In Search of Meme-Busters
Using and abusing the power of words
One of my professors in graduate school liked to say that “ideas are weapons.” He was suggesting that intellectual history is not a genteel, disengaged salon of lofty thinking but a contentious arena where power is claimed and exerted. Ideas have consequences. Words can change the world.
The power of ideas is evident in political movements and revolutions throughout history. Sophisticated belief systems are compressed into taut slogans that pack a hypnotic punch and move masses of people to action: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win...”
Even outside the explicitly political realm, words about the presumed nature of the world have the power to shape perception and action. A line in The Origin of Species becomes justification for a ruthless social Darwinism: “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
And of course, revered religious texts have unique power to inspire whole populations and cultures to all sorts of behavior, from self-sacrificing acts of charity to paroxysms of wholesale slaughter.
Ideas do not need to be “true” in any objective sense or virtuous in a moral one in order to possess compelling influence. They only need to speak to cultural tensions, psychological hungers or historical crises on a subliminal level. If they promise relief or glory or a satisfying explanation of the world’s mystery and complexity, people will grasp onto them like life preservers.
This is why ideas are not simply intellectual propositions that humans consider rationally and judiciously before deciding whether to adopt, modify or reject them. They are also self-perpetuating “memes” that burrow deeply into our cultural life and hold our minds in their tenacious grip. They can spread like viruses. We are not entirely free to be rational or even intelligent when under their spell.
I think this understanding of the power of words goes a long way toward explaining humanity’s violent, absurd and depressing history. We like to think of ourselves as the wise species (Homo sapiens — literally “wise man” or “knowing man”) but our intellect is a double-edged sword. It does indeed become a weapon when our unconscious tendencies take hold of it and wield it for their own irrational purposes.
There may be no solution to this dilemma. It seems more and more that our species is a maladapted freak of nature: the extraordinary mental powers that have enabled us to dominate the biosphere up to now have brought us to the verge of annihilation, and instead of responding to the crisis rationally we seem utterly determined to go over the cliff.
But if there is any hope for continued survival and perhaps even a chance to thrive, it will be found in those philosophical traditions that enjoin us to use the intellect much more carefully and face up to our unconscious impulses more deliberately.
In Western culture, two intellectual figures of the same early twentieth century generation — Carl Jung and John Dewey — offer contrasting but complementary approaches. Jung the psychiatrist teaches us how to explore the unconscious realm deeply, to come to know its impulses and desires intimately and establish a conscious, working relationship with them. Dewey the philosopher examines the nature of ideas and thought, and urges us to wield them with more discernment and modesty, to avoid engaging in a “quest for certainty.”
Both of these practices rely on a deliberate self-discipline. The Jungian path requires imagination and the courage to experience the mystery and chaos of the unconscious world. Philosophical discipline is like inviting an intellectual police officer into your life, warning you to please step away from the enticing scene of ideological assurance.
Another, quite different Western tradition that speaks to the need to tame intellectual memes is Quaker spirituality. From the time of the sect’s founding in the mid-seventeenth century, Quakers have practiced a disciplined questioning of received texts and belief systems. They turn inward to tap into a more original source of knowledge, traditionally described as God or Christ, yet understood by many modern Quakers in an almost Jungian appreciation of the deep unconscious.
An important aspect of this practice is its communal nature. Whatever insights one claims to find inwardly need to be tested in dialogue with other seekers of Light, a sort of spiritual peer review. Quakers emphasize the practice of discernment, a careful weighing of thoughts and ideas to find whether they conform to a larger reality including its moral dimension.
There are, of course, other Western practices aiming for this sort of self-discipline. But they are countercultural: The primary thrust of our civilization is toward ideological certainty. We are enamored of words, texts, systems of belief and the use of intellect to clobber all opposition. We find security and solidarity in our “isms,” our exclusive thought communities. We don’t like mystery, internal police or collaborative efforts of discernment.
This helps explain why, in times of countercultural arising such as the 1960s, many seekers have turned toward Asian religious and philosophical traditions. In general (though we should be careful not to overgeneralize or romanticize these ancient and diverse cultures), these traditions are less interested in mastering the world through raw intellectual power than in appreciating and learning from its hidden subtleties. Taoism and Buddhism are obvious examples of this attitude.
I can’t do justice here to the sophisticated teachings of these traditions; I simply want to pose them as counterpoints to the West’s quest for intellectual certainty and ideological purity. These are ways of looking at the world that embrace nonverbal ways of knowing the mysterious processes of nature and the cosmos. They counsel a more patient acceptance of paradox, mystery and natural rhythms. They remind us that our beliefs about the world are not the world itself and do not accurately describe its complex reality. The Tao that can be spoken — put into words and ideas — is not the genuine Tao or essence of reality.
All of these practices, derived from such different cultures and histories, are effective meme-busters and can help us avoid violent ideological conflict and self-righteous polarization. But it might be overly optimistic to hope that their use will actually help humanity to thrive, as I put it earlier. All of these approaches require a degree of self-discipline that throughout history and across cultures only a rarefied minority have been willing to practice consistently. It will take a lot more than that to save ourselves.
Perhaps the human brain is innately shaped (“hard-wired”) to cling to words and ideologies; there is too much short-sighted security in fixed beliefs to risk venturing into the unknown complexity of the world or our own unconscious life. Or maybe it is the essential nature of social life, bound together by language and now by pervasive technology, to treat words as more solidly real than they actually are. In either case, humanity has a tough road ahead because our belief systems have brought us to the brink of global catastrophe.
Still, at least we can try to practice meme-busting in our lives. We can try to nudge modern civilization, albeit in tiny and fragile steps, away from its ideological infatuations. Maybe this is all we can do and maybe it won’t be enough to turn the tide. But let’s give it a try.
