Meme and the art of mental maintenance
Can we dismantle the hard-wired circuitry of the human condition that sprawls before us like the asphalt of YVR?
by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>
republic-news.org
On a recent airplane flight I was struck by the resemblance between Greater Vancouver at night and the circuit board of some vast computer hard drive. My sleep-deprived mind ran with the metaphor, imagining the programs running across the matrix below me: political programs, economic programs, linguistic programs, layer upon layer of patterned human activity. It occurred to me that all our institutions, from the most primitive to the most technological, from families to multinational corporations, are really nothing more than patterns of recurring collective behaviours, no different in principle than the patterns found in beehives and termite mounds. Just as we can't talk about the behaviour of individual bees without talking about the behaviour of hives, we can't understand the behaviour of individual human beings without understanding our systems of collective behaviour. I wonder: can we say the same about human minds? Are human minds like circuits in a circuit board, or perhaps like neurons in an enormous brain? I tried to put these thoughts aside, but they wouldn't leave. Later that evening, as I turned to the television to soften my insomnia, I began thinking that if a single neuron were conscious, its consciousness would resemble a channel-surfer's. And so, I'm left wondering about collective minds. If they exist, what are their spiritual implications?
Scholars from diverse fields, such as biologist Richard Dawkins, psychologist Susan Blackmore, and anthropologist Robert Aunger, have provided a useful conceptual framework for exploring this question, a framework called meme theory.
A meme is any mental-behavioural pattern that's passed on from person to person through imitation. For example, the word “eh?” is a Canadian meme. Because there's limited storage space inside human minds, memes have to compete with one another for the chance to be stored and transmitted. As memes are transmitted, they're sometimes modified in ways that either enhance or reduce their competitive value. In this sense, memes are self-replicators driving an evolutionary process, just like genes. Like genes, they often band together. When genes do this, they form organisms. When memes combine, they form meme-complexes. The more competitive the meme-complex, the more appealing it seems and the harder it is to expel: songs that we can't help replaying inside our minds are examples of effective and relatively simple meme complexes. According to this theory, every form of organized psycho-social phenomena, from words to languages, from mythologies to mathematics, are simply different kinds of meme-complexes. As the building blocks of culture, memes influence every aspect of human behaviour. This is particularly obvious in the current age, when corporations spend countless billions spreading the meme-complexes we call “brands”.
Meme-complexes evolve to exploit the organisation of the human brain. Some exploit the advanced symbolic functions of our neocortexes. Others exploit our evolutionarily primitive limbic system, forming the habitual and often dysfunctional response patterns psychologists call “schemas.” The limbic system probably houses the most successful of all meme-complexes, the conceptual self: the belief that each of us has a stable identity uniting all of our discordant mental functions, that endures beneath the cacophony of synaptic chaos, that “has” beliefs and “owns” property. This meme-complex is so effective because it shelters so many others: once I decide that a belief is “my” belief, I'll do whatever I can to preserve and promote it.
By this reasoning, collective minds would be composed of multiple interacting meme-complexes in a given territory—a territory we could call the memesphere. Of course, these minds wouldn't necessarily be conscious. Remember that we're conscious of little that goes on inside our brains. Most mental activity—from the regulation of breathing to the decoding of language—occurs outside of our awareness. Since minds don't have to be conscious, we could be living within an unconscious collective mind, a mind with as little self-awareness as a sleepwalker or someone in the lowest depths of psychosis. Collective unconsciousness seems to be a good bet, given our societies' often compulsively self-destructive behaviour, our unthinking willingness to consume both our planet and one another.
Far from being a thoroughly secular perspective, meme theory lines up quite well with both Buddhist philosophy and the more esoteric branches of Christian philosophy, like Gnosticism. Both of these traditions argue that we're trapped by our habits of thought, that these habits interact to form a labyrinthine prison for human consciousness, and that the lowest floor of this prison is the conceptual self, represented mythologically by a cosmic ego. In Buddhism, the prison of samsara, or illusion, is ruled by Mara, “the evil one.” In Gnosticism, this figure is called the Demiurge. Mara and the Demiurge are simply anthropomorphic metaphors for the unconscious collective mind.
Buddhists believe the problem lies not in our thoughts, but in the way we tether them to the concept of selfhood and thereafter dogmatically cling to them. The remedy is mindfulness: by becoming increasingly conscious of our mental habits, we weaken our grip on them and their hold on us. Through mindfulness, conceptual rigidity gives way to cognitive flexibility and all the good things that brings. Logical analysis, meditation, and empathy are the Buddhist strategies of choice for developing mindfulness: logical analysis undermines dogmatic certainty, meditation exposes our mental habits, and empathy dissolves egoism. Meme theorists would add the scientific method to the list.
It's clear that mindfulness is itself composed of meme-complexes, but ones that eat away at the adhesive quality of all memes, weakening the hold they have on our minds and thereby liberating human consciousness. Mindfulness has implications that go well beyond individual mental functioning. As more people become mindful, our collective behaviour becomes more reflective, responsible, and respectful. Perhaps this, in turn, can slowly transform the memesphere into what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls the noosphere, the realm not just of collective mind, but also collective consciousness.
I think sometimes that this is the unrecognised motivation behind all of our social and environmental activism, and of our arts and our therapies too: to spread mindfulness, to heal the collective psychosis, to liberate ourselves and our planet from memetic tyranny before we unleash destructive forces we can't restrain.
As fundamentalism spreads in both the halls of power and the gutters of powerlessness, and as fires ignite the parched interior, I find myself wondering if isn't already too late. |
