The Postmodern Slaughter of Reason - Part 1: Memetic Theory

“The rise of the philosophers meant the fall of man, for once reason took over, men no longer possessed their former guides, their regulating, unconscious and infallible drives: they were reduced to thinking, inferring, reckoning, coordinating cause and effect, these unfortunate creatures; they were reduced to their ‘consciousness,’ their weakest and most fallible organ!” - Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II:16

The conscious will driving the mechanistic gears of the new dawn is Information. We live and breathe in the information age. An ethereal sea of information surrounds us. Before this ether encompassed us, the skies of ignorance were clear. If a plague wiped out the entire civilization flourishing in the Asian subcontinent. Inhabitants of the European peninsula wouldn’t know about it until it was much later. It’s not the case anymore. The ethereal sea ensures lightning-fast transmission of facts (or fiction).

In the mid 20th century, when the informational ether was introduced for the first time. It provided knowledge, and a sense of power with it. But as we moved towards the 21st century, the ether got flooded with all types of toxins. Information is not the only thing that spreads online. Misinformation is equally prevalent, if not more. We have been highly conditioned to accept anything the internet tells us. This misinformation on the internet has made it difficult to tell facts from fiction. We are drowning in the ether of information searching for wisdom, and experience to rescue us.

The mechanics of how news propagates on the internet are enthralling. Before the 21st century, only news channels shouldered this responsibility. Social media is all the hype now. It is the arsenal where multiple subtools are casually implemented to spread ideas. They are reels, images, podcasts, videos etc. You are bombarded by millions of them. There is an endless list of videos to watch, of reels to scroll, and of memes to laugh at. The subtool which has the fastest velocity is a meme. Memes spread like rapidfire. They spread across the culture, infect different cultures, and become a global phenomena. They are quirky, smart, funny, and catchy. The opposing side of the coin, oftenly ignored, is that there can be dangerous memes. I must clarify to the reader that I am not talking about the ‘funny images’ you see on the internet. There are memes which don’t require the internet. They are carried from one individual to the other, through their minds. There is a high probability that memes might just be the building block of our brains. The history of memes extrapolates further back than previously thought of..

A Redefinition of Memes:

The word ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”. The definition of a meme is not commonly known. The internet has actively hijacked the word ‘meme’, limiting its definition to “an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations.”

When Dawkins came up with the word. He meant something much deeper than ‘funny images on the internet’. Although the internet's definition of the word fits the actual definition. According to Dawkins, a meme is a unit of cultural inheritance. In order to grasp the cusp of what he meant by that, we need to understand the core premises of The Theory of Evolution and The Selfish Gene:

The grandeur of Charles Darwin’s idea of evolution and its impact on our understanding of life is remarkable. It can’t be overstated. Before Darwin, philosophers since Aristotle, meddled with the idea of an essence. “What’s the essence of X or Y?” was all the debate. Theory of evolution solved this problem by stating: life is a series of gradual improvement. It’s gradualism all the way through. Gradualism, trial-and-error, natural selection, gene refining, and a high degree of luck. Life starts from a single common organism (a cell) and goes through a series of gradualization carrying useful information (the gene) in the DNA.  It’s important to note the distinction that genes are not DNA. Genes are the information carried by the DNA. Through natural selection, the genes which contribute to the organism’s survival replicate themselves, while the genes which are counter-productive (or no longer contribute) to the organism’s survival die off and eventually go extinct. A gene, therefore, is a unit of selection of life.  A replicator that faithfully copies itself. This leads us to the following conclusion: a gene is truly immortal. It is immortal because it copies the information with significant fidelity. The genes present on the earth today are here only because they were remarkable at ensuring the survival of the individual body. The ones not so good were discarded in evolution’s garbage can. A gene has to be exceptionally good at building bodies that are survival machines. If it isn’t good, it wouldn’t be here. This is what Dawkins told us in the Selfish Gene

Memes are to culture, what Genes are to life. Gene are replicators for biological evolution, while memes are replicators for cultural evolution. Any idea that is imitated faithfully, spreading across the cultural fabric, eventually rooting itself in the cultural soil is a meme. We stuff our mind with all sorts of memes. “tunes, ideas, catch‐phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches” are memes. Words, and subsequently language, is a meme.

The reason memes are worth discussing is because they separate us from our cousin ancestors: the chimpanzees. A chimpanzee’s brain is like a computer without any software installed in it. On the contrary, humans fill their brain with all kinds of apps. This software/application is what memes are. We are awash in them. The host of a meme works actively to share it with the potential other hosts. This idea was developed into ‘The Memetic Theory’  by American Philosopher and Cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennet.

“It spreads like an epidemic. It acts like a Virus” - Richard Dawkins on Memes

Memes can be catastrophically dangerous. A meme doesn’t have to be correct. We are flooded by toxic memes. The ones which cause their host to think and act stupendously irrationally. Memes could potentially drive a host to extinction.

A Lancet Fluke’s effect on the Ant

Imagine as one day you are walking by your garden. You observe an ant engulfing in rather dangerous behavior. It climbs the top of a blade of grass, tries to balance itself, topples back down, starts all over again. Surely this behavior is irrational even from the rationale of an ant. What is it that drives the ant to do such a dull-witted act?
The answer is a Lancet Fluke, a parasitic flatworm. Once this parasite enters the ant’s system. It hijacks the ant’s brain. It controls the ant’s mind, placing the ant directly in harm’s way. The reason it commandeers the ant over the top of the grass blade is because this is a vulnerable position for the ant. A herbivore can easily spot and eat the ant. The flatworm leads the ant to its grave.

If an ant’s brain can be hijacked  by a flatworm. What can human brains be hijacked by? There are no flatworms or parasites capable of hijacking a human mind that modern biology is aware of, except ideas.

It’s ideas, or specifically, memes that hijack the human brain. Toxic memes are viruses of the brain: an information packet with attitude and arrogance. 

The Burden of Responsibility for Memes

The word “meme creator” popped up on the internet. Its someone who replicates, and edits an internet meme with the intention of it going viral. There are meme creators who don’t require the internet. They are the philosophers, scientists, physicists, doctors, spiritual gurus, and leaders of the world. They advent novel ideas implicitly hoping they will take off. Some ideas take off, most don’t. Novel theories, intricate equations, aesthetic artworks, and medicinal therapies are advents.
It’s imperative for them to take into account the beneficial effects, and the potential misuses of the ideas they create. The burden of responsibility lies heavy on their shoulders.

The magnitude of the burden of responsibility is distributed unevenly among different fields. Doctors and engineers handle a greater magnitude of this responsibility. They are trained to always hold in the back of their mind, “what if I am wrong?. The hippocratic oath is an example of a high standard of ethical commitment. It’s important that people in this field realize what is at stake. God forbid, if they turn out to be terribly wrong about a medicine or a design, millions of lives could be lost. To avoid dire consequences, there is a long standing tradition of caution.

There is no hippocratic oath for a philosopher. Neither is there for a scientist or mathematician. In the fields auxiliary to the ones described, no assertions are made generally which  can bring direct harm. What can a literary critic do to harm you? Hit you in the head with a copy of Homer’s Iliad or Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey?. A mathematician might inadvertently trip a student in the corridor as a prank… but that’s about how far it goes.
What is at stake for a philosopher or a mathematician is much less serious. If my research is on whether the concept of justice in Plato’s republic is rightly justified? Or if the concept of time is valid according to the new observations in string theory? Or if I can challenge my intellect and come up with a proof of Fermat’s Theorem. Let’s assume I turn out to be wrong, dead wrong. The most I risk losing is my ‘scholarly’ reputation.
However, the magnitude of the burden of responsibility increases significantly when philosophers aspire to dent the ‘real’ world (as opposed to the “academic” world). Many philosophers share this aspiration today. This is where they need to adopt the tradition and habits of the practical science department

They must be duly credited for the productive effects of their ideas, and ruthlessly criticized for its misuses.

Note: In the next edition to this series, we discuss the “postmodernist” philosophers and their treatment of science.