Humanity’s Greatest Memes: #1 – The Lore Meme
Internet memes are fun, but they don’t reflect the serious intent of the original concept. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins introduced the meme in his 1976 book, “The Selfish Gene”. He calls memes the “genes” of human cultures, our device for transmitting critical survival information down the time stream. Today’s societies are still shaped by the great memes of our past. Here we illustrate the impact of some of the most important memes in human history.
First is the meme that kickstarts human culture, the Lore meme. Some of the higher animals have cultures, passing critical survival information down the time stream through the living memories of a succession of mothers. The ability to use abstract language for this purpose sets humans apart. All human societies have fully incorporated the Lore meme, with origin myths and tales of heroes, passed down orally or by more clever means[1].
Some societies have not evolved much beyond the Lore meme because they have not interacted with other cultures. Their survival strategy for dealing with strangers has been to run away rather than compete. They were pushed onto the least desirable lands. At the other end of the scale, the most productive lands were the focus of the most competitive cultures. These cultures have experienced more meme competition. Their social evolution has gone through a lot more changes.
The Great Memes describe survival issues and strategies. Two of them come as a pair. First was the Agriculture meme, “We can grow food rather than chase it!” This was followed shortly by the Barbarian meme, “We can survive by raiding our neighbors’ siloes!” This strategy was not available prior to farming. Hunter-gatherers can’t carry enough food around to make it worthwhile.
The Barbarian meme leads to empire, where a core culture dominates neighboring cultures by force. It is a great meme in the same sense that Voldemort was a great wizard. It created a two-class system of oppressor and oppressed, whereas a hunter/gatherer band is essentially a classless society. The development of a third – the middle class – took thousands of years.
As a form of government, empire is about the worst way to treat one’s neighbors. “Let’s eat our neighbors!” is worse, but the cannibal meme has fortunately died out. “Let’s trust our neighbors!” has turned out far more survivable. It took time to build the institutions that made the Trust meme possible. The Treaties of Westphalia are often cited as critical to the development of the nation-state, one of the key institutions involved. It is ironic that the treaties were signed by western kings, who thus managed to make their kingdoms obsolete. Western civilization reached other kings, and some are still in king mode, though they are legally nation-states now. The extent to which their cultures absorbed the Trust meme depends more on the flexibility of the culture than the length of the contact. Still, non-western kingdoms survived contact better than tribes or clans. Those forms of organization got pushed off the productive lands and survive today only in the least desirable places. Nations did the pushing, as well as empires and kings. In general, nations don’t attack nations, but will take tribal lands. Empires will take anything. (need an aggression matrix here)
The West created laws and institutions that allowed the development of the Trust meme. It made us rich but did not replace the Barbarian meme. Newly created wealth was first used to increase military power. Another round of empire-building commenced. The new nation-states flexed their muscles in the same old imperial ways. These days, that sort of thing is frowned on. There are still a few empires around, and a few peoples under their thumbs. Just about every culture has had imperial entanglements. The only societies that didn’t are the Uncontacted Tribes. Their standard reaction to others was to run away.
Societies that chose to interact with others have tried many forms of organization since we started growing our food rather than chasing it. Empire was the largest form we’ve tried, and along with the city-state, the oldest. We tried kingdoms where the land was good or clan and tribe where poor land couldn’t support organizations so refined. Even less organized is the gang, an ad-hoc group formed when all else fails.
All of these forms of human togetherness are spontaneously
formed, as is characteristic of complex adaptive systems. (link)
Most societies have gone one level of abstraction further, making symbols for the sounds in their words, and storing their collected wisdom on clay or paper. Storing memes pictorially would have rated high in old Egypt or China. In the struggle between societies and their memes, the phonetic alphabet definitely won. Arabic numerals, abstract symbols for the number of things, also won. In terms of adaptability, Arabic numerals may be the easiest major meme for a culture to adopt and fully absorb. Compare to the Trust meme below.
The Trust Meme
The Barbarian meme led to empire, where one culture dominates its neighbors by use of force. This is not a nice way to treat your neighbors. Most games, like sports competitions, are zero-sum games – one winner, one loser. War, which is the empire’s forte, is a negative sum game. Even when you win, it costs lives and treasure. This is not always obvious if you are winning. In the olden days, it seemed the only way to get rich was to take stuff from someone else.
The best example of a positive-sum game, where both participants win, is trade. If I have two rifles and you have two hunting dogs, the first gun or dog is more valuable than the second. I’ll give you my second gun for your second dog. Both of us become better hunters.
Even barbarians can make such trades, but only face-to-face. The trick to modern civilization is to feel comfortable making a trade with a total stranger. This requires trust. One can use middleman, who knows both participants. More broadly, such middlemen can band into organizations with interchangeable middleman. Guilds started in the Middle Ages. These evolved into the second-most important organization man has created – the corporation. Corporations only work because they have proved trustworthy.
Topics of interest with respect to memes include how far and how quickly they spread. Also interesting is which cultures adopt new memes. In this regard, the speed of the Japanese incorporation of western memes is astonishing. They seemed ready to trust foreign ways.