The day the meme was tamed
1995 (c) Copyright | this meme may be spread
| freely as long as it is
By Onar Aam | spread in its entirety
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http://www.hsr.no/~onar/ onar@hsr.no
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One of the great milestones in the human race towards civilization was the
taming of fire. It completely revolutionized the lives of our ancestors.
Before this great event, fire needed to be guarded as a treasure. These
early humans had namely painfully learned that once a flame died out, it
was gone for good. Amazingly it turns out that the evolution of the meme
is directly analogous to the exciting history of fire. But the taming of
the meme may have been an even more important event, for with it the
direction of cultural evolution was staked out ever thereafter. The tamed
memes, which we call symbols, enabled people to communicate across
generations, yes, across millenia.
Earlier we have developed no less than three metaphors of the meme,
(cultural RNA, cultural photons and shadows of the mind) but all of them
have a common underlying definition: memes are socially emitted stimuli.
We shall bear this implicit definition in mind when we connect memes and
the history of fire. The idea of meme as emitted cultural photons very
naturally brings our attention to the _light source_. Without a light
source there will be no light, and in "Shadows of the Mind" we learned
that this source is the mind. The mind is like a raging fire, lighting up an
otherwise dark world, the source of light perceived by other minds.
Interestingly it was exactly a fire which produced the flickering shadows
in Plato's cage.
Before symbols were invented, stories and myths were passed on orally, from
parent to child. But this oral tradition was tender as a flame. The
stories lived on as long as they burned in the memories of the elder. But
once the elder failed to ignite the minds of the young, the stories of
that culture would be lost forever, sentenced to eternal darkness.
The problem with oral traditions is that these memes vanish the moment they
are spoken, like a burst of light. They have no persistence and totally
depend on a mind to animate and fuel them. The symbols radically changed
this. Humans learned that by carving the memes into reality they would
persist, shining on independently of minds. We can only imagine what an
extatic, yes, religious experience it must have been to the people who
invented the symbol. They had invented a light source which shone on without
the help of humans. This must have been close to the experience of seeing
an automobile for the very first time, a wagon driving all by itself,
only greater. Cars stop after a while, but symbols keep on shining and
shining, long after their inventors have perished. The symbol must be the
closest thing to an eternal flame that humans have ever invented.
Thousands of years after the extinction of cultures, archeologists dig out
remnants of their symbols. And amazingly, they are still shining! Imagine
what a feeling it must be to read the words that haven't shone on anyone
for thousands of years. It's literally (!) like receiving a long-distance
call from the past. The symbol is quite a miracle in the evolution of the
meme and has enabled people all over the world to speak with the dead.