Good memes and bad memes

Deutsch is interested in neo-­Darwinian accounts of the evolution

 of culture. Such accounts treat cultural items — languages, religions, values, ideas, traditions — in much the way that Darwinian theories of biological evolution treat genes. 

They are called “memes,” and are treated as evolving, just as genes do, by mutation and selection, with the most successful memes being those that are the most faithfully replicated. 

Deutsch writes with enormous clarity and insight about how the mechanisms of mutation and transmission and selection of memes are going to have to differ, in all sorts of ways, from those of genes.

There are  two particular strategies for meme-­replication, one 

 “rational” and the other he calls “anti-rational.”

 Rational memes — the sort that Deutsch imagines will 

replicate themselves well in post-Enlightenment societies —are 

simply good ideas: the kind that will survive rigorous scientific 

scrutiny, the kind that will somehow make life easier or safer or

 more rewarding because they tell us something useful about 

how the world actually works. 

Irrational memes — which are more interesting, and more diabolical, and which Deutsch thinks of as summing up the essential character of pre-­Enlightenment societies — reproduce themselves by disabling the capacities of their hosts (by means of fear, or an anxiety to conform, or the appearance of naturalness and inevitability, or in any number of other ways) to evaluate or invent new ideas. And one particular subcategory of memes — about which Deutsch has very clever things to say — succeeds precisely by pretending not to tell the truth. So, for example: “Children who asked why they were required to enact onerous behaviors that did not seem functional would be told ‘because I say so,’ and in due course they would give their children the same reply to the same question, never realizing that they were giving the full explanation. (This is a curious type of meme whose explicit content is true even though its holders do not believe it.)”