Dorion Sagan's column Dangerous Ideas: Memes and the New Orwellianism raises again the thesis that we loose elections because they are better at framing the issues than we are (George Lakoff's thesis too). It makes me feel bad to have to keep beating this drum, but the message needs to be taken seriously. We had all the warning we needed and we ignored it. The result was overwhelming to put it mildly. In case you don't know who Dorion Sagan is, he is the son of the physicist Carl Sagan and the Biologist Lynn Margulis. He is author of numerous articles and twenty-three books translated into eleven languages, including Death and Sex, co-authored with Tyler Volk; Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future and Into the Cool, coauthored with Eric D. Schneider. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, Wired, the Skeptical Inquirer, Pabular, Smithsonian, the Ecologist, Co-Evolution Quarterly, the Times Higher Education, Omni, Natural History, The Sciences, Cabinet, and Tricycle. Read on below to get his message to us.
The concept of the "meme" as an analogy/metaphor based on the biological gene has been around for a while. Evidently not everyone believes they exist let alone that they can be used as political tools and weapons. Here's what Sagan says:
Units of cultural information that replicate have been called a variety of names—mnemes, mnemotypes, culturetypes, and idenes—before their current name caught on and, as befits the concept to which it refers, proliferated like there's no tomorrow. Which there may not be.
Memes—the notion of self-replicating bits of culture—are a seductive, slippery concept, vigorously debated in some corners of academia. And while I am serious in saying that they are easily deployed not just in marketing and church, but in counterintelligence and propaganda, they can also be merely banal or annoying. For example, snippets of song you may not even like but can't get out of your head..."say I'd like to know, where you got the notion...Our love is like a ship on the ocean...rock the boat, don't rock the boat, baby..."—The Hues Corporation.
Memes take the form of clothing fashions, religious ideas, and technologies—anything that can replicate, not by genes (although they are ultimately involved) but by the monkey-see-monkey-do imitative tendencies—the mimesis from which their name derives—of the species Homo sapiens sapiens.
Memes were first brought to the world's attention by the erstwhile Richard Dawkins, who has himself morphed into a kind of meme, becoming not just a name but a cultural symbol—for atheism, and for Darwinism, especially neoDarwinism which considers genes to be the persistent physical core of evolution, with animals and species being mere vehicles for their persistence and spread.
The connection with Dawkins is ironic. since his evangelical atheism is so hated by the religious right. The irony is that they don't care what you call these things, they know they work and they use them effectively.
Here's a twist to the idea that has political analogs even if you don't buy the biology:
The high priestess of memes, Susan Blackmore (author of The Meme Machine, with an intro by Dawkins) even argues that memes drove the evolutionary enlargement of our ancestors' brains, giving them more room to multiply—certainly the reverse of the usual way we think about it. Blackmore may be putting the cart before the horse, but it is certainly an arresting contention.
In fact, the memes used out there conserve space and money spent in the media and that is what counts. Want more bang for your political buck? Learn to use memes effectively. Sagan and I are a bit different in our willingness to be overtly political so read this with care:
For me the most frightening aspect of the new "science" of memetics is the light it shines on the modern engines of Orwellian propaganda. It is rather obvious that rumors, errors, and paranoia, let loose in the nutrient broth of the Internet, can spread like wildfire. But what worries me about this is not so much the conspiracy theories, but the Machiavellian technique of purposefully attaching misinformation to critical thinking to deflect serious questions, curtailing our ability to keep tabs on the government.
The extremely level-headed and meticulous 9-11 scholar David Ray Griffin, points out in his latest book—Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee's Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory—that Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama, has published a position paper on the "cognitive isolation" of those who believe that 9-11 was an inside job.
Instead of letting bygones be bygones, some of these ingenues harp on annoying details such as the melting point of steel (1000 degrees F. higher than kerosene-based jet fuels), and the aerodynamic impossibility (due to air's density increasing closer to the ground) of planes flying 560 miles per hour at 1000 feet (part of the official account.) It's one thing for the government to suspend constitutional laws, destroying civil freedoms and protections in the name of liberty and security. It's another thing entirely to suspend scientific laws such as the Galilean formula for gravitational acceleration, which applies in a perfect vacuum, not to falling skyscrapers encountering friction from their own structural concrete and steel.
This comes very close to home:
Rather than delve into the morass, I wish only to call your attention to the role of memes in all this. If there is a cheaper way than the new biological warfare of memes to propagate counterintelligence and damage control, rather than honestly addressing the questions of pilots, engineers, scientists, emergency medical technicians and relatives of loved ones of whom not so much as a bone has been found, I wouldn't be able to tell you what it is.
Memes' tendency for spreading without regard to truth cannot have been overlooked by those who wish to obscure or keep hidden certain kinds of "sensitive" information.
The Southern Poverty Law Center used to be my favorite charity. Now, in recent issues of their once-fine publication The Intelligence Report (which chronicles hate groups), they have begun to conflate any group that criticizes the government – for example on the status of the Federal Reserve as a private corporation, the voluntary nature of the federal income tax code, or why Building 7, which wasn't hit by a plane, came down on 9-11—with truly nasty hate groups such as the Sovereigns, the Patriots, and Neo-Nazis. "The greatest tyrannies are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes," wrote founding father Thomas Paine, anticipating George Orwell. Politics makes strange bedfellows.
The attachment of liberal values such as tolerance and diversity to Machiavellian corporate-imperialist agendas is a form of what one could call memejacking. You associate the baby of good memes with the bathwater of your nefarious goals, or, contrariwise, you associate idiotic ideas with the good questions or noble courses of action you want to discredit. For example, I may say your questions about the inconsistencies and the internal contradictions of the official account of 9-11 are quite valid—and it is also amazing how many believe in that fake moon landing.
The list of examples could be endless. The real fill in the blanks exercise for us is to look back at who won in this last election and why. I think you will find that Sagan and our old friend George Lakoff have a point.