Saturday, December 16, 2006

Memes mean arbitrariness and conscious choice

by rjon on Fri 15 Dec 2006 06:29 PM PST Profile Permanent Link Reading D.G. Anderson's Integral Review paper: Of Syntheses and Surprises: Toward a Critical Integral Theory, I note that he uses the term 'meme' in a colloquial way that may be misleading in his deconstruction of the impact of Sri Aurobindo's writing on "Integral theory" ...But, as Stephen Jay Gould points out in his NYRB article "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism," in the article Rich previously posted on SCIY titled "Darwinian Fundamentalism (part 2)"...
by Debashish on Fri 15 Dec 2006 07:12 PM PST Profile Permanent Link Richard Dawkins' idea of "memes" has traveled into cultural theory as the latest attempt at adequately explaining the persistence of ideas, qualities and tastes in ethnic cultures. But Gould is quite right, in that this term gives a spurious impression of natural law and evolutionism to something which has an element of arbitrariness and conscious choice to it.
First off, biological natural selection works at the species level, while cultural selection works at the level of human habitus. Then, Darwinian inheritance is unconscious and statistical, while Lamarckian inheritance is willed. Enduring ideas and characteristics in (sub)cultures are partly willed through "writing and education" as Gould states, but also partly statistical. This is what makes them complex. Moreover, the principle at work in natural selection is survivability of a species, while in the case of cultural traits, cultural identity is partly constructed through choice, partly the persistence of taste and memory and only partly a matter of unconscious survival. So you are right, as with many other importations from the lexicon of Science into cultural theory (or the other "human sciences") , "memes" are an inexact and not very accurate translation which end up conveying an erroneous impression of rigorous law.

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