30 GMT
Next message: Steven Thiele: "(no subject)"
It is a good rule of thumb to accept
that whenever people start arguing about the definition of a word, then
no inquiry of any consequence is going on because there is no shared
sense about what is to be inquired into. In other words, a shift has
occurred from a focus on a phenomenon to a focus on the meaning of a
term.
The term memes has never referred to any particular phenomenon. This has
been the problem right from the time Dawkins proposed the term, because
he was arguing analogically and not from evidence of any kind about the
existence of memes. He just assumed that there must be something in
social life analogous to genes in biological life. Because there is no
justification for doing this, memetics was doomed from the start to a
Babel about meaning. This is exactly the same problem that bedevils most
of the social sciences. It is instructive that scientifically oriented
thinkers should end up this way whey they attempt to explain social
life.
The interesting question is why memetics has been so attractive. The
answer is that there is an intellectual vacuum in the area of what can
simplistically be called ‘the relations between social life and
biological life’. Sociologists (and other social scientists) have failed
to fill this vacuum, so biologists are constantly tempted to have a go at
filling it. First they tried to extend genetics, but, as Dawkins clearly
acknowledged when he came up with the term memetics, this couldn’t get
anywhere because social life is clearly a different form of life that
biological life.
But instead of going out and studying social life and finding out what it
is made up of and how it works, in the same way he studied biological
life, Dawkins extended biological explanation, specifically neo-Darwinian
explanation, by recourse to analogy. This was never going to work. If
social life is qualitatively different from biological life then it needs
a qualitatively different explanation.
It is true that the great bulk of sociology is intellectually empty. It
is a combination of such things as ideology, wishful thinking, careerism
and professionalism. But sociologists are right about one thing -
that social life must be explained in its own terms (just as biologists
say that biological life must be explained in biological terms). Memetics
can be understood an attempt to do this, but has too many problems, and
this is the case no matter what definition of memes is accepted. The idea
that there is something being replicated, in some particulate sense, by
jumping from brain to brain has problems enough, but the idea that this
something expresses itself in such a way as to generate the basic
features of social life, such as complex social organizations (like the
state) or social emotions (like shame and practices like shaming), makes
little sense. For a start off, if memes operate at the level of
individuals, then memetics is immediately burdened with the problem of
individualism - it is impossible to get an account of social life by
adding up the actions of individuals.
The issue of ‘the relations between biological and social life’ is one of
the biggest intellectual challenges remaining. Memetics cannot assist
much in meeting this challenge, except in moving the debate away from
genetics. This is the main contribution of memetics. It is time that
sociologists and biologists/neo-Darwinians got together to work out a
productive strategy for confronting this challenge. The sociologists’
refusal to deal with biology at all (thereby creating the nature/nurture
dualism) is an intellectual scandal, but so is the conceit of
neo-Darwinians that they have the key to understanding organised life in
all its forms. Social life might have evolved out of biological life, but
it is a novel from of life.
Steven Thiele
University of New England
Australia
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