“[E]nacting the [anti-rational] meme causes another person (typically one’s child) to lose the ability to think critically about the behaviour in question, and to become unable to refrain from enacting the meme himself.”
– David Deutsch
From the archives: Posted on 30th January 1999
Leonie wrote:
“The problem is the difference between good and bad from the perspective of survival, and good and bad from our moral perspective. Evolution is the survival of the fittest genes, not the best people. The same goes for behaviour. If coercive behaviour, violence etc make more people who use it survive, and is easier to encourage people to adopt, it will be more common than non-coercive patterns, which, whilst making people happier, might hinder their survival.”
You’ve made a small but vital mistake there. When you speak of genes, you get it right by saying “Evolution is the survival of the fittest genes, not the best people”. In other words, evolution favours genes that survive better than other genes, and that remains true even when this harms the individuals carrying that gene, or the species as a whole.
However, when you turn to memes, you have not carried over the same lesson. You couldn’t resist saying “if [a morally bad meme] makes more PEOPLE who use it survive … [that meme] will be more common”. But this is false. The number of people who survive using it is completely irrelevant; only the survival of the meme is relevant to whether it dies out or becomes prevalent.
Let me just emphasise this important point with an example: Consider the idea of committing suicide by a given method. Suicide methods are memes (indeed it is well known that they are highly subject to fashion). Even though no one survives enacting them, they spread from one person to another, and whether a given one of them becomes prevalent depends in a complex way on how it fits in with other memes, what sort of publicity it causes, and so on. It is just not true that a suicide-method meme spreads if it “makes more people who use it survive”!
Now, the next part of that same sentence is much truer, where you say that a meme will survive if “is easier to encourage people to adopt”. Yet even so, there seem to be misconceptions in that way of putting it. First of all, it’s not the memes that you adopt that count, it’s the memes that you enact. Secondly, ‘encouragement’ is a very rare method of transmitting memes. The most common method is where enacting the meme causes another person (typically one’s child) to lose the ability to think critically about the behaviour in question, and to become unable to refrain from enacting the meme himself. The next most common method is where a person observes someone enacting the meme, forms the conjecture that enacting it would be good, concludes that the conjecture is true, and enacts it.
Finally, you say that “[a good, noncoercive meme], whilst making people happier, might hinder their survival”. Now, this is indeed true: more often than not, the best thing to do is not that which will maximise your number of surviving offspring. Yet I can’t help feeling that you say this in a rather dismal frame of mind. You seem to think that the spread of the new meme requires some sort of sacrifice or trade off: WE (good, noncoercive people) can be happier but THEY (the nasty, coercive people) are better at surviving—and therefore they have an inherent tendency to WIN, unless some sort of miracle occurs. Do you see that this is just the same mistake as above? What counts is the survival OF THE MEME, not of the person, or their descendants, and this is no dismal conclusion leading to death and destruction but a very good thing.
Consider the meme of ‘family planning’ (viz. taking steps to have far fewer than the biologically possible number of children). This meme has spread like wildfire in our society throughout this century. Someone in the year 1900, say, who analysed the situation as you (Leonie) do, would have concluded that people who adopt the family planning meme may be happier, but they reproduce less well than people who adopt the old ‘go forth and multiply’ meme, and so the family planning meme is doomed to go extinct unless a miracle happens. And that’s a mistake, because causing its holders to reproduce more did the old meme no good at all. All it did was produce more potential recruits for the new meme, which is now absolutely dominant.
See also:
- What is an ‘anti-rational meme’—or any kind of ‘meme’?! And how does this have anything to do with being a parent?
- What if a child wants to buy something the parent is boycotting for moral reasons?
- The inefficiency of subjecting unwilling children to unwanted mathematics lessons
David Deutsch, 1999, ‘The fittest memes—survival of the meme’, https://takingchildrenseriously.com/the-fittest-memes-survival-of-the-meme