The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (64 page)

For a society to be static, all its memes must be unchanging or changing too slowly to be noticed. From the perspective of our rapidly changing society, such a state of affairs is hard even to imagine. For instance, consider an isolated, primitive society that has, for whatever reason, remained almost unchanged for many generations. Why? Quite possibly no one in the society even wants it to change, because they
can conceive of no other way of life. Nevertheless, its members are not immune from pain, hunger, grief, fear or other forms of physical and mental suffering. They try to think of ideas to alleviate some of that suffering. Some of those ideas are original, and occasionally one of them would actually help. It need be only a small, tentative improvement: a way of hunting or growing food with slightly less effort, or of making slightly better tools; a better way of recording debts or laws; a subtle change in the relationship between husband and wife, or between parent and child; a slightly different attitude towards the society’s rulers or gods. What will happen next?

The person with that idea may well want to tell other people. Those who believe the idea will see that it could make life a little less nasty, brutish and short. They will tell their families and friends, and they theirs. This idea will be competing in people’s minds with other ideas about how to make life better, most of them presumably false. But suppose, for the sake of argument, that this particular true idea happens to be believed, and spreads through the society.

Then the society will have been changed. It may not have changed very much, but this was merely the change caused by a single person, thinking of a single idea. So multiply all that by the number of thinking minds in the society, and by a lifetime’s worth of thought in each of them, and let this continue for only a few generations, and the result is an exponentially increasing, revolutionary force transforming every aspect of the society.

But in a static society that beginning of infinity never happens. Despite the fact that I have assumed nothing other than that people try to improve their lives, and that they cannot transmit their ideas perfectly, and that information subject to variation and selection evolves, I have entirely failed to imagine a static society in this story.

For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo. However, that alone could not suppress change. First,
no
enactment of a meme is completely identical to that of the previous generation. It is infeasible to specify every aspect of acceptable behaviour with
perfect precision. Second, it is impossible to tell in advance which small deviations from traditional behaviour would initiate further changes. Third, once a variant idea has begun to spread to even one more person – which means that people are preferring it – preventing it from being transmitted further is extremely difficult. Therefore no society could remain static solely by suppressing new ideas once they have been created.

That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.

How is this done? The details are variable and not relevant here, but the sort of thing that happens is that people growing up in such a society acquire a set of values for judging themselves and everyone else which amounts to ridding themselves of distinctive attributes and seeking only conformity with the society’s constitutive memes. They not only enact those memes: they see themselves as existing only in order to enact them. So, not only do such societies enforce qualities such as obedience, piety and devotion to duty, their members’ sense of their own selves is invested in the same standards. People know no others. So they feel pride and shame, and form all their aspirations and opinions, by the criterion of how thoroughly they subordinate themselves to the society’s memes.

How do memes ‘know’ how to achieve all such complex, reproducible effects on the ideas and behaviour of human beings? They do not, of course,
know
: they are not sentient beings. They merely contain that knowledge implicitly. How did they come by that knowledge? It evolved. The memes exist, at any instant, in many variant forms, and those are subject to selection in favour of
faithful replication
. For every long-lived meme of a static society, millions of variants of it will have fallen by the wayside because they lacked that tiny extra piece of information, that extra degree of ruthless efficiency in preventing rivals from being thought of or acted upon, that slight advantage in
psychological leverage, or whatever it took to make it spread through the population better than its rivals and, once it was prevalent, to get it copied and enacted with just that extra degree of fidelity. If ever a variant happened to be a little better at inducing behaviour with those self-replicating properties, it soon became prevalent. As soon as it did, there were again many variants of that variant, which were again subject to the same evolutionary pressure. Thus, successive versions of the meme accumulated knowledge that enabled them ever more reliably to inflict their characteristic style of damage on their human victims. Like genes, they may also confer benefits, though, even then, they are unlikely to do so optimally. Just as genes for the eye implicitly ‘know’ the laws of optics, so the long-lived memes of a static society implicitly possess knowledge of the human condition, and use it mercilessly to evade the defences and exploit the weaknesses of the human minds that they enslave.

A remark about timescales: Static societies, by this definition, are not perfectly unchanging. They are static on the timescale that humans can notice; but memes cannot prevent changes that are slower than that. So meme evolution still occurs in static societies, but too slowly for most members of the society to notice, most of the time. For instance, palaeontologists examining tools from the Old Stone Age cannot date them, by their shapes, to an accuracy better than many thousands of years, because tools at that time simply did not improve any faster than that. (Note that this is still much faster than biological evolution.) Examining a tool from the static society of ancient Rome or Egypt, one may be able to date it by its technology alone to the nearest century, say. But historians in the future examining cars and other technological artefacts of today will easily be able to date them to the nearest decade – and in the case of computer technology to the nearest year or less.

Meme evolution tends towards making
memes
static, but not necessarily whole societies. Like genes, memes do not evolve to benefit the group. Nevertheless, just as gene evolution can create long-lasting organisms and confer some benefits on them, so it is not surprising that meme evolution can sometimes create static societies, cooperate to keep them static, and help them to function by embodying truths. It is also not surprising that memes are often useful (though seldom
optimally) to their holders. Just as organisms are the tools of genes, so individuals are used by memes to achieve their ‘purpose’ of spreading themselves through the population. And, to do this, memes sometimes confer benefits. One difference from the biological case, however, is that, while organisms are
nothing but
the slaves of all their genes, memes only ever control part of a person’s thinking, even in the most slavishly static of societies. That is why some people use the metaphor of memes as
viruses
– which control part of the functionality of cells to propagate themselves. Some viruses do just install themselves into the host’s DNA and do little else except participate in being copied from then on – but that is unlike memes, which
must
cause their distinctive behaviours and use knowledge to cause their own copying. Other viruses destroy their host cell – just as some memes destroy their holders: when someone commits suicide in a newsworthy way, there is often a spate of ‘copycat suicides’.

The overarching selection pressure on memes is towards being faithfully replicated. But, within that, there is also pressure to do as little damage to the holder’s mind as possible, because that mind is what the human uses to be long-lived enough to be able to enact the meme’s behaviours as much as possible. This pushes memes in the direction of causing a
finely tuned
compulsion in the holder’s mind: ideally, this would be just the inability to refrain from enacting that particular meme (or memeplex). Thus, for example, long-lived religions typically cause fear of specific supernatural entities, but they do not cause general fearfulness or gullibility, because that would both harm the holders in general and make them more susceptible to rival memes. So the evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage to be confined to a relatively narrow area of the recipients’ thinking, but to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost if they subsequently consider deviating from the meme’s prescribed behaviours.

A static society forms when there is no escape from this effect: all significant behaviour, all relationships between people, and all thoughts are subordinated to causing faithful replication of the memes. In all areas
controlled
by the memes, no critical faculties are exercised. No innovation is tolerated, and almost none is attempted. This destruction of human minds makes static societies almost unimaginable from our
perspective. Countless human beings, hoping throughout lifetimes, and for generations, for their suffering to be relieved, not only fail to make progress in realizing any such hope: they largely fail even to try to make any, or even to think about trying. If they do see an opportunity, they reject it. The spirit of creativity with which we are all born is systematically extinguished in them before it can ever create anything new.

A static society involves – in a sense
consists
of – a relentless struggle to prevent knowledge from growing. But there is more to it than that. For there is no reason to expect that a rapidly spreading idea, if one did happen to arise in a static society, would be true or useful. That is another aspect missing from my story of the static society above. I
assumed
that the change would be for the better. It might not have been, especially as the lack of critical sophistication in a static society would leave people vulnerable to false and harmful ideas from which their taboos did not protect them. For instance, when the Black Death plague destabilized the static societies of Europe in the fourteenth century, the new ideas for plague-prevention that spread best were extremely bad ones. Many people decided that this was the end of the world, and that therefore attempting any further earthly improvements was pointless. Many went out to kill Jews or ‘witches’. Many crowded together in churches and monasteries to pray (thus unwittingly facilitating the spread of the disease, which was carried by fleas). A cult called the Flagellants arose, whose members devoted their lives to flogging themselves, and to preaching all the above measures, in order to prove to God that his children were sorry. All these ideas were functionally harmful as well as factually false, and were eventually suppressed by the authorities in their drive to return to stasis.

Thus, ironically, there is much truth in the typical static-society fear that any change is much more likely to do harm than good. A static society is indeed in constant danger of being harmed or destroyed by a newly arising dysfunctional meme. However, in the aftermath of the Black Death a few true and functional ideas did also spread, and may well have contributed to ending that particular static society in an unusually good way (with the Renaissance).

Static societies survive by effectively eliminating the type of evolution that is unique to memes, namely creative variation intended to meet
the holders’ individual preferences. In the absence of that, meme evolution resembles gene evolution more closely, and some of the grim conclusions of the naive analogies between them apply after all. Static societies do tend to settle issues by violence, and they do tend to sacrifice the welfare of individuals for the ‘good’ of (that is to say, for the prevention of changes in) society. I mentioned that people who rely on such analogies end up either advocating a static society or condoning violence and oppression. We now see that those two responses are essentially the same: oppression is what it takes to keep a society static; oppression of a given kind will not last long unless the society is static.

Since the sustained, exponential growth of knowledge has unmistakable effects, we can deduce without historical research that every society on Earth before the current Western civilization has either been static or has been destroyed within a few generations. The golden ages of Athens and Florence are examples of the latter, but there may have been many others. This directly contradicts the widely held belief that individuals in primitive societies were happy in a way that has not been possible since – that they were unconstrained by social convention and other imperatives of civilization, and hence were able to achieve self-expression and fulfilment of their needs and desires. But primitive societies (including tribes of hunter-gatherers) must all have been static societies, because if ever one ceased to be static it would soon cease to be primitive, or else destroy itself by losing its distinctive knowledge. In the latter case, the growth of knowledge would still be inhibited by the raw violence which would immediately replace the static society’s institutions. For once violence is mediating changes, they will typically not be for the better. Since static societies cannot exist without effectively extinguishing the growth of knowledge, they cannot allow their members much opportunity to pursue happiness. (Ironically, creating knowledge is itself a natural human need and desire, and static societies, however primitive, ‘unnaturally’ suppress it.) From the point of view of every individual in such a society, its creativity-suppressing mechanisms are catastrophically harmful. Every static society must leave its members chronically baulked in their attempts to achieve anything positive for themselves as people, or indeed anything at all, other than their meme-mandated behaviours. It can perpetuate itself only by suppressing its members’ self-expression
and breaking their spirits, and its memes are exquisitely adapted to doing this.