Survival of the Fittest Ideas
                The New Style of War -- a Struggle
                            Among Memes
            an excerpt from a speech by David Brin, Ph.D.
The following is excerpted from a speech that I gave at Brigham
Young University in 1989, and later transcribed and lightly
revised for publication in a small zine. Of special note is my
prediction, even before the Berlin Wall fell, that our Cold War
with the Soviet Union would give way to an era of dire strife with
some version of frenetic, male-centered fundamentalism... such as
we now see manifesting in a new century. While this early
forecast may read a little rough (it was a speech, recall), it is an
unusual view of our world's troubles, one that may bear further
discussion. Since then I have further developed most of these
themes, including the notion of criticism as an antidote to error
and the idea that tolerance depends on openness.

Naturally, we needn't look at this struggle over human hearts and
minds as a 'war.' I wrote it that way to be intentionally a bit
provocative. Ideally, it can be 'won' by changing many of the
myths that children are brought up with... that is, over the long
run.

And yet... given the dramatic events we all saw in late 2001,
doesn't the 'war' metaphor seem even more apt than it did over a
decade ago?

For more on these topics, see my 1998 nonfiction book The
Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose
Between Freedom and Privacy? Note especially where I talk
about the coming century becoming an "Age of Amateurs."

What we are fighting for is a world in which people don't have to
fight anymore. One in which we appreciate our differences. That
seems worthwhile enough.
Can we take a momentary break from exploring the
future, and take a dip into the world of biology?

A well-known scientist-author, Richard Dawkins, in his
book The Selfish Gene, described how everything from
our bodies to civilization may have arisen out of a
billion-year-old contest among nearly invisible clusters
of DNA, competing against both nature and each other.

Most of us are used to envisioning evolution as having
to do with macro creatures -- like plants, microbes or
animals -- whose bodies and behaviors prove their
'fitness' value by surviving and reproducing across
countless generations. By this reckoning, DNA is no
more than a tool, like the creature's eyes or limbs -- a
repository of codes, a passive library of biochemical
and cellular tricks -- serving the needs of an individual
or species. But in a classic chicken-and-egg
conundrum, things can be viewed the other way
around. Our complex bodies and behaviors may only
serve as the pragmatic implements used by genes to
facilitate their own replication.

Yes, this bizarre-sounding idea is taken seriously, in
fact, by a majority of the world's experts in Darwinian
selection. While many of them won't take it quite as far
as Dawkins does, it certainly is a widely-accepted
viewpoint to see evolution as a competition between
bundles of coded genetic information, written along the
chromosomes of living beings.

Of course, molecules don't contemplate "goals." Still,
even prim biologists are known to anthropomorphize,
now and then, because the effects of natural selection
often do look eerily as if different genetic heritages
have been striving against one another for niches in the
ecosystem, instead of just stumbling into them by
happenstance.

Let's put it this way -- if, by fortuitous chance, a bundle
of genes happens to produce an organism with the
right attributes, enabling it to live and pass on more
copies of the genes, then naturally many those copies
will also share the original successful trait and have an
improved chance of making copies... and so on.

For our present purposes, let's use biology as a
launching point, skipping on to a strange and delightful
concept that Dawkins extracted from this notion of
natural selection among genes. In a side musing that
has since been widely discussed, he suggested
similarities to other kinds of self-replicating systems --
like computer viruses -- that use information to be both
infectious and prolific.

Extending the notion still farther, Dawkins
hypothesized living bundles of ideas that he called
memes.

Just like genes and computer viruses, memes are
packets of coded information, but no longer contained
in strings of molecules or software code. Rather than
operating inside computers or living cells, memes take
action inside human minds. Furthermore, these aren't
just ordinary ideas. Like successful genetic codes, they
must have the trait of making copies of themselves.

Again, it's already been shown that information can do
this -- the code itself, if played back in a receptive
environment, can force that environment to offer up
resources for self-reproduction. If it happens in a cell or
a computer, why not the rich environment offered by
our brains?

                Ideas That Live / Ideas That Spread
Suppose I read, or heard, or somehow picked up a new
concept -- say the very one we're discussing at this
moment, the notion of memes. Now I guess you could
say this idea was successful at "infecting" me, because
I've continued thinking about it, giving it continued
existence, or life.

In thinking an idea, you in a sense cause the idea to
live.

But a virus or bacterium that just sits inside its host
organism doesn't accomplish much. Flu viruses make
us sneeze because those viruses which stumbled into
that trait spread their progeny far and wide, giving
them, in turn, further chances to proliferate.

How would a living idea proliferate? By somehow
getting its host not only to think about it, but also to
spread copies... by telling other people!

And now, if you've been paying attention, you'll realize
that's just what I've been doing the last few minutes for
one particular meme... the meme of memes! By telling
you all about it, I am doing the memic equivalent of
coughing on you. Infecting you with the infectious, self-
replicating organism of an idea... the very notion of
these infectious ideas. And if it's a successful self-
replicating notion, some of you will go tell others. And
so on.

Of course this is not the first time this has happened on
the planet. We do it all the time. In fact, life would be
dull, if not impossible, if we didn't share ideas we had
heard -- mutating and adapting them to our purposes
along the way.

                Memes -- Shedding Light on History
Intriguing. Now imagine that some of these self-
reproducing ideas pick up a few other attributes. Say a
notion becomes helpful to its hosts in some way -- for
example a belief in washing hands before eating --
resulting in better health and survival of more children.
The meme of bathing could also facilitate its own
spread by causing more people to enjoy being around
its human host, helping the good-smelling host to
become more successful and influential in his or her
community. This, in turn, helps the meme to spread. (If
more people listen to your host, then the host's store of
devoutly-believed memes will spread!)

Imagine now that some memes acquire yet another
trait. Some might cause their host organisms, or host
tribes, to try to keep other memes out! To expose their
children to only those ideas the parents already have
within their heads.

If a meme fell upon the trick of making its hosts behave
in such a way, it would thus secure the territory of
many human minds for itself and its progeny and keep
away competitors for all time.

Sound like a bizarre science fiction scenario?

Or is it, rather, a pretty good model of what we've seen
going on around us, in nearly every human society
where citizens have been taught to believe certain
things and to hold alien ideas in suspicion?

Examples abound. Take the dogmatic exclusion rules of
most religions. Can we look again at the Inquisition, or
the Tokugawa extirpation of Japanese Christians, or the
Holocaust, in new light? One of the Iranian Ayatollahs
once said of America -- "We don't fear your bombs, we
fear your pagan ideas."

Or take the Soviet Union. What's going on in Russia
today (ed.note: this was early 1989) may be considered
the meme-equivalent of AIDS! After all, consider which
people over there seem most infected with our western
worldview. Certainly not vast portions of the population
as a whole, who often seem sullen, resentful of change,
and xenophobic. No, it appears to be the aristocracy, a
lot of guys at the top, Gorbachev and even some large
elements of the KGB, who are now turning off the
jamming devices. The 'immune system' of former
Leninist Russia -- the memic equivalent of white blood
cells -- who used to keep out anything that contradicted
Communist purity, has changed sides! Border guards
who once confiscated videotapes were the equivalent
of antibodies. But now their orders are to "let anything
in. Come on! Infect us!"

Under such circumstances, how much longer will their
outer barriers last?

                  Memes Can Wage War on One Another
Some of you have heard me talk before about how, in
my opinion, there are presently four major worldviews
battling over the future of this planet. Now, so long as
you're willing to take all this with a grain or two of salt -
- and remember, this is only a model, a metaphor -- I'd
like to give you an updated version.

These four combating worldviews have little to do with
all those superficial slogans that people have let
themselves get lathered about in this century. Things
like communism, capitalism, Islam. We have seen wars
and death aplenty, but they weren't fought over such
simpleminded ideologies. Not really.

Rather, I am talking about deeper themes that pervaded
human psychology since the dawn of time. All four of
the antagonistic memes that I'm about to describe can
be shown to have appeared in all historic cultures,
sometimes coexisting under conditions of high tension.
Or else they have taken turns, dominating or setting the
tone for entire civilizations.
*  There is, first off, a worldview best called
    Paranoia.
Take the best recent example; one can understand
Russian traditional xenophobia and dread of enemies
lurking on the horizon, given their history of repeated
invasion at least once per generation, for a thousand
years. Under these conditions, a people might school
themselves, through every myth and fairy tale, to
support even a monstrous leadership if it promises to
keep the Enemy at bay. Still, this meme made for an
uncomfortably brittle and capricious superpower. If
Paranoia had won, or even lasted much longer, the
world would probably become a cinder, sooner or later.

The great enemy of Paranoia is peace. Without constant
threat and suffering, human beings eventually start
thinking in terms of comfort and personal ambition.
And yet the fearful meme is still carried in the
mythology that Russian parents pass on to their
children. That part of it may take a long time to go
away.
*  Second on our list of competing themes is
    Machismo.
Machismo is the most powerful worldview -- the leading
meme -- in many parts of the world.

Wherever you see women oppressed and the
environment ignored, wherever professionalism and
skill are downgraded in favor of strutting and male-
bonded loyalty groups, it's a good bet that Machismo
sets a culture's major chord. And don't underrate it!
Macho-chiefdom was an effective social pattern,
especially in countless natural hunter-gatherer tribes.
Much that is noble and heroic came out of such clans,
including probably most of our ancient legends. A later
version -- feudalism -- appeared wherever and
whenever humanity came up with both agriculture and
metallurgy, with such reliable consistency that it has to
be something basic. In other words, it may be the most
'natural' human self organizing system. Nevertheless, if
this meme prevails, we and our planet will die.

Today, different versions of Machismo are dominant in
wide areas of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East,
and several other zones as well. For example, in the
Iranian language, Farsi, most of the traditional fairy
tales that are recited to children apparently focus on
one dramatic theme, above all others, that of revenge, a
motif you can also see repeated in 1001 Arabian Nights.
Nor is this trait limited to any one subculture. Almost
every social lineage on the planet passed through a
macho phase, e.g., the feudal era in Europe, which gave
us the occidental myths collected in Grimm's Fairy
Tales. Consider how many of them centered either on
revenge or on premises of prickly male honor, or else
on rescue themes with strictly defined sexual roles. Or
take Latin America where, I am told, mothers in some
places are still known to sit their little sons on their
knees and tell them -- "Someday you'll be a macho guy.
You'll deflower virgins and seduce other men's wives.
But if this happens to your wife or sister, you must cut
her throat." This may sound bizarre to many of you, but
I have double checked. Moreover, it would be a mistake
to dismiss it as an aberration.

Again, as worldviews go, Machismo has a long
tradition, a lot longer than ours. It is also hot-tempered
and deeply threatened by modernity. Watch, as time
passes and the elevation of women progresses. We
shall see how this meme reacts to the insistent
pressure of western values, perhaps erupting in harsh
reaction. It may burst from Machismo's Latin or middle-
eastern or south Asian variants -- too soon to tell
which. Let's hope not all of them.

When this happens, the underlying fever will probably
go undiagnosed and unnamed. Western pundits and
leaders will probably focus unduly on superficial details
like religion or nationality. Wherever it manifests, the
real cause, lying much deeper down, will probably be
ignored.
                              . . .
How about a side bet? Here's a prediction regarding the
first meme we mentioned -- Paranoia (specifically the
Russian/Soviet variant). We'll see, in the course of the
next decade, if it really is on the way out, or if its lasting
power has been underrated, giving rise to powerful new
surface forms. There are plenty of fresh symbols that
might suffice, replacing both czars and communist
stars.

Assuming it does continue to fade: keep an eye on how
the other three culture families devour what remains of
the old Soviet Empire, as some of its parts hurry to join
the domain of the West, some tumble into the
Machismo orbit, while still others become Eastern with
stunning rapidity.
*  The third worldview is (as I just alluded), one that I call
    The East.
Of the three opposition memes discussed today (there are more,
but these are the most important and all we have time for), The
East is demonstrably both traditional and sane... after its own
fashion. It's been around for a very long time, after all. During
most of recorded history it was the dominant theme in China and
several other parts of this planet. The East's principal motif,
homogeneity, was most eloquently mapped out and prescribed by
the sage known in the west as Confucius.

Everyone should subsume their sense of self to the larger group, to
the nation, to the tribe, whatever. It's more complicated than that,
of course. For example, while the Eastern Meme hews to the
ancient human pattern of pyramidal social hierarchies and a
highly privileged leadership class -- just like Paranoia, Feudalism,
and Machismo -- it also moderates many of the worst effects of
hierarchy. It does this by believing deeply in skill,
professionalism, and taking the advice of meritocratic civil
servants. Indeed, this bent toward meritocracy allows some social
mobility! The brightest sons (and yes, daughters) of the peasantry
can rise up, gradually, if they don't offend or get too far out of
line.

The crux: individualism is dangerous. Deviation and eccentricity
are worse. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

One can see how such a meme would make governing large
populations easier. Capital isn't wasted too much on feathers for
male strutting (as in Machismo), nor excessively on arms and war
(as in Paranoia). If the East wins, you will probably have peace,
some preservation of the environment, some pandas, some trees.
Suppression of women is traditionally limited in scale and may
even evaporate somewhat in a modern version. Humans might
eventually, slowly, get out into space. But when or if we ever met
aliens, we won't understand them -- because by then the very
notion of diversity, let alone finding it attractive or interesting,
will have been extinguished.

I don't think it would be very much fun living in a human
civilization dominated by some Eastern Meme. But then, if I'd
been brought up under Eastern Memes, I might not consider "fun"
to be such a fundamental desideratum! (In many oriental
languages, we're told, there was no real word for the concept.) In
any event, the Eastern Worldview is the only one which, as I said
before, has a proved track record... which has been demonstrably
able to operate a civilization for thousands of years in a manner
that's fairly decent, in its way. Though we here in this room would
find life tyrannical and oppressively boring.
*  Finally, there is a fourth mentality, one which has always
    been a minor theme, a tiny minority in every culture --
    until ours. What is that fourth meme? One could possibly
    call it The West, but I find that self-serving and
    tendentious. Rather, in an article a few years ago, I called
    it the Dogma of Otherness.
The Dogma of Otherness is a worldview that actually encourages
an appetite for newness. A hunger for diversity. An eagerness for
change. Tolerance, naturally, plays a major role in the legends
spread by this culture. (Look at the underlying message contained
in most episodes of situation comedies!) A second pervasive
thread, seen in the vast majority of our films and novels, is
suspicion of authority.

Historically, this is a very strange meme, one which encourages
such art forms as science fiction, and is in turn spread quite
effectively by such forms. Its notion of a Golden Age, for
instance, does not reside in some lost, lamented past but in a
future that our children may create, if we hand them tools and a
better world to work with. The importance of this reversal in the
perceived timeflow of wisdom cannot be overstated. It represents
a sea change in the human relationship with time.

Naturally, this way of looking at the world was rare in the past.
Even today, it would be an exaggeration to suggest that this meme
"owns" territories like Europe or America. Even where it is
strongest, it must contend ceaselessly with any other forces
inimical to its goals. There are lots of Californians, for instance,
who personally emphasize macho, paranoiac or homogenizing
values, instead of tolerance and otherness.

What we can say, nevertheless, is that Otherness has become
powerful in the official morality of most western societies. Look
at the vocabulary used in most debates on issues concerning the
public. So-called 'political correctness' can be seen in ironic light,
as a rather pushy patriotism in favor of the tolerance meme! But
even the other side often wraps itself in phrases like "freedom," or
"color blindness," or "individual rights."

Even more important, though, is the fact that millions accept the
deeply utopian notion that our institutions must be improvable,
and that active criticism is one of the best ways to elicit change.

                      Scenarios for the Future
All right, I've put up four strawman worldviews, suggesting that
they are engaged in a struggle over the deep programming of
human minds. Feel free to accept or reject this arrangement... after
all, it's only a model. Or a meme.

Still, I've thought of an amusing experiment you might play, using
these four protagonists. Try to picture what might happen if a ship
full of extraterrestrials landed in a Macho culture, or a Paranoid
one, or in the East.

You get three wildly different scenarios, don't you? Now imagine
if aliens made contact with people brought up in the fourth way I
mentioned -- under the Dogma of Otherness. Forget Hollywood
pathos about nasty CIA types and trigger-happy rednecks. Try to
picture a flying saucer setting down in today's Los Angeles. The
National Guard might be called out to encircle the vessel, but they
wouldn't face inward. They would be far too busy facing in the
opposite direction, protecting our alien visitors from autograph
hounds, groupies, and hordes seeking novelty.

The first thing that Californians would ask aliens is -- "Have you
got any new cuisine?"

This fourth worldview is related to what we started out discussing
this evening... the Look Forward way of conceptualizing truth and
knowledge. The notion that, while some theories may be better
than others, all can profit from criticism and experimentation.

Emphasizing diversity, this meme even welcomes a little
disturbing eccentricity, now and then. You can earn a living as an
iconoclast in the West today, especially if you make it
entertaining. One gets ego points for being different, if you do it
with style.

                      The Underlying Struggle
Make no mistake, this competition among driving inner memes is
one of life or death.

Not necessarily (I hope!) for the human beings who host these
infectious ideas, but almost certainly among the memes
themselves. For one cannot be both tolerant and paranoid, or both
deeply conformist and loving of eccentricity, can one? Again, I
am not talking about nations or religions or superficial cultural
things like language or rituals -- though diversity of such things
will certainly thrive far better under Otherness than under any of
the other worldviews that proved so intolerant across millennia.
No, it's a war over whether diversity itself can and will be a
paramount human value.

How is the war going?

I can't really say which zeitgeist is winning at this point. Though
the Paranoia Meme, held intact for so long by the Russian Empire,
does seem to be dissolving, slowly, as a new generation takes over
which never knew war. (Indeed, it's remarkable how closely
events have followed the memic model since I first began
speculating about this, five years ago.)

The western worldview has a few advantages, such as the growing
acceptance of English as the world's common tongue, and the
fantastic effectiveness of the modern university in educating
modern minds. Liberation of women seems to be profoundly
effective at spreading this meme. Acting on an even broader scale
is the power of the West's propaganda department... which some
call Hollywood.

Still... the other memes are much older. And they seem to resonate
with people at a deeper level, echoing their fears, their lusts, and
their ancient dreams of achieving order by following strong
chiefs. Insecurity seems to be their best ally.

This may be why feudal fantasy novels and films about kings and
wizards are still popular even in the modern West, a society who's
greatest accomplishment was to smash the steep hierarchies that
monarchs and magicians used to erect in order to oppress us, for
thousands of years.

The jury is still out whether the tolerance meme -- or other-
fetishism -- is really any saner than older, paranoiac ways. No
tribe ever before had the guts to make tolerance and individualism
paramount themes, especially in the messages they feed the young
and poor and powerless. Traditionally, the aristocracy would rally
those below by pointing to some outside threat, thus making
conformity a principal virtue. The whole existence of many tribes
was based upon "It's them against us, and us should win."

No guarantees.

And yet, I know where I stand. My preference cannot help coming
out in my writing. Not just a shaman or an entertainer, I'm also a
propagandist in this war. I'd like to think that people come away
from my books feeling just a little more tolerant than before, or a
little more eager for change and diversity in the future of this
world.

In fact, I think that we should go forth and crush every other
worldview that doesn't promote tolerance!
                              . . .
All right. That remark was intended to be ironic and I'm certainly
glad most of you in the audience laughed just now! I would have
felt a shiver if you hadn't!

Let's check though... how many of you, despite your laughter,
agree at least in part with what I just said?

As I expected. You are intolerant of intolerance... and at the same
time amused by the paradox this puts you in!

Well, I'm not surprised. The fact that you are capable of laughing
at yourself means, by my reckoning, that you are members of a
worldview that says "Don't take yourself too damn seriously." Yet
another emblematic trait of this new meme.

Before, fathers, mothers and teachers used to say, "I shall keep all
alien notions and foreign ideas away from my children, in order to
protect them." None of those ancestors would have felt
uncomfortable, as so many of you out there are feeling right now,
with the very notion of winning and losing. They simply took it
for granted.

Now, though, for the first time, we have a cultural mind-set that
has parents saying to their kids -- "I've taught you basic values.
Therefore, I don't care what ideas you play with, because I know
you'll be a decent person, whatever notions you're exposed to."

If this worldview wins, naturally there will be Kabuki theater and
Bantu dancers and Sufi dervishes and all manner of diverse
cultural treasures preserved from the past and around the world.
Being of a mind to romanticize anything that is different, children
of the west will rebel against the very thought of such things ever
going extinct. They'll be trained from birth to hunger for diversity.

Perhaps this is nothing other than the development of the wold's
first multicellular meme. The first in which exclusion has turned
into inclusion. If so, we are, indeed, in for interesting times.

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