Marilynne Robinson - Absence of Mind - The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

We have been told to disallow the intense and emotional subjective considerations a human altruist is likely to ponder, and to do so in deference to a mathematical formula that can never be made subject to any test in a human population. It is consistent with the genre of parascience, however, that this formula is applied with great confidence to the nature of our species. Hamilton himself said he “realized from common experience that university people sometimes don’t react well to common sense, and in any case most of them listened to it harder if you first intimidate them with equations.” 15If one may judge from the impact of his equation on his field, this is certainly true. Hamilton’s rule is really the transmogrification of a statement Thomas Huxley had made a century before him. If his formula is taken seriously, it precludes any other conclusion than that altruism, where it occurs at all, occurs within families, on account of the “selfishness” of a gene. That is, it occurs only in circumstances that reduce as far as possible the degree to which the behavior can be called altruistic, not in order to refine the definition of the word but in order to make the phenomenon seem assimilable to a theory.

Spencer’s mention of the “parent infusorium,” Freud’s mention of “the stores of libido by means of which the cells of the soma are attached to one another,” for that matter Auguste Comte’s pondering the physiology of the brain — such things have lent authority to philosophies that in turn deeply influence the thought of subsequent generations. 16And by dint of sheer historical importance they have legitimized a style of argument — the use of fragments of what in the writer’s moment is taken to be scientific truth — to leverage the broadest statements on the largest subjects.

Thinkers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett attribute the universe in all its complexity to accident. In this view, accident defines over time the range of the possible because circumstances develop which create an effect of optimization, an enhanced suitability of life forms for survival, individual and genetic, in whatever conditions pertain. Not surprisingly, Dennett likens this process to an algorithm. The inevitable iterations of variation on one hand and selection on the other have yielded all that exists or has ever existed. The human mind is one more, very splendid, product of these iterations. Of course Dennett assumes that the human mind was and is profoundly wrong about its origins and nature. This can be true despite the unsentimental workings of natural selection because a new layer has been superadded to reality by Dennett, Dawkins, and others to allow for the anomalous character of the brain/mind. This entity or phenomenon is called the meme, by analogy to the gene. It is a selfish, brain-colonizing personal or cultural concept, idea, or memory that survives by proliferating, implanting itself in other brains. Dawkins says, “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” He quotes his colleague N. K. Humphrey: “Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking — the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.” 17

The meme is not a notion I can dismiss out of hand. It seems to me to describe as well as anything does the obdurate persistence and influence of the genre of writing I have called parascientific. This piece of evidence for its reality might not please its originators, who always seem to assume their own immunity from the illusions and distractions that plague the rest of us. Still, aware as I am that Einstein’s cosmological constant was first of all a sort of fudge, in his view a blunder, I am willing to concede that this idea cannot be wholly discredited by its obvious usefulness to those who have proposed it. It does raise questions within the terms of their conceptual universe, however. For example, let us say altruism is a meme, inexplicably persistent, as other traits associated with religion are also. Then is there any need to make a genetic or sociobiological account of it? If its purpose is to have a part in sustaining related memes by which it would also be sustained, such as “family” or “religious community,” would it be dependent on the process of Darwinian selection represented in the theoretical rescue/non-rescue of the drowning child?

To put the question in more general terms: the role of the meme in this school of thought is to account for the human mind and the promiscuous melange of truth and error, science and mythology, that abides in it and governs it, sometimes promoting and sometimes thwarting the best interests of the organism and the species. Then why assume a genetic basis for any human behavior? Memes would appear to have sprung free from direct dependency on our genes, and to be able to do so potentially where they have not yet done so in fact. And assuming that Homo sapiens are unique in this experience of meme colonization, does this theory not set apart something that might be called human nature, that is, certain qualities of humankind that are unique to us, and not to be accounted for by analogies between ourselves and the hymenoptera? Sociobiology, with its dependency on gradualist neo-Darwinism, is difficult to reconcile with these incorporeal, free-floating, highly contagious memes which, in theory, have somehow managed to grow our physical brains to accommodate their own survival and propagation. Only consider the physiological and societal consequences of those big heads of ours in terms of maternal and infant mortality, the helplessness of infants, and the importance to us of culture, among other things. Does not this theory implicitly marginalize gene-based accounts of human behavior?

Memes and Hamiltonian genes do resemble each other, though only as a stone resembles an oyster. They differ in that the first has a status that is something less than hypothetical, while, of course, genes are actual and are thoroughly mapped and studied. The traits of this notional meme align nicely with the Hamiltonian idea of “selfishness,” that is, the idea that, like the gene, the meme impacts the organism’s function and behavior to perpetuate its own existence through generations. Granting that such an entity as a meme would have an interest in the survival of the one species that can serve as the vehicle of its spread and perpetuation, in individual cases this is clearly at odds with the personal survival of human beings. To choose an illustration of the point at random — the Horst Wessel Lied, a song written in celebration of fallen comrades by a young man who was himself assassinated, was, so to speak, an important modern carrier of that ancient meme and killer of young men, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori . I think it is generally believed that the martyrdoms of early Christians did much to anchor their religion in the culture of the Mediterranean world. The best case to be made for the correctness of the notion that there are indeed memes, and that they do indeed perpetuate themselves in human culture over time, would be the potency they acquire in the very fact of the destruction of the young and strong. When factions or nations turn on each other, those who win lose from the point of view of the species, in destroying the genetic wealth of their adversaries, and no “selfishness,” however leveraged by equations, intervenes to limit the losses we as a species suffer.