"Religion was discovered" - great point here. It's interesting to me that the debatably most influential religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) all originated from a part of the world where water scarcity was a real issue. I think prophets discovered an ability to use religion to urge cooperation without kinship, and to solve collective action failure.
yes, I really think it's not fundamentally different from the discovery of any particular technology or science. I don't think this is necessarily a secular view either. I think people who have faith in their religion can agree with the statement that "it was revealed" "it was discovered", the prophets were literally messengers in this way, articulating what they found to be true
very good read. That list of "who else is working on this" is immensely useful. Here comes a funny story: I found Tim Tyler's book in a hipster café in Asunción, Paraguay and spent the better part of an afternoon skimming through it. I remember being left rather confused, but maybe the book deserves a second chance and I just have to actually read it with patience.
Your article here seems to be build around the idea of memes being narratives. Michael Smith introduces memes as patterns of behavior. Dennett uses words as first example for memes. For Deutsch memes are basically ideas (as far as I understand). All of those perspectives have some merit - it's probably fine to conclude that memes come in different shapes. ... however confusing that might be.
I dislike about memes as ideas (with natural selection attached) that it's so general. I can't deny that every idea can be a meme ... but take the maybe overly specific definition of a meme as a behavioral pattern in contrast: suddenly you can analyse how humans copy behavior (by looking at and understanding the goal of the person they are copying!) and how humans are actually experts at this. And how we explicitly teach stuff to each other like no other species and dedicate years of our lives to learning (absorbing memes!).
Also, when people think of memes as ideas, they immediately fall into the good-meme-bad-meme trap. i criticize this with Deutsch's irrational memes, too (or is it anti-rational memes, even?).
If you want more input: I think it should be possible to build memetics in strict analogy to biological evolution (genes). I am not the first to propose this, of course ... but when I read Dawkins' "the extended phenotype" where he lays out so gracefully the many quirks of biological evolution, I feel a certain empowerment: Biological evolution is not exact in a lot of details, like
* where does one gene end and the next one begins (impossible to tell)
* how long is a gene? what is the minimum length - well, if it gets copied it was long enough ...
* where does one organism end and the other begin (crazy examples in biology with the weirdest parasites)
* what is the spider's net? what is the beaver dam? is there a gene for the size of either one?
... yet that doesn't mean biological evolution is "bad science" or anything. It's just the real complexity of the mechanism of natural selection that emerges when you have nature run its course.
And the same is true for memetics: is an idea (big enough to be) a meme? Is there a difference between the informational content of a meme (like the genotype) and it's real-world effect (like the phenotype) - well, sometimes! Is there a clear boundary between what is a meme and what is memeplex?
So I think it's totally worth exploring memetics with the most strict and critical eyes of an evolutionary biologist. As far as I know this hasn't been done. And correct me if you know more, the groundwork for this has been laid by Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett.
I think I’m struggling a bit (really, hesitant, but i’ll get to that) to accept your emphasis on narratives. Is it necessarily to convince someone of something by forcing it to fit their worldview? Doesn’t this necessitate, in some cases, that we lie to ourselves or to others, in order to accept beliefs that are good for us but would otherwise contradict our narratives if framed as the way that they really are? This makes me hesitate, because I don’t like believing falsehoods, and I don’t like telling lies, even if they may be more comforting or beneficial (and even then I believe in many cases they really aren’t).
For example, take your example about Trump willing the election. I don’t particularly like Trump, but if the next 4 years turn out to be great, I don’t want to believe that they were great in spite of him instead of because of him, if they really were great because of him. I don’t think it is healthy in the long-run for others to believe this, just because it fits their narratives.
Now, maybe you’re saying it’s just not possible for some people to believe certain truths, because their narratives are so heavily ingrained and difficult to change, and thus we should “reframe” the beliefs to fit their narratives to get the outcomes we want. I don’t like this at all, it feels like manipulation, but maybe it’s true.
This is a very important point I want to dedicate one (or several) posts too. I agree with you on the bottom line: truth matters, we are capable of pursuing it and finding it, testing & validating our beliefs. I think self-delusion and manipulation are bad.
My ultimate goal with studying narratives is studying how they can be used to manipulate us, without us even noticing us. My mental model is that narratives are like glasses we use to look at the world, and there is no way to look at the world directly, but we can swap out multiple narratives back & forth and get a more complete picture. "All models are wrong, but some are useful" applies to narratives too.
It gets a little blurry when you think about narratives affecting reality. You may be a realist and look at a vast empty landscape and say "this is barren land, there is no civilization here", but you can also look at it and say "hold on, this is where the beginning of the town is, this is where the townspeople will gather, this is where we will chop wood". If you want to prove no society can thrive here, you can. If you want to prove a town can thrive here, you can also do that. Where the rubber hits the road: if reality is malleable, our narratives can bend it to our will. If it is not malleable, the narrative must be updated in order to survive (maybe you say: the town must be further upstream/closer to the river, or whatever)
In the case of the Trump narrative, it's possible that the things he seeks to do are going to be bad for a lot of groups of citizens, and that the people/systems around him can counter that and end up creating a better world in spite of it. It's possible his things actually do work out as intended. I think we can find out which is which, especially if you have insider knowledge with people who work close to the administration. In the case where it's ambiguous, where we don't know, I think it's totally valid to pick the belief that is most useful, that will lead to the best outcome
(same way as believing that whether or not you get the job is in your control. It may be a false belief, but it is a useful belief, and in the absence of strong evidence either way, you can pick the useful belief and gather more evidence for it). This is fundamentally not different to how science operates (we pick a paradigm to work within. When you get evidence counter to the theory, you don't toss the theory, you try to rule out mistakes, and failing that, you tweak the theory. Rarely do you consider a completely different foundation, when we do we consider it a scientific breakthrough, this is what Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is about)
"The simplest contribution you can make to culture is to reframe truth to fit inside of existing narratives. A much bigger contribution is creating new narratives to explain existing truths. Which narratives take root in human minds & outcompete other narratives is a scientific question."
In the world of spirituality, the new narrative that comes from enlightenment is that if it is all just narratives, you gain power over the narratives you invest time in and give attention to.
Neuroplasticity is also whispering the same message. And visa is too. "Focus on what you want to see more of", and allow new memes to come to you.
Defender, I am afraid you might be reinventing the wheel here. What you're looking for is "cultural theory", or "cultural studies". They just don't call it a "science", perhaps partly because analyzing culture is essentially interpretive, and maybe that's why "cultural science" appears so neglected.
"If shared beliefs are technology, where did they come from? Who is maintaining them?": Isn't that what Marxists have been grappling with for ages?
"We can ask these questions of every single cultural norm or belief: “what does it do for us?” and “where did it come from?”": Nietzsche? Or even better, Foucault? There's a reason why Foucault has been the most highly cited thinker in the social sciences for a while.
If you want to unravel the narratives in your mind, Barthes' "Mythologies" is a classic. All sorts of everyday phenomena turn out to be imbued with taken-for-granted meanings. Alternatively, Lakoff and Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" makes for easier reading if you're more analytically disposed. Why, in our culture, is argument seen as "war"? Love as a "journey"?
The aforementioned names are just the big ones. There's SO much work being done on culture. Because culture obviously matters, a lot. You just have to escape the TPOT framing for a bit. I hope I've pointed you in a helpful direction!
I’m doing applied cultural science at Fractal (alongside Tyler and others). Essentially, Fractal is an experiment in creating agentic people (or “friendly, ambitious nerds”).
For me personally the biggest learnings have been:
1. Hosting is an accessible and effective way for anyone to learn agency. And it’s possible to help people become hosts, and to create a culture that perpetuates hosting memes, creating more and more hosts
2. Teaching is extremely transformative. It can accelerate people from timid dabblers to confident people doing novel work. A “community university” enables people in the community to step into the role of teacher and grow into the role of “expert”
3. “Agency” can be grown via classes on any subject, as long as the class includes a meaningful “doing” component, not just theory
"Religion was discovered" - great point here. It's interesting to me that the debatably most influential religions (Islam, Christianity and Judaism) all originated from a part of the world where water scarcity was a real issue. I think prophets discovered an ability to use religion to urge cooperation without kinship, and to solve collective action failure.
yes, I really think it's not fundamentally different from the discovery of any particular technology or science. I don't think this is necessarily a secular view either. I think people who have faith in their religion can agree with the statement that "it was revealed" "it was discovered", the prophets were literally messengers in this way, articulating what they found to be true
Cool piece! I think you can add Luke Burgis to your list https://substack.com/@lukeburgis
thank you, I wasn't aware of his book!!
very good read. That list of "who else is working on this" is immensely useful. Here comes a funny story: I found Tim Tyler's book in a hipster café in Asunción, Paraguay and spent the better part of an afternoon skimming through it. I remember being left rather confused, but maybe the book deserves a second chance and I just have to actually read it with patience.
Your article here seems to be build around the idea of memes being narratives. Michael Smith introduces memes as patterns of behavior. Dennett uses words as first example for memes. For Deutsch memes are basically ideas (as far as I understand). All of those perspectives have some merit - it's probably fine to conclude that memes come in different shapes. ... however confusing that might be.
I dislike about memes as ideas (with natural selection attached) that it's so general. I can't deny that every idea can be a meme ... but take the maybe overly specific definition of a meme as a behavioral pattern in contrast: suddenly you can analyse how humans copy behavior (by looking at and understanding the goal of the person they are copying!) and how humans are actually experts at this. And how we explicitly teach stuff to each other like no other species and dedicate years of our lives to learning (absorbing memes!).
Also, when people think of memes as ideas, they immediately fall into the good-meme-bad-meme trap. i criticize this with Deutsch's irrational memes, too (or is it anti-rational memes, even?).
If you want more input: I think it should be possible to build memetics in strict analogy to biological evolution (genes). I am not the first to propose this, of course ... but when I read Dawkins' "the extended phenotype" where he lays out so gracefully the many quirks of biological evolution, I feel a certain empowerment: Biological evolution is not exact in a lot of details, like
* where does one gene end and the next one begins (impossible to tell)
* how long is a gene? what is the minimum length - well, if it gets copied it was long enough ...
* where does one organism end and the other begin (crazy examples in biology with the weirdest parasites)
* what is the spider's net? what is the beaver dam? is there a gene for the size of either one?
... yet that doesn't mean biological evolution is "bad science" or anything. It's just the real complexity of the mechanism of natural selection that emerges when you have nature run its course.
And the same is true for memetics: is an idea (big enough to be) a meme? Is there a difference between the informational content of a meme (like the genotype) and it's real-world effect (like the phenotype) - well, sometimes! Is there a clear boundary between what is a meme and what is memeplex?
So I think it's totally worth exploring memetics with the most strict and critical eyes of an evolutionary biologist. As far as I know this hasn't been done. And correct me if you know more, the groundwork for this has been laid by Dawkins, Blackmore and Dennett.
I think I’m struggling a bit (really, hesitant, but i’ll get to that) to accept your emphasis on narratives. Is it necessarily to convince someone of something by forcing it to fit their worldview? Doesn’t this necessitate, in some cases, that we lie to ourselves or to others, in order to accept beliefs that are good for us but would otherwise contradict our narratives if framed as the way that they really are? This makes me hesitate, because I don’t like believing falsehoods, and I don’t like telling lies, even if they may be more comforting or beneficial (and even then I believe in many cases they really aren’t).
For example, take your example about Trump willing the election. I don’t particularly like Trump, but if the next 4 years turn out to be great, I don’t want to believe that they were great in spite of him instead of because of him, if they really were great because of him. I don’t think it is healthy in the long-run for others to believe this, just because it fits their narratives.
Now, maybe you’re saying it’s just not possible for some people to believe certain truths, because their narratives are so heavily ingrained and difficult to change, and thus we should “reframe” the beliefs to fit their narratives to get the outcomes we want. I don’t like this at all, it feels like manipulation, but maybe it’s true.
This is a very important point I want to dedicate one (or several) posts too. I agree with you on the bottom line: truth matters, we are capable of pursuing it and finding it, testing & validating our beliefs. I think self-delusion and manipulation are bad.
My ultimate goal with studying narratives is studying how they can be used to manipulate us, without us even noticing us. My mental model is that narratives are like glasses we use to look at the world, and there is no way to look at the world directly, but we can swap out multiple narratives back & forth and get a more complete picture. "All models are wrong, but some are useful" applies to narratives too.
It gets a little blurry when you think about narratives affecting reality. You may be a realist and look at a vast empty landscape and say "this is barren land, there is no civilization here", but you can also look at it and say "hold on, this is where the beginning of the town is, this is where the townspeople will gather, this is where we will chop wood". If you want to prove no society can thrive here, you can. If you want to prove a town can thrive here, you can also do that. Where the rubber hits the road: if reality is malleable, our narratives can bend it to our will. If it is not malleable, the narrative must be updated in order to survive (maybe you say: the town must be further upstream/closer to the river, or whatever)
In the case of the Trump narrative, it's possible that the things he seeks to do are going to be bad for a lot of groups of citizens, and that the people/systems around him can counter that and end up creating a better world in spite of it. It's possible his things actually do work out as intended. I think we can find out which is which, especially if you have insider knowledge with people who work close to the administration. In the case where it's ambiguous, where we don't know, I think it's totally valid to pick the belief that is most useful, that will lead to the best outcome
(same way as believing that whether or not you get the job is in your control. It may be a false belief, but it is a useful belief, and in the absence of strong evidence either way, you can pick the useful belief and gather more evidence for it). This is fundamentally not different to how science operates (we pick a paradigm to work within. When you get evidence counter to the theory, you don't toss the theory, you try to rule out mistakes, and failing that, you tweak the theory. Rarely do you consider a completely different foundation, when we do we consider it a scientific breakthrough, this is what Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is about)
"The simplest contribution you can make to culture is to reframe truth to fit inside of existing narratives. A much bigger contribution is creating new narratives to explain existing truths. Which narratives take root in human minds & outcompete other narratives is a scientific question."
In the world of spirituality, the new narrative that comes from enlightenment is that if it is all just narratives, you gain power over the narratives you invest time in and give attention to.
Neuroplasticity is also whispering the same message. And visa is too. "Focus on what you want to see more of", and allow new memes to come to you.
--
Great article :)
Important work. Godspeed (to all of us!)
Defender, I am afraid you might be reinventing the wheel here. What you're looking for is "cultural theory", or "cultural studies". They just don't call it a "science", perhaps partly because analyzing culture is essentially interpretive, and maybe that's why "cultural science" appears so neglected.
"If shared beliefs are technology, where did they come from? Who is maintaining them?": Isn't that what Marxists have been grappling with for ages?
"We can ask these questions of every single cultural norm or belief: “what does it do for us?” and “where did it come from?”": Nietzsche? Or even better, Foucault? There's a reason why Foucault has been the most highly cited thinker in the social sciences for a while.
If you want to unravel the narratives in your mind, Barthes' "Mythologies" is a classic. All sorts of everyday phenomena turn out to be imbued with taken-for-granted meanings. Alternatively, Lakoff and Johnson's "Metaphors We Live By" makes for easier reading if you're more analytically disposed. Why, in our culture, is argument seen as "war"? Love as a "journey"?
The aforementioned names are just the big ones. There's SO much work being done on culture. Because culture obviously matters, a lot. You just have to escape the TPOT framing for a bit. I hope I've pointed you in a helpful direction!
I’m doing applied cultural science at Fractal (alongside Tyler and others). Essentially, Fractal is an experiment in creating agentic people (or “friendly, ambitious nerds”).
For me personally the biggest learnings have been:
1. Hosting is an accessible and effective way for anyone to learn agency. And it’s possible to help people become hosts, and to create a culture that perpetuates hosting memes, creating more and more hosts
2. Teaching is extremely transformative. It can accelerate people from timid dabblers to confident people doing novel work. A “community university” enables people in the community to step into the role of teacher and grow into the role of “expert”
3. “Agency” can be grown via classes on any subject, as long as the class includes a meaningful “doing” component, not just theory