The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

  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 so
ciety 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.

  Dynamic societies

  But our society (the West) is not a static society. It is the only known instance of a long-lived dynamic (rapidly changing) society. It is unique in history for its ability to mediate long-term, rapid, peaceful change and improvement, including improvements in the broad consensus about values and aims, as I described in Chapter 13. This has been made possible by the emergence of a radically different class of memes which, though still ‘selfish’, are not necessarily harmful to individuals.

  To explain the nature of these new memes, let me pose the question: what sort of meme can cause itself to be replicated for long periods in a rapidly changing environment? In such an environment, people are continually being faced with unpredictable problems and opportunities. Hence their needs and wishes are changing unpredictably too. How can a meme remain unchanged under such a regime? The memes of a static society remain unchanged by effectively eliminating all the individuals’ choices: people choose neither which ideas to acquire nor which to enact. Those memes also combine to make the society static, so that people’s circumstances vary as little as possible. But once the stasis has broken down, and people are choosing, they will choose, in part, according to their individual circumstances and ideas, in which case memes will face selection criteria that vary unpredictably from recipient to recipient as well as over time.

  To be transferred to a single person, a meme need seem useful only to that person. To be transferred to a group of similar people under unchanging circumstances, it need be only a parochial truth. But what sort of idea is best suited to getting itself adopted many times in succession by many people who have diverse, unpredictable objectives? A true idea is a good candidate. But not just any truth will do. It must seem useful to all those people, for it is they who will be choosing whether to enact it or not. ‘Useful’ in this context does not necessarily mean functionally useful: it refers to any property that can make people want to adopt an idea and enact it, such as being interesting, funny, elegant, easily remembered, morally right and so on. And the best way to seem useful to diverse people under diverse, unpredictable circumstances is to be useful. Such an idea is, or embodies, a truth in the broadest sense: factually true if it is an assertion of fact, beautiful if it is an artistic value or behaviour, objectively right if it is a moral value, funny if it is a joke, and so on.

  The ideas with the best chance of surviving through many generations of change are truths with reach – deep truths. People are fallible; they often have preferences for false, shallow, useless or morally wrong ideas. But which false ideas they prefer differs from one person to another, and changes with time. Under changed circumstances, a specious falsehood or parochial truth can survive only by luck. But a true, deep idea has an objective reason to be considered useful by people with diverse purposes over long periods. For instance, Newton’s laws are useful for building better cathedrals, but also for building better bridges and designing better artillery. Because of this reach, they get themselves remembered and enacted by all sorts of people, many of them vehemently opposed to each other’s objectives, over many generations. This is the kind of idea that has a chance of becoming a long-lived meme in a rapidly changing society.

  In fact such memes are not merely capable of surviving under rapidly changing criteria of criticism, they positively rely on such criticism for their faithful replication. Unprotected by any enforcement of the status quo or suppression of people’s critical faculties, they are criticized, but so are their rivals, and the rivals fare worse, and are not enacted. In the absence of such criticism, true ideas no longer have that advantage and can deteriorate or be superseded.

  Rational and anti-rational memes

  Thus, memes of this new kind, which are created by rational and critical thought, subsequently also depend on such thought to get themselves replicated faithfully. So I shall call them rational memes. Memes of the older, static-society kind, which survive by disabling their holders’ critical faculties, I shall call anti-rational memes. Rational and anti-rational memes have sharply differing properties, originating in their fundamentally different replication strategies. They are about as different from each other as they both are from genes.

  If a certain type of hobgoblin has the property that, if children fear it, they will grow up to make their children fear it, then the behaviour of telling stories about that type of hobgoblin is a meme. Suppose it is a rational meme. Then criticism, over generations, will cast doubt on the story’s truth. Since in reality there are no hobgoblins, the meme might evolve away to extinction. Note that it does not ‘care’ if it goes extinct. Memes do what they have to do: they have no intentions, even about themselves. But there are also other paths that it might evolve down. It might become overtly fictional. Because rational memes must be seen as beneficial by the holders, those that evoke unpleasant emotions are at a disadvantage, so it may also evolve away from evoking terror and towards, for instance, being pleasantly thrilling – or else (if it settled on a genuine danger) exploring practicalities for the present and optimism for the future.

  Now suppose it is an anti-rational meme. Evoking unpleasant emotions will then be useful in doing the harm that it needs to do – namely disabling the listener’s ability to be rid of the hobgoblin and entrenching the compulsion to think and therefore speak of it. The more accurately the hobgoblin’s attributes exploit genuine, widespread vulnerabilities of the human mind, the more faithfully the anti-rational meme will propagate. If the meme is to survive for many generations, it is essential that its implicit knowledge of these vulnerabilities be true and deep. But its overt content – the idea of the hobgoblin’s existence – need contain no truth. On the contrary, the non-existence of the hobgoblin helps to make the meme a better replicator, because the story is then unconstrained by the mundane attributes of any genuine menace, which are always finite and to some degree combatable. And that will be all the more so if the story can also manage to undermine the principle of optimism. Thus, just as rational memes evolve towards deep truths, anti-rational memes evolve away from them.

  As usual, mixing the above two replication strategies does no go
od. If a meme contains true and beneficial knowledge for the recipient, but disables the recipient’s critical faculties in regard to itself, then the recipient will be less able to correct errors in that knowledge, and so will reduce the faithfulness of transmission. And if a meme relies on the recipients’ belief that it is beneficial, but it is not in fact beneficial, then that increases the chance that the recipient will reject it or refuse to enact it.

  Similarly, a rational meme’s natural home is a dynamic society – more or less any dynamic society – because there the tradition of criticism (optimistically directed at problem-solving) will suppress variants of the meme with even slightly less truth. Moreover, the rapid progress will subject these variants to continually varying criteria of criticism, which again only deeply true memes have a chance of surviving. An anti-rational meme’s natural home is a static society – not any static society, but preferably the one in which it evolved – for all the converse reasons. And therefore each type of meme, when present in a society that is broadly of the opposite kind, is less able to cause itself to be replicated.

  The Enlightenment

  Our society in the West became dynamic not through the sudden failure of a static society, but through generations of static-society-type evolution. Where and when the transition began is not very well defined, but I suspect that it began with the philosophy of Galileo and perhaps became irreversible with the discoveries of Newton. In meme terms, Newton’s laws replicated themselves as rational memes, and their fidelity was very high – because they were so useful for so many purposes. This success made it increasingly difficult to ignore the philosophical implications of the fact that nature had been understood in unprecedented depth, and of the methods of science and reason by which this had been achieved.