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Introduction (this is a provisional extract from Urban Legends by Nick Harding)
MEMES
“meme (mi:m), n. Biol. (shortened from mimeme ... that which is imitated, after GENE n.) “An element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation”.
The O.E.D.
Why do Urban Legends possess a durable survivability? Why, despite our growing understanding of the world in a more enlightened age do these stories continue to be told and passed on?
One theory involves the idea of memes.
In 1976 the eminent Professor Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of Memes in his seminal work The Selfish Gene. In this he describes memes as being a vector for the transfer of ideas throughout culture – anything from a tune, a catchphrase to an acquired habit or the correct way to build an arch. This simple but effective concept was taken up and developed further by Dr Susan Blackmore in her important book The Meme Machine. Of course the idea of memes is a controversial science, and like any new theory it has its supporters and denouncers in equal measure but it is one that is rapidly gaining ground towards acceptance. Memes, under the umbrella term Memetics can offer us new theories about human evolution taking in altruistic behaviour, the development of consciousness and language along the way. Memes may in fact affect us at the genetic level, an exciting enough concept in itself.
But what are memes and how do they relate to Urban Legends?
In short a Meme is ‘ A self replicating element of culture, passed on by imitation.’
Memes, in many respects, behave in a not dissimilar way to genes, as both are replicators. Variation and selection occur when the material is copied or passed on. Likewise with Urban Legends – adaptations, details, place, even the characters alter on each replication, in other words the telling of the story, but the basic heart of the meme remains the same. In the Phantom Hitchhiker the country the story takes place in may change from the US to the UK, the sex of the hitchhiker switches from female to male back to female, it may be someone’s daughter, niece, grandchild yet the basic storyline remains exactly the same, that of a hitchhiker picked up on a lonely road then mysteriously disappearing and for the good Samaritan to discover that the person they offered a lift to has in fact been dead for two, five or ten years. The story evolves, mutates adapts itself to the society in which it exists and survives by taking on specific cultural references to enable it to replicate further.
In other words an urban legend is a meme and on the whole a relatively harmless one at that, like for example a children’s songs. Although there are many memes that could be described as selfish and it could be said destructive in nature – replicating themselves purely for survival reasons. Computer viruses are one example.
As memes are transferred they lose information and pick up new data, which can lead ultimately to changes in human culture. Sometimes memes occur in large groups or congregate together and are passed on en masse. These are called co-adapted meme complexes, or memeplexes. Organised religions are the best example of this where a whole panoply of memes i.e. rules, regulations and credos are passed on. One only has to study all the world’s religions to see that even there, memes are at work changing their basic tenets or creating schisms within these belief systems. If memes were not at work there would not exist so many variations on a theme. How many versions of Christianity exist in the world today with each claiming to be the only ones party to the truth? The Religion meme has certainly affected human culture in a myriad of ways.
Ideas like good and evil are in fact memes. In the real world there is no independent force at work called good nor is there one called evil but these are notions that have somehow survived to the point where most of us cannot look at the world without defining something as good or evil, seeing it in terms of black and white and not shades of grey. Of course these kinds of memes can be useful as a social control. Religions, which Dawkins calls ‘viruses of the mind’, use the false ideas of good and evil as a way to propagate their meme material by threatening adherents to pass on what they have learnt to others as a method to ensure its survival. Religious organisations also use missionaries, a very obvious meme vector; the memeplex stored in their brain – the belief system - is transferred directly into other cultures using a meme machine in this case the Missionary. Chain letters are another meme that use a threat strategy to replicate. The reader is threatened with a psychological attack usually along the lines of a trite phrase about suffering bad luck if the letter is not mailed to “x” number of people within twenty four hours. This threat is backed with a positive enforcer – that those who have done have been suitably rewarded. Religious memes use the same tactic by offering a ‘heavenly’ reward and eternal peace in some after life.
In one sense memes can also be termed viruses of the mind and could be said to be just as contagious as their biological counterparts. They are spread almost subliminally from person to person or group to group; disseminated throughout society by social interaction, verbal communication and through the media, where large scale memes and indeed the small scale can be replicated and spread on a global level. With the development and increasing proliferation of the World Wide Web and the Internet, memes can be injected into mass culture at the speed of light and with almost instantaneous television transmission stories often mistaken as truth, can be beamed from country to country almost as fast. More often than not we are entirely unaware that we are watching and absorbing memes, busy replicating themselves within the constant stream of information that pours from computer screens or television sets into our brains where they are stored to await their inevitable adaptation and eventual transference.
Prior to the global communications revolution memes would have taken a long time to proliferate and would have developed within a limited and somewhat confined space focused for example on one tribe or a lose affiliation of tribes, sharing perhaps limited contact until an invading nation brought their own ideas, modes of dress and more often than not their all powerful religion to bare on an indigenous peoples. New ways of thinking, of correct attitude and behaviour were injected subconsciously and no doubt purposefully into the now out of date society of the conquered, to smooth the transition and therefore benefiting, on the whole those who had moved in to dominate but there would, of course have been some degree of reciprocation - meme transfer is not just one-way.
Trade routes too, would have offered a way for these cultural viruses to spread but only, as it were at horsepower rates. Empires may have risen and fallen but so much of what they brought to a conquered nation lived on as near invisible influences that evolved and adapted to survive, their sources forgotten but their telling strong as ever. American ghost stories are the natural progression from their British sources but have taken on the cultural references of the new world. A tale set in Essex would not be as powerful as one set down the road in Nantucket.
Memes operate on a basic level e.g. a craze for yo-yos that sweep through a school to the large scale in the shape of a religion or a recognisable urban legend. Many businesses and companies rely on memes to spread their messages to society at large. Adverts use memes in the form of catchphrases or jingles – which enter the mind and take up root and a day, a week maybe years later we find ourselves humming a tune from a commercial that in all likelihood has not aired on television for a decade or more. Music itself is a widespread propagator of memes – memes that are styles of music, chord sequences, flourishes and so on. Some years ago the meme of ‘sampling’ started – and there reached a point where every song that made the charts had some form of copied sound within its structure. Musicians themselves and particularly those involved with composition pick up meme styles and pass them on – e.g. much of the Brit Pop revival of the early and mid Nineties contained references and signatures reminiscent of music of the Sixties.
Memes may also be passed on as types of behaviour. Richard Dawkins describes tutoring a young woman who adopted an unusual response to a question set her. If the answer required serious thought she would close her eyes tightly, drop her head to her chest and then freeze for half a minute or so while she pondered the question. She would then look up and offer a fluent and intelligent answer. When Dawkins imitated this to a colleague the response was “That’s Wittgenstein!” Dawkins discovered that this pupil was the daughter of admirers of the philosopher from whom they had picked up this affectation subconsciously transmitting it on to her. Now this book has picked up the baton and become a transmitting device for that behavioural meme as well shifting from a behaviour vector to one of the written word, a clear case of memes adapting to survive. It would be interesting to find out, as Dawkins asked, where Wittgenstein picked up that meme.
Some memes become well known and use all kinds of methods of transmission. Today the mass media offer the perfect growing medium for memes. A certain degree of social acceptance is attached to a particular design or name – especially one that has been around for a long time – for example take the name of a well known clothing manufacturer who use the name of an ancient Greek winged goddess for victory as their logo with its famous ‘tick’ symbol. The name itself has been part of the collective subconscious for thousands of years and at the very least had a life before its resurgence as a brand name. More people today of course, will know the new meaning rather than the original source but this is a clear example of a meme hijacking an extant name to continue its existence, because memes evolve, change shape, adapt so as to allow their continued existence which is akin to the evolutionary idea of survival of the fittest. Only the strong memes will survive.
Urban Legends evolve as well and indeed the strong ones do survive. They adapt and grow with each telling and have a life of their own. As the psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett said, the storyteller embellishes every tale told with details forgotten or added and the whole iteration and passing on of the tale becomes one large game of Chinese Whispers.
Memes act like living organisms but to suggest that memes are biological is to hint at the possibility that they can be extracted and dissected under a microscope. They cannot nor can they be measured or indeed quantified but they do use a biological medium in which to profligate i.e. humans so they should in a sense be regarded as living structures not just metaphorically but technically.
Certainly memes are everywhere and a great deal of culture thrives on them but we are not unwilling participants in their survival. We are infected minds certainly but nor are we just passive robots passing on Urban Legends for their sake only and as Dr Blackmore says, they are tools with which we think but not everything we think about is a meme. The American philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that our minds and selves are created by an interplay of memes that are constantly shifting and changing – new ones accepted, old ones rejected.
Perhaps there is something of a symbiotic nature to them. When we try to fit in with particular groups we adopt the fashion, mannerisms and ways of speaking common to that human sub set. We are imitators certainly but we do this to fit in, to be accepted and to feel wanted. There is perhaps our own survival at stake in a kind of mutual gene – meme symbiosis where one helps the other. A loner will soon find his or genes going extinct so belonging to a group of a mutual status allows the greater possibility of the gene’s survival. Memes need genes to continue as well. In groups we tell stories to each other in a kind of bonding process. At a party the guests stand around in groups discussing each other’s lives and retelling stories they have heard – (in some cases these stories turn out to be urban legends). But other memes are exchanged here including body language, vocal intonations and delivery, jokes, even fashion.
Of course some memes are destructive – notions such as ‘all scientists are mad’ – as portrayed in films and television cartoons (mostly) is one such example. To simply dismiss the idea that all scientists are mad as harmless and done in jest is, in the long term, bad for all of us. A good number of urban legends, as we have seen, carry a moral message at their heart but there is nothing ‘right’ in the continuation of a stereotype meme, so what is at work here?
Various memes succeed because they are genuinely useful to us and behave in a benign beneficial fashion, for example scientific thought and theories, literature or art. In opposition to this other more malign memes use a variety of tricks and manipulations to get themselves copied regardless of whether the information is beneficial to us or not. In short they have to survive – they must replicate and to them that is all that matters, the data they carry does not. This latter group are often called “selfish memes”, a reference to Dawkin’s idea of the Selfish Gene.
Some memes may in fact conflict with each other to survive. Take for example the iconic image of the Swastika. Before the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party the Swastika or Fylfot was a symbol of good luck or the sun. During the war and continuing right up to the present day the Swastika’s meaning is forever linked to great acts of barbarism and to most of the Western world is a ‘symbol of evil’. But in Buddhist countries particularly Tibet the Swastika symbol is still one that possesses a positive representation. In this case though, there is no doubt which meme is more prolific but there may come a time when the Swastika meme will revert back to its original meaning but only when a point is reached where its survival is threatened and to continue it will have to adapt and evolve.
There is no doubting the fact that urban legends, as they are passed on evolve and adapt to their cultural environment and that the basic heart of the myth remains the same as do the principal elements that go to make up its fabric despite regional and national variations. What changes within any urban legend are the elements that allow it to be transmitted – it changes its coat much like a virus – to survive. To all intents and purposes this description fits a meme completely.
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